THE LAST SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY
February 26, 2006
2 Kings 2:1-12
2 Corinthians 4:3-6
Mark 9:2-9
Year B
A few years ago I sat at dinner with several other clergy and a conversation arose regarding a religious experience one of us had had. Another priest, curious, but not wanting to intrude into the territory as intimate as another’s encounter with God, almost hesitantly asked, “Is that something you could share with us or not?” The priest said, “Certainly” and the story was told. Since it was my story, I can say I did not think it was particularly earth-shattering, but as eyes widened and ‘men of the cloth’ (they were all men) leaned forward to block out conversation from the next table, it was obvious how hungry they were to hear about any experience of God.
And then slowly but surely, one after another, their own stories emerged; stories where God’s presence and power had broken through the bounds of the expected and predictable. No doubt you could have gathered up a hat full of theological degrees that night, but no one interrupted the stories with any lengthy theological comment or question. There was merely a silence in between stories that were beyond commentary.
Of course there are always people willing to provide you with an experience of God. For the right price they will provide you with all the tools. Or, you may have tried your own do it yourself kit for encounter with God; using tried and true methods of fasting, prayer, or walking on your knees until they bleed. Some people go to seminary seeking such experiences while others just go fishing. But encounters with God are not moments you can order up like lunch. They are gifts given to us from God – for a purpose.
In today’s Gospel Jesus took his closest friends up a high mountain; Mt. Tabor say many archeologists. And there, before their very eyes, the indescribable ‘happened’. The veil between this world and God’s presence, was lifted. What drove Jesus to the mountain top was the realization that his earthly ministry was nearing an end. Perhaps troubled, exhausted, fearful, he went up the mountain to pray, taking with him Peter, James, and John. And there, something extraordinary happened. It was so extraordinary all four gospels record it.
The Aramaic root of the verb “to see God” evokes the image of a flash of lightning that appears suddenly across the sky. It can be a brief, but terrifying moment. If anything like that has ever has happened to you, you do not need anyone to explain Christianity to you. You do not need to go to seminary or prove your experience to anyone. You just try to recover from being stunned until it dawns upon you that you just saw God and lived to tell about it. Most of us, however, haven’t had those kinds of experiences. Scratch the surface and there’s an agnostic inside most of us.
Frederick Buechner writes:
An agnostic is somebody who doesn’t know for sure whether there really is a God. That is some people all of the time and all people some of the time. There are some agnostics who don’t know simply because they’ve never taken pains to try to find out – like the bear who didn’t know what was on the other side of the mountain. There are other agnostics who have taken many pains. They have climbed over the mountain, and what do you think they saw? Only the other side of the mountain. At least that was all they could be sure of. That faint glimmer on the far horizon could have been just Disneyland.
Everyone of us can identify with those words. In my sixteen years as a priest anyone who ever sat before me and started talking about blinding lights or red hot bushes were people who worried me. Once a lady sat in my office and told me that every time I celebrated the Eucharist she saw Jesus hovering over my head. While I don’t remember exactly what I said to her I do have some vague recollection of searching for some kind of alarm button under my desk.
Yet, at its heart religion is mysticism, whether it be Moses before the burning bush or Elisha’s experience with Elijah. Religion, as institution, morals, ritual, scripture, or social action, all such things came later. So the danger is that religion can become something which is ‘about’ God rather than ‘of’ God. Indeed, in our first reading today, when Elisha sees what happens to Elijah, he proves that he is capable of seeing into the spiritual realm and thus worthy to receive Elijah’s spirit.
In everyone’s spiritual journey we are called first and foremost, to openness to the world that is not of this world. Otherwise, as one author says, “sharing the Gospel becomes a form of the ‘bland leading the bland’. Evangelism becomes a moral cause, rather than an irresistible urge to share the story that has changed lives.” Thomas Aquinas understood that. After he had nearly completed the greatest theological work in all of history he had an experience while saying Mass one day that halted his writing completely. When questioned whether he would ever finish his work he would only reply, “I have seen things that make all my writings seem like so much straw”.
All of us are mystics more than we realize. But modern life is complicated. After we experience the holy the theologians go to their computers and the skeptics take to their beds to forget it and most of us just carry on carrying on with the busyness of life. We become so accustomed to our anesthetizing routines it’s no wonder God is unable to break through more often. And yet – I think we all hunger for exactly that to happen in our lives. We seek the high mountains and moments in life, somehow hoping that the curtain might be drawn back for one shining moment. One author says he thinks this is part of what people hope to experience when they go to the symphony or the opera; for the holy to break into lives that are often painful and dead ended.
So it’s well to remember that any mountain top experience of God is meant, not to dazzle or overwhelm, but to empower – and set free. N.T.Wright, Bishop of Durham, England, says that our ordinary experiences of the holy are given to us as signposts, wherein we are called not only to recognize God’s presence, but also God’s involvement in our lives.
One priest tells of being at the airport when his peace was interrupted by someone who wanted to discuss ‘religion’. The guy said, “I don’t go to church, but I do try to do right and live a good life, to help people when I can, and isn’t that what Christianity is mostly about anyway?” The priest writes, “If I hadn’t been in an airport, and if I were really committed to this man’s intellectual development, I would have said, “No, you poor, simple, secular soul, that is not what the Christian faith is about. The Christian faith is about more, so much more than our little deeds, even our very good little deeds. It’s about worship, awe, ecstasy.” He says, “To reduce this faith to the merely moral, to boil down this uncontainable fire to the essentially ethical, is to demean it. Try to lasso a wave, go hold a burning coal in your hands, put out to sea in the middle of a hurricane – that’s closer to the Christian faith than the merely moral”
That’s what I pray for all of us today. That’s what I pray for Addison today. That’s what I hope you will pray for her; that her life might be open to the power of God to transform her, because we cannot know what life may bring her way. Remember, Jesus led the disciples back down the mountain because it was there that God’s profound transformation of the world was to take place. It was there, in the midst of real people and real problems, real pain and real risk, where God’s love was fully revealed.
Today, standing as we do at the edge of Lent, we are asked to ponder and pray about our experiences of Transfiguration. Where have they been; those moments when time stood still, still enough to be filled by God’s presence. Where have the moments been when God touched you and said, “Fear not”? Where have the moments been when God said to you, “Be transformed”?
The Benedictines have long said, “We do not seek experiences of God. We seek God”. Granted, we do see through a glass darkly, but the veil of this world is thin enough that you can never tell when God’s glory might break right through and into your life. And when that happens, there’s no telling how the world, or even you, might be changed.
AMEN
The Rev. Virginia L. Bennett, D.Min.
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
Edwardsville, Illinois