Seeing what is truly in front of us
The Sunday before Ash Wednesday is a liminal moment when we pivot from an Incarnational focus to the Crucifixion and Resurrection within the Christian calendar. This sermon explores an app about stars and planets, the story of Moses and his veiled face, and the Transfiguration of Jesus to ask “What do we really see?” This is a time that invites us to reflect on our deeper vision, as we yearn to see the fullness of God’s presence with us.
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Transcript
Give us eyes to see you, give us ears to hear you and give us courage to go where you would lead us. Amen.
So just a few thoughts this morning, as we find ourselves on this very important and intentional, pivotal day. So in the church’s calendar year, this is the last Sunday before Ash Wednesday, when we make a pivot, a very important turn in our life. Here’s why this day is so important. We have been, if you will, living with the Incarnation cycle. So all the way you can track it back, all the way beginning at Advent one back after Thanksgiving. That’s how far this goes back. This Sunday culminates, that season, that length of time, if you will. That all orbits around the birth of Christ and the person of Jesus and the birth of Christ within each of our hearts. How we make sense of that: the coming of God into the world, and during this Epiphany-tide, if you will, these past several weeks, all of our readings have invited us to look at the dynamic of how we understand the light of Christ, the light of God coming into the world. How do we notice it? How do we pay attention to it? How do we resist it? How do we participate with it? All that goes along with that. That’s where we’ve been during this period of time. Now we pivot on this day to set our eyes, if you will, on the season of Lent, which is to prepare us for Holy Week and all that comes with that, looking at the Last Supper on Palm Sunday, on Good Friday, the crucifixion, the death, the burial and the resurrection of Christ. And then from there, we live into this Easter truth and ask ourselves, what does it mean that we share in this new life of Christ?
Those two pivotal points mark so much of our life in the wider church, how God comes into the world and how God redeems the world, and how we share in both of those deep truths; how they transform the way we see ourselves, and how they transform the way that we live in the world; how that matters and how it helps us find meaning. And this Sunday is the pivot point. It’s fascinating. We always have the reading from Jesus being transfigured on the mountain on this Sunday, and we ask ourselves why we’re going to get to that in a minute. But this feast day actually occurs at another point in the year as well. On August the sixth, is the set day for the Feast of the Transfiguration, and it’s the feast day closest to my birthday, so I have adopted it as my patronal, my marker feast day, because I think that the image, the deep truth of the Transfiguration of Jesus, actually is an interpretative key that helps us understand all of the other parts of our faith. And here’s why I think that. Here’s my show and tell: Meg McPeek introduced me to an app that I have put on my phone. This app is called Sky View. Has anyone heard of this app? One of my favorites. So the Sky View app lets you see at any point in time, throughout the day, where the stars and the planets are, and you can look through it, and it even plays music.
Isn’t that lovely? I know!
So you can look through your phone when you pull it up at any time. So just by happenstance, right now, you put the circle when you look through your screen. You can’t make this up if you go straight out those doors, right out in front of the church on the other side of the planet is Jupiter. And if you look right up from Jupiter, it’s the constellation Taurus. So right outside the front of the church is Taurus with Jupiter right between his horns on the bull. This morning, Dave Westfall sat right there, and when I pointed it at Dave. Saturn was sitting on Dave’s head. It was wonderful. You couldn’t make it up. So if you turn at any point, and it even lets you, if you point at the floor, you can see the stars, and just by happenstance, right here, if you drilled a hole straight through the earth right there on the other side is the Hubble Space Telescope just on the other side. I know, just right there! So I have become completely addicted to this app. We’re just going to do this for the next 10 minutes. It’s going to be good.
But here’s what it teaches me. Here’s what it continues to teach me. Right there, right on Fabian Howard is Mars. Straight through there is Mars with the Gemini the twins. Mars is in Gemini right now. I don’t know what that means, but it sounds important. Here’s what the app has taught me. It’s one thing to go out at night time and use it, and you can walk outside in your driveway, and you can point it up at the sky, and you can see all of the things that are there that you can’t see with your naked eyes, and it will magnify that. And you can track them and move. You can turn at any point and look at the night sky. And with so much light around us, we can’t see it. It’s another thing entirely to use it during the day, because we can’t see those. We’re blinded to them. The light has blinded us, but all around us are Jupiter, are Mars. Taurus, is right out the front door. All the stars, all the planets surrounding us, but we can’t see any of them. That’s the lesson I’m learning. Is to ask ourselves, ask myself, why can’t I see what’s in front of my face sometimes? Why can’t I see it? What am I blinded by? What is obstructed my vision? As much as I love the sun, because it lets me see the trees and it lets me see the birds, and it lets us sit outside and lets us see all of that, as much as it lets me see so much beauty around me, it still blinds me. The things that I can’t see that I would like to see.
