+In the Name…
“After six days Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart by themselves; and he was transfigured before them, and his garments became glistening, intensely white, as no fuller on earth could bleach them”
(St Mark 9:2-3).
Many of you will remember that in December, 1996 I made my first trip to the continent of Africa, and specifically journeyed to the country of Malawi (once known as Nyasaland) at the invitation of the bishop of the Diocese of the Northern Malawi, who was at that time Bishop Jackson Biggers. I was invited by Bishop Biggers (with whom I had had a deep friendship for many years when he was the Rector of the Church of the Redeemer in Biloxi, Mississippi) to lead a week- long retreat for his clergy. It was a life changing experience for me which I shared in early 1997 with a talk and slide show in the Kemper Great Hall.
Before I went to Malawi, I bought a white cassock in anticipation of the sun and heat (Malawi is 10 degrees below the equator). I wanted to in some way reflect the sun instead of absorb its rays with a black cassock. Church custom there is that the clergy daily wear their cassocks. To make a long story short, the travel required to get to the Cathedral on Likoma Island (by a combination of a steam boat, pick-up truck, and miles of walking) left my new white cassock in a shade of light brown with some lower parts of the cassock being dark brown. There was nothing I could do about this, and Bishop Biggers’ white cassock had suffered equally; and there were bigger concerns ahead of me and him.
When we arrived at the inn on Likoma Island in the middle of the evening before the first day of the retreat, the Bishop told me to leave the soiled cassock outside the door of my room. I lit the kerosene lamp in the my room, undressed, cracked open the door and placed the dirty cassock outside my room, pulled the mosquito net around my bed, and fell asleep in about 30 seconds.
I woke up very early the next morning as some roosters were crowing, and at the foot of my bed was my cassock neatly folded. When the sun came up fully, I saw that my cassock had undergone a transfiguration during the night from one condition to another. It was brilliantly white, and seemed whiter that before. I said to myself, “How in the world is this possible, and who in the world did this?” I did think of our Lord’s Transfiguration when (as we heard today) “his garments became glistening, intensely white, as no fuller on earth could bleach them.” While I slept, there had been a nocturnal ritual of washing and ironing somehow and somewhere in that rustic and primitive village (where there was one water tap and no electricity) that washed away the physical dirt of the day for me to begin the next day robed in white, “intensely white”- yes, whiter than before, “as no fuller on earth could bleach them”- except as on Likoma Island in Northern Malawi!!
For our Lord on the top of Mt. Hermon, it was more than his garments that were transfigured – “glistening, intensely white, as no fuller on earth could bleach them.” It was Jesus Himself whose face (as St. Matthew tells in his Gospel) “shone like the sun,” as heaven had intersected with earth with Moses and Elijah standing to His right and left, and talking with Him.
A cloud overshadowed them as the cloud would do over the tent of meeting during the 4o years of the children of Israel’s wandering in the wilderness indicating the Lord’s presence in the midst of his people, and as the cloud came to rest upon the temple in Jerusalem at the time of its dedication.
And then there was the voice of the God the Father from heaven as was heard at our Lord’s Baptism, “This is my beloved son,” and at this time with the added words, “Listen to him.”
As we come to the end of the season of Epiphany (that word meaning “manifestation”), we have before us today a superlative manifestation of Jesus Christ as both God and Man.
Jesus experiences a transfiguration of the human condition that He as the Son of God had humbled Himself to assume as the Savior of the world. He had “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men” as St. Paul writes in his letter to the Philippians. He was fully in the condition of Man along with and beside those men He had called to be Apostles. In the midst of the inner circle of those Apostles which was constituted by Jesus to consist of Peter, James, and John, God the Father reveals to them that the man they have followed is God indeed. At the same time, Jesus is graced in the midst of the assumption of the human condition with the Father’s heavenly assurance that His earthly ministry is on track. This assurance is provided so lovingly at the time when He is soon to enter into His Passion which is the crux of what His ministry as the Incarnate Son of God is about and where it will be fulfilled. He had instructed the Apostles six days before the Transfiguration, “…that the Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.”
In the Transfiguration, Jesus experienced a foretaste of His place in heaven beyond who He was and what He was to do on earth. His human body was transfigured with other-worldly properties – his face shining as the sun, his garments white and glistening, and his being in the company of those who were antecedents to His ministry in the fullness of time.
Peter, James, and John were graced with a visible manifestation of who He was who they were following, and that He was indeed the fulfillment of the law and prophets as they saw Moses and Elijah flanking Him.
Peter wanted to capture this manifestation, this theophany, by building three booths to hold onto this experience, but that was not to be the way. What was to be the way was for him and the apostles to continue to listen to Him and follow Him.
We heard in the epistle this morning that Peter referred to this Transfiguration experience as a source of his witness to the Church that Jesus was the real thing in which they were to place their belief and trust. We all know that before He wrote this to the Church, he even after witnessing the Transfiguration had denied the Lord three times. Even with heaven touching earth in such a dramatic way, Peter couldn’t see heaven’s activity on earth a lit later on.
What we are to gain from this is that God reveals Himself to us in many ways to confirm in our hearts and minds that we are on the right track, that we have made the right choice, and that Jesus is (as C.S.Lewis said) everything He said He was. But it is often in hindsight of God’s many and varied manifestations for us and to us that we are able to say, “Now I see; now I understand.” Unfortunately between the manifestations and the hindsight there are times when what we’ve seen and known doesn’t adequately inform and sustain us in the “now.”
What we must pray for is to see God’s hand at work readily in the “now” so that we are freed from worry and anxiety, from trying to control things, and from wasting precious time in not seeing that God is working for good. God doesn’t play hide and seek with us. He doesn’t move upon and in our lives in ways in which He doesn’t want us to see and know His presence. It is our own impaired spiritual sight and weakness of faith that causes us not to discern His presence and activity.
The holy season of Lent is just days away. I would say that for all of us (whatever our particular disciplines will be in keeping a holy Lent) there needs to be the growth of our awareness that God in His very nature to love and lead is at work daily in and for those who have placed their dependence upon Him. We all need to ask God to impress that upon and in our souls.
Let each and every one of us know that God’s love and investment in each and every one of us is very real, and that we can believe that the words to Jeremiah are indeed words to all who believe in Him and such words give us peace. Those words are: “For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me; when you seek me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:11-13).
+In the Name… |
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