The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
February 3, 2008

Last Sunday after the Epiphany - Year A
Exodus 24:12, 15-18
Philippians 3:7-14
Matthew 17:1-9

The New York Times used to claim that “Sundays were made for The New York Times.” I don’t know if it still believes that, because these days television insists that Sundays were made for sports, especially football.

What we’ve forgotten in our 24/7 world is that Sundays were made for a Christian shabbat, for a sabbath, for a day to be kept holy with prayer and study for the purpose of remembering who we are and where we came from and where we are headed.

Some of you know that I believe that of the Ten Commandments the most important is the fourth, God’s word to us to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. I believe it is the most important because if we do not stop to remember that we were once slaves in Egypt and that it was the Lord who brought us out of there with a mighty hand, then we will not remember to keep the other nine as well and will forget the most important question of our lives – What is the purpose of life? – and will surely end up back in slavery.

What is the purpose of your life? Do you know if your life has a purpose? I mean a real purpose, a purpose with guts, a purpose beyond the next game of bridge or the next movie, a purpose beyond the next paycheck. What’s the purpose of your life ultimately, once the kids are gone and the house is paid for and you’ve played your last round of golf and taken your last trip and, indeed, your last breath?

Or is that it? Is life, as someone once said, just one damned thing after another, just one job after another, just one football game after another, until it’s all over, so much ado about nothing?

Do we know who we are and why we are? That’s what the Sabbath, a day for stopping (which is what the word “sabbath” means), is for – to remember who we are and why we are so that we remember whose we are. Not to remember these things, Abraham Joshua Heschel reminds us, is the one unforgivable sin.

Several years ago, the World Almanac polled 2,000 American 14-year-olds to learn which people they most admired, which people they wanted to be like when they grew up. The leading role model at the time turned out to be Burt Reynolds, followed by Richard Pryor, Alan Alda, Steve Martin, and Robert Redford.

This list is dated now, of course. A similar poll today would yield different luminaries. But I wonder if it would be different in any substantial way, or if it would just be a list of more contemporary celebrities. Because the really significant thing about the results of the survey was that there wasn’t one single person on the young people’s list who was not an entertainer or sports figure! No statesman, no scientist, no author, no painter or musician, no architect or doctor, no pastor or lawyer or explorer. Now that, friends, is a catastrophe our 24/7 lives only reinforce and beside which 9-11 pales in significance!

I suppose it should come as no surprise that neither Moses nor Jesus made the list either. The purpose of life to 2,000 American 14-year-olds that year was to be like Burt Reynolds.

The reason for the Sabbath, the reason for a weekly halt to 24/7, is to remember that there is more to life than business as usual. So week after week we come here to church to hear our story again. We hear it in the Eucharistic Prayer – how in the beginning God created the world, and how God created us, how he created us for himself in order that we and God might know and love each other, because that is who and why we are.

And we are reminded of how, in the past, we forgot that truth. We are reminded of how we forgot who and why we are, and of how we walked in our own ways and became lost. And we hear, once again, how God did not abandon us when we forgot and became lost, but how he sent his servants, the prophets, to call us back to Him. And week after week we are reminded of how we didn’t hear, and how, finally, God’s love for us was so strong that he sent his own Son to show us God’s purpose in his own life, so that, through him, we might be found and brought back to God, brought back to our true purpose, redeemed. So that we might be brought back to the purpose of a life lived in God’s purpose.

Jesus did the same thing for us. When Jesus was asked what is the most important law, he reminded us of our story. “Remember,” he said. “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. This is the first and greatest teaching. Do you remember? And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the law and the prophets hang on these two teachings.” This is the purpose of our lives, Jesus reminds us, which is what the whole of our story is about, and which is what every 14-year-old should know. Indeed, it’s what every four-year-old should know. But how can they know unless we teach them?

Rabbi Stanley Wagner says that to love the Lord your God with all your strength means to love God regardless of circumstance, to love God regardless of what life metes out to you. And the second commandment is like it: to love your neighbor, regardless of circumstance.

