God's Epiphanies Matthew 17:1-9 February 6, 2005, Year A, the Last Sunday of Epiphany The Rev. William V. Livingston, Rector Church of the Resurrection, Starkville, Mississippi At this past week's Clericus, the gathering of clergy from our area convocation, in a discussion of what last weekend's Diocese Council had or had not resolved, I found that not only could I not engage in the dialog (or debate, depending on one's perspective) but was bothered by it. Perhaps, I was tired of recent ecclesiastical debates or maybe just tired. However, as I considered Matthew's account of the Transfiguration, I conclude my disengagement may grow from my concern that we Christians, and especially we Episcopalians, too often value cognition over experience. If I were to visit Mississippi State University entomology, I could find case after case of butterflies pinned to Styrofoam boards with their common and scientific names neatly pinned in front of them. If I was a serious student of butterflies, I would be able describe characteristics of each species and label each body part. However, who experiences a butterfly, one who visits such an exhibit or one who happens to be lying in a field of wild flowers and has a butterfly unexpectedly light on his chest? I propose, whether the butterfly remains for only a few seconds or an hour, whether one can identify the butterfly by its scientific name or not or identify the butterfly's body parts, it is the one on whom it lands who has experienced a butterfly. Matthew's account of the transfiguration of Jesus concludes the celebrations of Epiphany, the manifestation of the divine on earth in which the whisper in Bethlehem becomes a shout heard round the world. It also ushers in Ash Wednesday, the sobering beginning of Lent. Of all the questions with which our Epiphany experience and which our Lenten journey to the center of the soul confronts us, the one that emerges from the transfiguration account may be the most determining of them all. Once this question is answered, everything else falls in place, an uneasy place, perhaps, but in place, nevertheless. The question is a deceptive one, simple at one level, dangerously profound at another. The transfiguration narrative asks us not, "What should we do to make ourselves religious?" but "How do we experience the Holy?" There is a tension in religion today that swirls around the struggle for authenticity. Is adherence to doctrinal purity the true mark of the committed Christian? Or is it deference to hierarchy? Does authenticity lie in being citizen Christians whose intention to maintain the Christian world lies in fashioning into law and public structures the theology of one denomination or another: Enshrining the Ten Commandments in courtrooms that allow the powerful to further oppress the powerless, fighting to keep prayer in schools in which racism is the norm? Does real spirituality lie in withdrawal from the fray into some kind of pious Nirvana where we are sequestered from the cares of the day and the questions of the time? The answer, I think, lies in the story of the Transfiguration. Matthew tells us it took place on a high mountain. Getting there would have been an exhausting climb. Then, at the top, with the exception of the view of the desert below - there is nothing there. It's an out of the way place that has all the character of a dead end that Jesus took Peter, James and John, where they thought they had been called to go up the mountain to be with Jesus alone - a pietist's dream. And, sure enough, scripture records that a strange and wonderful thing occurred there. Up on the top of that faraway mountain, Peter, James and John got a new insight into Jesus. Up there by themselves, they began to see Jesus differently. And he was a great deal more than they had ever imagined: He was dazzling and intense and all-consuming. The idea was overwhelming. And very, very heady. It was also very, very disturbing. Because then and there, in a gospel that is apparently about the mystical, in privatized dimensions of religion we begin to see the perennial struggle between piety and Christianity, between religion-for-real and religion-for-show. There, on the top of that mountain, right in front of their eyes, Jesus, the scripture says, became transfigured before them. He was radiant as the sun and talking to Moses and Elijah. This is real experience here. But, real experiences can be overwhelming. And so, Peter, an Episcopalian before its time, proposes, "Let's institutionalize this mystical moment. Let's stick a pin in this butterfly and place it on a Styrofoam board." At the very moment of his deepest revelation and clearest call, in other words, Peter decides that the spiritual life has something to do with building temples and keeping the rituals and enlarging the facilities and floating above the fray. Indeed, if there is a temptation in Christianity on this Last Sunday of Epiphany, it is the temptation to play church. To dabble in religion. To recite the prayers without becoming them. No sooner has Peter decided to be a church bureaucrat, before he decides whether the three dwellings will be in a line or in a triangle, of equal or varied sizes (things we could debate for thousands of years to come), than the irony of the situation shocks us all: Scripture dashes the entire thought in mid-air. "While he was still speaking," the scripture records, "The voice of God said, `This is my Son ... Listen to him!'" As they descend the mountain, and Jesus admonishes them to wait till his death before telling anyone about this, only Matthew uses the word vision. Rather than meaning something not real, hear vision as something that cannot normally be seen or understood. A gift from God, not from human wisdom or understanding. Impossible to explain the Mystery to others. We, of course, can only know about that mountaintop experience through a reading of the Gospel. However, if this bedrock incident of the narrative of Jesus is to have meaning in our times and in our spiritual journeys, to experience the Holy, we must first accept our need to be transfigured, transformed, metamorphosed. Just as we will probably never experience a specific rare, exotic butterfly if we go out with only that goal and, for certain, will never experience one in the entomology lab, so, we, too, must be open to numinous moments: times when the brilliance of the Christ so touches us that we are transfigured in our humanity - when we can become more closely in touch with God; times when God can become so alive for us that the experience is almost beyond bearing. Happenings that help us see with absolute clarity who and what God is. There is no shortage of epiphanies in this world. Those of us who have not yet glimpsed the full brightness of the Lord may still behold his glory, reflected all around us as we stand within the cloud. These theophanies may come in a worship service, holding the hand of someone as she draws her last earthly breath, a pained and exhausted mother holding her infant seconds after his birth, a father gently teaching his son to hold a bat properly, those moments, in which God speaks to you and you know there is God. By them we experience the presence of Christ among us. In these unexpected moments, that come as flashes of insight or glimpses of the holy, we see shattered the barrier between the broken and incomplete NOW and the Godly and complete NOT YET. In them we can be transfigured from what we have been to what God calls us to be. And then, as did Peter, James and John, we must go back down the mountain. We are not transformed to build dwellings to honor the transfiguring moment. We are not transformed to safeguard institutions. We are not transformed to stick the butterfly on a Styrofoam board. We are transformed so that what we do on Sunday is reflected in what we do on Monday and Tuesday and every day of the week. We are transformed so that it is not a matter of how much we pledge to the church but how we use everything we have. So that we don't withdraw on mountaintops or build church dwellings to avoid the pain of the world but to give us the ears to hear the grasping, groaning voices of the world of our own time, to give us the strength to wade into the throngs of hurting people exposing the underlying causes of all the wounding in this world and the love to heal what we touch.