It’s not an ideal world, though, so if I’m honest with you these prayers are often in one ear and out the other for me, and I expect the experience might be the same for you. That’s probably ok since a prayer’s intended audience is God. But it’s still a shame because many of these prayers have an incredible pedigree. Many of them date back 1500 years or more. And if you spend time with them, you’ll find that the insights and disquietude about the human condition in relation to the divine that inspired the anonymous liturgical authors of the age following the collapse of the Roman Empire aren’t that different from our own.
The collect from this morning, however, is not of that vintage. In fact as churchy things go, it’s pretty modern, written in 1898 by the Rev. Dr. William Reed Huntington. Let me read it for you again:
O God, who on the holy mount revealed to chosen witnesses your well-beloved Son, wonderfully transfigured, in raiment white and glistening: Mercifully grant that we, being delivered from the disquietude of this world, may by faith behold the King in his beauty; who with you, O Father, and you, O Holy Spirit, lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
A wonderful transfiguration, delivery from disquietude, beholding the King in his beauty. All these things seem worthy of our gratitude, petition, and hope.
But what about the “raiment white and glistening” Huntington describes in the prayer, referring to Jesus’s clothes becoming “dazzling white” in Luke’s Gospel account? This prayer is brief enough that even four words is quite a bit of real estate. Why devote so much of it to a phenomenon that today we can achieve with the humble elements of Clorox and glitter, or if you have a bigger budget, rhinestones and a good dry cleaner?
Focusing on the clothes makes the Transfiguration, the miracle we celebrate today, feel a little bit, I don’t know…cheap?
In 1898, when he wrote this prayer, William Reed Huntington was the rector of Grace Episcopal Church in Manhattan, which still stands at 10th and Broadway, and not so long ago celebrated its 200th anniversary. Huntington was a proponent of the social gospel, a movement originating in the late 19th century that looked at the poverty and injustice that are plainly contrary to the will of God and wondered what the Gospel had to say about it. Proclaimers of the social gospel thought about that line in the Lord’s prayer - “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” - and decided that maybe Christians ought to have something to do with making that happen. All Saints is an inheritor of this movement.
Consider life in an industrial city in 1898. Horse manure in the streets and coal smoke in the air. Arnold Manoff, a folklorist documenting life in the city in the subsequent decades, describes one neighborhood this way, “despite its proximity to….[a] tradition of middle class refinement…maybe because it runs downhill…[the place] has gotten a little frayed around the edges and battered at the middle, as if the muddy waters that run down…when it rains have seeped into the cellars and plumbing of the houses so that the people drink muddy water, and maybe that makes them so gray and gloomy.”
If that’s your lived reality, a raiment white and glistening, or - why does it have to be white? - pink and sparkling, green and glittering, or Cher or Dolly Parton or Tina Turner or Barbie shining in the Bob Mackie look of your choice, that’s a sight for sore eyes, real good news that gray gloom isn’t the way it has to be. That joy and beauty don’t solely belong to those who can buy their way out of discomfort, but are the heritage of every child of God. People needed the petition of William Reed Huntington’s prayer. It was still another 15 years before the first bottle of Clorox would hit the market.
Now, I have a bottle of bleach among my cleaning supplies. I take my shirts in to get dry-cleaned and starched every now and again. The same is probably true for a lot of you. I can appreciate a good outfit, but with easy access to these technologies that would have been a miracle in 1898, let alone in Jesus’s time, shine is maybe less of a sign of salvation for me.
But the muddy waters that run down when it rains, seeping into plumbing and cellars? The literal water that flows through the pipes of our homes may be safe enough to drink, but the figurative waters we figuratively drink and in which we figuratively swim? God help us.
Our own sins? Those who sin against us? The evil done on our behalf? The evil we contend with day after day? Deliver us from this disquietude; Lord, help us.
After Jesus, but before the collects, the creeds, and the Emperor Constantine, was Irenaeus, a priest and bishop of the second-century church. Irenaeus isn’t a household name, but he had a critical role in figuring this whole Christianity enterprise out. His major surviving work has the inviting title of Against Heresies, but it’s a book filled with more love than you’d expect considering the name. No one burns at the stake.