Week after week we come to the Eucharist to be reminded of this. That’s the purpose of the Eucharist – to remind us of our purpose, to remind us that beyond every car payment and every bridge game and every football game, and even beyond our last breath, there is God, the source of our lives and both the subject and the object of our love. We belong to God. The purpose of our lives is to live God’s purpose.

Maybe some people don’t need to be reminded, but I do. And I suspect that most of you do, too. I suspect that that’s why Jesus has brought you and me here this morning, just as he once took Peter and James and John up the mountain of Transfiguration. And I suspect that that’s why the Transfiguration is always our Gospel reading on this Last Sunday after the Epiphany, on the threshold of Lent, the threshold of real life, because, like Jesus’ disciples, we need once again a vision of who God is and who Jesus is and what life is all about.

Now visions are powerful realities. Sometimes people see things they don’t see with their eyes. Visions are the result of imagination, the result of an openness to realities not readily available to the five senses, realities that may even contradict or point beyond what is visible to those focused on 24/7 life.

Here’s an example. A little over three hundred years ago, in 1687, Isaac Newton published his great work Principia Mathematica. It is, I’m told, arguably the most important work ever published in the physical sciences. It revolutionized our understanding of the universe. It demonstrated that the movements of the heavenly bodies are governed by something we cannot see with our eyes, by a force Newton called universal gravitation.

The popular story we all heard in school was that Newton was sitting in his mother’s back yard one day when he saw an apple fall from a tree. Whether it was an apple, and whether it was his mother’s back yard, or whether it’s just a legend like George Washington’s cherry tree, I’ll leave to the history folks to argue about. What interests me is Newton’s vision, what Newton saw that day.

When most of us see an apple fall from a tree we see a bruised apple, and we either pick it up and eat it or we leave it there for the birds and the squirrels. When Newton saw the apple fall from the tree he saw something else as well, something he had never seen before and, as far as we know, something no one else had ever seen before.

When I told this story in a sermon in my parish in Wisconsin, I asked if anyone knew what it was that Newton discovered that afternoon in his mother's back yard. ”It was the differential and integral calculus,” responded Jim Hyde for all the church to hear. Jim, a physicist, told me at the coffee hour afterwards that never before in his life had he been moved to speak up in church, but he wanted to be sure I got Newton’s story right!

Of course! Of course it wasn’t gravity as such that Newton discovered, because several people before Newton had speculated that there must be some kind of force that pulls objects to the earth from the tops of trees and buildings, some kind of gravity. What Newton saw that day that was new, the vision he had when he stopped his 24/7 life long enough to let it happen to him, was that the force that reaches up to the top of a tree to pull an apple to the ground is a force that also reaches out beyond the earth and its atmosphere endlessly into space. Newton looked beyond the top of the tree and saw a force that reaches to the moon, and beyond, to govern the movements of all heavenly bodies.

And then Newton developed the calculus to prove it, and our later experience, including our travel to the moon and the planets, has confirmed that what Newton saw that day is true, a reality which few others at the time either saw or expected.

Now the point of all this is that something like that also happened to Peter and James and John that day when they took that sabbath time-out on a mountain with Jesus. After a week on the road Jesus called a halt to 24/7 and led Peter and James and John up the mountain. And there, on the mountain, the disciples had a vision of a truth they had been struggling with and had only feebly been able to grasp down on the road of ordinary life. “Jesus was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light. And just then they saw Moses and Elijah talking with Jesus,” and a voice spoke to them from the cloud and said, ”This is my Son, my beloved, with whom I am pleased. Listen to him.” And the disciples fell to the ground, terrified.

What Peter and James and John saw on the mountain was that the glory of God that pulls all things toward God himself pulls all things toward Jesus as well, and in a way they had not known before, and contrary to all expectation and reason and with a kind of inner certainty they had not experienced before, they knew that Jesus was Messiah.

