First United Methodist Church of Reno

²⁹Moses came down from Mount Sinai. As he came down from the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant in his hand, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God. ³⁰When Aaron and all the Israelites saw Moses, the skin of his face was shining, and they were afraid to come near him. ³¹But Moses called to them; and Aaron and all the leaders of the congregation returned to him, and Moses spoke with them. ³²Afterward all the Israelites came near, and he gave them in commandment all that the LORD had spoken with him on Mount Sinai. ³³When Moses had finished speaking with them, he put a veil on his face; ³⁴but whenever Moses went in before the LORD to speak with him, he would take the veil off, until he came out; and when he came out, and told the Israelites what he had been commanded, ³⁵the Israelites would see the face of Moses, that the skin of his face was shining; and Moses would put the veil on his face again, until he went in to speak with him.

¹Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain, by themselves. ²And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white. ³Suddenly there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him. ⁴Then Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” ⁵While he was still speaking, suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice said, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” ⁶When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear. ⁷But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Get up and do not be afraid.” ⁸And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone.

⁹As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus ordered them, “Tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.”

Do you suppose that we’ll ever cease to be surprised by the life of Jesus? I mean, just when we’ve finally begun to come to terms with the idea that the story of his life is not about triumph, prestige and the admiring acceptance from his own people, but about sacrifice, humiliation, and suffering, we’re confronted by the legend of these strange events that supposedly took place on a remote mountain top. Just when we’ve begun to settle into the journey toward his inevitable crucifixion, we’re confronted by visions and voices from clouds and lights and transformations. Just when we think that we know what to expect, we’re brought face to face with the unexpected.

In one of his more famous poems, “East Coker,”^³ T. S. Eliot describes the return to his ancestral home – he’s gone there to die or to contemplate dying – and throughout the poem is the recurring refrain, “In my beginning is my end.” And suddenly we remember when we heard these same words that we hear today coming from the cloud. As he’s facing the end of his ministry, with the brutality of crucifixion waiting for him, Jesus hears the same words that he heard at the beginning of his ministry – at his baptism: “This is my Son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”^⁴ At the beginning, when life was filled with promise, energy and success, and at the end, when life was filled with shame and sorrow, horror and suffering, the situation is exactly the same: it has been a life well-lived.

It’s in that kind of life – radically open to the power of God to heal, to bless and to make new, and yet at the same time radically open to the human experience, to suffering and sin and death – that God is “well pleased.” As Eliot’s poem ends:

Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.^⁵

When earlier in this same gospel account Matthew recognizes Jesus as having said, “You are the light of the world…let your light shine,”^⁶ he isn’t just giving us a mere metaphor. You and I are being called – no, pushed – into reflecting the light of God! Our light has got to shine! We’re being called to nothing less than a transformation – of ourselves and of our world. We can’t run away and hide from that light. We can’t deny that it’s there. We can’t make it any dimmer – without turning away from it completely so that it won’t shine in our own faces at all. We are meant to be light.

The timid among us tend to believe that “shining” is what other people do – Jesus most of all. “I’m pretty dull,” they say. “Let somebody else shine.” Those who think far too much of themselves, on the other hand, tend to polish their own lanterns just a bit too much. “I’m pretty bright,” they say. “I don’t need anybody to enlighten me!”

There’s a whole world down at the bottom of that mountain waiting, hoping, hungering for the light – for a vision of hope, a voice of assurance. The stunning thing about being a Christian – the Body of Christ – is that the God who may exist in as unapproachable a light as the light of the sun, exists in us. We can’t dim that light and we can’t outshine it. We’ve just got to simply let it be reflected in our faces and in our very lives.

What does that really mean? Well, at least three things. In the first place, it means that we are flesh and blood – mortal – marked by a finite beginning and yet faced with a finite ending. But in between, here and now, we’re fully alive! We are a people of justice, sharing our bread with the hungry, sheltering the homeless and clothing the naked. To reflect the light of God means that we are meant to be a people of hospitality.

In the second place, we’ve got to tell others who and whose we are. To those who live in the darkness of self-righteousness, we’ve got to get in their faces and say, “Stop your oppression!” We’ve got to take every opportunity that we have to challenge false accusations, malicious talk, and opportunistic profit at the expense of others. We’ve got to “stand up and be counted.” At the voting booth, at work, in our families, and even here at church, we’ve got to reflect the light that shows us all the way to a better life. To those who are looking for meaning in their lives and looking for a church home, we’ve got to say to them, “Come, join us.” Almost every adult who joins a Christian church does so, not because one of the pastors pursued them, but because somebody who’s already there welcomed her or him. Ask. Reach out. Be a guide and a light reflected on the path to somebody who’s struggling to see clearly.

In the third place, we need to gather here together on a regular basis and worship together. We’re not the “light of the world” by ourselves. We’re the light reflected in us all as we come together as the body of Christ. It’s here – particularly as we break bread and share the cup together – that we’re taught the art of hospitality. In our care for each other as we gather around this table, we see the light reflected in the person next to us, and yet we also learn how to recognize that same light in every stranger that we meet.

In the weeks to come, we will embark on another journey – a road to Jerusalem and beyond with Jesus. On this coming Wednesday, Ash Wednesday, we’ll begin to gather the dust off of that road and wear it on our foreheads. At the end of the road we’ll stand at an empty tomb, and maybe then we’ll be able to reclaim for ourselves (and maybe even for the world) the story of the Transfiguration. We’ll turn a vision into a gospel, good news for building up the community of faith. In every age and for every generation, the story of the disciples’ vision on the mountaintop can become a message of good news that the Christ and this man named Jesus are one and the same person. What is truly revealing, though, is that the legend of the Transfiguration can become for every one of us a gospel which proclaims that in this rabbi from Nazareth we too are being transformed for the sake of the world.

3 The full text of this remarkable poem reads this way:

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the village, in the electric heat
Hypnotised. In a warm haze the sultry light
Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
Wait for the early owl.

In that open field
If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie—
A dignified and commodious sacrament.
Two and two, necessarye conjunction,
Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
Whiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire
Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long since under earth
Nourishing the corn. Keeping time,
Keeping the rhythm in their dancing
As in their living in the living seasons
The time of the seasons and the constellations
The time of milking and the time of harvest
The time of the coupling of man and woman
And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
Eating and drinking. Dung and death.

Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.

What is the late November doing
With the disturbance of the spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
And hollyhocks that aim too high
Red into grey and tumble down
Late roses filled with early snow?
Thunder rolled by the rolling stars
Simulates triumphal cars
Deployed in constellated wars
Scorpion fights against the Sun
Until the Sun and Moon go down
Comets weep and Leonids fly
Hunt the heavens and the plains
Whirled in a vortex that shall bring
The world to that destructive fire
Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.

That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.
It was not (to start again) what one had expected.
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment. Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

The houses are all gone under the sea.

The dancers are all gone under the hill.

III

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

The First United Methodist Church of Napa, CAFebruary 3, 2008Transfiguration Sunday Scripture Readings:

The First United Methodist Church of Napa, CA
February 3, 2008
Transfiguration Sunday
Scripture Readings: