Sermon for Year B, Epiphany Last/Transfiguration: "The Red Carpet and the Way of the Cross"

This sermon was preached at Christ & Saint Stephen's Church on Sunday, February 22, 2009. Lectionary readings this sermon is based on can be found here.

Well, here we are at the Feast of the Transfiguration. It is the last Sunday of the season after Epiphany. This Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, this is the last Sunday before Lent begins. It’s a pivotal Sunday in the course of the liturgical year. But we here at Christ & Saint Stephen’s know that it is more than just Transfiguration Sunday. This is an important Sunday for other reasons – this is Oscar Sunday!

This is the night of red carpet arrivals and evening gowns. Borrowed finery on beautiful actresses. People’s Sexiest Man Alive Hugh Jackman in a tuxedo as host. Something for everybody! Bad dance numbers. Cloying, embarrassing acceptance speeches. Film clips of movies we didn’t see, but being New Yorkers and having read the review in the Times, we can still have an opinion about whether they deserve to win or lose.

I can assure you. I’ll be in front of the television early and won’t look away for a single moment until it’s all over. I love Oscar night. I never miss it.

I’m not even sure why, really. I’m not a rabid film fan, or that much of a celebrity watcher. But there’s something about watching big stars win and lose. There’s something about the drama of it. Because you are guaranteed that for some, this night will transform, indeed transfigure their lives and their careers. Some little stars and some big stars will become even bigger stars after tonight. And after tonight, a few of those stars will wind up disappointed and maybe a bit disgusted, some of those we will watch on TV tonight will wind up skulking off to sulk over their misfortune just like our friend Elijah in today’s reading from First Kings.

In this morning’s Old Testament lection, the prophet Elijah has gone up to Mount Horeb (which is Mount Sinai by another name) to hide out, to sulk a little bit, it seems.

Now, Elijah has just pulled off a major victory. He has contested with the priests and prophets of the god Baal and has won. He has challenged the followers of Baal to a contest of divine strength. Each team has prepared a sacrifice, and each has called upon their god to set the sacrifice alight on the altar. Baal didn’t come through. But Elijah’s God – our God – at Elijah’s word, sent down fire from heaven, and the sacrifice was set alight. The Baalite prophets were put to death. And not only that, but the crippling drought was ended with a rushing rain. By in large, a stellar feat on Elijah’s part. It was, for all intents and purposes, an Oscar winning turn: best performance by a prophet in a leading role! Instant fame and fortune and great power.

But Elijah finds it all a bit disappointing. Not like the winner, but rather like the losers, he heads off for a sulk. For some reason, Elijah’s great triumph has left him feeling empty and alone. He goes off to die and it is an angel of the Lord that has to bring him food so he doesn’t starve to death.

Then God decides to help Elijah gain some insight. God’s angel sends Elijah to Horeb where he is promised the God he has tried so faithfully to serve will pass by before him. For the Hebrews the physicality of God was very, very holy and very taboo. No images of God were allowed, no uttering the name of God. Only Moses had seen God on this very mountain and then only very briefly and from behind.

So, what happens? Well, Elijah gets to Horeb and there is a great wind, and then an earthquake, and then a fire, but God is not in the wind nor in the earthquake nor in the fire. Then a strange thing happens. Elijah hears a sound that is not a sound exactly but a silence, the sound of silence. The Hebrew passage here can be translated literally as “a sound of fine silence”. Our lectionary puts it as “a sound of sheer silence”. And we all know the King James Version’s translation of this phrase, “A still, small voice.”

The great God, Yahweh, Jehovah, who has just brought down a mighty firebolt from heaven to burn up Elijah’s offering, when he shows himself in this very intimate, very holy setting, it is not as a great destructive wind, or devastating earthquake or consuming fire… The almighty God is found, the awesome God is heard, in the quietest of whispers. And Elijah wraps himself in his mantle much as Moses covered his face when he knew that yes, this was the sound of, the very essence of, the one God.

Elijah learns that God is not about the big scenery chewing performance that wins all the awards, but a calm almost silence in which the power of the almighty is known not in great gongs, but in a tiny whisper.

Next we find the Jesus, like Elijah, headed up a mountain. Now the Jesus of Mark’s gospel is a somewhat quieter Jesus from the Jesus we find in Matthew, Luke and John. In Mark, Jesus never portrays himself as the son of God, the messiah, in explicit terms. Rather it is other voices that do so, and usually otherworldly voices. At his baptism and in our reading today, it is the voice from heaven that proclaims that Jesus is indeed the son of God. But not just voices from heaven, the unclean spirits know Jesus and in Mark’s gospel they call him out on three occasions, naming him God’s son and the messiah. Of all his followers, only Peter says to Jesus, “You are the messiah” and in response to this assertion and again at end of the today’s gospel, Jesus tells Peter and the others to tell no one of what they have seen, say nothing of his true identity, let’s keep this out of the tabloids.