Oh, Peter had confessed as much earlier, but so much about Jesus perplexed him. Jesus perplexed Peter because Jesus was so comfortable with sinners, which Peter didn’t expect Messiah to be. And Jesus spoke so much about the blessedness of the poor and of those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, and he talked so often about how, if one wanted to save his life he must lose it, and about how he himself would suffer and be killed and then be raised on the third day, and about how if anyone would be his disciple, well, then he’d just have to take up his own cross and follow Jesus back down the mountain to all that poverty and suffering.

But when on the mountain Peter and James and John witnessed the presence of Moses and Elijah with the transfigured Jesus, they know for a certainty who Jesus was. Still, Peter said, “But, Lord, I’m still confused by all your talk about suffering and dying. This is a great moment here on the mountain top. Why all this talk about suffering and dying? Why can’t we just stay here and enjoy this? I’ll build three shelters, one for you, and one for Moses, and one for Elijah. There’s no need to go anywhere else.”

And then, when the disciples looked again, they had to rub their eyes, because they saw no one there – no Moses, no Elijah, no transfigured Jesus, only the ordinary Jesus sitting under a plain old apple tree and staring off into the distance. And Jesus said, ”No, Peter, we can’t stay here. There’s one more mountain to climb, a mountain near Jerusalem. Don’t be afraid. It’s time to go.” And the disciples wondered about what they had seen and heard that day, now that it had all disappeared. But Jesus told them that there was a way to confirm it, and that was to do the spiritual calculus for themselves and to set their vision in the same direction Jesus was setting his, and then to follow him down the mountain to Jerusalem and the Cross.

Well, that was Peter and James and John. But what about you and me?

The New York Times says that people get up on Sundays to read its reports about everything that’s important in the world, “all the news that's fit to print” and all that. News like the latest promises from this year’s political candidates, which sometimes differ from yesterday’s promises. News like the latest quotes from Wall Street and the latest results from the worlds of sport and war and terror and murder and mayhem.

But I suspect you’re here this sabbath morning because you’re tired of using Sundays for The New York Times and its dreary news. I suspect that you are here this morning, rather than at home reading The New York Times or The Gazette or The Denver Post, because you are hoping for a larger vision of life, a vision of the world and a meaning that is larger than the Sunday papers offer.

Sundays were made for things bigger than The New York Times. Sundays were made for holiness, for a sharpening of our vision of God and for experiences of the mystery and meaning of life. I suspect that you are here this morning for the same reason Peter and James and John went up the mountain with Jesus, because you hope there is more to life than The New York Times can see.

You have followed Jesus here today, just as Peter and James and John followed him up the mountain that day, for a sabbatical, for some kind of confirmation of your hope. And sometimes you receive the confirmation you seek, briefly. Your vision of Jesus is brightened and enlarged, and a voice tells you, “This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him.”

And then, like the disciples, when you look again, you see just the same old mountain, the same old church and the same people, and they don’t look any holier to you this week than they looked last week.

But once again you’ve sat for a time with Jesus under the tree on the top of the mountain. And once again you’ve seen him stare off into the distance, toward Jerusalem. And again this morning you’ve heard him say that there is more to life than the business-as-usual world of the polls and the press, more even than the goddesses of success and fun and entertainment can offer. There are the hungry to feed and the lonely to comfort and sinners to love, and there are shirts to give away when your coat is all that’s asked of you, and there are strangers for you to welcome and get to know and enjoy, and there’s your life to lose if you want to gain it, and there’s the road back down the mountain to Jerusalem and the Cross. And you scratch your head and wonder, ”Is he for real? Is Jesus Messiah? Does he see something I don’t see?”

And Jesus gets up and walks out the door, back down the mountain, back out into the world, to continue on toward Jerusalem in order to climb the other mountain of Calvary. There he will suffer and be crucified and then raised on the third day, as he promised. And, like Peter and James and John, the only way you have to confirm the hope that is in you is to do the spiritual calculus for yourself, and then to get up and follow him, day by day and sabbath by sabbath, all the way through Lent and Holy Week to Easter.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.