Sunday Sermon - The Rev. Susan Flanders

[00:00:35] Speaker A: The Holy Gospel of our Savior Jesus Christ, according to Matthew. Glory to you, Lord Christ. Six days after Peter had acknowledged Jesus as the Christ, the son of the living God, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain by themselves. And he was transfigured before them. And his face shone like the sun and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly there appeared to them Moses and Elijah talking with him. Then Peter said to Jesus, lord, it is good for us to be here. If you wish, I will make three dwellings here. One for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah. While he was still speaking. Suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them. And from the cloud a voice said, this is my son, the beloved. With him I am well pleased. Listen to him. When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear. But Jesus came and touched them, saying, get up and do not be afraid. And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone. As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus ordered them, tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead. The Gospel of the Lord, we praise you. [00:02:45] Speaker B: I invite you children ages 3 through 10 to go with King to the music room for story time and prayers. They will return to us at the feast. O God, our great companion, lead us ever more deeply into the mystery of your life and ours and make us faithful interpreters of life to one another. Amen. I begin with an experience of dazzling, radiant whiteness going back to 1995 in a fancy restaurant in San Francisco. I have told this story before, but not in a sermon. I did share it in a daily bread one day during COVID so if you did hear it, then I hope you won't mind. In the spring of that year, my oldest son Chris was in culinary school, and part of his training was to be a chef and do an Training to be a chef was to do an internship at Aqua Seafood restaurant in San Francisco. So of course I had to visit and I flew out of Dulles. We rose up over a huge expanse of white everywhere, as far as the eye can see, sort of the way things have looked around here for the last three weeks. I was to meet Chris that evening at 10 in the restaurant where he worked. And so I showed up at the bar a few minutes early, sat myself down and ordered a lovely glass of California Chardonnay. Minutes later, I looked up and saw Chris walking towards me. He was a vision in dazzling white. Tall, handsome, dressed in full chef's attire, crisply pleated Trousers, the double breasted jacket and the high chef's toque on his head. All pure, clean, crisp and white. Hi, Mom. This was the young man who had loved cooking since he was a teenager, turning out delicious food and T shirt and jeans in our home, all very casual. This was the young man who had dropped out of journalism school in order to become a chef, worrying his father and me about his future. And now here he was in a new world and a new light. He was still learning, not yet a chef. But in his appearance that night, I glimpsed the promise of his future and the success he would achieve. It was a moment of transfiguration, a moment of seeing Chris not only as who he was, but as who he would become this morning. All three readings tell of transfiguration moments. Moses on the mountain and then Jesus shining in glorious light, revealing to those who saw them God's presence. In each event, the imagery was of dazzling glory, a blinding light, a sense of the miraculous. These were moments of profound recognition, of seeing beyond what was. They were moments of revelation, announcing to those who were watching that God was at work. Through Moses, through Jesus. And those are great moments, those times when we feel we are actually experiencing God's presence. They can happen, of course, in a variety of ways, in nature, great music, profound moments of love. Many people, including Chef sun, claim nature as the source for them of a sense of the divine, whether or not they embrace any religion. Probably most of us have known such moments in one form or another. But I now want to be more specific in our thinking about transfiguration, because it really is more particular than just any experience of the divine or of God's presence, presence. Transfiguration stories are about people. Transfiguration points into the future and bids us respond, calls us to act. The transfiguration stories we heard in scripture were about Moses and then Jesus, about human beings appearing as more than as beyond what people thought of them before. They were bearers of God's love and God's word. And. And in the case of Jesus, for Peter, James and John, they realized that he was the one, the anointed or Messiah. They heard the same words that Jesus had heard at his baptism. This is my son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased. Jesus. Transfiguration was an announcement of his Messiahship, advance notice of what would be confirmed on Easter morning. But is transfiguration only about the Messiah? Is it a story setting Jesus apart, reminding us in all its trappings of the miraculous, of how different he is? From us. Is it a story of the first coming? And we are left with our longings for the second, for Jesus someday coming again, A glorious and majestic return to save the world. Well, I have a different sense of this now. After a visit only three weeks ago to All Saints Church in Pasadena, California, I heard something extraordinary that morning. Part of a sermon. But the sermon was not the usual type. It was actually a question and answer session between the rector and the congregation. I bet Hillary can hardly wait. So at that church, people filled a basket with their questions. And there were a lot, because it's a big church, like Saint Columbus. The rector drew a handful at random and began responding. He drew this. How come we sit around waiting for Jesus to come again in clouds of glory instead of recognizing the Messiah in each of us? Recognizing the Messiah in each of us. I don't even remember the rector's response because I was so taken with those words and that question. I've always had problems with the idea of a second coming, some sort of historical event, when an actual reappearance of the Messiah or Jesus Christ will occur. In fact, when we say, as we so often do at communion, Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. I often say, for that last part, Christ comes again. Maybe I will today, but maybe that's it. Christ or Messiah. Both of these mean the anointed. The anointed one. Christ, or Messiah, is incarnate or embodied within each of us. How do we recognize this? Can we imagine God's incarnation of God self as in Jesus, as the Christian recognition of God's incarnation in our humanity for all time, the Messiah in each of us? In other words, Jesus is not set apart, completely different from us, part of God in ways that we can never be but connected. Jesus was recognized as God's Messiah. Can any of us ever be? This is radical incarnation theology, and I've held to it for a while. What the disciples saw on the mountain in the transfiguration story was God's presence and glory in Jesus. And what they heard was not only that he was God's beloved, but that they should listen to him. And they also heard him say, don't be afraid. Don't be afraid of the Messiah wherever you encounter Messiah. So how about us? When do we recognize in ourselves or another something that feels like Messiahship, like an anointing? Maybe we would never use these words. Maybe we would call it just a. A prophetic voice or a sacred calling, or maybe just powerful inspiration to go out and do something, to do something loving or sacrificial or simply to be our best selves. When do we see that in others? Many saw it in the Buddhist monks who walked all the way here from Texas last week as a witness for peace. When do we see Messiah in all the beautiful, squirmy children in our we worship going on right now? Or in the teenagers who go on the scat problems every summer? God announcing God's self in a new generation that promises to move this tired world a little further towards the kingdom of God? When in the depths of your being have you experienced being blessed and anointed to bring the gifts you have into fuller service in the world, in the world in all its needs, in whatever ways that you can, large or small. Where might we recognize the Messiah? On what mountaintop? The poet T.S. eliot got this and expressed it far better than I can in the last part of the third of his Four Quartets. He says this to apprehend the point of intersection of the timeless with time is an occupation for a saint. No occupation either, but something given and taken in a lifetime's death, in love, ardor and selflessness and self surrender. But for most of us there is only the unattended moment, the moment in and out of time, the distraction fit lost in a shaft of sunlight, the wild time unseen, or the wind lightning or the waterfall, or the music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all. But you are the music while the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses, hints followed by guesses. And the rest is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action. The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is incarnation. End quote. That gift is incarnation, and it is part of our humanity, not reserved for Jesus, but our transfiguration. Moments when we recognize this are rare. The rest, as in the poem, is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action. It's what Jesus and his followers did after the transfiguration and after the cross. They did not linger waiting for clouds of glory. They lived prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action. May this transfiguration story kindle our hearts to recognize the Messiah living in each of us and to act accordingly. That sounds a lot like living God's love. Amen.