The surgeons found that those blind since birth had no understanding of space and depth perception, no way to name shapes or shadows or tell the difference between them. Instead, they were dazzled by the sheer brightness of the light that now flooded their eyes—vision was more a physically overwhelming sensation rather than a fully functional one of the five senses. Some were filled with delight everywhere they looked. She tells of a girl who sees a tree in a garden and stands before it, transfixed. She takes a hold of it, and at the touch of the leaves and bark names it as a tree, but then refers to it as “The tree with the lights in it.”
Dillard herself seeks to be visually amazed in her perception of the woods and creek near her home, where she walks daily. She seeks particularly to try to untrain her mind for just a moment to see the two-dimensional yet carnival-like swirl of colors and brightness of what is before her described by those with restored vision.
She searches for her own “tree with the lights in it,” what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins described as kingfishers catching fire, to see beneath the recognition of objects as objects and instead to behold the spark within all creation. Sometimes, she manages the un-knowing of the objects around her until they broke down into their constituent colors and brightness, but only fleetingly, for an instant at a time.
Far more commonly she would look for hours and yet have everything resolve into known categories of flora and fauna. She walked through a peach orchard repeatedly, craving the montage of fruit, leaf, branch, and air to unravel in front of her, to no avail. She admitted:
“I couldn't sustain the illusion of flatness. I've been around for too long. Form is condensed to an internal dance macabre with meaning: I couldn't unpeach the peaches. Nor can I remember ever having seen without understanding; the color patches of infancy are lost. My brain then must have been smooth as any balloon. I'm told I reached for the moon; Many babies do. But the color patches of infancy swelled as meaning filled them; they arrayed themselves in solemn ranks down distance which unrolled and stretched before me like a plane. The moon rocketed away. I live now in a world of shadows that shape and distance color, but world where space makes a kind of terrible sense…. The fluttering patch I saw in my nursery window --silver and green and shapeshifting blue --is gone; a row of Lombardy poplars takes its place, mute, across the lawn.” (Dillard, p. 31)
Finally, one day it happened when she had all but given up after years of effort.
“Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was holy fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, not breathless by a powerful glance.” (Dillard, p. 35)
Dillard, in other words, was looking for the spark of the divine that is embedded in and that makes holy everything in creation. Our readings today similarly writhe and swirl with visions and revelations. The veil of our knowing perception is pulled back to reveal that which has not been seen before, and those who witness it are both charged and changed forever. What are we to learn from these stories of the revealing of God’s presence in the world, what is known as a “theophany,” or showing of God?
In both the story of Elijah’s departure from Elisha, and the disciples’ witnessing of the Transfiguration of Jesus on the mountain, we see awe and wonder—but also bewilderment, confusion, and a sense of looming loss. Scholar and teacher Debie Thomas points out that these visions also represent thresholds, changes in the lives of those who witness these events. With each of these epiphanies, something familiar is lost, and what will take its place is shrouded in mystery. It’s only human to be reluctant and resistant at the approach of such transitions in our lives.
As we have moved through the stages of life, our vision and perceptions are changed as well. We resonate to these stories because we know that life itself involves crossing many thresholds.
We are well acquainted with the bittersweet passages of life: there is no new baby without the pain and risk of childbirth and often the vulnerability and risk of relationship for the parents and then the parents and child. There is no creation of a family without eventually letting go of children as they enter adulthood and leave home to make their own ways in the world. Our own parents, who once seemed so invincible and unerring suddenly begin to become dependent upon our help, and it sends a ringing slap of a reminder about our own mortality as well as calling in the loan of care they first invested in us.
It seems we are just get used to one way of relating to each other, and then another season of life comes by and scrambles our understanding of what we thought we see and know, especially about each other.
If we remember the backstory to our reading from 2 Kings, we recall that old Elijah had taken the boy Elisha away from all he had ever known and become his teacher and mentor. Now, in the reading we hear today, all that has become familiar to Elisha in those succeeding years is coming to a close with a final snap, and Elisha is awash in what today we call “anticipatory grief.” How will he go on without the old man’s guidance? We all have been there, as Thomas notes:
Regardless of the particulars, we all know what it's like to get used to one way of being in the world. One way of knowing God, one way of practicing our vocations, one way of relating to our families, one way of doing church, faith, and religion. By the time Elijah's ascension draws near, his student Elisha is well entrenched in finding both his God and his purpose through his mentor. He can't bear the thought of having that safety net ripped away. Who will God become in Elijah's absence? Who will Elisha become, if he is forced to step into spiritual adulthood? If he is forced to evolve?... Elisha saw God's glory, that's for sure. But he also saw a point of no return, and his response was neither gratitude nor joy. He tore his clothes and grieved. (3)
Because Lent moves in the calendar from year to year, the number of Sundays in the season of the Epiphany can change, and due to the way the Christian calendar is set up, there just aren’t that many weeks between Jesus being born as a baby and Jesus moving toward his passion and resurrection. It is traditional to tell the story of the Transfiguration on the Sunday before Lent starts.