By comparison, the Jesus of the Gospel of John is running a full scale pre-Oscar campaign: “I am the way and the truth and the life” “I am the vine, you are the branches” “I am the gate, I am the door”. For your consideration: Jesus of Nazareth. Academy members admitted free to all screenings.

No, the Jesus of Mark keeps a lower profile. All the more stunning then when, on the mountaintop, Jesus is transfigured before the eyes of Peter, James and John. He is made dazzling white, and is surrounded by the two most revered of the prophets: Moses and our friend Elijah. For a guy keeping such a low profile this is an amazing transformation.

Once again in Scripture, in the most unexpected way, the truth is revealed. At the end of the season after Epiphany, we have a revelation of Jesus as God’s son, the messiah, the Christ. There’s no doubting it, as we hear from Peter himself in our epistle reading. But what are we to do with this information. Build a booth? Give him an Oscar for this literally dazzling performance?

No, what is to come is quite unexpected too. What is to come is arrest, trial and execution. What is to come is betrayal and denial. It’s going to get rough for Jesus and his followers. Not what you might expect after this vision of the glory of God in Jesus, this transfiguration on the mountaintop.

Transfiguration is at the heart of our faith, it is at the core of what it means to be a Christian. We are the heirs of the people who walked to freedom on dry land in the midst of a transfigured great sea. It was our ancestors in faith who toppled the walls of an ancient city, transfiguring Jericho into rubble, not with artillery, but with trumpet blasts. It was to a daughter of these ancestors in faith that a miraculous message was brought by an angel, and she too was unexpectedly transfigured, made great with child though yet a virgin. And it was this child who was able to transfigure water into wine, to heal the sick, to quite the minds of those pestered by demons, to conquer death.

This carpenter’s son, this synagogue loudmouth, this rabble-rouser, was revealed to be none other than the Christ, the anointed one, the son of God. This lowly Galilean, from a forgotten backwater of the Roman Empire, who suffered the most ignominious of deaths, nailed to a tree by the side of the road out of town, left to die in the noonday sun. This broken, lifeless body laid to rest in a borrowed tomb who would be transfigured into our resurrected Lord. This Jesus whose transfiguration was not his alone, but who, through his own death and resurrection has transfigured our humanity and made us little lower than the angels, forgiving our sins, transfiguring our mortal life into everlasting life in him.

Then there are those times in our own lives when we see those around us, as it were transfigured. When the all too flawed spouse smiles or says something that makes us look up and see once again the love of our life where before we could only see the disappointment, the wear and tear of years. There’s the sullen teenager who hasn’t spoken a complete sentence in what seems like years, who does something or says something and suddenly we see both loving child she once was, and the woman of character that she is already becoming. There’s the stern disciplinarian and too hardworking provider, who becomes a grandfather, and is transformed into the most loving, most caring, most gentle of men. There’s the devoted churchwoman, matriarch of the parish who suddenly reveals the extraordinary life of adventure she led in her youth, running off to New York, studying that scandalous modern dance.

Then there are the transfigurations in ourselves, those times in life when we find within ourselves new things. Those times of profound struggle when worry and fear abide with us as daily companions, but then, suddenly, the still small voice speaks so clearly and we find within us the opposite of fear -- which is faith. Those times when all the anger and hurt and disappointment gives way to a glimmer of understanding, and in time, forgiveness, and finally by passing through the doorway of forgiveness, we are able to heal, to move beyond the injury done to us. Those times of deep despair when we hit rock bottom and there at our lowest point we come to admit our own flaws, our own dis-ease, and from this lowly, desperate place, we finally begin the journey to recovery. Those moments when we look around us and find our life filled with friends and family who love us, a world peopled with lovers and friends and boon companions, a life spent caring about and for children, nephews, nieces, students, god children, grand children -- and our hearts seem to burst with love for all those who people our life -- and then in an instant, we know that the love we feel and give is not the product of our own hearts, but rather it is God’s love living in us, flowing through us. Only God’s love could be this pure, this immense, and then we know that in loving those given us to love, then we are God’s most obedient servants. We realize that in loving one another we are doing God’s work in the world.

The power and glory shown to us -- and love and redemption granted unto us -- in Christ Jesus, are transformative and transfiguring. The God of the firebolt becomes the still, small voice. The carpenter’s son is revealed as the true son of God. And we, wretched sinners, pursuers of the vainglory of this world, we are transformed and transfigured into the very children of God who one day will join God in all his glory.

The red carpet arrivals may look pretty glorious as the stars pull up before the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood tonight, but oh, my brothers and sisters, it cannot compare to the day we all arrive at the Pearly Gates, to live in glory with our transfigured Lord and Savior.

+ Amen

© The Rev. Mark R. Collins