Sunday
February 11
Transfigured Life
By Marsh Chapel
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Of a sudden our lessons from St. Mark, for some weeks about the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, are interrupted, even upended, by the unexpected insertion of today’s gospel, the account of the high mountain, the wild and windy mount of the Transfiguration. We are taken up higher, we are guided to a promontory, to a peak, to a place of vision, of vista, of mystery, of presence, elusive but nonetheless powerful presence. This is our seasonal way, one would say, of keeping perspective, of allowing the high calling in faith, with hope, for love, not to be clouded or overshadowed by lower lights. And this is why, come Sunday, we come to church. For you, for us, the ordered public worship of Almighty God upon the Lord’s Day is not a matter of indifference. It is a matter of attention to the meaning of life, the high calling of living a transfigured life, a transfigured life. Frost…
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.
For the month of February, broadly across American culture, there has come to be a healthy attention to Black History, a shared if quite variously engaged cultural project, a good thing. Especially it is a good thing within a time that has found media generated ways to normalize the abnormal, in politics but also in other things, to normalize forms of rhetoric and behavior, in national leadership, that prior 2016 were adjudged abhorrent and immoral, not normal. There is of course a media financial incentive. With humility and pride both, let us recall, we have at Marsh Chapel our owned lived history. My dad graduated from BUSTH in 1956, preceded a year by Martin Luther King, become Dr. King 1955.
Martin, first and last, was a preacher. Martin Luther King’s own favorite sermon, “The Dimensions of a Complete Life”, as Gary Dorrien reminded us (157, The Making of American Liberal Theology), was itself based on a sermon from Boston’s own Phillips Brooks. King preached the sermon in 1954, to candidate at Dexter Avenue, and again at Perdue in 1958 before a national UCC convention, and again in 1964 in Westminster Abbey to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. As you learn, guest preaching on the circuit, what is good the first time, can often be better preached, three times or more. The opposite also may be true. King, following Brooks, compared life to a cube, possessing the three dimensions of length, breadth and height. The good life flourishes when all three interact in something like a great triangle. “At one angle stands the individual person, at the other angle stand other persons, and at the top stands the Supreme Infinite Person, God”. Length means achieving personal goals, breadth comprises the concern for the well being of others, and height signifies the desire for an upward moving longing for God.
Today’s text is about the third dimension, about height, and personally asks you whether your life exhibits this, King’s third dimension. Height. Hast Thou Height? Granted your personal achievements. Given your communal engagements. Have you a known, or been known by, ‘a mountain view’? In Boston, during this winter of 2024, in the speaking and hearing of Mark 9, there could hardly be a more personal, pertinent question. On it hang hope and health, yours and mine. The dimension of height, today acclaimed in the transfigured life of Jesus, is one of the gifts which the religious communities may offer to support our common hope across the globe. To survive, personally and communally, the next year and more, we shall need this height.
Today we hear of the Transfiguration. Originally a resurrection appearance account, this legend eventually was placed, by Mark, in the year 70ce, back into the life of Jesus, as a confirmation of his Messiahship, a portent of Easter, and an affirmation of Peter’s earlier confession. Our lectionary places this passage, given symbolical and other similarities, adjacent to other Old and New Testament readings. But the truth is that there are as many reasons to disjoin as to conjoin texts, and it is generally better to avoid more than absorb the inherited usurpation by the Newer Testament of the Older, when and if at all possible.
Mark has brought the trumpets of universals to the occasion. All life longs for height! Hear the resurrection gospel! Light. Shining. Cloud. God. Tradition. Prayer. Silence. Presence. White…white as snow…white as no fuller on earth could bleach…white as light…dazzling white. What arrives to Mark is a Mountain View, an announcement of God. This is my beloved…listen…to Him…
Mark has brought you something profoundly hopeful and healthy. Good life has height, as well as length and breadth. Good life has height that is a part of human experience. For Mark, the Transfiguration is not only about divine but also about human experience, not only about a divine voice but also about human ears. Mark’s passage is about heightened human experience. We need this view today, a day when we recall that for all the rigors and excellence of sports, there was $115B in sports gambling in the USA 2023, and 25M million more people participated in 2023 than in 2018.
It is striking that Mark, facing similar fright as do we, witness to the destruction of the Temple, wrote otherwise, here. (May his courage, and the courage of the other biblical writers, ever infect us.) As if to say, there is more than one witness, the cost of discipleship, Mark’s unflinching honesty about the dark, itself, strangely heightens human experience, making even transfiguration fully human, making our life open to height.
At least ask yourself, whether your life has height? Human height? Has it?
Height allows an appreciation of multiple interests, the unspoken presence in every gathering. Reason recognizes multiple interests without demonizing the interests or the interested.
Josiah Royce: Now I submit to you that this meaning of the word reason is perfectly familiar to all of you. Reason, from this point of view, is the power to see widely and steadily and connectedly. Its true opponent is not intuition, but whatever makes us narrow in outlook, and consequently prey to our own caprices. The unreasonable person is the person who can see but one thing at a time, when he ought to see two or many things together; who can grasp but one idea, when a synthesis of ideas is required. The reasonable man is capable of synopsis, of viewing both or many sides of a question, of comparing various motives, of taking interest in a totality rather than in a scattered multiplicity. (87).
