LAST SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY

SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH

THE REV. ANNE G. STANLEY

3 FEBRUARY 2008

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Exodus 24:12-18; Psalm 2; 2 Peter 1:16-21; Matthew 17:1-9

             This year the season of Epiphany has been shortened, because of the way the calendar works and when Easter falls. So we’ve heard only five epiphanies this year, beginning with the first on January 6, five occasions when Jesus’ identity was made known: Jesus revealed to the Wise Men, Jesus revealed as God’s beloved Son at his baptism, Jesus revealed by John the Baptizer as the Lamb of God, Jesus revealed to the fishermen as the One they couldn’t help but drop their nets for and follow.

            Today is the last epiphany, the mountaintop epiphany, the last revelation of Jesus’ sacred uniqueness, before his final journey to the Cross.

            Today’s story is packed with juicy tidbits. There’s Jesus’ retreat up the mountain, not alone, for a change, but with his inner circle of disciples in tow, Peter and James and John. There’s the disciples’ vision of Jesus suddenly transformed before them, his face shining and his clothes dazzling white. There’s the sudden appearance of Moses and Elijah, standing around chatting with Jesus. There’s Peter’s sudden, inspired plan to build three dwellings, one for Jesus, another for Moses and a third for Elijah, as if to capture them and preserve this wonderful moment. There’s God interrupting Peter (how do you suppose it feels to be interrupted by God? Maybe it’s a message that Peter talked too much, not listening enough, so maybe it’s a message for us, too, to do more listening to what Jesus tries to tell us).  There’s God repeating what God had said not long before, at Jesus’ baptism, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him.” There’s the disciples’ falling to the ground in terror at God’s voice and the bright cloud casting a shadow over them (How does a bright cloud cast a shadow, I wonder?).  There’s Jesus telling his friends not to be afraid and suddenly they realize that the vision is over and it’s time to go back down the hill and get on with things, and it’s all over and they’re not to tell anybody about their mountaintop experience just yet.

            And they didn’t tell anybody, apparently, until after Jesus death and resurrection. That’s when the strange, confusing time on the mountain came back to them and they remembered and it now began to make sense.  

            What made sense? What sense did the vision make?

            We suspect that the disciples realized that, like any vision, that one was not a run-of-the-mill thing. We suspect they realized that it had come from God as a special gift to them. We suspect that the disciples knew that it was beyond their control, that even though it really had happened, it nevertheless was a total mystery.

             We imagine also, perhaps, that they eventually knew that even as they and Jesus had had to come down off the mountain to get on with life again (and death), the vision was still there for them to remember day after day. That somehow, gift that it was, God had given it to them as a reminder of who Jesus would become for them, a reminder, too, of God and God’s desire that no matter what happened in their lives, God was with them for comfort and strength and power. 

            When I tell stories in sermons about living, breathing people that I know, I like to ask their permission first. I haven’t asked my mother about the story I’m about to tell, but somehow I don’t think she’d mind. When my mother told me about her own recent vision, a thing she told me had happened to her for sure, I didn’t make a connection between her story and today’s gospel. But then I read an article that helped me make the link.

            A couple of weeks ago, we were chatting away, she and I, a typical conversation of talk, followed by silences while my mother thinks about things, sometimes even forgetting that she is on the phone with me, sometimes even nodding off for a minute or two. That day, suddenly my mother said, “I went to Boston today. To the Symphony.” Her voice had its old lilt to it, and energy, that I remember from earlier times.

            But I knew full well that no way had she gone to Boston. She used to go, regularly, it was one of her favorite things to do with friends. But not for years now, fifteen or more.  Not since she began living in the nursing home.

“Oh, great,” I said. “Who’d you go with?”

“Nobody. I went by myself.” 

Pause.

“Hey, what did they play?”

“Hayden,” she said. “And some Mozart.”  She said it was very good, although she couldn’t remember if the concert had been symphonies, concerti or smaller selections.

Our conversation went on, until I asked her later how she had gotten down to Boston.

“I can’t remember that part,” she said. But she could remember running into Scott, one of her current and favorite CNAs. “I kept seeing him---at the subway, in elevators.”

In subsequent phone calls, my mother has mentioned again her expedition to Boston. How wonderful it was, I could tell, to get away, to hear some of her favorite music, to wander around her old city, to see old friends and even her new friend, Scott, the guy who crocheted her the blanket that she sleeps under every night.

            My mother absolutely did not go to Boston last week.  I know that. The nursing home knows that. But she had been to Boston and to the Boston Symphony, over and over, in her lifetime, and that was all real, and Scott is real, and the music she still hears is real. Her vision, as she remembered all that had been, was, I am convinced, a gift from God.  A mysterious gift, given to her so she could be strengthened and comforted, when she found herself down off the mountain and back in her same old nursing home chair, living her 94 year-old life in present time, day after day.

            The disciples awakened from their vision-gift, too, and went back down the mountain with Jesus to resume life where they had left off. Years later, they remembered and perhaps relived their vision and talked about it amongst themselves. And it strengthened them, knowing that God was with them always, giving them comfort to face what they had to face. They have told the story to us, for our own comfort, to strengthen us, too.

            Perhaps even Jesus was given, by this transfiguration experience, the strength he needed for his own journey. We can only guess.

            I believe that the story of the transfiguration of Jesus, as he was shown to be whom God intended him to be, is a story of hope.

Not that hope means that everything will turn out all right, or that things will be pie in the sky wonderful.

But hope meaning, as Vaclav Havel puts it, that in the end everything makes sense, no matter how things turn out.

For my mother, it seems that everything makes perfectly good sense. Her vision, based on real memory, is enough right now. She is sustained. 

Hope for us Christians also means, of course, that nothing, not even death, can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.  A gift, a mystery—but let that be hope for us as we go through our own lives.  May it make, for us, sense enough.