Transcendence & Transfiguration (Sunday before Lent)

“Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory” Luke 9.32

It’s been quite a good week in the press for Christians with home goals by Richard Dawkins’s Foundation for Science and Reason; and the National Secular Society. Somewhat unusually it’s Christians 2; Lions nil.

As we look out at all the terrible abuses of human rights around the world, it seems absurd that the National Secular Society would claim that their human rights were being infringed by prayers at the beginning of a Bideford Council meeting. Goodness! The millions of us who had our human rights infringed by countless school assemblies!

Fortunately, the Government thought this was absurd as well.

Richard Dawkins would do well to take heed to the words of Elizabeth I who famously said when asked to go down the continental, Reformation route of closely defining what makes a Christian: “I have no desire to make windows into men's souls.”

It is not for the Monarch, nor the Archbishop nor Richard Dawkins to proclaim who is and isn’t a Christian.

And our beloved Queen Elizabeth II had generally good press coverage for her appearance before a multi-faith audience at Lambeth Palace last week.

She suggested that “the concept of our established Church is occasionally misunderstood and, I believe, commonly under-appreciated.”

She reminded us that the Church is “woven into the fabric of this country” and has helped to build a better society; and added that it has a duty to protect the freedom of those of all faiths and none in the country.

It seems that the National Secular Society and Richard Dawkins and his new rationalists are treading the well-worn path of ‘nothing buttery'.

The cosmos and you and I are ‘nothing but’ what can be measured, quantified, rationalised and explained.

It is this ultimately simplistic ‘nothing buttery’ - human life is ‘nothing but’ this or that - which says, that because there is no scientific evidence for much of what we believe as Christians, then it’s all make-believe.

There is in all of this militant atheism (and most atheists are not militant) an implicit denial of the ‘mystery of being’ and the longing for some greater purpose which is obstinately present in the vast majority of humans who have inhabited this planet.

And there are Sacred Spaces, of which this church is one, where, these general feelings of awe and transcendence, of longing and loving, and occasionally what Rudolph Otto called the ‘mysterium tremendum et fascinans’ - the fearful and fascinating mystery at the centre of life and existence -

– there are places and occasions where these feelings find particular focus in the life, death and, we believe, resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The Gospel account of the Transfiguration of Jesus in the presence of his disciples is such an occasion of deep mystery and transcendence. It’s recorded in the three synoptic Gospels: Matthew, Mark and Luke.

(And just take note that Matthew is the first book of the New Testament, in case you meet any of Richard Dawkins’s pollsters on your way home – because apparently you’re not a Christian if you don’t know that.)

It’s hard to know exactly what happened on this mountain. It was a liminal, mystical experience which left the disciples almost dazed.

And as they reflected on it after the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, they realised what they had seen.

• They saw Moses the lawgiver and Christ as the fulfilment of the Law.
• They saw Elijah the chief of prophets and Christ as the One to whom all the prophets pointed.
• They heard the voice of Almighty God, reiterating Christ’s Baptismal affirmation that this was his beloved Son and that they should listen to him.
• And they saw the Shekinah cloud, a theophany of the God of glory, and the reflection of that glory in the face of their teacher, Jesus the Messiah.

This is what St Paul was hinting at in today’s epistle when he writes that God “has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” (2 Cor 4.6)

Luke’s account puts in a little Jewish joke here as well - a sort of pun. Blink and you miss it.

I’ve preached before on the Hebrew word for ‘glory’, ‘kabod’. It’s the word for weight, heaviness, gravitas.

Here the disciples are weighed down with sleep, Luke tells us, but they remained awake and so were weighed down with glory. That joke is never going to make its way into a Christmas Cracker is it?

This also gave rise to another Hebrew word that has come into the English language: ichabod - the glory has departed.

There is something of ichabod about our current western society.

There’s much spiritual interest but little spiritual depth or weight.
Believe but don’t belong. (70% of people claim to be Church of England – they believe something, but they don’t belong to our congregations in any meaningful sense.)

This was actually the point that Richard Dawkins was trying to make – our faith can sometimes be quite shallow and ill-informed.

But that is because we are all deficient disciples and often not very spiritually perceptive. However, that is quite different from saying we are actually ‘closet atheists’ who won’t own up to it.

Let’s go back to our Gospel – the transfiguration of Jesus.

As Jesus goes down the mountain with the disciples, he speaks to them of his impending suffering and of his resurrection. And he has already told them, although they do not understand, that his Passion will be the greatest display of God’s glory – a theme of John’s Gospel. That’s why we read this Gospel passage always on the last Sunday before Lent.

We celebrate this Mass to the glory of God. As we bring the gifts of the world at the offertory - our bread and wine and money - so we celebrate God’s glory in all he has given to us.

And as we lift up our Lord’s broken body, so we celebrate his victory over death and the glorious hope which is ours.

The Westminster Catechism reminds us that “The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him for ever.”

Or in the words of St Irenaeus: “The glory of God is man fully alive.”

Secular drowsiness, the stupor and busyness of 21st century life, must not rob us of seeing God’s glory and delighting in his creation. Like Elijah’s warning to Elisha in the Old Testament lesson, if we do not see the glory and mystery of God, in that case in Elijah’s translation to heaven, then we will miss God’s blessing. Our lives will be diminished.

Part of the reason for the disciplines of Lent is to keep ourselves spiritually awake and alert – clear-sighted.

And here at the mass, as Christ is present in another Transfiguration, not with Moses and Elijah, but with bread and wine; here is weight and depth in our so light and shallow culture. Let us be awake to the presence of the Glory of God and see him who loved us and gave himself for us.

“Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory” Luke 9.32