Episcopal Church of the
Incarnation
The Last Sunday after the Epiphany (B)
2
Kings 2.1-12 Psalm 50.1-6 2 Corinthians 4.3-6
Mark 9.2-9
May the Lord be in my mind, on my lips, and in my heart, that
I may rightly and truly proclaim His holy Word. Amen.
Seeing is believing; or is it? Peter sees Jesus transfigured before
him. He sees Him shining with the
brightness of the sun, with Elijah and Moses on either side. He hears them speaking, and how is it that he
reacts, he–Peter–who within the prior week has been the first and only disciple
to “get it”, to understand and declare who Jesus is; that He is the
Christ? You can almost hear the nervous
laugh: “[I]t is good for us to be here
... one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” Peter has recognized who Jesus is, now he
recognizes that it is Moses and Elijah who are with Jesus. He’s been with Jesus for a long time. He’s
seen Him perform miracles, heard Him teach, trudged along the road with
Him. He’s clearly drawn to and impressed
by Jesus, but he still is not quite sure what to do, because this whole
experience is so different from anything he can relate to. And now there comes a voice from the cloud
which overshadows them, a voice which proclaims “This is my Son, the Beloved;
listen to him!” Just when Peter is
putting all these data together–the voice which proclaims the messiah as in
Psalm 2, the cloud in which the Lord
appeared before Moses atop Mt. Sinai, the presence of Moses and Elijah, and his
own prior declaration that Jesus is the Christ–just when these data come
together with his own fear and confusion, it’s over. The transfiguration of reality which Peter
has experienced is over, and Jesus and James and John are walking with him down
the mountain.
When has this happened in your
life? Oh, I’m not saying that you’ve had
a mystical experience of God (although you might have). I’m not saying that you’ve heard a voice from
heaven, but I am saying that at some point in your life there has been a time
when reality changed, when your understanding of the world and of yourself
changed. That might not have been a
dramatic moment, even if it might have been an auspicious moment, like when you
got married, or graduated from college, or opened your own business, or became
a mother or father. At a time like that
there probably came a little “A hah!” moment when you realized that life was
now different and you were now different.
You see, when Peter sees Jesus transfigured–when he sees Him in His
glory–he sees not only how Jesus really is and how he will be; he sees how he,
Peter, will be. He sees the glory of
heaven. He experiences, in Paul’s words,
“the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2
Cor. 4.6) In other words, he experiences
the glory to which he is called.
Peter sees the glory of heaven, and in our Gospel lesson we get a
foretaste of the glory to which each one of us is called.
Think back to that time when reality
changed for you. The doctor said “It’s a
boy!”, and in your experience of the pain, exhaustion, anxiety, relief and joy
of childbirth you now held this little warm bundle, this little warm person
whose presence now made your life a new and different life. Think back to the time when the minister said
that you and your spouse were now joined by God. Think back and re-live that first day when
you opened the door of your business and greeted your first customer, or held
in your hands a piece of paper with your name on it, calling you “Doctor”. Like Peter you may have said something a
little bit lame and a little bit confused, because like Peter you knew that
your world had changed, and you were casting about for some mooring.
And where was this mooring? In Peter’s case a voice provides
direction: “This is my Son, the Beloved;
listen to him!” In yours? It’s the same Son, the same God and what He
has to say to you. He speaks to you in
holy Scripture; He speaks when you listen for Him in prayer and in the voices
of those with whom you gather in worship and service; He speaks to you through
the needs of others. “Listen to
Him!” That’s what Peter is told, and
that’s what each one of us is told in the Gospel.
The
voice from heaven doesn’t just show up in Mark.
God’s voice is heard at a particular point in the story. Mark tells of the coming of Jesus, of His
call of the disciples, and of His ministry with these disciples. About the middle of this story Jesus asks the
disciples who they believe Him to be, and Peter confesses, “You are the Christ”
(Mark 8.29). Jesus then tells the
disciples what that means, that the Son of man must suffer, be rejected and
killed, and then rise again. The
disciples don’t listen, and Jesus has to rebuke Peter, “Get behind me, Satan!”
