Sermon for the Transfiguration

Gill and I have just come back from Northern Ireland. Last Sunday we worshiped at Down Cathedral in Downpatrick, built, so they say, on the site where Patrick was buried and a place where Christians have worshipped for fifteen hundred years. Today’s building is very different from the original, being built in the early 19^th Century. We also visited a number of other sites. There was the Franciscan Friary just outside Ballycastle, long ruined and used for centuries as a burial ground, the ruined Cistercian Monastery, Inch Abbey and, almost by accident we stumbled on Temple Cooey, a holy well and the site where the obscure Celtic saint built a church in the late 7^th Century and today is a place of pilgrimage for the Catholic population.

Why am I mentioning these things? What have they to do with the Transfiguration?

Well, this Sunday is about change. The word Transfiguration means to change the outward appearance or figure. (You know what a figure is, that thing you constantly try to keep in shape after you turn about twenty-five. Slim-fast, yogurt Atkins diet you know the drill.) But to transfigure something means to change its outward appearance, not what it really is on the inside. Tadpoles become frogs, babies become adults, there is often an outward change, but the essence of the thing remains the same. All the site we visited have changed over the years, certainly in appearance and possibly in use, but, for me, all retained their core of holiness. To those attuned, they know they are standing on holy ground.

Jesus was nothing to look at in His day. Judas had to go up to Jesus and give him a kiss of greeting so that the soldiers would know which one he was! In Jesus’ life He was often overlooked. We hear almost nothing about Him for thirty years. He could get lost in a crowd. He died with common criminals. They rescued His body, but that was hardly unusual in the day. The prophet Isaiah even said that Jesus had no beauty that we should desire Him.

Now on this Transfiguration Sunday, we get a glimpse of Jesus from the inside. We no longer see him in the shadows, hiding behind the cloak of the dirt and muck of the world. Now it is broad daylight. Now we see Him as He truly is, God of God, light of light, very God of very God.

On that Transfiguration Day, the disciples saw Jesus and realized that He really is somebody that mattered. He is in fact much more than that: Jesus is the only somebody that matters. Hidden beneath the anonymity and ordinariness of a travelling Jewish rabbi was the King of King and Lord of Lords. All of the fullness of the Godhead dwelt bodily in Jesus Christ. God became man and now the disciples were getting a picture of how we will be transfigured in God.

Yet August 6, 2006 reminds us of another transfiguration. Sixty-one years ago flyers of the U.S. Army Air Corps dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan -- a profoundly dramatic event that forever changed the world. This cataclysm released such energy that a blue sky was transfigured into a blinding white light of an intensity never before witnessed.

To some, it seemed that hell itself had intersected with the earth that day. Fifty to seventy thousand people were instantly killed and countless other maimed and fatally injured.

For more than six decades we have lived with the reality that humans have the capacity to destroy every lifeform God so lovingly created.

Without going into details, on our visit to Northern Ireland we were reminded of the divisions and hatreds that have divided the people for so long. One wonders about places like Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine will ever cope in the future. Left to human devices, I doubt they ever will.

However, what is impossible for humans is possible for God.

One of fundamental beliefs of the Quakers is that 'there is that of God in everyone' There is a principle placed in the human mind which is pure & proceeds from God. It is deep and inward, confined to no religion nor excluded from any where the heart stands in perfect sincerity. (John Woolman, American Quaker, 1720-1772)

In you and me, somewhere in the core of our being, there is something of the Divine. God is not ‘out there’ but living in each one of us. Transfiguration for us is in allowing that Divine core to shine through. That is not an easy process and one which we will never complete in this life, but one small spark of God in one person can do more good than we can ever imagine.

Last Sunday, the text at Downpatrick was from Eph 3:20 “Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to do more than we can ask and imagine.” Whatever we imagine -God can do more.

It may be hard to accept that there is a Divine core within us – harder still to accept is that core exists also in out enemies. But because it does there is hope – when both sides touch the Divine everything and anything is possible.

So then Transfiguration is about change – not just the change that took place in Jesus on the mountain top, but the change that can take place in all. It is not a just a commemoration of an event in the life of Jesus but a picture of what is waiting for all of us.

The Transfiguration is also about hope – that when all the earthy shell with all its faults is dropped at the core is the Divine. It is that Divine which enables those things we think impossible to be possible. It is the hope for the world.

It is about opening ourselves up to hear the voice of God and his word for us. However busy Jesus created time and space for himself in order to hear his father’s words. Ought we not do the same?

I can do no more than to leave you with a prayer of St. Paul’s – again from Ephesians 3.

I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses all knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Now to him, who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, for ever and ever. Amen