A Sermon Preached on the Last Sunday after Epiphany
In Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal
I want to express my thanks to Canon Sanchez for inviting me to preach today. This Sunday has been designated Theological Education Sunday, so I will say why theological education is something you should be concerned about. You have a stake in knowing about, and, indeed, in supporting theological education in this diocese and province. You actually have a greater stake than you may realize. Canon Sanchez and the Rev’d Karla Holmes are both graduates of Dio, the theological college just up University Street from here where I work. Dr. Elizabeth Rowlinson and Dr. Patrick Wedd are also alumni of the college, and both have ministries at the college : Dr. Rowlinson as honorary chaplain, and Dr. Wedd as college musician. Also, a large proportion of our student body consists of current or former cathedral parishioners : Donald Boisvert, Robert Camara, Rhonda Waters, and Maïda Vandendorpe. I recall a few years ago I used an analogy drawn from professional sports to thank the cathedral for its contributions to the college. You’re a great farm team, I said. In fact, the benefits, I hope you will agree, are reciprocal.
Why should you be concerned about the continued vitality of theological education even apart from the benefits I’ve just mentioned ? Some of you may have seen last week a report in the Globe and Mail under the headline ‘Anglican Church facing the threat of extinction.’ The article reports a study prepared for the Diocese of British Columbia. The study calls Canada a post-Christian society in which Anglicanism is declining faster than any other denomination. It says the church has been ‘moved to the far margins of public life’ and is only a generation away from disappearing. I don’t know whether we Anglicans in Montreal should feel smug because we’ve heard this before. I do believe, however, that the wrong response to the article is to wring our hands and say : ‘This is a wake-up call. We’ve got to make ourselves popular again. Let’s develop strategies to make us look appealing.’
I am not opposed to filling the pews, and I know there are little things we could do to be more welcoming to the world around us. But I think the right question to ask is not : ‘How can we make ourselves more interesting ?’ The right question is : ‘What is God doing at this time in this world of God’s making ? What is God doing, and how is the Anglican Church hindering what God is doing, or witnessing faithfully to what God is doing, or avoiding altogether what God is doing ?’ I can’t claim to have an inside track on what God is doing, but I have some hunches about how we might approach the question. The follow-up question is : ‘Is theological education a luxury in our current context of shrinking congregations and shrinking budgets, or, can it help the church to be a faithful witness to what God is doing ?’
A non-negotiable starting-point for discerning what God is up to is, of course, the scripture, and the scripture that comes to us today is the gospel of the transfiguration of Jesus. This story has been described as ‘the paradise and despair of commentators.’1 Paradise, because it invites the reader or hearer into an extraordinary, textured vision that conveys more than can be expressed in words. For one thing, it feels as if we are being given a glimpse into heaven, as Jesus is portrayed conversing with Moses and Elijah, figures no longer of this world, and Jesus himself is clothed in an other-worldly radiance. Also, the terrifying voice and the cloud symbolize the presence of the invisible God who declares this man, Jesus, to be the person in whom God’s glory is made visible for us.
At the same time, we are reminded that this bearing of divine glory on the part of Jesus does not remove him from the world of flesh, nor from the conflicts of history. The transfiguration occurs at the point in his ministry when opposition to him is gathering and ready to be galvanized into deadly hostility. His upcoming passion, his exodus, as the Greek text puts it, that is, his upcoming passover, which he is about to accomplish in Jerusalem, is the subject of the conversation with Moses and Elijah. So, we are led to believe, the suffering of the Messiah, his dying the death of a cursed man, something scandalous to Jews, was not unknown to those two figures representing the Law and the Prophets.
All these associations make the transfiguration story the paradise of commentators. I suppose these same associations also make it the despair of commentators, especially those who are concerned with questions like ‘did it really happen ?’—a question, let me say, that can only be answered with a firm no . . . followed by a firm yes, which is not a cop-out, but a way of saying the story brings together various strands of experience un-doubtedly rooted in the real, historical encounter of Jesus with his disciples. Still, it is a story that must be read with ‘a poet’s eye and ear.’2 So, although its extraordinary character may suggest we have to do with an isolated incident, a kind of interruption in the every-day life of Jesus, the transfiguration is, to the contrary, continuous with Jesus’ announcement of the kingdom, his teaching in parables, his deeds of power, etc. In the ministry of Jesus, there is a signifying of something extraordinary. God is up to something. God is taking the initiative, through Jesus, to bring about the most radical conceivable transformation of human existence. Sinners are welcomed, the hungry are fed, the blind see, the lame walk. In other words, people paralyzed by sin or bodily ailment or destitution are forgiven and given a taste for what the world will be like when God is truly its ruler. If you want to know what God is up to, look to the ministry of Jesus. He is announcing the inauguration of the Kingdom of God. The transfiguration, in a dramatic way, reveals to us the normally invisible side of this ministry, and that is, Jesus embodies the transformation he brings. He embodies human flesh made radiant, showing forth the Creator’s glory, a beauty that permeates even the material environment that sustains us and clothes us, suggested, of course, in the assertion that his clothes became dazzling white.
The New Testament has a variety of ways of speaking about the way the blessing of the transfiguration is spread around. St. John speaks of our being given eternal life in union with the Son of God. St. Paul speaks about God’s Spirit dwelling within us and producing a moral fruit in Christlike lives. The same idea with a different spin is given in today’s epistle. ‘And all of us, with unveiled faces, says Paul, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.’ And Paul also tell us of the ultimate goal of this transformation, namely, our participation in the resurrection of Christ. ‘For this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality.’ Jesus Christ, crucified and risen again, embodies the transformation he brings.