(Mark 8.33). Jesus’ glory is revealed on
the mountain top, and then what happens?
He turns to Jerusalem, turning to the cross which He knows awaits. It is in this turning, and in the journey of
ministry that will take place over the rest of Mark’s account that the disciples
and we hear and see Jesus teach again and again. The voice which says “Listen to him!” tells
us that in what Jesus does says we are instructed in the new reality, in the
only reality that matters. This is
the “mooring” provided by God, the mooring by which we are to understand and
live our lives.
What is this reality? What is this transformed, transfigured new
world, new life? It is that there is one
mooring, one rock upon which we anchor all existence; the rock of being a child
of God, of being an heir of the kingdom of heaven, of receiving in our hearts
the light and love which God gives us when we accept Him and confess Him as
Lord and Savior. In other words, this
new reality is salvation.
If you ask somebody “Are you
saved?”, they’ll probably not think that you’re an Episcopalian. That’s not an expression that’s common in our
faith experience. We’re more reticent,
more reserved, but consider that in being reserved we must not deny that the
new reality of the kingdom of heaven is here now. A young person might say, “One day I hope to
be a mother”, or “I plan to be a doctor”, and know that this doesn’t mean that
life has changed yet. But if I say, “One
day I’ll die, and I hope to be saved and to go to heaven” then I make salvation
a future event only, I deny a present reality:
who I am in relation to God. I
deny that God has given His Son already for my salvation, and that His
Son reigns in heaven already; that God has sent me His Spirit to guide and
comfort me already.
Salvation happens now; it is a
present reality. I am saved. Writing many years after the transfiguration,
many years after the resurrection, Peter (or one writing for him) says:
His divine power has granted
to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of
him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to
us his precious and very great promises, that through these you may escape from
the corruption that is in the world because of passion, and become partakers of
the divine nature (2 Pet. 1.3-4).
Pay attention to the verb tenses in this passage from Second Peter. Peter, writing after the fact, describes what has been given to us already, reminding us that just as he saw on the mountain, we too are called to God’s own glory and excellence.
Salvation happens now, and
when we realize that we are saved, what do we do? Like Peter we follow our Lord, recognizing
that there will be times when we will fall.
Like Peter we listen to what our Lord has to say, to how He teaches and
guides us, because we recognize His voice (John 10.4). In other words, like Peter we recognize that
our life has changed, and that we are to live our life differently. (Notice that the order in those events that
is the opposite of what the world might expect.
We are not saved because of how we live our lives, but live our lives
differently–we enjoy new life–because we are saved.)
So, let’s think back again to some
point in our own lives when we recognized a new reality. As soon as you knew you were going to have a
child, you changed how you lived. As
soon as you opened your business, you changed how you lived. In both cases you started to think less of
your immediate wants and more of long term needs; you started to live less for
yourself and more for another, for others.
Your life reflected the new reality of who and what you now were. And it’s the same in faith. Because of faith, because of salvation, we
try to follow the Son of God, of whom the Father says “Listen to him!”
Lent begins in three days. In Lent we’re intentional about focusing on
the new reality of salvation, the new reality of being people who seek to
follow Jesus. We do this by calling to
mind all the ways in which we have damaged our relationship with God, and all
the ways in which God reaches out to repair the damage. We seek to follow, to listen, to live as
those who know “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of
Jesus Christ”, to know that it is to the glory of heaven to which we are
called.
Let this be a holy Lent for
you. Keep before you the vision of
heaven. As you take one step at a time
to follow Jesus, know that others walk with you. As we work to renounce all that is not of
God, and reach out to all that is of God, we do this together as the Body of
Christ in this place. We walk together,
just as when he came down from the mountain Peter walked along with James and
John, just as all the disciples walked along with their Master.
Let this be a Holy Lent, a journey
with the vision of heaven ever before you.
In
the Name of the Father, and of the Son,
and
of the Holy Spirit. Amen.