Photo by Kyle Johnson on unsplash.com
May my words be
gentle but your message strong. Amen.
What
an emotional week this has been. It’s not often that we have school shootings
in Canada. Only 9 since 2000 compared to the US’s 642. And yet here we are,
mourning alongside our neighbours of Tumbler Ridge for the lives lost in and
affected by a horrific event. While this is not something that happened in the
Cowichan Valley, it feels like it happened in our backyard. When a tragic event
like this happens, no matter where in the country it happens, feelings like
grief, numbness, anger, and fear rise up inside of us. It’s hard to know what
to do with these feelings we’re having. We want to hug our families close,
especially our children, and maybe even hide away from the world. Maybe we want
to yell at God, and that’s ok. There’s no one else to yell at, and I promise
you, God can handle it. To have all this tumbling around in our hearts while
hearing passages about the dazzling sights and sounds of Jesus’ glorious
divinity being revealed to his friends, and to us, is confounding, to say the
least. But perhaps there is something in today’s scripture that can give us
some comfort, maybe even some hope.
The
Last Sunday of Epiphany, also known as Transfiguration Sunday, serves as the
climax of the Epiphany season. It marks the transition from the season of
revelation – celebrating Jesus as the light of the world – to the reflective,
penitential season of Lent. What we will see and hear takes us from one season
to the next: from Epiphany, God made manifest in Jesus to Lent, Jesus’ journey
to the cross. Clouds, and fire, and glory! God is making a bright and bold
statement, clarifying what Jesus means to us and who he is to us, but first
there is this mountain before us, especially today. A mountain of emotions that
is perhaps dimming the light, making it so that we can’t see clearly what God
is trying to show us.
In
both the Exodus story and the Gospel story, the mountain is a place our main
characters go off to pray and to meet God. In Exodus, Moses and his friend
Joshua climb up Mount Sinai where they sit for 6 days. I am making the
assumption they sat in prayer, not idly hanging about. On the 7th
day, they meet the devouring fire of glory that is God. The dazzling sight
before them began the steps of receiving the new covenant between God and the Israelites.
Matthew also tells a dazzling story where Jesus and his friends Peter, James,
and John, after 6 days of prayer (ok I’m making another assumption here), go
off on their own up a mountain. It is here that Peter, James, and John see and
hear more in this moment than they’ve seen and heard in the previous three
years they’ve been with Jesus. This is a light and sound show like no other.
Suddenly, the earthy Jesus with his dusty feet and tired eyes becomes the
ethereal Jesus – robe glowing and face shining – a shimmering window into pure
divinity. It is in this moment, on this mountaintop, that these men meet God in
Jesus – and they fall to the ground in fear.
What
would you do with a mountaintop experience? Resist? Fall down in fear? Would
you even climb the mountain in the first place?
There
are many points in our lives where we come across mountains that cast a shadow over
us, building up our fears and uncertainties. This past week has certainly been
one of those mountains. The world feels like a terrible pace right now. The
world is a challenging place right now, for many reasons, and we often don’t
know how God’s people are called to live within it or how we are called to lead
people in these fearful and changing times. It’s in these times where we can
easily lose sight of God.
And
yet, through it all sometimes in profoundly unexpected times, we are pulled up
out of the difficulty and find ourselves right back up on the mountaintop where
again we are privileged to see Jesus transfigured before us, “shining like the
sun itself.” We remember why we are here and why we do what we do. And somehow
with that to carry us, we are able to join Jesus in going back down the
mountain and joining God’s beloved people in times and places where they also
find themselves yearning for the kind of understanding and hope which too often
we only receive when we have been on the mountaintop. And though the way of our
journey ahead is not entirely clear; what is sure is that we will encounter God
and that we do not travel alone. God invites us into ministry where we might be
delving into the hard parts of life, and not necessarily through dazzling
moments of transfiguration, but more likely in the daily trenches of
faithfulness.
We
need to take our transfiguration moments, our mountaintop moments, our God
moments, with us, to remind us why we are on this journey, especially when
things are difficult. Like Moses and Joshua…like Peter, James, and John, we may
not always understand what we have witnessed or what we have experienced, but
we know that we are loved and called by the God who shares these moments, these
experiences with us. We may not always understand the mountain of emotions
before us, but we can take to heart the knowledge that God feels every emotion
with us – grief, anger, fear – all of it.
As
we prepare to enter the spiritual wilderness of Lent and explore our
brokenness, we already know how this story ends. The story of Jesus requires us
to take the brilliance of the Transfiguration into our own journeys, so that
God can give the ending meaning. The story of Jesus tells us that God was
willing to suffer agony on the cross so that we would know we are not alone in
our despair. The story of Jesus tells us that death is not the end and gives us
comfort and hope that God is always with us, and we will always be with God.
Let
us pray the prayer provided to us by the Provincial House of Bishops,
We
stand together in hope. We stand together in faith. We stand together in love.
We stand individually as ambassadors of hope, vessels of faith, and sentinels
of love. We stand as a community committed to making no peace with gun
violence. We pray for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit to inflame and enkindle
our lives, our churches, our communities, our cities, and our nation with a
passion for lasting peace; through Jesus Christ the Author of Peace.
Amen.
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