Sermon: The Glory is…
Texts: Exodus 34:29-35, Luke 9:28-36
Today's Gospel tells us that, "While Jesus was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white." Moses and Elijah appeared in glory, talking to Jesus about his imminent departure.
Epiphany is not a single event - this is the third epiphany. The new star that guided the Magi was the first epiphany. Jesus' baptism - the second epiphany, with the splitting of the heavens, the dove descending and the voice of God affirming Jesus as the beloved Son. Now the transfiguration - another brilliant kind of epiphany with such details as the mountain, Moses, Jesus' face and clothes changing to be dazzling white, the voice, the glory! The story of Epiphany - the manifestation of light - tells the identity and the destiny of Jesus. This epiphany of transfiguration tells of Jesus’ departure.
He must go to Jerusalem, proclaim and suffer - and die. Before Jesus begins his ministry, Jesus receives heaven's confirmation as the Divine Son in baptism. In today's story, Jesus receives Heaven's confirmation again before he turns towards Jerusalem and towards the glory on the cross. Today is the last Sunday of the season of Epiphany. We are in transition to the season of Lent, the season of passion.
(Picture) It’s both painful and beautiful that God reveals God's love toward Jesus, as the sovereign son and the suffering servant, with a garment of light - a light of dazzling brightness. It is “a light from heaven, brighter than the sun (Acts 26:13)” - the description Acts uses to illustrate Saul’s experience of the risen Jesus.
The flood of light, the glory in its dazzling brightness, which the text calls, “white” is beyond any parallel, hard to translate into our ordinary experiences. It is Divine.
But - if the only thing we take away from this story is the brilliance of the light, the glory of the light, we are hearing just half of God’s story.
In the following scene, what appears is a cloud. A cloud that overshadows. A dense, dark, thick cloud that terrifies Peter, James and John as they enter it. Peter reveals his ignorance and inability to understand what is happening before his eyes, by saying to Jesus, "Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, one for Elijah!” He’s insisting on settlement, permanence, not knowing that the conversation Jesus had with Moses and the prophet embraces the opposite, "departure.”
I wonder about the composition of this cloud. Why do we see a cloud here? Is the appearance of a cloud a report about the actual weather conditions on the mountain? Is it accidental? Does it make the story more dramatic? Many Gospel stories are not just reports; they are parables. Every word has its reason to be written, is necessary, and informs us about the nature of God, people and the world.
Since the earliest imaginings of the Hebrew people, the Bible witnesses that the glory of God appears in the form of a cloud. God tells Moses, "I am going to come to you in a dense cloud." The Bible states that "The glory of the Lord resided on Mt. Sinai and the cloud hid it for six days,”; this is the context of the first story we heard this morning. When the cloud envelops the mountain, Moses goes up to God. Cloud is the tent, the canopy, the dwelling presence of God. Many of us remember the familiar story of God guiding the Hebrew people out of the hostile empire, Egypt, into the wilderness, to the promised land. In their exodus journey God was a pillar of cloud in the daytime and a pillar of fire in the night. Clouds of glory have long been a sacred symbol of God's presence, not terror, not secrecy, not incomprehensibility, but protection, saving the people of God from human enemies and non-human wilderness.
I’m interested in exploring more about God’s glory and how it is related to our experience of life. What transforming meaning does it have for our lives?
We often hear others say, “Glory be to God”. My first encounter with that praise was when I watched the Miss Korea national beauty contest on TV. Apparently 30 % of the Korean population self-identifies as Christian. So, it’s no surprise that many of the beauty pageant winners are Christians, and when they come up on stage with tears and pride, they say “I would like to give thanks to my family and all glory to God.” As if they had been trained, raised with the idea that Glory is success. Glory is triumph. Glory is light, purity, all that represents the brightness of life, as opposed to the dark, the shadow, insecurity, ambiguity, failure, death.
However, when we read about glory in the Bible with openness and a different reading strategy, some stories teach us that we need to see darkness differently; we need to see God and Glory and Messiah and the cross differently.
We might think of God's glory as distant, ethereal, unearthly, supernatural, as pure mystery, yet today’s transfiguration story inspires us to see that God’s glory surrounds the humans, the mountain, the place where the disciples were lost in sleep, not only in dazzling white, but also in the dark clouds.
We might think that God's glory affirms the supremacy of light against darkness. We learn that oppositional viewpoint, the binary of light and dark, very early. Perhaps in Sunday School, with the first chapter of Genesis: God calls the light “good”, so that dark, as the absence of light, must be “bad.” Early western modernity, colonization, excuses for slavery “systematically encoded ignorance, inferiority, and evil" as darkness. The "New World”, as the European narrative went, "was formed out of the darkness beyond the sea, out of subjugated, dark-skinned populations." African skin was translated through Biblical quotes as "The curse of Ham" or the "Mark of Cain.” Blackness is condemned as fault, inferiority, stain.
I wonder whether the light supremacism which has a very important place in our Christian symbolism must be a permanent one?
We are quite familiar with one theological doctrine that originated from St. Augustine: creatio ex nihilo, meaning: God's creation/God creates out of nothing. In Genesis, God says “Let there be light" and we think it means that the light displaces the darkness and puts it in its place as chaos, identifies it as evil. In this understanding the light has no relation to the dark. Light has also been used to represent male reason, and Dark, feminine confusion.
Today's transfiguration story tells us that "Then from the cloud came a voice that said, "This is my Son, my chosen; listen to him.” Interestingly, we discover that in today's story, God does not speak from the light of "dazzling white", but from within the thick, dense cloud, which is not gray, (which would not be "terrifying" darkness), but rather brilliantly and possibly, a "black incandescense." (Catherine Keller)
The story of Jesus' transfiguration does not tell us to simply be amazed by the dazzling white light that may be as bright as the light of a million fluorescent light bulbs or the focused power of the noonday Sun. This story teaches us to be amazed by the possibility of finding a new luminosity within us and within God's glory that reveals itself in both the light and the dark cloud, in the white and in the black. In Aesthetics in Blackness, Bell Hooks says, "Racism has created an aesthetic that wounds us, a way of thinking about beauty that hurts." The supremacy of whiteness, the rule of light, hurts human conceptions of justice and possibility, the full potential of our ability to appreciate God in each and every thing.
Where is the purest white? It is as abstract as it is almost non-existent and not real. The dark can never be white, and never bright enough.
The white supremacy, the light supremacy hurts.
The light is just half the story of God's Mystery. Peter fails to understand that Jesus and the followers of Jesus must take their own departure.
Peter fails to see that he needs to journey with Jesus towards the valley, Jerusalem, towards the cross, not settle on the mountain. We too must journey on in our faith, and not settle in one brightly- lit spot.
New theological reflections challenge us to decolonize our way of approaching the old, treasured symbolism of light and dark, white and black, purity and duality, look past a facile, self-serving interpretation - look into the depths of God. We are encouraged to learn our God; our God is never a God of ‘segregation.’
What is the dark? The dark is none other than that which exceeds our knowledge; our security; our arrogance; our familiarity. God’s glory gleams in dark, in flesh, in matter. The cloudy radiance can never be truly banished - it is present in our locations, our lives, it teaches us. In the end, Peter turns his head toward the cloud - the black incandescence, the black effervescence, and hears God say, “This is my Son, my chosen. Listen to him!” God speaks to us from the cloud, from the force field of all colours, all beauty, all reason, all power, all in God and God in all.
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