The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost
August 10, 2008
Feast of the Transfiguratio (transferred)

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Transfiguration. And this is what writer Madeline L’Engle has to say about this miraculous story we have just heard from our Gospel:

“Suddenly they saw Jesus the way he was: the way he really was all the time, although they had never seen it before, the glory which blinds the everyday eye and so becomes invisible. This is how he was, radiant, brilliant, carrying joy like a flaming sun in his hands…And there on the mountain, they saw him, they really saw him, saw his light…And now perhaps,(in this light) we will see each other too."

In the light of the Transfiguration, I would like to say a few words this morning about love and death. Death and love, of course, are the two greatest forces in our lives as mortal beings. And when everything in our lives is distilled to purity, love and death are the only things that remain.

I want to say something about love and death because they hold such a prominent place in our life as a spiritual community. Lord knows death is a regular visitor to our parish. It is unavoidable, inescapable. And it tests our love mightily. Some of you have even wondered aloud to me if this is what I bargained for when I came to St. Mary’s. To bury so many of those I have come to love.

I wondered this myself last Sunday night when I went to say goodbye to our dear friend, Don James, in his last hour. To see another bright light extinguished in so few days left me feeling hollow and alone.

But when I arrived at the Nursing Home, and as stood beside Don as he labored hard for breath, and as I said the beautiful prayers at the time of death from our prayer book, I looked up and saw pictures of his beloved Norma and his children and his grandchildren. And I recalled how many of you visited Don in his final days. Suddenly, the light and air in his room changed. There was a fullness in the space, a sense of being in a time out of time. And in the midst of it all, there was the assurance that love is stronger than death.

It is a great gift to be called into these sacred moments of love and death. These places of fullness, these times out of time. Psychologists call these liminal experiences, where we are drawn to the edge of reality, and given a glimpse of what lies beyond. I had a wonderful friend when I was a new priest back in Minnesota, a retired bishop named Bill Dimmick. Bill called these sacred moments thin experiences, where there is little that separates us from God.

I think this is exactly what is happening in our story of the Transfiguration. Jesus takes Peter and James and John to a high mountain apart to pray. He does this because he has already turned his face to Jerusalem. Jesus knows he is about to die. And not only this, he tells his disciples just before they ascend the mountain, that if they are to follow him, they too must take up their cross, they too must lose their lives for his sake.

On the mountain, the disciples are drawn to the threshold of the very presence of the divine, where Moses and Elijah and Jesus himself are aglow with celestial light. In this thin expereince, everything temporal, everything that is passing away, everything we human beings construct to shield us from the truth is stripped away, and the disciples see Jesus and themselves as they truly are, holy souls, aflame with the glory of God. In a single moment, they know that death is not final. For they recognize all that was, and is, and ever will be is held in the eternal love of God.

Mountains have always held this liminal power, this capacity to transport human souls to what exists above and beyond what we can grasp or control, to bring us to this place where love and death intersect. I know this. Jeannette and I have just returned from the mountains. For ten days, we were together in a small Carmelite hermitage in Crestone, in Southern Colorado, at the base of the rugged Sangre de Christo range.

Crestone, we soon learned, is a spiritual mecca. Three decades ago, religious communities from around the globe were invited to Crestone to establish retreats for pilgrims of all faiths. So today, there is are a number of Buddhist, Hindu, Tibetan, and Zen communities which surround the little Catholic hermitage where we made our own retreat as a couple. And each of these traditions reflects on love and death in their own way.

Much of our time we spent in the Sangre de Christos themselves. Because of their proximity, we were able to climb to 12000 feet. There, truly, awaiting us, was a thin experience. Wildflowers were everywhere, of incomparable variety and color, fields of purple columbine. The birds were amazing, some species tropical in origin. Jeannette even saw a tanager, which we had last seen years ago in the Costa Rican cloud forest. It seems even the birds know where to return to find heaven on earth. One day, we walked up to two large herds of bighorn sheep. And there were elk and antelope aplenty.

The air itself at alpine heights is thin. And breathing it has the capacity to concentrate the mind. To be part of such grandeur, to see light as light, color as color, precipice as precipice, vista as vista, to listen and touch and smell, all at once, without interruption or distraction, to be among things as they have been for eons, this is the glory of God, this is transfiguration, this is a foretaste of heaven. This is to stand at the crossroads of love and death. This is the truth the mountain imparts.

Yet it was back in the valley, on our last morning, where the greatest truth lay in store. One of the members of the Carmelite order, Sister Connie, for some time had been nursing her elderly father, a 96 year old retired doctor. For years he had been able to live in Crestone, but had recently taken a fall, and went into quick decline in a hospital in Alamosa. For the ten days Jeannette and I were on retreat, the community was keeping a death vigil, and two days before our stay was up, Connie’s father succumbed.

Connie invited us to be part of her father’s burial, an open cremation, a practice that, in Crestone, is shared ecumenically. Quite honestly, I did not know what to expect. Hindus have buried their dead this way for millennia, as have Native Americans in our own land. Cremation is what most of us choose at death. It is what I myself will choose. But to do it so openly, so unashamedly?

In any event, just before dawn, as we were departing, we joined about fifty others on the open range, where a pyre had been built. Solemnly, the body was processed beneath an Orthodox shroud which the family had purchased in Jerusalem last year. Laid on the pyre, we were all invited to take pine boughs and place it on the body. So that is what we did.

What came next, I struggle for words to convey. As the fire was lit, Connie came forward and sang the Exultet, the Resurrection Hymn we sing each Easter Vigil. When she finished, a cantor stepped forward and sang the Jewish burial kaddish. And then, three Buddists intoned their sutras. And then, just as the sun broke over the Sangre de Cristos, a muezzin sang his morning prayers. The gathering around the fire grew silent, for quite some time. The sun rose bright across the vast prarie. Birdsong drifted in and out. And then, Connie and Suzie from the community stepped forward and began to sing:

“I sing because I’m happy
I sing because I’m free.
His eye is on the sparrow
And I know He watches me.”

The fire burned hot, and I watched the billowing smoke as it circled the full moon, still bright in the morning sky. Here, in that very moment, love and death became for me one, a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. Here was the sacrifice each of us will one day make. Here was Peter’s lamp shining in a dark place, until the morning star rises in our hearts. Here was our transfigured Lord, who died so we might live. Here, just as on the Holy Mount long ago, all my assumptions about God and humanity were interrupted and overthrown. For here, again, was the open embrace of our Creator God, whose love quickens us into being, and in whom, and by whom, and through whom, we shall never die.