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Last After Epiphany-B: March 2, 2003
H O M I L
Y G R I T S
The Last
Sunday After Epiphany
Transfiguration Sunday
Year B - March 2, 2003
(© 2003 by Grant Gallup -
permission given for free distribution in fair use or quotation )
¶ Book of Common Prayer Lectionary:
O God, who before the passion of your only-begotten Son revealed his
glory upon the holy mountain: Grant to us
that we, beholding by faith the light of his countenance, may be
strengthened to bear our cross, and be changed into
his likeness from glory to glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who
lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.
1 Kings 19:9-18 You shall anoint Elisha as prophet in your place
Psalm 27 or 27:5-31 Dominus illuminatio - The Lord is my light and my
salvation
2 Peter 1:16-19 (20-21) While we were with him on the holy mountain
Mark 9: 2-9 He was metamorphosed before them
¶ Revised Common Lectionary
2 Kings 2:1-12 Elijah and Elisha were on their way from Gilgal
Psalm 50:1-6 Deus Deorum - The Lord, the God of gods, has spoken
2 Corinthians 4:3-6 The god of this world has blinded he minds of the
unbelievers
Mark 9:2-9 (as above)
Transfiguration
Amongst his Twelve Apostles
Christ spake the Words of Life,
And shew'd a realm of beauty
Beyond a world of strife:
when all My Father's glory
Shall shine express'd in Me,
Then praise Him, then exalt Him,
For magnified is He!'
Upon the Mount of Tabor
The promise was made good;
When, baring all the Godhead,
In light itself He stood;
And they, in awe beholding,
The Apostolic Three,
Sang out to God their Saviour,
For magnified was He!
All hours and days inclin'd there,
And did Thee worship meet;
The sun himself adored Thee,
And bow'd him at Thy feet;
While Moses and Elias,
Upon the Holy Mount,
The co-eternal glory
Of Christ our God recount.
O holy, wondrous Vision!
But what, when this life past,
The beauty of Mount Tabor
Shall end in Heav'n at last?
But what, when all the glory
Of uncreated light
Shall be the promis'd guerdon
Of them that win the fight?
John Mason Neale, Collected Hymns, Sequences and Carols. London 1914,
p.63.
In Eastern Orthodoxy, last Sunday was the Sunday of the Last Judgment,
and today is called the Sunday of Forgiveness, on which is commemorated
the Casting Out of Adam from Paradise. At Orthodox vespers this evening,
the vestments and the hangings will be changed to darker colors. The
priest and people prostrate themselves and ask each other's forgiveness.
For them, tomorrow is the Monday in the first week of Lent. In both East
and West, we have expanded Lent from its ancient observances in a
one-week pre-Nicene fast, and a forty day fast connected with the
Epiphany, found in evidence from the fourth century onward. Tom Talley's
paper at the Valparaiso, Indiana, Liturgical Institute in 1984, offered
evidence for its connection with the final preparation of catechumens for
the "illumination" of Baptism, in which members were encouraged to share
in the preparation of catechumens, to renew their own baptismal vows. So
Lent early on was a season of solidarity.
For us in the churches of the West, Wednesday of this week is the first
day of our Lent, and we call it the Wednesday of Ashes, Miercoles de
Cenizas. We see our common ancestry and our common destiny in the ashes
of our palms of triumph of a year ago. . From now the days will lengthen
in the season called for its Length of Days, towards the Sunday called
Suffering Sunday. We turn it into Latin and call it Passion, or back
into English and call it Palm Sunday. Except in church, Passion means
the heat of the emotions--love, anger, or sexual ardor or argumentative
zeal. We know that in the context of the Church's highly idiosyncratic
way of using words, Passion means the suffering of Jesus during his
torture and murder. The capitalist punishment of our beloved, at the
hands of the State. At this early end of Lent, however, we get today a
mystic vision of where that suffering leads--beyond itself to
Transfiguration. The Greek word is metamorphosis, a monumental change of
shape, form, content, and style. We are able from here to see beyond
Easter day, through this experience on the high mountain. We can see
beyond the defeat of Jesus to his vindication. The Feast of the Ecstasy
of our Lord Jesus Christ, it might be called. Ecstasy, "ex-stasis",
means standing outside oneself. What happens in ecstasy is that we are
able for a minute or two, to be in a place completely outside our
historical moment, and to see ourselves for who we really are. One of
the reasons most of us are so intensely interested in this story of the
mountain top experience is that we have each of us had it at some time.
