A sermon for the Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Sunday, August 6, 2023. The scripture readings are Exodus 34:29-35, Psalm 99 or 99:5-9, 2 Peter 1:13-21, and Luke 9:28-36.
Today’s Gospel tells the story of the Transfiguration of Jesus. It describes the physical change in Jesus as his disciples watch. Light overtakes Jesus completely and his face shines like what is imagined as the face of God.
But there are other transfigurations that seem to take place as well. It may be here that Jesus’ own self-identity changes, his future becomes clear in a new way, and he sets his face toward Jerusalem. The disciples themselves are perhaps transfigured as they come to understand Jesus in a new way. They don’t fully understand, but they’ve learned that in a time of confusion, things may seem to get even more cloudy, but through prayer, through an ongoing relationship with God, clarity comes in the end.
And so, the Gospel describes the drama of transfiguration, but it also shows us how transfigurations can happen in our lives as well. We may not use that word, and we may not see them as dramatically, and we may not ever be alert to them, but God often works through confusion, a cloud, and eventual clarity.
The key to moving through this transition, the key to making it up the mountain and back, the key to transfigurations, is at the very beginning of today’s Gospel. They went up on the mountain to pray.
Prayer keeps us open and alive to Jesus Christ. It is our being with him and our listening to him. Prayer enables us to endure confusion, because our focus is on God and not on whatever blows around us. Prayer takes us into the cloud and there we find God in a deeper way. From there, prayer shows us the way out of the cloud, the way forward, the way down the mountain.
In the 14th century an anonymous monk wrote a book that has been called the Cloud of Unknowing , and it has helped spiritual seekers for centuries ever after. The author counsels that sometimes our effort to know, our need to understand everything, to get it sorted out in our head, can be the very stumbling block to a deeper knowledge of God.
The author talks about prayer in simple ways, ways that are sometimes described in what modern spiritual writers call Centering Prayer. But the praying is simple, and easy, it’s not complicated. It’s simply sitting with God, being available for God, trying to un-clutter the mind so that we’re not constantly thinking and talking to God, but listening, being, breathing. We may think that the presence of God is unattainable and so, “Why bother?” We may have tried some kind of prayer in the past and felt like we failed at it, but the author of the Cloud of Unknowing suggests that heaven is closer than we might have imagined.
The author writes
“Spiritually, heaven is as near down as up, up as down, behind as before, before as behind, on this side as on that! So that whoever really wanted to be in heaven, he is there and then in heaven spiritually. For we run the highway (and the quickest) to heaven on our desires, and not on our two feet.”
Chapter 60
The Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, writes about prayer and captures nicely the way so often we think about praying, but we put it off. (From the Abundance of the Heart: Catholic Evangelism for All Christians, London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2006, p. 93.) We imagine that tomorrow we’ll have more time, or the apartment will be quieter, or we’ll be less distracted and somehow more available for God later.
Archbishop Cottrell thinks of the way people sometimes will be driving down a highway and notice the gas gauge is moving toward empty. But there’s a kind of game we play—we see a sign saying that gas if available in 5 miles and also in 50, and so we pass the 5 mile marker and try to make it to the 50 mile mark. We don’t save any time doing this—it will take the same amount of time to fill up later as it might sooner, but we delay. And sometimes, we end up almost driving on empty. Cottrell suggests that too many of us are often running on empty, spiritually—we need times of prayer, we need patterns of prayer that are woven into our days. That might look like Morning or Evening Prayer with a Prayer Book, or it might look like a prayer while walking or jogging in the morning.
It might mean meditation or Centering Prayer, or it might mean journaling, or prayerfully listening to music or any number of things that you choose to be your prayer.
Prayer gives us the means to make into through any cloud and beyond.
An image that always comes to mind for me around the Transfiguration is one that was on view in the Metropolitan Museum a few years ago. We took a group together to visit an enormous altarpiece and other paintings by Christóbal de Villalpando, a mixed-race painter in New Spain, (Mexico) in the late 1600’s. His Transfiguration is a massive painting originally for a chapel altar in the Cathedral of Puebla, Mexico.
Villalpando paints an odd Transfiguration, pairing it with the scary story from the Book of Number about how the people of Israel disobeyed God and God sent a plaque of serpents. Moses prayed for the people and God said, “Build an image of a bronze serpent, put it on a pole, and have the people look at it. Then they will be healed.” Jesus refers to this story when he meets with Nicodemus and relates it to the way in which Jesus will be crucified, hung on a cross, but through his sacrificial death and resurrection, we will find healing.
What’s new, and what Villalpando does is to pair the bronze serpents with the Transfiguration, rather than the Crucifixion. It’s as though Villalpando is saying that through the cloud, we find healing—no matter what the cloud may bring.
I sometimes make fun of Peter on the Mount of Transfiguration. I identify with his wanting to jump into action, to build a shelter and get everyone fed and taken care of. But I’ve begun to think differently about Peter. Perhaps that act of hospitality (or the suggestion of it) IS his prayer. In other words, maybe the way for him to move through the cloud and accept the transfiguration before him was to do the next good, faithful thing.
Teresa of Avila reminds us, “Remember: if you want to make progress on the path and ascend to the places you have longed for, the important thing is not to think much but to love much, and so to do whatever best awakens you to love.” (Teresa of Ávila, The Interior Castle, trans. Mirabai Starr (New York: Riverhead Books, 2004), 91.)
On this feast of the Transfiguration, may we, like Peter and the other disciples, like Teresa of Avila, and so many others, be strengthened through prayer to withstand any storm or cloud that might come our way. May we always remember that prayer draws us into the cloud of God’s presence and can help us move forward with new clarity. May we, too, be transfigured and changed by God’s love.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.