One of Irenaeus’s major concerns is the mutuality in the relationship between God and humans, mediated by the Word made flesh, Jesus. Jesus, he writes, “became the dispenser of…grace for the benefit of [humans], revealing God indeed to [people], but [also] presenting [people] to God.” In his conception of atonement - the means by which humankind and God are reconciled to one another - the Transfiguration is a mediated encounter between the invisible God most high, and the all too mortal Peter and John and James and you and me.
The imagery of the Gospel text - the shining clothes, the disembodied voice from heaven, the clouds. even Moses and Elijah - with enough time and money and smoke machines and holograms and CGI we can do all this. I have friends who attended the recent Beyonce concert in Louisville and between their photos and descriptions vivid enough to call testimony I’d say the technology of the Transfiguration has persuasive contemporary rivals.
The power of our technologies to replicate the described experience of the Transfiguration doesn’t diminish its power any more than the existence of effective HIV therapies, defibrillators, and mental health treatments diminishes Jesus’s healings and exorcisms. Jesus called on his disciples to do the miracles he did and the fact that good science means we don’t need to rely on miracles for our health care as much as we used to is humankind doing its job. (I’ll leave equitable access to health care for another sermon, though)
To the extent any of you are skeptical about the miracle of the Transfiguration because of the power of a global megastar’s ability to deliver an experience that meets the technical specs, consider what the choices are to describe the mountaintop moments of our lives when words fail. Luke is trying to convey an encounter between the disciples and the divine and all he can do to transmit the import of what’s basically a you-had-to-be-there experience is describe the special effects.
Within this, Irenaeus and William Reed Huntington both discern something else. It’s not every year we celebrate the Feast of the Transfiguration on a Sunday. It’s one of the rare feasts of the church that usually falls on a weekday but takes precedence when it falls on a Sunday. But no matter, right? We hear the story of the Transfiguration annually on the last Sunday of the Epiphany, aka, the Sunday before Lent. Some people call this day “Transfiguration Sunday,” and while I try not to be a very judgmental person I do say those people are wrong.
Because the descent from the mount of the Transfiguration is the beginning of Jesus and the disciples trekking back to Jerusalem. Therefore the homiletic impulse on so-called Transfiguration Sunday is to look at Peter’s proposal, “not knowing what he was saying,” to build dwelling places for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah and point out why you can’t stay on the mountaintop, why you have to go to Jerusalem, the cross, and the grave.
That sermon has its place.
But today actually IS Transfiguration Sunday, an event that occurs only one in seven years. Today, without Lent looming, we can consider there’s another possibility to why the Gospel asserts Peter didn’t know what he was talking about. Maybe it wasn’t that Peter didn’t understand the import of the moment vis a vis the inevitable journey to the cross, but that he was so overwhelmed by the beauty of the moment that he wanted to dwell in it forever.
This is indeed what Irenaeus posits: “For the glory of God is a living [person],” he writes, referring to Jesus, “and the life of a [person] consists in beholding God,” he goes on, referring to Peter, and James, and John, and by extension those of us gathered here.
Some decades after his moment awaking from sleep on the holy mountain to encounter an astonishing vision, Peter describes attending to it as to “a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star arises in your hearts.”
No special effect, no shining garment, no words any gospeller or preacher can write or speak, can take the place of the reality of a celestial hope coursing through arteries and veins to aorta and ventricles, that morning star that is the beauty of God arising in our hearts.
I can’t say what the right image is for you, but I challenge you to ponder a thing so beautiful, so strong, so compelling, that it takes a heart prone to wander and so tangles it up in God’s goodness it can’t be unbound. A vision of the realms of endless days you can’t help but long to purchase mountaintop real estate and stay.
In the moment of the Transfiguration, there was no time to stay. There was still Salvation work to do. But the Transfiguration is a revelation not just of Jesus’s authority but of God’s intent for eternity. It is another version of the New Jerusalem - a dwelling place for God amid God’s creation, where the majestic Glory of the Trinity can shine upon us fully, and where we, delivered from disquietude, can behold the beauty of our heavenly King.
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Sermon preached on the Feast of the Transfiguration
August 6, 2023
Episcopal Church of All Saints, Indianapolis
Readings: Ex. 34:29-35; Ps. 99; 2 Pet. 1:13-21; Lk. 9:28-36
Image by the author
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