Was it in suffering, or in intimacy, in transcendental passion, a moment
when we were changed, and were surrounded by splendor and love, and could
see in a moment what life and death and metamorphosis are all about.
Mark puts this episode at the center of his gospel, and has Jesus in
dialogue with history: Moses and Elijah, in one moment, and his sleepy
disciples in the next. Mark does not tell us anything of the agenda at
the summit, but Luke says it was Liberation Theology. The Greek word is
Exodus , the Spanish despedida, a new departure in human history,
beginning with Jesus himself, but firmly rooted in the history of God's
people. They lay out together the coming days of struggle, and there can
be no Exodus without suffering, no deliverance without great cost, no
Easter without the day called Good Friday, no coming age of the people's
victory without the Via crucis, the way of the Cross. It was to give
Jesus the courage--the great heart--that he was swept into ecstasy, and
this is what made it possible for him to go in the strength of that
vision forty days unto the mount of God called Calvary. If Jesus had not
had this metamorphosis on the Holy Mount, he would never have had the
strength to send Judas from his table with a kiss, to sweat as it were
drops of blood in Gethsemane as his friends slumbered, or to look Pilate
in the eye, to forgive the mindless cruelty of the soldiers, the
treachery of his friends. The transfiguration changed the shape of his
understanding--he was conscientizado, had his consciousness raised, from
this moment. Without this experience, the suffering of the poor and the
oppressed in history is an unmitigated disaster still. If we look at the
ghastly photos of the slain Jesuit priests and their housekeepers laid
out on the floor of the house in San Salvador, murdered by hirelings of
U.S. hegemony, we see the suffering of Jesus Christ, and if we look at
the martyrs of the people's struggle all over the world, Janani Luwum,
the Anglican archbishop in Uganda (his murderer Idi Amin lives safely in
Saudi Arabia, U.S. ally in the war on terrorism) the Roman Catholic
archbishop Oscar Romero in San Salvador, Lutheran pastor Dietrich
Bonhoeffer in Germany, the Baptist martyr Martin Luther King Jr, in
Memphis--we see Jesus in the hous ands slain in modern warfare, from
Hiroshima to Panama City, from Santiago de Chile to Baghdad in Iraq we
have seen daily disaster and defeat of the best in the human spirit.
Modern history has been a gigantic holocaust of human hatred, a perennial
slaughter of the innocents. In Don Juan in Hell George Bernard Shaw
has the Devil ask "Is Man any the less destroying himself for all this
boasted brain of his? Have you walked up and down the earth lately? I
have; and I have examined Man's wonderful inventions. And I tell you
that in the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he
outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the
slaughter of plague, pestilence, and famine. The peasant I tempt today
eats and drinks what was eaten and drunk by the peasants of ten thousand
years ago, and the house he lives in has not altered as much in a
thousand centuries as the fashion of a lady's bonnet in a score of
weeks. But when he goes out to slay, he carries a marvel of mechanism
that lets loose at the touch of his finger all the hidden molecular
energies, and leaves the javelin, the arrow, the blowpipe of his fathers
far behind. In the arts of peace, Man is a bungler. . . there is nothing
in Man's industrial machinery but his greed and sloth: his heart is in
his weapons. This marvellous force of Life of which you boast is a form
of Death: Man measures his strength by his destructiveness. . . Man, the
inventor of the stake, the gallows, the electric chair, of sword and gun
and poison gas. . . above all, of patriotism, and all the other isms
which even those who are clever enough to be humanely disposed are
persuaded to become the most destructive of all destroyers." And Shaw
never met good churchman Colin Powell. (But Shaw didn't often go to
church.)