To return, then, to the question, what is God up to ? Here is the cosmic scope of it : the invisible God is transforming flesh and spirit, human life and its environment into the visible milieu of God’s beauty. Is this, perhaps, too big a thing for you and me to grasp, or to have a part in ? But we do already have a part in it. We are baptized into Christ, clothed in him, to use a baptismal metaphor, so his life is already our own. Remember his transfiguring work : he announces God’s mercy ; he confronts conditions that immobilize human beings, that blind them and alienate them and that deaden human potential. Those very same tasks are, in a way, written into our baptismal covenant, and thereby enjoined on us. To participate in the transfiguration it is not required of us that we have extraordinary mountain-top experiences or that we change the world through grand gestures. A Lutheran theologian, commenting on what’s different about Anglicans, said that our peculiar gift is to foster the idea that ‘we [human beings] come to share in the holiness of Christ as persons situated in the world in specific, contingent ways, our lives intricately bound up in commonplace obligations, ties and circumstances that may be transfigured by grace into spiritual opportunity.’3 In other words, we may participate in the transfiguring work of Christ through our relationships, in our communities, in our jobs. These are the circumstances that may be transfigured by grace into spiritual opportunity.
This entails that we be there, present to our neighbours, and present with strangers ; not just geographically proximate, but present so that their language is no longer foreign to us, so that their poetry may come to our lips, so that their passions and aspirations might enter our hearts and be brought by us into our liturgy as a priestly people. That study in British Columbia says we Anglicans have moved to the margins of public life. Maybe now that we’re there, we might learn something from the spirituality of those who were there before we joined them.
I hope it is clear I am not suggesting that we abandon our heritage. To the contrary, the last thing we should do is to try to market ourselves by adopting the strategies of so-called ‘successful’ churches. We have a liturgy with ancient and ecumenical roots. It is saturated in scripture in a way that the worship of so-called bible churches doesn’t even come near. We have a rich devotional heritage. We have hymns and music of the type that have stood the test of time as well as those that startle us with their adventurousness and open us to new experiences of God’s sublimity. I dare to say possibilities for encouraging a mature, world-affirming faith more reliably emerge from a tradition like our own than from what are often held up as more popular options.
Why, then, is theological education important, given our decline as a Church ? The British Columbia study identifies one of the reasons. We live in a post-Christian society, it says. What that means is that most people stay away, not because they know the gospel, nor because they’ve tried the church and found it wanting. They stay away because they think they already know what we stand for, and because they suppose they know what we stand for, they believe we have nothing that will give depth to their lives or challenge them. Our society is a lot like Jesus’ hometown which, you remember, rejected him because they already knew him, or thought they did. This supposed familiarity is one of the background beliefs of a post-Christian society. It’s the new unquestioned tradition. One consequence of it is the huge ignorance of religion in our society, and the space this leaves for various fundamentalisms, not only of the religious sort. In this context, the church cannot afford not to help its communities, congregations and parishes develop qualities that will enable them to witness faithfully and creatively to the gospel. If those qualities are to belong to communities, they must likewise be the qualities we look for in the leaders of those communities, particularly the clergy. Let me suggest four qualities and briefly say something about each. The church must have : (1) theological intelligence, (2) pastoral wisdom, (3) spiritual grounding, and (4) integrity. By theological intelligence I mean knowledge of the tradition and the ability to apply it in context. This is a skill that presupposes the kind of knowledge that can only come through study, not only of theology, broadly understood, but also, of culture. By practical wisdom, I mean knowing how to act appropriately in a particular situation of pastoral opportunity, a skill that can only be acquired over time by entering intentionally into situations of human need and reflecting critically on one’s responses. By spiritual grounding I mean being a person, or a community, of prayer, accustomed to waiting on God, blessing God and interceding for God’s people. I mean being grounded in the church’s corporate prayer and engaged in ongoing work, ideally with a spiritual director, of reflecting on what God is doing in our life. And by integrity I mean the capacity to keep it all together. I mean having an awareness, as an individual, of one’s vocational predilections and inhibitions, not only to hone the skills one does possess, but to recognize where challenges may lie. And communities should likewise be aware of their strengths and their weaknesses.
Finally, to get back to what God is doing and our part in it. I said God is transforming flesh and spirit, human life and its environment into the visible milieu of God’s glory. Yes, but. The transfigured Christ underwent the disfigurement of crucifixion. We who are baptized into him are baptized not only into his life, but into his death. I take this to mean, partly, we need to be skeptical of popularity, of being successful on the marketing register. It is not our job to be glossy and manipulative. The transfiguration did not occur in the sight of Pilate or Herod, or the crowds. Where, then, will we see Christ transfig-ured ? Do we see him ? Yes, he is with us. The radiant face of Christ greets us. But notice he comes to us now holding out bread and wine and saying, join me in the sacrifice.
John Simons
Principal, Montreal Diocesan Theological College
1. D.M. Beck in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, (Abingdon, 1962) s.v. ‘Transfiguration.’
2. Stephen Farris, The Lectionary Commentary, Vol. 3, edited by Roger E. Van Harn (Eerdmans and Continuum), p. 358.
3. David Yeago, ‘Theological Renewal in Communion : What Anglicans and Lutherans Can Learn From One Another,’ originally published in Inhabiting Unity : Theological Perspectives on the Proposed Lutheran-Episcopal Concordat, edited by E. Radner and R.R. Reno (Grand Rapids, MI : Eerdmans, 1995). Reprinted in Ecumenism, No. 135 ‘Towards Full Communion : Anglicans and Lutherans in Agreement,’ where it appears on p. 30.
