Transfiguration Sunday, Year A (Aug 6th) (To new priests)
Good morning my friends and siblings! Here we are again, gathered amongst the trees in this beautiful sacred space. Welcome to the new curates who are here at curate cohort for the first time. I look forward to our companionship, all the stories we can share here, and the growth we experience listening and learning from one another. None of us have walked the same path to get to this place, to our ordinations as priests in the church, this Way of Jesus Christ. Yet, here we are, like on the spokes of a wheel, we have found our way to this center point of our calling.
From the stories I’ve heard from you all, the stories we will continue to hear from each other, we’ve all experienced some kind of transformation in this process–a transfiguration of the human kind, a metanoia. Many of us were in seminary together, and now we’ll all gather together each month at Camp Allen, and through our future work together in this Diocese, we will continue to be transformed. Much like in the Gospel for this coming Sunday, Jesus’ transfiguration was not done in isolation. In that thin place where the eternal and the incarnate met, Jesus was in conversation with his ancestors while Peter, James, and John looked on in wonder.
At some point in our lives, each of us has had at least one encounter with Jesus that was beyond our comprehension, yet was, and continues to be, a metanoia within us, a part of the impetus to stay on the path to serving God in the Church. An encounter that stays with us, continues its work in us even as we go about our daily tasks. These encounters may have made their way to being shared in a Moth Story, but more likely than not, we’ve discovered that we can only carry the truth of that encounter in our hearts and souls. Trying to describe it even to our closest partners or friends felt like a devaluing of the experience, our words made it lose the mystery of the encounter we experienced. Perhaps that is why Peter, James, and John kept silent and told no one any of the things they had seen until later.
But we give words to that transformational encounter when we preach, when we pray, when we sit in silence by someone’s hospital bed, when we sing our hymns, and when we drink coffee after the service with parishioners, and with those we encounter in our neighborhoods.
The encounters with Jesus were experiences of ongoing conversion in us. Are any of us the same as we were before seminary? Was there not some kind of encounter with Christ at our ordinations, no matter how subtle or profound? Perhaps we might call what happened inside of the three onlookers at the transfiguration as a part of their on-going conversion, the shaping of Apostles whose mandate to proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ has been passed on to us through our priestly ancestors. I’ve found that conversion continues in me almost every day.
I think of Oscar Romero and the transformation, the metanoia that was working in him over the years and into his final years as archbishop. He loved to preach on the Transfiguration texts. People say he was converted during his priesthood to his true calling. He called it “a development in the process of knowledge.” The plight of the poor, the indigenous, and the oppressed was part of a conversion in his heart and soul and he explained his commitment to the work of transformation in his own ministry as “I have always wanted to follow the gospel, although I did not suspect where it was going to lead me.” I suspect it was the same for Peter, James, and John as they walked down that mountain with Jesus.
We have all said yes to following the Gospel. We have all said yes to inviting and leading others into this continual metanoia that all Christians are called. We commit ourselves to this development in pastoral fortitude as part of a lifelong process of turning toward God. We are witnesses to those moments of mystery on the mountaintops, those moments of conversion where our hearts change, our understanding grows. Romero mused in one of his last pastoral letters to his people that “Conversion is difficult and painful because the changes required are not only in ways of thinking but also in ways of living.”
We gather as a worshiping community and through the depth of meaning of our liturgy, as Alexander Schmemann would describe, “convey[ing] an understanding of ministry as the work of the ecclesial community at the service of the world.” Much like Jesus and his friends on the mountain, we come down into the everyday lives and actions of our own humanity–the Quotidian mysteries–and guide a group of people to become something corporately which they had not been as a mere collection of individuals—a whole greater than the sum of its parts. We are cooperators in Jesus Christ’s mission to give himself for the life of the world.
While most of our ministry is not on a mountaintop bearing witness to an otherworldly visual mystery, I am grateful that we are companions in the Way of Jesus and we will bear witness to the transformation as we grow into our callings as priests. Our hearts and souls will continue to be challenged as God continues this work in us when we find ourselves confronted with how to respond to the injustices in our own communities and the disparities within our churches. How will we allow a transformation in us and in our congregations when we hear of pregnant women caught in razor wire at our border and miscarry, here in our backyard in Texas. How will Jesus work in us to share the resources we have with the mission churches in our Diocese who are grappling with feeding the hungry community around them? How will we allow the Spirit to guide us in response to those in our unairconditioned prisons who are dying from excessive heat? How will we support and advocate for our LGBTQ siblings when they are being endangered by discriminatory laws? Individually, we cannot respond to each and every crisis, but much like the transformational work done in a priest in El Salvador who was quite comfortable in his position, we cannot turn away. We have to make room for the uncomfortable and sometimes painful conversion within us.
These conversions are also holy mysteries, sacred, restorative, and truly out of this world. Opening ourselves to this sacred activity within us we give honor to those encounters with Christ that led us here, we become whole, we step fully into our calling, we step into who God has known us to be all along–we continue our “yes” to God. In the discomfort of transformation we find that we are able to sow love where there is hate, union, where there is discord; faith where there is doubt; give light where there is darkness; and where there is sorrow we offer joy. We bear Christ in us. It is Jesus who makes what seems impossible, possible. We rejoice because we do not do this work alone, we are vessels of God’s work.
We have always wanted to follow the Gospel, and we do not know where it will lead us. But so far, walking down the mountain from our encounters with Christ, we find we have each other, and Jesus is walking with us.
Magdalena's Musings 