There is a kind of religion that does not want to deal with the reality
which the devil himself sees in our human history. It is the religion
which Peter was tempted to opt for on the mountain top: shrine
religion. Let us enshrine this experience, he says. Let us build us an
Anglo-Catrholic shrine here on the mountain, and here we shall have all
the fun things of our religion, the raiment white and glistering, the
brocade vestments, the apostolic succession stretching back to Moses and
Elijah, and the mystic cloud of incense, the wonderful whistling of the
wind in the mountain of organ pipes, and the sleepy quality of sermon
time. Fatigue and ennui, rest and repose, will be institutionalized and
we shall have a long nap through our own epoch, through our own
historical moment, and Peter is tempted to become a Rip Van Winkle and
sleep through the Revolution--the Exodus--that is waiting on the Other
Side. But the voice of God can be heard even in these mists, and the
message is: Listen to Jesus!
That's what your religion is to be about, Peter. That, Church, is what
your life is to focus on. "This is my Beloved! Listen up!"
Religion is to be about the active engagement of the people of God with
the gospel of liberation--the Human Project, the movement aimed at the
deliverance, the new Pacto, the New Departure for the human future which
Jesus is to accomplish in us, beginning at Jerusalem. It is not about
settling down to build shelters, nooks, to practice tea cozy
churchmanship, to build what my friend John Fortunato used to call
"RMO's" -- Religious Maintenance Organizations. And it is here, at the
near end of Lent, that we are bidden to choose up sides for the Jerusalem
road with Jesus, to choose for a new start for Liberation, and the
struggle. We can't let our religion stay at mountain top level--the
air's too thin, it's too sleepy and misty there. If we do, our part in
the human project will stay in hibernation, and we'll sleep through the
Revolution in our Succoth booths. G. K. Chesteron wrote in "The
Everlasting Man" that "A despotism may almost be defined as a tired
democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the citizens are less
inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price
of liberty: and they prefer to arm only one single sentinel to watch the
city while they sleep."
The people of the U.S.A. have given to their unelected president the
power to decide and to do what they themselves are too lazy, too sleepy,
to decide about, and now we have slipped into the despotism of an easy
imperium with the glassy stare of a half witted demon. The mass media
in the U.S.A. have censored themselves for decades, and most citizens
define themselves now as consumers, and do not yet know they are victims
of their selfishness. Most have fallen asleep in front of their oversize
TVs, watching Baboso channels on the Boob Tube. In the face of a
somnolent Church, the Church Recumbent, the gospel now comes to us from
Islamic minarets all across the East: Allah Akbar! God is greater!
Hear O Israel, Hear O Israeli State! The Lord our God, the Lord is
One. Hear, O Church, Hear, Peter and James and John! Listen to Jesus!
(Don't just talk to him, Listen to him!).
The high mountain of Metamorphosis is where we as Church find ourselves
today--it is the place where we may be in this moment transfigured, it
is our chance for a miracle of change. But with Peter some of the
disciples now are stuck, wanting to settle down into irrelevancy, into
the last century or the last decade, with "personal" religion, with The
Prayer of Jabbez and prosperity religion, with the Anglican Mission to
19th Century America, into "the Episcopal Church Missouri Synod." Into
fixing up tomorrow with the blueprints of yesterday. Jesus makes it
clear that his ecstasy, his mystic moment of truth, is for the purpose of
seeing into the deepest meaning of the historical project of God's
people, the Exodus to be accomplished. In our own moment, we must see
there on the Mount with Jesus not only Moses and Elijah, but Muhmmad and
Gautama there as well, for there can be no human future which does not
make room for new departures, a new Exodus, a new Despedida for all of
humankind, and new summit meetings to chart the future of the species.
There is a-borning a new willingness of believers to chart a roomier
human future. The mountain of God is not be a shrine for the past, but a
meeting place to envision a future of peace and justice on our planet.
And where do we begin? The gospel has a single answer which will engage
us for the rest of our lives, and beyond. It says we begin by
listening. This Jesus whom you follow around and want to enshrine in an
Ikon here in the woozy, misty atmosphere of Church: Hear what he has
to say! Listen to him!
GRANT GALLUP
Apartado RP-10
CASA AVE MARIA
Managua, Nicaragua C.A.
Tel. 011-505-2662165
gallup@tmx.com.ni
GRITS 2nd series now on-line:
http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/homilygrits