"Transfiguration as Expression of Universal Revelation" | The Rev. Luk de Volder | February 14, 2021
“Transfiguration as Expression of Universal Revelation”
Sermon by the Rev. Luk de Volder
An abbreviated version of this text was presented as sermon at Trinity on the Green, on the Last Sunday of Epiphany, February 14, 2021.
2 Kings 2:1-12 | 2 Corinthians 4:3-6 | Mark 9:2-9 | Psalm 50:1-6
Good morning everyone. Happy Valentine’s Day. Happy Presidents’ Weekend. Let’s join each other in prayer. The church is not just built on the people we see on Sunday. As church we are first and foremost built on the foundation of our Lord: the presence of the Lord is what holds us together. That is the first reason why we meet on Sunday because it is on the day of the resurrection, the day that Christ anchored his presence in the heart of our humanity, as the heartbeat of our faith.
During these rough and tough pandemic days, however, we often wonder during our daily challenges: where is God in all of this? Is God still present to us, are God’s comfortable words still providing comfort to our souls? We certainly need God’s love and God’s presence to face the challenges of our time, currently the challenge of our society that is getting more polarized and hardened. Is there a way to return to a more human society, where we still can dialogue and really see each other? Where we can see Christ in each other? These questions are on many people’s mind. They are also at the heart of this Gospel of the Transfiguration, a Gospel story that shows us how God’s love is with us when trial awaits.
This sense of absence of God’s presence is an urgent question. Because some Christians seek to fill the void, but in a confusing, questionable way that has little affinity with the Gospel of Christ. For example, there is a growing movement in the US, of non-denominational self-proclaimed Christian prophets, with prophets such as Jeremy Johnson, who prophesied both in 2015 and 2019 Trump’s electoral win. This fast growing niche of Christian movements appeals to the desire to see God working in our daily lives. One very popular prophet is Cindy Jacobs, who in March 2020 led a Global Day of Prayer to contain the spread of the virus. At that moment she also prophesied the end of the pandemic for the fall of 2020. But when the future became history, the predictions of Jeremy Johnson or Cindy Jacobs and many other self-proclaimed prophets, quickly became discredited.
But the rise of this prophet movement in America doesn’t simply point to a level of preposterous ignorance about Christianity, it also points to a deep hunger to find God and divine intervention in this world. These awkward grasps to catch a glimpse of the divine are accompanied by a certain helplessness to find God’s guidance. These people do not find solace for their souls in churches where the core message is an almost exclusive social-justice call, often well-aligned with the canon of the modern rational discourse that provides justification for the old pre-modernity Jesus-narratives as ethically relevant for today. But that moral guidance for the inter-personal behavior - the “horizontal” dynamic in life, (and Jesus’ contribution to evolution of ethics was indeed massive and crucial), is for many people missing the source that inspired Jesus himself, which is the crucial connection with God as the source of life and the power of liberation - the “vertical” dynamic of life.
To find some clarity for this very influential struggle between the horizontal and vertical dimension of our faith - more influential than is often acknowledged - we need to take an extra step. Because you are correct if you feel God’s love to be distant and removed in the world that we are living in. For centuries, humanity in general recognized the presence of the divine in three major ways: in the world as creation, in our soul as the principle of our being, and in God as the maker and energy of all that is. Than came modernity and with all its gifts, it also became an instrument of disenchantment and disconnection of the divine. The soul became the psyche and subject to psycho-analysis, the world became the ecological environment and subject to human management, and God was replaced by reason and the shared power of knowledge that liberates humanity from what is primitive and undeveloped. As a result, it is indeed much harder to sense that God is present, that our world is steeped in God’s grace and that our souls are sheltered under God’s eagle wings. The person in the pew feels the Gospel as no longer addressing their questions. Christ never offered us a manual for the unconscious, for the ecological challenge, for the quantum physics of the cosmos.
