George, our sexton, came across a couple of boxes in the Rock Room a few weeks ago. They were filled with copies of a red booklet entitled ‘The Windows of Christ & Saint Stephen’s Episcopal Church’. Some 17 years ago, Anne Pope and Elinor Anderberg put together this little booklet, with some help from Joellen Schertz and Lucius Barre. The booklet gives a description and the history of each of our stained glass windows, the name of its donors, the scripture verses that the windows depict. Lots of great information. There’s plenty more in the back of the church this morning. I hope you’ll take one. Someday I’ll have this text updated and posted on our church website for all to see.
Now you might think that among the oldest and most venerated windows in Christ and Saint Stephen’s Church might well be the St. Stephen window in the back of the church by the track rack. Not so. The oldest window in our church is one that most of you don’t see very often. It’s way up here in the chancel. Come up and get a better look at it after the postlude this morning. It’s right over there in the right hand corner of the chancel – and it is a depiction of the Transfiguration – the event that we just heard recounted in our gospel reading this morning.
This is the last Sunday after the Epiphany before Lent begins this week on Ash Wednesday. As you know, Easter is a movable feast and therefore the 40 day season of Lent that precedes it moves about from year to year. As a result, we take up the slack during the Sundays after Epiphany. Sometimes there are as many as 9 Sundays after the Epiphany before Lent arrives, sometimes – as was the case this year, there are only 5 Sundays after Epiphany before this Last Sunday. But no matter how many Sundays fall after the Epiphany, our lectionary always makes the Last Sunday after the Epiphany a commemoration of the Transfiguration.
The Transfiguration appears in Matthew, Mark and Luke, and it comes just after Jesus has predicted his passion and suffering. Peter was so shocked to hear Jesus’ predictions of his crucifixion that his response was a memorable one. “God forbid!” Peter exclaimed, to which Jesus offers his famous rebuke, “Get behind me, Satan.” Jesus is aware that what is coming for him, his suffering and death, which is also what is coming for us in the culmination of Lent at Holy Week, what is coming is going to be hard on his followers, the very idea of it is too hard for Peter even to contemplate.
So, it seems, following this rather dire prediction, Jesus gives some of his disciples, Peter among them, a glimpse of something else that is to come – and that is his transfigured heavenly glory. Jesus shows forth his coming glory in addition to predicting his coming suffering. What is coming may be hard, perhaps even deadly, but it will also prove transformative, and it will end ultimately in the resurrection of Jesus and his ascension into heaven to sit at the right hand of God. But, as much as the Transfiguration is about looking forward to a glorious future to come, it’s also about looking back into the past.
In our account from Luke’s gospel, we find a transfigured Jesus accompanied by two major figures from the history of the Hebrew people. There on one side of Jesus is Moses. Of course, Moses is a great hero of Salvation history. Moses parted the Red Sea and brought the children of Israel out of captivity, he fed them manna from heaven in the desert and led them to the Promised Land. It was through Moses that God gave the law to the people of Israel, detailing for the first time in human history how a people of God would relate and interact with that God and with one another in a reflection of God’s love for them. And of course, as we heard in our reading from Exodus this morning, Moses too was transformed, transfigured in his time too. His face began to shine after his encounter with the most high God on a mountain. And thereafter when conversing and communing with God, Moses’ face would shine, so that he would have to cover his shining face with a veil when he came to share what God has communicated to him with the people.
It’s a funny thing, that shining face of Moses. When Jerome translated the bible into Latin beginning in the 4th century, he used the original Hebrew version of the texts. And he made a significant translation error. The Hebrew word that means “to shine forth” is virtually identical to the Hebrew word for “to grow horns”. In Jerome’s Vulgate edition of the Bible, Moses is said to return from his encounters with God – with horns. Not as bad a translation error as it may sound, really. Horns were associated with other Near Eastern gods in the ancient world and Hebrew altars had horns at each of their four corners. In fact, we still refer to the corners of any altar as the ‘horns’ of the altar. So, Jerome’s mistake is somewhat understandable. And it was the official translation for centuries, so Michelangelo and others have depicted Moses with horns on his head.
In addition to Moses, the Transfiguration scene includes another important figure from Salvation history. And that is Elijah. Elijah was a key prophet in the Bible and for the people of Israel. Elijah cleansed Naaman the Syrian of his leprosy, and raised from the dead the son of the widow of Zarephath, and Elijah has an important epiphany of his own on a mountain. It was on Mt. Horeb that Elijah encountered the living God not in the earthquake or the fire, but in the still small voice. And you’ll remember how, when the time had come, Elijah rode a flaming, shining chariot into heaven, just after dropping his mantle of prophetic authority onto the shoulders of his successor Elisha.
In Jesus’ day, many expected Elijah’s return from heaven, which they believed would herald the imminent coming of the Messiah. In the verses immediately preceding our reading from Luke this morning, Jesus asks the disciples what the people are saying about him, and they answer, “Some say you are Elijah.” (Lk 9:19) And of course, in Christian interpretation, Elijah did come again, as John the Baptist, to prepare the way of the Lord.