So these two texts that we have in front of us this morning prime us up to ask that about ourselves. If you look at the first text, the first story from Moses, Moses going up and encountering God, witnessing God, if you will, face to face, and then coming back. And the people don’t like it. It’s made them very uncomfortable, because they’ve had a normal way of living. They’ve seen the world. They want to see it how they’ve seen it. They have their own plans. And here comes Moses, walking in with his face glowing, and they have to come up with an arrangement where Moses puts a veil on his face when he comes in to talk to them, because it makes them feel a little bit better. They can continue going about their lives the way they have, and that disruption, if you will, of the divine glory gets dampened a little bit, and we can go back and control things and have them the way we’ve always known them. There’s a lesson in there for us.
If you look at the Gospel text, Peter, take Jesus, takes Peter, James and John with him up on the mountain top, and they have this moment where they encounter Jesus transfigured before them, gleaming white with the divine glory, His own essence radiating out of him. The trick about this story, when we read it, is that Jesus wasn’t the one who changed. Jesus had always been that way. They didn’t see it. They weren’t able to see what was in front of their face the whole time. The deeper truth of the Transfiguration is that their vision was changed and they could behold Jesus as Jesus really was. That’s the miracle of that story. And their eyes were opened, and they saw Jesus as Jesus truly was, and it changed their life, and it scared, if you will, the bejesus out of them. And they didn’t know what to do.
Now, I think. Paul in that second reading when Paul wrote his second letter to the church in Corinth, I don’t think that was called for. I don’t like how Paul laid that out and criticizes the Jews en masse and says that all of them to this day have veils on their faces and they can’t see because the truth is that’s all of us. No need to pick out just one group of people there and point your finger at. That’s all of us, because look at what happened in the story itself with Peter and James and John. They encountered Jesus as He is, and what’s the immediate next thing that they want to do? Control it. Let’s build three dwellings. Let’s construct a framework for it, a definition for it. Let’s compartmentalize it. Let’s put it in a container so we can somehow navigate our proximity to it. Makes us feel better. I know this is great, and we really appreciate it, but honestly, if we don’t have something to mediate it, it’s going to ask too much of it, or, I don’t know what it’s going to ask of us.
So this is the truth. This is a space that we find ourselves in, that the Sky View app helps me see, that these gospel, that the Gospel story and these texts help us all see, is we always have in front of us this crucial question: what do we not see that’s right in front of our faces? And why do we not see it
Is it because we cannot, because we will not? Because those are two very different things. If we cannot, there’s a whole set of practices that we can employ and engage with. The reason we don’t see it is because we will not, that’s another task.
And that’s why, friends, I think it’s so important that we look at these texts on this Sunday before we step into Lent. Because Lent is the season that invites us to do that deep inner work, to ask ourselves, how is the spirit calling us to be transformed? How is the spirit calling us to change, to see new things, to see what’s been in front of our face this whole time, but we haven’t been able to see it. We’ve been blinded to it, either by ignorance or willfulness. How are we being convicted, challenged to live with a transformed heart, so that we walk and live in the world in a different way? That’s what Lent invites us to do. It’s not to give up chocolate. Who wants to give up chocolate? I’m not giving up. It actually asks us something much, much harder, to be honest with ourselves, to ask ourselves, what is motivating us? What is the lens that we see the world through, and once we become aware of that lens, how does it need to be cleaned? How might we need a new lens entirely, and what does that look like?
So I invite you to pay attention this week for that shift, to feel it within yourself as we step into Ash Wednesday and be reminded of our own mortality, in doing so we are reminded of God’s grace that’s always with us, that holds us and opens our eyes in new ways.
Let us pray.
We give you thanks, oh God, for days like this, for moments in time when we see perhaps a new way of being in the world, a fresh way of being in the world; when we become aware of the limits of our own vision. We become aware of our ignorances, our blind spots, and also those parts of ourselves that are willful and grasp on to rigid frameworks and patterns of being that we only want to preserve because they protect our own sense of control. Give us courage to live into the vision you have for us as we prepare ourselves to step into this season of Lent, it’s through Christ we pray.
Amen.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai