John and I have been going to a lot of movies this summer. There are some good ones out there, but also its really fun to spend a few hours in an air conditioned theater. Sometimes in seats that recline in all kinds of fancy ways. With a bucket of salty popcorn! It feels like the summer rituals of our childhoods. Or at least it feels like a return to pre-COVID rituals, which we have all missed so much.
Speaking of movies of my childhood, in one recent trip to the cinema there was a preview for a new Exorcist movie. Neither John nor I saw the 1973 original; he was a pastor’s kid in a midwestern town where it was too controversial. And I was just too young. It would have given me nightmares, my parents rightly judged. But when the preview for Exorcist Believer appeared—to be released in time for Halloween this year—I did recognized the cultural references. Snarling adolescent girls with weirdly translucent eyes, and—drum roll—the church scenes that were just all wrong. The demon-possessed girl was chanting “the body and the blood” in an obviously Protestant church. This is the kind of thing that makes your dean all cranky, and then poor John had to listen to my complaints about inaccurate church representation for the rest of the evening.
But I digress. This has nothing to do with the Transfiguration of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Or does it? The Exorcist and its cinematic spawn notwithstanding, I tend to think that there is something quite transfiguration-like about movies, especially projected on a big screen. Familiar scenes from life or books or fantasy writ large in a glowing light that gives them a kind of mythic significance. Which is certainly one way to think about the Transfiguration. It was as if the old familiar stories of Moses and Elijah were cinematically projected on a mountain; an ensemble cast of prophets whose messages came into clear focus in the presence of Jesus. Yes, Jesus: the disciples’ intimate companion from all those dusty Galilean roads. Suddenly and terrifyingly revealed as God’s chosen, through the first century equivalent of IMAX.
John and I, we didn’t climb Mount Tabor with Jesus, but we did ride our bikes to the local megaplex to see Oppenheimer last weekend. It was a superbly directed and morally complex tale of power-mad scientists and political prophets with intriguing religious reference thrown in. J Robert Oppenheimer himself chose the name for the Trinity atomic bomb test site, referencing Anglican poet John Donne’s Holy Sonnet #14: “Batter my Heart, Three-Person’d God.”
Out there in the remote New Mexico desert, almost a century ago, a small group people peered through welder’s goggles to witness a kind of inverse Transfiguration. Unlike the original disciples, who saw the God of all creation transfigured in Jesus Christ, the Los Alamos band of atomic disciples witnessed atoms—the building blocks of the universe—become the most destructive power the world had ever seen. Little wonder that Oppenheimer, watching that horrific first blast, invoked the Hindu deity Vishnu. Quoting from the Bhagavad Gita, he said: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Filmmakers and Gospel-writers, they both know that it’s all about what we allow ourselves to see. Creation, redemption, or destruction: they’re all happening all around us. At all times, and not just in Sacred Scriptures or blockbuster movies. You could walk out of Trinity Cathedral right now and see the destructive consequences of misguided social policies towards mentally ill and poor people. You could see architecture and urban design intended to make city life more welcoming and healthy. You could see the natural world, striving to reproduce life and clean air and nourishment despite the ravages of an unstable climate. You could also look through our stained glass windows and see the love and labor of generations of talented artists committed to rendering God’s beauty visible. It’s all right here for our seeing. So I wonder: when you look around, which vision do you choose to see? When you listen, which story do you hear?
I’m going to guess that, if you’re here this morning, you’re willing to see and hear as the disciples did. Hopefully even wanting to see and hear as the disciples did.
Because this particular Trinity is not the place where we tell or project stories of destruction. On the contrary, here we call each other’s attention to old stories still taking on fresh significance, and contemporary stories giving new life. Our sacred stories are themselves like the figures of Moses and Elijah and Jesus in our midst. We can choose to see and hear how glorious they are, or not.
If that’s too abstract an idea for you, let me bring the Transfiguration home. When I got here almost four years ago, our beautiful Trinity Cathedral was looking a bit seedy. It wasn’t anyone’s fault: ours is an old building that simply needs consistent TLC, and you had been without a dean for a little while. But you saw what was possible! You saw us transfigured with a rather dazzling white paint job, and organized yourselves to get it done. You saw our intimate, daylight-filled St. Mark’s Chapel where an abandoned office had been.
Within just a few weeks, there will be yet more luminous change to our historic campus. Our Parish Hall will be painted and new technology brought in. God an budget willing, there will also be upgrades to our sound systems. And—although we have run into a few installation hiccups, I want to call your attention specifically to our narthex; our soon to be transfigured threshold to the world.
Narthex is Episcopal-speak for what anyone else in the world would call a lobby or a vestibule. Literally, a space to move through on your way to somewhere else. In our case, on the way to a welcoming usher and a dazzling sanctuary. Which is beautiful, as far as it goes, but—because of our location—I had become convinced that our narthex had the capacity to reveal something more of God’s righteousness. I had been listening for quite a while to many of you speak of your sorrow about not being able to offer our suffering neighbors a better respite. And you—in both your sorrow and your hope—consistently teach me about how to hear the Spirit of God. So yes, some of our unhoused neighbors (and most of us present) come for the holy space and ancient rituals and lovely music. But some people need other things, and often rather urgently. A bottle of water, a nourishing bite to eat, a safe place to sit.
Praying about all that, I saw it! I kid you not: in my prayers I saw our narthex transfigured into not so much a pass-through as a parlor: a welcoming space where people in need could get their bearings and a bit of care before decided whether to come into the church.
And now, thanks to the generosity of the Episcopal Church Women of St. Andrew’s and the labors of several of you, we are on the verge of having that welcoming space. And as it is completed, I want you to see it with the eyes of your hearts. Just as surely as those disciples once saw Jesus and Moses and Elijah on a mountaintop. Let us see the familiar—the ancient and the ordinary of our building entrance—taking on new meaning as a demonstration of God’s abiding welcome and compassion.
I like summer blockbuster movies as much as the next person. But I wonder if the narrative drama of the Biblical Transfiguration wasn’t actually intended to describe a much simpler phenomenon. Of mythical significance, to be sure, but maybe it was just a matter of the weary disciples seeing Jesus and the Old Testament prophets as they already really were. As if the director had turned her camera on the main characters so we could recognize their significance in God’s redemptive story. So we could see them as if they were lamps shining in a dark place… until the day dawns and the morning star rises in all of our hearts. First of all we must understand this—as Peter’s letter taught us—that no prophecy is a matter of one’s own interpretation. Because no prophecy (nor project nor parish hall nor parlor in this holy place) ever came by human will, but men and women moved by the Holy Spirit, spoke from God.
