Sunday: Last Sunday after Epiphany
Reading: Matthew 17:1-9
Preacher: Peter C. Lane

In this snow-covered neighborhood, life can be awfully cruel. I ate dinner recently with a wonderful couple. Mothers of many children, they had found each other slowly over the years and were growing more comfortable in their life together. One reported that her mother treated her partner just like a daughter-in-law. The other, however, said her mother would probably prefer that she be dead than being gay. One of the blessings and responsibilities of being a priest is learning about the specifics of the cruelty of life. When I was chaplain at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital, one woman was continually tormented by demons. Another, a gentleman whom I met with every week, used the crucifix on the end of his rosary to cut his wrists. When I met with him after that, there were always two staff members watching him and recording his movements every fifteen minutes. The horror. I spoke, here at SPR, with someone on the anniversary of the death of their spouse. The death had caused a deep unhealed rift between the in-laws and this person. I could hear the pain. I watched a YouTube video this week, produced by an 18-year-old high school student in New York City. She interviewed her African American friends about beauty and blackness and then reproduced the old experiment where black children prefer white dolls. There is so much self-loathing, so much cruelty. All of these people, my gay friend, the psychiatric patients, the widow, and the children in the video, found themselves inadequate, unloved, unlovable in some way.

What a discrepancy! When I traced the sign of the cross on Valencia and Katharine at their baptism three weeks ago, I said, "You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ's own for ever." We are God's own and yet we don't know it. There is such a discrepancy between self-loathing and the belovedness of baptism. We don't know where to find God. We forget what God has to tell us.

Moses and Jesus found God up on the mountain. They found God like a cloud. Moses waited in silence for six days. Jesus heard this from cloud, "This is my Son, my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased." The clue to the resolution of this imbalance, between the cruelty of life and the love of God is found up on the mountain. "You are my beloved."

Belovedness. Today, the last Sunday after Epiphany, in the story of Jesus' transfiguration, we have a manifestation of God, not just an epiphany about the importance of Jesus. The mystery that is God shows itself. The mystery in the cloud like a devouring fire reveals itself as a God who loves, who is pleased. On the mountain Jesus is transfigured and we learn the nature of the mystery of God. I once went up a mountain looking for God, looking to understand the mystery. Carrying a sleeping bag, a tarp, a bible, eggs and an English muffin, and two matches, I headed for a night alone on the mountain, together with the Great Spirit. The mountain I was on, just a little over 4,000 feet in the Adirondack Mountains, had a wonderful rock ledge overlooking Lake Whitaker. I built a fire and perched on that ledge for the night. It was a night which was designed for me to be close to God. A crazy group of young men in the 1920s had come up with an Eagle Scout type award with a distinct Christian turn. After "mastering" six areas-swimming, canoeing, wilderness survival, and the like-the Lone Eagle Fellowship could invite you to join their number. The bizarre, fake Native American ceremony began with the initiate spending the night alone on the mountain. In the mystery of God, there is something about mountains. It's hard to get to the top of them, it's cold there, quiet, often windy, and certainly beautiful. There's something about that combination that suggests we might find God there. The night I was on the mountain it was not cloudy; the mystery of God was not as present as it was for Moses and Jesus. But I do remember that my awareness of God was heightened. One of the main things I did that night was to sing. For me, singing is the easiest way to pray, to present myself before the mystery. I sang all the songs I knew. And I sang a little Christian camp song that went like this: "God loves me so, God loves me so, God loves me so, God is so good to me." Belovedness.

The story of the transfiguration falls on the Last Sunday of Epiphany every year. It is the last story we read before heading into the Great Fast of Lent. The last story we hear before focusing on our waywardness, our sinfulness. The story appears in all three Synoptic Gospels in remarkably similar form. Despite its wide circulation, it is not easy to pin down its meaning. Although the gospels are full of fantastic stuff trying to make sense of Jesus, this story speaks directly to Jesus' mysteriousness. Jesus takes only his best friends to the top of a mountain where he immediately becomes dazzlingly white and is joined for a conversation by two heroes of the Hebrew Bible. Interrupting their conversation, God shows up in a cloud to talk. Having been ignored in their earlier suggestion to build small shacks for Moses, Elijah, and Jesus, the disciples hit the deck in fear. Jesus politely tells them to get up and not be afraid. Making it all the more inscrutable, Jesus does his thing of telling the disciples not to tell anyone. It is what the voice out of the cloud says, however, that I think is at the very center of this passage and indeed the gospel. "This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him." It echoes almost directly the words to Jesus at his baptism at the hands of John. Jesus is marked as God's own forever. The words were not, however, for Jesus' ears only. If Jesus was true man of true man-human in all of its fullness-I suggest that the mystery of God in the cloud was talking to each of us. Jesus, the second Adam, the prototype for humanity, was our stand in. Jesus found his true humanity in relation to God. As do we. When we hear the words, "This is my child, the beloved," we are changed into Jesus' likeness-we become as truly human as Jesus. When we know the loving God, we can know ourselves. For we are most fully human before God. In this epiphany on the mountain, the mystery opened up to reveal a God who sees us as beloved.

I can hear my younger self, another side of my current self, critiquing this sermon: What is this "You're O.K., I'm O.K. bullcrap?" What about expectation and transformation? Not now, not today. We have lent for that. Jesus, out of the silence of the cloud heard an epiphany. Jesus, in all of his humanity and for all of humanity, heard that we are God's children, that we are pleasing to God. We can not ignore that place of true love. We are not our true selves until we rest in God. That is the message to the woman whose mother might prefer her dead-you are my child, the beloved. That is the message which must ring out at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital-you are my beloved. It is the message to the widow, to the children of color, to you and me. Jesus represented humanity before God and heard, "This is my Son, the Beloved, with him I am well pleased; listen to him!" I went up the mountain and heard, God loves me so, God loves me so, God loves me so, God is so good to me.