The tradition of responsible Christian liberalism, advocated at Marsh Chapel, understands and honors Mark 9. Now those of us who initially studied theology forty years ago, heard very little of this. We heard Neo-Orthodoxy, on the one hand. We heard Liberation, on the other. Both the liberationists and the Barthians are correctives to the larger liberal tradition, needed at times and good at times, but both espousing not only a responsible authority, but also a kind of authoritarianism, and both imbued with a lasting anger, which the transfiguration does not justify, as appealing as both are to the nighttime all around us.
The gospel offers another message. Your life, in its struggle up the mountain, may open up, at points, to a humanly accessible mountain view, a saving human height!
Take a breath. Up here, the air is rarified. Up here, you may have a moment of clarity. A transfigured life brings us to the altar of loyalty. We are in the thin air that requires a use of archaic words—loyalty, duty, chivalry. Beware though the sense that loyalty is a matter of sullen obedience. On the contrary! Loyalty is the red flame lit in the heart’s chancel, lit with the admixture of personal need and social concern, illumined by the reason and ignited by the will. Loyalty combines the conservative concern for morality with the liberal hunger for justice. Loyalty is life, but life with a purpose. Real clarity, can come with a brush up with loyalty. Tell me what you give to, and I will tell you who you are. Tell me what you sacrifice for, and I will tell you who you are. Tell me what altar you face, and I will tell you who you are. Dime con quien andas, y te dire quien eres
And real loyalty is magnanimous. Real loyalty is bighearted enough to honor an opponent’s loyalty. At the summit, there can be a reverent respect for another’s loyalty, truly lived, even when it clashes with our own. Maybe especially then. US Grant felt this at Appomatox as he took the sword from RE Lee. My close friend, Jon Clinch’s new historical novel, The General and Julia, about Grant’s last few months of life, is a kind of homage to chivalry. It is chivalry, this honoring of loyal opposition. People of faith were once known for this kind of chivalry, an appreciation of multiple interests, a reverent respect for divergent loyalties, as long as they did not eclipse the one great loyalty. A football player, a burly bearded lineman, explained a defeat saying, “They played better than we did.” Our granddaughter is a Swifty, a fan of Taylor Swift, who last week in receiving an award said, ‘the work, the work is the real reward.’ Yes.
Such a memory could help our political conversations, reminding us that at depth loyalties converge out of difference. Surface difference can occlude deeper agreements. Loyalty has a magnanimous height that honors others’ divergent loyalties, best perhaps known in vibrant local communities, what Alistair Macintyre (Dean at CAS next door in 1972) called ‘the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained’ (LRB, 2/8/24, 17). Maybe he worshipped then at Marsh Chapel?
In fact, if life does not retain a height dimension, life becomes a kind of death. Without the mountain presence, the absence of the valley becomes the valley of death. I may ask you, a question. Does your life have height? Is the spiritual ceiling in your weekly house of sufficient stature? How high is heaven, day to day? Is there any place for a cloud, for brilliance, for presence, for the numinous? Is there a room with a view? Is there a place for special experience, even ‘special revelation’? A pastor asked a harried housewife what would make her life better, and she replied, ‘a window over the kitchen sink’.
Sometimes, as Karl Jaspers taught us, the third dimension of life, its height, may be opened to us in liminal moments: change, loss, death, birth, relocation, illness, healing. Let us remember Jaspers this Lent.
Sometimes, as John Wesley taught us, the third dimension of life, its height, may be provided for us by means of grace: a regular mealtime prayer (do you know one?), a memorized set of verses (do you have them?), a favorite hymn or two (do you hum one?), a pattern of worship (do you claim one?), a church family to love and a church home to enjoy (do you attend one?). Personal goals, life’s length, do not come without effort. Communal changes, life’s breadth, to not come from wishes. Why should we think that a mountain view, a certain height, will come our way without attentive effort? Let us remember Wesley this Lent.
Sometimes, as Ralph Harper taught us some years ago, we need the height of presence: “When I am moved by a painting or by music, by clouds
passing in a clear nigh sky, by the soughing of pines in the early spring, I
feel the distance between me and art and nature dissolve to some degree,
and I feel at ease. I feel that what I know makes me more myself than I
knew before. This is how the saints felt about God, and I see in my own
experience elements that I share with the saints and prophets, the
philosophers and priests.” (On Presence, 6) Let us remember presence this
Lent.
Sometimes, we need to remember that you cannot cook on a cold stove. What bakes bread is not only yeast but heat! Let me hear you whistle! Let me feel your body in the pew! Let me notice you humming a hymn! Let me eat at your table and see your photographs! Let me know your name! Then there may come the chance for a certain height. Let us remember this, this Lent.
‘Reality takes shape only in memory’, said Proust. In my junior year, spent abroad in Segovia, I had the good fortune to meet a friend. We climbed the mountains of Castile together, though we never saw each other in church. Then the week before Lent in 1975, the last year of Franco’s reign, we met each other in the plaza. My friend was carrying, in good Castilian fashion, the Ejercicios Espiritualesof Ignatius of Loyola. Surprised, I inquired about this reading for Lent, and participation in the visionary exercise of Loyola. “Siempre se saca algo bueno de estas cosas” said the confirmed agnostic: “ah, one always gets something good from these things” said the passionate climber of mountains. Another kind of mountain view…Hear the gospel: the gospel of height, the gospel of a high mountain view, the gospel of a transfigured life…and this gospel awaits you, too.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.