In the wisdom of the lectionary, we began the season of Epiphany with the story of Jesus’s baptism in Mark, hearing the voce of God address Jesus and declare to him, “You are my Son, the Beloved….” It is only right and fitting, therefore, that we close out the season after Epiphany with another declaration from God about the identity of Jesus, and with another revelation of God’s glory. It is a bit disconcerting, considering that we spent six weeks covering just the first two pages of Mark’s gospel, and now suddenly we jet to the fulcrum of Mark’s story like we were teleported. Yet we hear those words twice, and are reminded that we are God’s Beloveds, too, and Lent tells us exactly how much God, through Christ, loves us.
The depiction of the Transfiguration is a singular miracle story. Unlike the other ones we’ve heard this year, where Jesus heals or changes others, it is Jesus himself who is the one who appears changed. But is he really changed—or is the veil pulled back from what we mere mortals can tolerate in seeing the glory of God, so that the disciples get a glimpse of Jesus as he REALLY is?
The Transfiguration reveals to us the profound mystery of God’s intimate involvement in confronting the evil that can overshadow too much of human existence. And that’s a truth we need to remind ourselves of repeatedly, as we witness injustice, oppression and falsehood seemingly reign. We have to remind ourselves that God empowers us as children of God to denounce and stand against evil forces in the world, that lie to us and tell us the world is so broken there is no point in trying. There is a reason why Satan is called “the Father of Lies.”
That evil comes about through our need for domination, mastery, and power over others, which is also the source of much of the suffering for the majority of the world’s population. In the reading from 2 Corinthians, Paul reminds us about the things that keep us from seeing the gospel as it really is. Paul points out that if we focus on the “god of this world,” we are unable to perceive to see God in unexpected places, or to see the gospel with clarity and what it requires of us. Instead, our perception is “veiled.” Humans are the ones who have broken our societies, and God gives us the wisdom to fix it. We just need to understand the power within ourselves. That’s another thing the Transfiguration does—it reveals God’s empowerment of us as God’s children.
Perhaps Paul is too generous to make the “god of this world” singular. Power, status, self-righteousness, money, material possessions, fame, greed, entertainment, yes, even violence, as we remember three years since the Parkland Florida school shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School: all of these things we may worship, as we offer them the priority for our attention, our time, and our striving, hoping they make dependence upon God unnecessary.
There are so many gods we focus upon and elevate that we think will take the place in our hearts that belongs to God. And this is especially true in our lives today, with false prophets all around us proclaiming a gospel that seeks to divide and conquer rather than unite and heal. Our perceptions are scrambled.
The story of the Transfiguration recounts a moment when the veil between the visible and the previously invisible is torn away, like the first time you look at a few drops of pond water through a microscope, or at the milky surface of the moon through a telescope. In both cases where once we saw something ordinary, now color and crater and shadow dance before our eyes, and we become aware that those things were there all along—we just didn’t see it.
This is the turning point, midway between Jesus’s baptism and his death. Now he will turn his face toward the cross. On the cross, Jesus will also be between two figures—the two criminals who were crucified with him. On the cross, his claim to be God’s son will be inscribed over him as a form of mockery, for surely the true Son of God would not be hanging on a cross. While he is on the cross, the crowds will wait around to see if Elijah will come to save Jesus. Three of Jesus’s followers will witness his crucifixion, although they will be women (Mary Magdalene, Mary and Salome).
We now turn toward Lent, a wilderness season of our own, where we are led to being transformed ourselves—transformed by our honest admission of our need for repentance, for perceiving the world and ourselves with a new light. During Lent we are called to let go of all that holds us back and prevents us from crossing the threshold of new life that Jesus offers. Yet if we allow this season to open our eyes to new ways of seeing the gospel of Jesus at work even in the face of evil, violence, and death, we will cross over to the other side of death, to resurrection and joyful discipleship, to full maturity, from belief to faith.
As we prepare to enter into Lent, we are encouraged to lean into the creative power of darkness in order to expand our perception. We end the season after Epiphany each year with stories of transfiguration to give us the courage to allow our eyes to adjust to the seeing of who Jesus REALLY is in our lives, much like those disciples who witness his transfiguration in our gospel.
Too often we seem to expect a bearded man, wearing a loose linen tunic, sandals, gorgeously-tressed hair. We fail to perceive him in other guises: the frazzled dad working three jobs to help put food on the table; the teenager hungry for someone to take her under their wing and counter the story she hears at home about being ugly inside and out; the neighbor with whom we have been feuding for so long we no longer remember why; the panhandler on the corner we sneer at for having a cell phone.
But the point of the transfiguration is not to focus on how Jesus has been changed. Rather, what if we looked upon him and realize that the veil has been pulled back: Jesus reveals just a tiny bit of who he really is, and once we perceive that, it is we who have been changed. In a year when even the everyday and commonplace has sometimes become a struggle, we may not perceive the ways in which the Christ-light has been revealed to us, much less within us.
The season of Epiphany is about drawing back the veil and joyfully encouraging us to see God’s presence everywhere and for everyone. Jesus’s transfiguration calls us to embrace our own, so that we ourselves may perceive that that same glory and light resides within each of us. As Jesus transfigures us, he urges us to leave behind the gods of this world. “Come, follow me. Be the light you need to see within the world.”
Amen.
Preached at the 10:30 am online worship service at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville.
Readings:
Citations/Links:
(1) Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 31.
(2) Ibid., 35.
(3) Debie Thomas, “When Everything Changes,” February 7, 2021, at Journey With Jesus, https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/2917-when-everything-changes
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