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Last Sunday after Epiphany
February 26, 2006
Delivered by Dora J. Odarenko, Seminarian
Mark 9.2-9
Psalm 27
1 Kings 19.9-18
2 Peter 1.16-19 (20-21)
Please pray with me:
Holy God, open my words and open our hearts so that the grace of your Word may direct our lives though Jesus Christ, our Redeemer and our Lord. Amen.
From Today's Gospel:
"Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, 'This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!'" (Mark 9.7)
I have always had a bad case of being the Little Red Hen. You remember the refrain when there was a task that no one else would do: "Well," said the Little Red Hen, "I will do it myself." And she did. There is nothing wrong with this approach per se and I'm sure God is fond of that part of me. But the imagination of such birds is largely earthbound and even the best of them will not roost much higher than the barn rafters or the midpoint of a high tree.
For those of you, like me, who have this tendency, there is hope: A few weeks ago, I went on retreat to Canterbury Cathedral with eleven other members of my senior class at Berkeley Episcopal Seminary, at Yale Divinity School. This was a gift to help us reflect upon a period of wonderful but strenuous training that is drawing to a close and to help us prepare for what comes next. The night flight over to England was like most such, with not much sleep; by midmorning, when we got down to Kent and to the Visitor's Center on the Cathedral close, we were pretty bleary. As I entered my room, however, my energy surged back because there was a picture window, complete with window seat, and beyond it a full view of the whole south side of the Cathedral. Each of the visitor's rooms, I learned, has this view. Several hours later, as the bells summoned us to Evensong, all I had to do was walk across the road and slip in a side door.
Evensong is held in the long, narrow quire, reached by wide stone flights of well-worn steps. Because of them, the quire is well above the nave, entered through a massive stone screen that effectively encloses it and the eastern end of the cathedral. One sits in the great carved stalls, looking at the stalls across the aisle and the tiers of windows above. The altar and lectern were at the other end from where we were placed and virtually out of sight. The choir of men and boys was in stalls midway down, divided and facing one another. The space is formal, ancient. With a depth and distance that is vertical as well as horizontal, it has all the brilliance of Early English Gothic. I found myself leaning backwards to look at the vaulted ceiling, not so much out of curiosity but because all the architectural elements were urging me upwards, out of and beyond myself.
The choir began the service with the familiar "Open thou our lips." As I opened mine to give the response, I heard it sung by the choir and I realized that this was a service in which I would be required to do very little. As the choir moved into the antiphonal psalms and then the evening canticles, the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis, with their affirmation of Christ, I felt enveloped, wrapped, cradled in a holiness both vast and tender. This was a service in which to respond with my ears and, through them, with the very depths of my being. It was a time to be attentive, to listen, to seek God.
Afterwards one of my friends said that it had seemed like a concert to him, that worship needed to be more participatory. On that evening and on the evenings following--doubtless because of my own need--it was for me a gift, a powerful time of prayer and an almost unbearable joy, a time of illumination, of transparency, of that thinness that occurs when earth and heaven meet, when we feel-and allow ourselves to respond to--the palpable pull of the infinite.
But God is not only in Canterbury. We experience such thinness here at St. Peters when our choir sings, when we hear the voice of our young choristers, at a service such as Lessons and Carols before Christmas.
Our readings this morning are about such thinness. This is the last Sunday in the Epiphany Season, the Sunday each year when we hear about Jesus' Transfiguration. Today the account is from Mark. Last year it was from Matthew. Next year, we will hear from Luke. Epiphany begins with the revelation of Christ's birth and of his divinity to three wise men-strangers, foreigners. The word "epiphany" means an appearance of great significance, a showing forth. Inasmuch as an epiphany reveals a divine being, it must also be the "manifestation of the essence or meaning of something"(1) a perception of reality through a sudden realization.
Thus in our own lives we have flashes of intuition, perhaps in the midst of what has seemed like an ordinary conversation. Even more, the accounts of Jesus' teaching and ministry that we have heard in the last weeks are filled with moments that shock and reorient the expectations and understanding of those around him. Today's event in Mark is both bigger and more private.
The lectionary prepares us through the story of a terrified Elijah, fleeing for his life. God tells the prophet that in order to receive the word that he needs, he must encounter God in a transforming way. And so Elijah goes, as directed, to Mount Horeb or Sinai, the sacred spot where Moses received God's covenant with Israel. There he is battered by forces that were thought to demonstrate God's power: wind, earthquake, and fire. Translators fuss about what Elijah heard after these elemental forces subsided. Was it "a gentle little breeze," "the sound of a light whisper," "a still small voice," or possibly, as we heard this morning, "a sound of sheer silence"? Certainly it was a moment in which God revealed God's self in a new way. And it is out of this quiet, this attentive listening, that Elijah hears God's instructions, one of which is to anoint the prophetic successor who will see him ascend into heaven in a chariot.
Jesus too could well have been terrified-and we for him-by the ninth chapter of Mark, for he knows that he will die in Jerusalem. Mark does not report Jesus' conversation with Moses and Elijah on the mountain. It is probably safe to understand them here as prophetic figures who also suffered because of their fidelity to God. (2) What Mark does report is the effect upon the three companions whom Jesus has chosen to bring with him, and particularly Peter, who in his terror and continuing denial of Jesus' impending death, wants to do something. He wants to fix and stabilize this event by building three tents or booths for these three great figures. Maybe then, nothing worse will happen.
His reaction also makes it clear that the men are literally able to see Jesus-at least for the moment--in an entirely different light: "He was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them." In this moment of epiphany, of thinness, they are able to see-and before the Resurrection--the blazing glory of Jesus' divinity that transforms even what he is wearing. Having seen, they then hear the voice of God that identifies Jesus as divine, as God's beloved son. Giving Jesus divine authority in this way, the voice commands them to listen to what Jesus will say.
If that means hearing and following a difficult teaching and discipleship, it also means hearing and following a God who has revealed God's self to them, a God whom they have now seen conversing with figures as great as Moses and Elijah, and a God whom they have been allowed to see with almost more brilliance and mystery than they can bear.
As Peter, James, and John come down from the mountain with a Jesus who once again looks as he had before, they are filled with questions about the fate of their teacher and friend and about the resurrection, a concept that they cannot yet understand. But had they not remembered the Transfiguration or something like it, their "eyewitnesses of his majesty" (2 Peter 1.16) would not be part of our Scripture. Some fifty or sixty years later, the author of 2 Peter urges us to "be attentive to this [prophetic account] as to a lamp shining in a dark place" (19). Longing for such moments of transparency, our hearts cry out in the command and response from Psm 27 that we read/herd the choir sing this morning, "'Come...seek his face!' Your face, Lord, do I seek."
As we prepare to enter into the season of Lent this year, may we each remember that we have just come from a season of Epiphanies, of revelations, and that our God continues to call us into a deepening awareness of divine presence, right here, right now. What God requires is our loving attentiveness, and our willingness to still the business within us, to move out of and beyond ourselves to listen. Then "Jesus' resurrection [will] raise us if we stumble, [and] the Christlight [will] beckon us if we lose our way." (3)
AMEN
1 American Heritage Dictionary.
2 John R. Donahue, and Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Mark, Sacra Pagina (Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 2002), 269.
3 From the New Zealand Prayer Book (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1997), 132.
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