The collapse of God’s presence - the vertical dimension of our faith has huge consequence that we still experience today. With God out of the picture, the religious crisis is not only giving rise to a desperate wild-life of spiritual claims such as the American prophecy movement, but it also affects the horizontal dimension of our faith. We all can sense it: we are also facing an ethical crisis. While for some people Jesus’ stories are still relevant in their ethical appeal and their call for justice for a better humanity, the moral stopgaps against violent reduction of the world and violence reduction of people (people are demonized and “otherized”). Dialogue and difference are doomed. The other becomes even dispensable - extermination is justified, because the moral stop-gaps lack their sacred foundation.
Today’s Gospel unites that horizontal dimension and vertical dimension of reality and faith and presents as liberating path a radical view on life as revelation. There is Jesus on mount Tabor, present to his friends beyond the confines of time and the discomfort of the day. For people who are on the fence about Jesus and Christianity, Jesus’s transfiguration, with the mystery cloud and the secret voice, may feel more like a Harry Potter scene than like a Jesus fact significant in the Christian faith. The episode is easily overlooked by many churches, but it points to a key aspect of our human life: namely that the reality in which we live is soaked in God, steeped in Christ, and therefore in one way or another is reflecting the presence of God’s mercy and love, not simply as a path to redemption when we messed up, but first and foremost in every filigree of our being, in our bones, in the mountains, the galaxies. As Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, paleontologist and theologian, loves to highlight: God’s love is the very physical structure of the Universe.
Before Jesus embarks on the most important spiritual battle of history, his pathway to the cross, Jesus shows his core source of strength: that his being is already immersed in the power of love stronger than death.
Seeing the world and our souls as places where God is already revealing God self is the key to experiencing Christ as active in our lives today. As the transfiguration is showing, grace is the other side of the coin, always already there and noticeable once we change our frequency from conquest of the world to the world as revelation.
The transfiguration was the moment when Jesus invited his disciples to see him as already resurrected before his crucifixion, as already being Love-stronger-than-death. The transfiguration wasn’t simply a divine wink to inform his select few that Jesus will make it. It was a manifestation of what is: that revelation is core to our daily experience of the divine. Revelation, in this way, not as an exceptional once-in-a-blue-moon event, but as the daily experience of grace-abundance whereby we start noticing God’s presence and God’s guidance in the daily movement of our day, restores not only the power of the world as creation or the power of our soul - we came into being because God loved us and wanted us to be. Christ’s transfiguration is inviting us to walk through life, especially when trials come our way, with the eyes of our souls wide open for the continuing communication of the divine through our whole being (our heart, our feelings, our imagination), through our surrounding in nature and other people.
Revelation as always present filigree of our lives is by no means a sidetrack to escape the challenges of life. On the contrary, the Love of God strengthens us to keep going, to get real and to renew our faith in humanity when humanity seems lost. This universal revelation is the exact crucial antidote to the brutalizing and desensitizing that is poisoning our society today. Because the universal revelation reminds humanity of the sacrality of each resource and each person and helps to restore the horizontal dimension of love. The face of the other is always calling me to see the miracle of every human person, to see the beauty of life and of every moment we share (Levinas). Every person is a sacred presence and every encounter is sacred ground.
The horizontal and the vertical dimension of our faith go hand in hand. As St. John wrote, if we don’t love our neighbor, our faith in God is worthless. Because if we love our neighbor without connecting with God’s presence, it becomes hard for many people to maintain the love. The love for humanity and the world brings us to care for the psyche, our climate, for reason. The continued beckoning presence of the divine communicating in filigree frees us from the destructive reduction of reality that boxes our souls, our world, and God Godself in a toxic disenchantment of our being
Let us than on this Sunday take a moment to open ourselves to the Revelation moment of Jesus’ transfiguration. Let us renew the awareness that every moment of our lives is sacred time, every person we encounter is now an encounter with someone who transcends us. Never again can we reduce the world to a mere product, never again is time just money. And never again should we “otherize” someone. The world is forever our temple, our neighbor is always calling us to grow our hearts, and the Christ is continually working to liberate us and make us grow beyond what we can ask or imagine. Let us take in the continued revelation of the Christ as a medicine for society and for our own souls.