Last Sunday After the Epiphany

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark
Exodus 34:29-35; Psalm 99; 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2; Luke 9:28-36-43a

The Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Priest-in-Charge

The last Sunday after the Epiphany marks a hinge point for us as we move from the celebration of Jesus’ loving presence in, among, and for us, to the season of Lent—when through prayer, reflection upon scripture, participation in the sacraments and sacrificial service to others we come face to face with all that is not the light, all that is not love in us. Indeed, the Christian life is perhaps most easily understood by holding these twin realities together—light and darkness, love and what gets in the way of love, clear sightedness and all the veils that obscure and occlude seeing our own belovedness that we might proclaim with boldness that belovedness to others.

Our collect for today is a powerful reminder of what we are up to not just on Sunday mornings, but of the grand, sweeping telos, or goal, of the life of following after Jesus down the way of love. It is by “beholding by faith the light of [Jesus’] countenance” that “we are strengthened to bear our cross, and… changed into his likeness from glory to glory.” Beholding is an interesting word. It occurs 1,300 time in Holy Scripture and is often translated as “look.” But it’s far more than looking. It’s a self-forgetful, worshipful, gazing upon love for the purpose of becoming a little more like that which we behold. Gazing upon love fully disclosed in humanity of Jesus that we might become that love for others. The great century mystic Dame Julian of Norwich counsels us to “seek into the beholding” that we might become by grace what Jesus is by nature.

With that picture of the life of discipleship before us , it’s clear that Christianity is not a spectator sport, but a way, a path of transformation of body, mind, and spirit whose ultimate end is freedom. Freedom from all that gets in the way of love, and freedom to be that love for all whom we encounter. The tendency, of course, is to merely think that the Transfiguration is something that happened a long time ago atop Mt. Tabor to Jesus. But our collect for today reminds us that what we see revealed in the Transfiguration is something into which we too are called to participate. Yes, the Transfiguration show us who Jesus is—a little glimpse pre-resurrection of his risen life—but it also shows us who we are called to become by grace.

The interesting thing about this process, however, is that we can’t just become that which we behold all in one go. It’s a process, a journey, a gradual path of letting go and surrendering all that gets in the way of our lives, each in their own unique way, being transmitters of the light. In the language of our readings today, we might call that process the seeing, acknowledging, and letting go of the veils that hinder the light of God’s love from shining upon us and from shining through us for others. Christ is the one in whom we see God unveiled and our job is to see the various ways in which the veils in our lives cover over Christ from living his live in and through us.

Veils come in all sorts of shapes sizes and the reason Lent lasts for forty days is that it takes a while to come to see them for what they are—things that impinge on the enjoyment of the glory of God for which we are made. Veils, of course, blind us—they prevent us from seeing clearly. And we can be blinded by all sorts of different veils. Just think of the phrase “He/she was blinded by _______” to get a sense of all the various things that can occlude our vision. We can be blinded by rage. We can be blinded by greed. We can be blinded by a need to control others. We can be blinded by a judgement and tendency to habitual complaint. We can be blinded by seeing only what others don’t do and not what actually do do. We can be blinded by negative stories we tell ourselves about ourselves—that we’re no good, that we’re unlovable. We can be blinded by the sense that we are always a day late and a dollar short—never enough in the eyes of world.

Paul Tillich, in his sermon “You Are Accepted” reminds us that we tend to project outward onto other people the things to which we are addicted, enslaved, or attached. Rather than seeing the veil, we blame the other person. We blame the alcohol, the political situation, the tempter or temptress, the system, the cops, or religion. This outward projection prevents us from seeing the veils through which we see the world. It keeps us stuck. And why do we project this outwards? Essentially because we can’t face it in ourselves. We lack that calm assurance of being accepted in our unacceptableness—that God loves us without condition, just as we are, warts and all. When we can rest there, when we can rest in the reality of God’s “yes” to us, all that has been previously shoved aside and blamed on other people starts to come into view more clearly. We start to see the veils for what they are and that yes, we have them too. Welcome to the human race!

Now the tendency when we start to become aware of our veils—of the way for instance we latch on the one criticism and perseverate upon it when most of the other things in our life are positive—is to beat ourselves up. We castigate ourselves for being self-castigating and in the process we dig ourselves even more deeply into the pit of self-recrimination from which the gospel, life in Christ, is meant to free us. The necessary thing to realize that the seeing of our veils, is for our healing, that God’s deepest desire for us for union and communion with us, that we are made for freedom and that it in finding ourselves in Christ, that all the various veils that obstruct our vision are poor substitutes for the joy, the abundance, of fullness of life in Him.

Recall for yourself why it was that God brought the Israelites up out of Egypt. Was it for a sight-seeing tour of the wilderness? So that he could conjure up some cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night? Or was it out of God’s deep love for the people of Israel whose life under Pharaoh was marked by slavery, of being hitched to state mechanism of brick-production and the story that who they were, their worth as individuals and as a nation was determined by how much they produced? It was to free the people of Israel from the veils that kept them enslaved under Pharaoh that brought them up out of Egypt, opened a way through the Red Sea, and taught them how to live and love in the forty years in the desert.

When our Gospel for today speaks of Jesus’ departure—it’s direct echo of the exodus. In fact, the departure in Greek is exodus. That reminds us of what God has been up to all along with the Israelites and now is the unique, once-and-for-all disclosure of God in human form in the person of Jesus. In Him, we make our exodus. In Him we see the veils that obstruct us from seeing clearly. In Him, we find the acceptance, the love, the security to gently let go and become more like him that we might enjoy the freedom, the true freedom that is the inheritance of all human beings as children of God.

And what do we do with that freedom? We’ve spoken mostly of freedom from—freedom from those limiting pictures and stories that crash around in our heads. But we should also recognize that there is also freedom for. We follow Jesus up the mountain to see our own belovedness, to accept our acceptance, but we don’t camp out there. We continue to follow after Him and that takes us down the other side of the mountain into the marketplace where we encounter the unmitigated suffering of others and seek to serve them. Right on the heels of the Transfiguration we have the healing of the man’s son who is possessed of an unclean spriit. Freedom from the veil is always in the service of freedom to be love for others. Mountaintop and marketplace aren’t two separate things. Our growth in interior freedom from the veils we’ve inherited from parents, teachers, nation, and religion is always for the purpose that love might spread out to all those who have been shoved aside, neglected, forgotten—the last, the least, the lost, and the left behind—that they might know themselves as beloved.

As we prepare for our Lenten journey, my prayer for us is that we remember who and whose we are. My prayer is that we remember for what end God has made us. My prayer is that in accepting our acceptance we might let all that is not love drop away—that seeking into the beholding, looking to Jesus and Jesus alone, we might become the light that he reveals to us.