What’s important about these two figures in the context of the Transfiguration is that they testify to Jesus, to his place in Salvation history, to his coming glorification. Both the law and the prophets, in the persons of Moses, giver of the law, and Elijah, progenitor of the prophets, stand as witnesses to Jesus’ glorification on the mountain. Jesus stands as their more than worthy successor, having shown his authority over the sea and his ability to feed the many -- like Moses, and having cleansed the leper and raised the dead as did Elijah. And as at his baptism, the voice from above proclaims for us all that this transfigured Jesus is the chosen one, the very Son of God.
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Sometimes, we look backwards in order to find our way forward. We look to our history to help us understand who we really are. Why does the oldest window in Christ & Saint Stephen’s Church depict the Transfiguration? Well, because when this building was built in 1876, it was built not as a church, but as a chapel by the Church of the Transfiguration. This was the Chapel of the Transfiguration for only 20 years or so until St. Stephen’s Church procured the building for its new home – over time transfiguring a suburban chapel into a vibrant urban parish which in time, became the Christ & Saint Stephen’s Church that we call our spiritual home. But though this building bears the marks of its past, it’s not the building that brings us here each Sunday.
Peter, awed by what he has seen on the mountain top, seeks to hallow the spot in which such a glorious vision has taken place. And he says to Jesus, “Lord, it is good that we are here. Let us build three booths for you and Moses and Elijah.” But Peter kind of misses the point. It’s not about the place, it’s about the process. What is holy and glorious in the Transfiguration is not the mountain top on which it occurred, but the fact that through the presence of God, we become transformed and transfigured, into the children of God that we are, into the image of God that we were created to be. And it is often in our pasts that we find the clues to who we are and the tools to become who it is that God wants us to be.
Anyone who has ever been in therapy, and here on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, I’m assuming that all of us… And we know that the first thing the therapist always says is, “Why are you here?” and it makes no difference what your answer to that question is, because the second thing the therapist says is always, “So, tell me about your childhood.” The pathway to change and growth in that process runs straight through the past into a restored and recovered future.
As Shakespeare puts it, the past is prologue. Or is it? There are some among you who can recount a different history of St. Stephen’s Church. In addition to being President’s Day weekend, and Valentine’s Day -- this month is also Black History Month. And Christ & Saint Stephen’s Church has some of its own Black History to recall. In the late 1950s, when Robert Moses (there’s that name again… Moses) was transfiguring our neighborhood, tearing down tenements to build Lincoln Center, a church fell under the wrecking ball as well. St. Cyprian’s Episcopal Church, one of New York’s African-American congregations, was closed and its community of worshippers displaced.
Many of those folks joined St. Luke’s in Harlem, but others sought to stay in this neighborhood. They were faced with a choice of two parishes: St. Stephen’s and Christ Church. Well, it seems that of the two, Christ Church was far and away the more welcoming to these African American Episcopalians. St. Stephen’s had some changing to do, but let’s not be too hard on those folks, because lots of folks in this country had some changing to do. And in that time, God sent to us prophets to call us to repentance and to change. Over the ensuing 20 years or so after St. Cyprian's was torn down, both this congregation and indeed all of American society was transfigured and transformed -- thanks to hard work and prophetic vision of many who looked into a past of segregation and discrimination and sought to create a different future for themselves and their children -- and a different future for all of us.
By the time Christ Church and St. Stephen’s merged in the 1970s to become Christ & Saint Stephen’s, this congregation did welcome those it had been less welcoming to but 20 years before. In fact, on the Sunday that celebrated that merger, there was a procession that left St. Stephen’s Church, travelled across Broadway to Christ Church, gathered in those children of God, and led them back to their new home here at Christ & Saint Stephen’s. We had changed; we had been transfigured, along with all of American society. This morning some of that faithful remnant from St. Cyprian’s, Miss Avon, Miss Mae and Miss Mavis will be our hosts at coffee hour. They have provided for all of us, of their hospitality, sustenance and an opportunity for fellowship. God is good – all the time.
No one can say that the work of that era is done -- far from it. But we can stand here on this President’s Day weekend and look back at that history, and then look to our current president and say that God has indeed transfigured us, and that we, as a nation and a people, now better reflect the image of the loving and just God that we were created to be.
Often it is in the past that we find a way forward, a direction in which to go to reach our destiny. Often it is by looking into the past that we find the parts of ourselves that we need to change, the history that needs to be re-translated, ways in which we need to be transformed and transfigured. Our past can be prologue and it can be a prescription for the change that we need to make manifest in our hearts, in our churches, and in our world. Sometimes there in the past, we find the tools we need to make those changes.
Come up front after church this morning and take a look back into our past. Take a look at our Transfiguration window. It shows our Lord and Savior in all his glory, a glory that we are promised as well. Do you see yourself reflected in that vision? Do you perhaps fall a bit short of that glory? Look through that window into our past and see if you catch a glimpse of your future.
That glorious vision will be one that can strengthen us for the journey that lies ahead through Lent. That vision can sustain us as we allow the coming time of repentance and renewal to transform and transfigure us into all that our God wants us to be, into the children of God that we are called to be, into the very image and face of God for our world.
Amen+
© The Rev. Mark R. Collins
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