A Vision to Live For

The Rev’d Dr Hugh Kempster

Second Sunday of Lent (08.03.20)

Readings: Genesis 12:1-4; Ps 33; 2 Timothy 1:8-10; Matthew 17:1-9

In her classic Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) Annie Dillard tells the story of one of the doctors who performed early cataract surgery in Europe. When the doctor removed the bandages from a girl’s eyes, she exclaimed: “I can see the tree with the lights in it.” That story became a metaphor for Dillard:

It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. 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 … doves roost charged and transfigured ... I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance ... The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it” (pp.33-34).

Dillard’s “vision to live for” is a clear echo of a vision from the Hebrew scriptures. The story of Moses at the burning bush is another tale of spiritual awakening; a vision from the thin place between heaven and earth. A displaced person, a refugee spared from infanticide, rises to great power and wealth. But then Moses’ fall from power is equally great when he awakens to the injustice of the power structures of his culture, and impulsively murders an Egyptian soldier. He flees the wrath of his adopted grandfather, the Pharaoh, and takes up the simple life of a shepherd. One day, after many years in self-imposed rural exile, he and his flock come to Horeb “the mountain of God” (Ex. 3:1).  An angel appears to him in the form of a waking vision; a bush is blazing with flames but not consumed. Then God speaks from the fire: “Moses, Moses! … Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground … I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt … I know their sufferings … I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to … a land flowing with milk and honey” (vv.4-8).

It is also at Mount Horeb, in another age, that a second great prophet receives a supernatural revelation. This too is a beautifully crafted story of divine sustenance, and ongoing call into an uncertain future, in the midst of horrific political violence and costly leadership. The prophet Elijah has been involved in a bloody power struggle with King Ahab, his wife Jezebel, and the false prophets of Baal. Elijah flees for his life, seemingly having failed his God, and in a state of deep depression walks alone out into the wilderness. There is nothing to live for. He comes to a solitary broom tree and sits under it: “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life” (1 Kings 19:4).

But aided by angels, Elijah’s trek into the wilderness to die is transfigured into a spiritual pilgrimage, and after forty days and forty nights the prophet arrives at Mount Horeb, the site of Moses’ spiritual awakening and his call into leadership. Exhausted Elijah goes to sleep in the shelter of a cave. “What are you doing here?” God asks. He, like Moses, is on sacred ground. God instructs Elijah to go and stand on the mountain “for the Lord is about to pass by.” A great rock-splitting wind arises, but terrifying as it is, the Lord is not in the wind. Then the whole mountain begins to shake, but the Lord is not in the earthquake; and then the mountain is consumed by fire, but the Lord is not is the fire. Finally, there is silence, a deep, deep silence. It is into this “sound of sheer silence” that God’s presence and word is finally revealed.

Today’s gospel story intentionally evokes these two great visionary narratives from the Hebrew scriptures. The story of the Transfiguration is, if you like, the third story, the climax to a mystic trilogy. It is, in Dillard’s words, the vision to live for.

The earliest Transfiguration text no longer exists, but its words are carefully preserved in all three of the synoptic gospels (Matthew 17:1-13; Mark 9:2-8; Luke 9:28-36). Jesus and his disciples have been proclaiming the good news, healing the sick, and miraculously feeding the great crowds that have been following them. Then the Rabbi foretells his own death and resurrection, and “six days later” he takes three of his closest companions, Peter, James, and John, “up a high mountain, by themselves” (Matt 17:1). Jesus is suddenly transfigured, his face shines like the sun, and his clothes become dazzling white. Then suddenly, the great visionary prophets Moses and Elijah appear, whose stories we know so well. They are talking with the new prophet. Our patron, Saint Peter, wants to capture the moment, there are no cameras, but perhaps he can make three dwellings, put up three tents, to concretise the moment. Then a bright cloud appears and God echoes the words from Jesus’ baptism: “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased” and then importantly adds, “listen to him” (v.5).

This mountain-top experience is both spiritual awakening and ongoing revelation for the three disciples. They truly see their Rabbi as Messiah for the first time; and as they come down the mountain and back to normality, nothing will ever be the same, their shared mystical experience has changed everything and has powerfully reaffirmed their call.

What about us, here today at St Peter’s? Do you have a “vision to live for”? A huge issue for us in the so-called developed world is that we have largely excised the mystical and the visionary from our secular society. The Biblical story, even Dillard’s story, is kept at arms length, words on a page. It is bizarre that even in church circles we are seen as crazy if we talk in personal terms about dreams and visions. Important as this anti-mystical corrective may have been for the development of science and a modern society, the baby has undoubtedly been thrown out with the bathwater. Psychologist William James, in his The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902; 1982) argues convincingly that (p.428):

Mystical states indeed wield no authority due to them being mystical states. But the higher ones among them point in directions to which the religious sentiments even of non-mystical [people] incline. They tell of the supremacy of the ideal, of vastness, of union, of safety, and of rest. They offer us hypotheses, hypotheses which we may voluntarily ignore, but which as thinkers we cannot possibly upset. The supernaturalism and optimism to which they would persuade us may, interpreted in one way or another, be after all the truest of insights into the meaning of this life.

What drives you as a Christian? What drives us as a Church? In Lent we are encouraged to pay particular attention to our inner lives. That is why the purple Lenten cloth veils all images in our church, other than the Stations of the Cross. That is why we fast, that is why we take on Lenten disciplines; so that we might better pray, better listen to one another and to God. And perhaps, we might even catch a glimpse of that “vision to live for.” That vision that changes lives, that opens our hearts and minds to the gospel, to social justice; that vision to care for creation, to care for the downtrodden and marginalised, for prisoners, for the sick; that ancient vision of Transfiguration.

The Lord be with you.