The Transfiguration
A sermon preached by the Revd. Peter Wolton on 15th February 2015
This year the church will celebrate the Transfiguration on 6th
August. Yet we also read the story of the Transfiguration today on the Sunday
before Lent starts. Why?
I expect a number of us may have come across the book the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell,
published fifteen years ago.
Gladwell defines
a tipping point as "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the
boiling point". It’s that magic
moment when an idea or trend or movement tips and starts to spread.
He tells the story of “Hush Puppies,” the world’s first casual shoe. The
suede shoes with their basset hound were introduced to the world in 1958 and
early adoptors included Warren Beatty, Perry Como and our very own Prince
Philip. Five years later one in ten adults in the US owned a pair. But by the early
1990s they were only selling 30,000 pairs a year and the owners were thinking
of ceasing production. Hush Puppies were difficult to get hold of except
through “Mom and Pop” stores in trendy artistic areas such as the Village and
SoHo in New York. Creatives thought they were “dead chic.” Fashion designer
Isaac Mizahri wore them for personal use. Then in Autumn 1995 a designer John
Bartlett said he wanted to use Hush Puppies as accessories for his Spring
collection, followed by Anna Sui (famed for her timeless designs and ability to transcend eras with historical and
culturally inspired collections). A few months later, in Los Angeles, the designer Joel
Fitzpatrick put a twenty-five-foot inflatable basset hound on the roof of his
store and gutted his adjoining art gallery to turn it into a Hush Puppies
department. By the end of the 1990s Hush
Puppies were selling 1.6million shoes. A trend started by word of mouth and
then following neighbours and peers had “tipped” into a global phenomenon. And
today annual sales are close to 20 million across 120 countries. Quite a result
from a near death experience.
So what has all this got to do with
the Transfiguration? Quite simply, the
Transfiguration and the events in the week leading up to it, is the “Tipping
point”, the threshold moment, in Jesus’ ministry. It is the time when the
disciples move from identifying Jesus as a special leader to understanding the reality
of his ministry. From identification to understanding reality.
Jesus’ ministry from the call of the
first disciples, Peter and Andrew, James and John, three of whom will be
present at the Transfiguration, with healings and preaching and casting out of
devils and miracles heralded a new era. All this took place in an occupied
country full of fear, so unsurprisingly Jesus would strictly order that such
events should not be made known. But as the ministry developed, “the more he
ordered people to keep things quiet, the more they proclaimed it.” The growing
conclusion was that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of Man who would do some or
all of three things:
·
decisively defeat Israel’s enemies
·
cleanse or rebuild the Temple
·
bring God’s justice “that rich,
restoring, purging, healing power to bear in both Israel and the rest of the
world.”
Then six days before the Transfiguration
Jesus asks a very direct question: “Who do you say I am?”
Peter, and some would say as was his
habit, answers:
“You are the Messiah.” This is really
dangerous stuff. The Romans won’t like it and maybe other authorities too. Think of some the most chilling literature about
life in occupied countries or those ruled by tyrants, the knock at the door in
the dead of night, people disappearing or public executions. Roman Palestine
had all that. It is scary.
So Jesus has to rapidly teach the
disciples the true nature of his mission. From now on it is going to be very
different from what they are expecting, and exceptionally difficult. He is
going to be rejected by the authorities and the chief priests and killed. And
after three days he will rise again. Not the disciples’ idea of a Messiah at
all. Consternation is the background to the Transfiguration.
The week of the Transfiguration is when the ministry tips
decisively towards the events of Holy week and the resurrection. The inner
circle of disciples, Peter, James and John accompany our Lord up a mountain
where Jesus prays - and this is very important- he prays - and then is seen by
the disciples, who are “weighed down with sleep” according to St. Luke, as a
dazzling presence conversing with Moses and Elijah.
The presence of Moses and Elijah indicates sole divine
authority had been given to Jesus. After witnessing the Transfiguration the
disciples came down the mountain very different people and to understand that
glory will come from the cross, a new biblical but un-heard of idea of glory.
And some weeks later, before the crucifixion the same trio of
disciples will, once again, need to be awoken by a praying Jesus, this time in
the Garden of Gethsemane. The disciples asleep on the mountain, the disciples
asleep in the Garden, and a praying Jesus, a sort of symmetric set of bookends
to Lent.
At the Transfiguration, a number of voices are heard. I would
like to focus on two and what they mean for us. My namesake Peter “Rabbi it is
good for us to be here.” And the voice of God, “This is my Son, the Beloved;
listen to him.”
Peter’s words remind us how good it for us to be here today,
in St. George’s worshipping in freedom and without fear, nourished by the gift
of ritual which Father James spoke about
last Sunday.
He said:
“We hear again and again of the importance
of love of God and love of one’s neighbour – that sums up all of the
commandments. The transformation of our character, our lives, our habits,
quietly happens as we come to church week by week, to hear God’s word and to
receive simple gifts of bread and wine, and we are reminded that we, here in
Campden Hill in 2015, are the body of Christ.”
It is indeed good
that we are here. A seventh century abbot of St. Catherine’s, Mt. Sinai
wrote of this gift: “What greater happiness or higher honour could we have than
to be with God, to be made like him and to live in his light. Here in our
hearts, Christ takes up abode together with the Father saying as he enters our
hearts: “Today salvation has come to this house.” With Christ, our hearts
receive all the wealth of his eternal blessings and there, where they are
stored up for us in him, we see reflected as in a mirror both the first fruits
and the whole of the world to come.”
Let us remember
Peter’s words when we are in church and try to make our hearts a tabernacle for
Jesus.
It is good for us to
be here, and with the coming of Lent we can prepare ourselves for some deep
listening. “This
is my Son, the Beloved; Listen to him” is a perfect commandment for Lent. Lent
is about listening. We can listen to God in many ways during Lent and here are
three suggestions:
· Through prayer.
· By attending lectures, and I commend
the Kensington Council of Churches Lent course “Walking & Praying with
Christians of the Middle East.” Some of us were privileged to hear Iraqi
Archbishop Warda of Erbil speak this
week on the crisis our brothers and sisters are facing. The Lent course is so
timely.
· And thirdly, by coming to our United
Benefice “Why me?” programme of Lenten addresses at the 6.30 pm
Sunday Mass at St. John’s.
The Transfiguration was the tipping point in Jesus’ ministry
and is one of the bookends of Lent. It reminds us of the opportunity we have to
live as children of the Light of the World, how blessed we are to know Christ,
how good it is to be here and to come to
St. George’s each Sunday, and the chance Lent gives to us to do some deep
listening.
We pray that our Lents may be tipping points in our lives and
through our lives we may do for the growth of gospel what those users of Hush
Puppies did in the 1990s, that others
may sense the radiance of Christ in us, so that they too may be tipped evermore
towards the wealth of His eternal blessings.