The Ven Richard I Cluett
February 18, 2007
Exodus 34:29-35 + 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2 + Luke 9:28-36
I would like you to take a minute and range over the events and moments of your life, and focus on an event or a moment, when everything came together, when it was perfection, when it was bliss, when you felt blessed.
Perhaps it was when the whole family, all the available generations, were gathered in the same room or around the same dinner table, and it suddenly comes to you how absolutely perfect the moment is; how incredibly wonderful it is; how miraculously blessed you are to experience it.
It is a mercy. It is ecstasy. It is perfection. It is the essence. It is bliss. It is a blessing. It is an epiphany.
Or perhaps it is a different kind of moment when you have discovered in an instant who the Thou is who completes your I.
Or perhaps it is a different kind of moment when after years of sweat and labor in working on your prayer life, you suddenly feel in the core of your being that God is present with you, around you, and within you. A blessing.
Or perhaps it is a different kind of moment when the project you have been creating, the thing you have been making, the work you have been building is finally and wonderfully and complete,
Or perhaps it is something totally differently, uniquely, utterly other; having nothing to do with my suggestions, but something yours, your blessing, your epiphany… to savour, forever.
If you have experienced this somehow, someway… then you can begin to know something of what Peter and James and John experienced. Theirs was uniquely theirs, but we have ours. And if we don’t, “Why not?” is a good question. The answer may just be a “Not yet”. Or it may be that there is a veil.
To be on the mountain top – of whatever mountain – is to receive a gift that lives forever in memory and in the future persons we live to become. It will sustain even when down in the deepest valleys, even when mired in the deepest mud, even when enmeshed in the most complicated complexities of life. It is a mercy, a gift, pure gift, a blessing and it lives forever in us. We never forget.
For Peter, James and John it was to see Jesus as he truly is. It was to be present at an Epiphany much the same as when Jesus saw himself as he really is for the very first time. It was at his baptism when the same voice uttered the words, “You are my Son, the beloved.” Today we hear, “This is my Son, my Chosen”.
You have heard the phrase, “See God and die.” The glory of God was reflected in the face of Moses, and except when he spoke the word of God he covered his face. He stood and lived and moved in the midst of the people, his face radiant, radiating the presence of God in the midst of the people, and they could not see it.
On the mountain, Peter, James and John, these three, and we, see God in the face of Jesus and live. The face of Jesus is for us the face of God. The only and true face of God.
The Apostle Paul says that in Jesus we “with unveiled faces, see the glory of the Lord… and are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another”
To see it, to know that, is the gift of life, of new life, of true life. It is the insight that makes all the connections. It is the Great Aha. It is the meaning of life. It brings all things together. It is foreknowledge of the heavenly kingdom. It is God’s mercy for all creation to know this truth. It is a blessing.
Who would not want to share that? Who would not want those we love most to have that? To what lengths would you go to make that available to your loved ones, even to those you do not know, because of the profound influence and affect it can make on the life of each person and on the life of all, the very life of the world?
Many of you know that one of my joys is leading a wellness conference for clergy called CREDO. At that conference we lavish, and I mean that literally, we lavish care on these clergy who give their lives for others and for the church.
In that conference I use a short film, which I also use with vestries sometimes, that is produced by a National Geographic photographer who talks about his trade, and at that same time shows his photos of the incredible beauty of this world.
There are a number of learnings in the film, but I tend to keep coming back to two:
• There is more than one right answer
• To find one, to find the right answer, you have to put yourself in the place of greatest opportunity
To experience, to get a hint, a whiff, of what the scripture offers today, we have to make ourselves available to it. We have to put ourselves, and those we love, and those whom we may not love or may not know, but for whom we bear some responsibility… put us in the places of greatest opportunity.
No booths or tents or monuments need to be erected when these moments happen, but when the veil is lifted we need to be there.
It is what the parents of these children being baptized today are doing. Bringing their dearest, their children into relationship with God; beginning what they hope will be a growing and life-long relationship that will be a mercy to their children; that will be a blessing to their children; that will provide them with a pathway to the right answers in this life; that will be a light in the dark valleys of this life; and that will be an occasional occasion for their children to know a moment, every now and then, of bliss, an epiphany.
It is their, and our, gift from God. It is the gift each of us has to give to another.
