Sunday Musings

Transfigured by speaking and silence

Today is the final Sunday after Epiphany. Epiphany is the sacred season in which God’s light is revealed in the world, when glory is made manifest. The spiritual flow of these winter seasons are awaiting light in the darkness (Advent); light overcoming darkness (Christmas); and following the light to its glorious source (Epiphany). The story moves from flickering candlelight, to the light of the cradle, to seekers welcomed into the widening circle of light.

And now the mood of the lectionary is changing. Mists are gathering. We’re moving toward Lent.

The tradition on this Sunday of Epiphany is to remember the Transfiguration, a pivotal occasion in Jesus’ life that St. Thomas Aquinas deemed to be the greatest of all of his miracles.

But what was the real miracle?

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Psalm 50:1-6

The Lord, the God of gods, has spoken;
he has called the earth from the rising of the sun to its setting.

Out of Zion, perfect in its beauty,
God reveals himself in glory.

Our God will come and will not keep silence;
before him there is a consuming flame,
and round about him a raging storm.

He calls the heavens and the earth from above
to witness the judgment of his people.

"Gather before me my loyal followers,
those who have made a covenant with me
and sealed it with sacrifice."

Let the heavens declare the rightness of his cause;
for God himself is judge.

Mark 9:2-9

Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.

As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.

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A few years ago, I met a twenty-something woman who was clearly nervous about being introduced. When our mutual acquaintance underscored that I write about Christianity, she said to me, “I hate religion.”

She was serious. It was a challenge. “Many people I know share that opinion,” I said sympathetically. “Some days I share that opinion!”

“I want you to know that I don’t want to talk about it or hear about it,” she said, staking out the conversational territory as if she was the Martin Luther of atheism: Here I stand.

“I always say exactly what I’m thinking,” she said. “I don’t hold back. I’m blunt. And you won’t like what I have to say. That doesn’t matter to me. I speak my mind.”

It was hard to know how to reply. Instead of arguing, I asked her to tell me why she hated religion. She shared painful recollections of growing up in fundamentalism.

Her story didn’t entirely surprise me. Mostly, the exchange reminded me of decades earlier when I was in a somewhat similar conversation. I informed a person who held considerable power over my career exactly what I thought about a particular subject. He told me that I was opinionated and spoke my mind too freely. He wasn’t offering friendly advice as a helpful mentor. He was trying to control and silence me.

I didn’t take it well and became more defensive and even combative.

I don’t remember exactly what I said, but his criticism eventually led to me becoming an opinion columnist! I fought back with words. Because words are powerful. Speaking is powerful.

Today’s readings call attention to the power of speaking — and speech as a divine attribute.

Scripture itself opens with the speaking God: God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. . . . And God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters”. . . .And God said. . . .and God blessed them, and God said to them. . . . And God said. The Psalm harkens back to this creative power:

The Lord, the God of gods, has spoken;
he has called the earth from the rising of the sun to its setting. . .
Our God will come and will not keep silence. . .
He calls the heavens and the earth from above. . . .

And the Transfiguration itself is a miracle of speaking. Moses and Elijah appear with Jesus, a vision that both stuns and confuses the disciples. A cloud envelops them, and through the mists, the meaning becomes clear: Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!”

Without the words, the vision makes little sense. When named for what it is — a proclamation of the Beloved One — the disciples are caught up into the divine presence, the mystery behind the veil of fog.

Speaking is a kind of transfiguration. From creation through the New Testament, words transform worlds. Our God will come and will not keep silence — bestowing blessing and belovedness.

Speaking is a reflection of that sacred attribute in us; it is an aspect of the image of God in humankind. We, too, can bless and announce. We name the world around us, gifting even the animals with the beauty of our words. We confront Pharaoh or Caesar. We tell of God’s faithfulness from generation to generation. We declare peace. We recite poetry and stories. We proclaim Good News. We pronounce mercy, forgiveness, and love. We share thanks.

But we often get it wrong. For, like other aspects of God’s image, our speech can be distorted. We view things in a mirror cracked by sin. What we see might be jagged and deformed. We don’t quite understand. On the mountain, Peter saw something amazing but misconstrued its meaning. He jumped too quickly into speaking of the vision: Let’s build a temple! Let’s tell the world! He saw, but he lacked the experience and insight to truly understand. And he was afraid. No one sees clearly when they are scared.

Like Peter, we might speak up too quickly or from fear. As we all know, speaking up comes with pitfalls. We use the wrong words. We make gaffes and mistakes. We might gossip, exaggerate, fib, or lie. We use words to threaten. And sadly, we insult, demean, and bully. We might yell or become verbally violent. And the pitfalls of personal speech extend to communities or institutions. A powerful group might silence its critics, taking away an individual’s ability to speak truth or address injustice.

Speech can injure as well as bless. As it says in Proverbs, “Death and life are in the power of the tongue.” Our words might distort with refracted light or more clearly reflect the image of God we bear. Sometimes, we speak from the ambiguous space between beatitude and sword, often seeking to explain or justify our own lack of understanding by projecting our hurt on others with words.

An editor of one of my early books gave me some of the best advice I’ve ever received — as both a writer and a human being. “Don't write about a meaningful experience,” she warned. “Until it is well past.”

“How long?,” I asked.

“Five years is a good benchmark,” she replied.

You can’t always follow that guideline when you write about the news! Contemporary publishing favors immediate conclusions, quick takes, and doing one’s therapy in public. I confess I have given in to all these journalistic and literary temptations.

But she was fundamentally correct. All the worst mistakes I’ve made as a teacher, preacher, or writer have come from speaking too soon and without sustained reflection on the meaning of what I have witnessed or experienced. I spoke without understanding.

And that’s why these texts about the power of speaking are twinned with directives of silence.

Knowing when to speak and when not to speak takes practice; it is a spiritual skill learned over time. And each of us must discover it for ourselves. To be told to speak up or to be forced into silence are wrong and hurtful. Jesus didn’t tell his friends to shut up to maintain his control of or power over them. He prompted them into a practice of listening — of quiet reflection — that they might better understand.

The miracle isn’t Jesus’ angelic appearance. It isn’t being joined by Moses and Elijah. The real Transfiguration takes place when they couldn’t see — when everything was obscured by the cloud. It happened between speech and silence, in the mists of uncertainty: “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” and “he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen.”

Without the words and the following silence, this would be just another miraculous tale resulting in a grifting religion. Magic and a temple. Spiritual tourists trekking up a mountain to pay homage to something they don’t understand.

But speech and silence — the right kind of speech and the right kind of silence at the right time — can transfigure the world.

And us.

It is countercultural; this is the beginning of wisdom. It takes time to learn. It grows with practice.

Watch. Listen. Wait. The miracle isn’t always what it seems at first.

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Yes, I know; keep silent…
Yes, I know; be silent.

— 2 Kings 2:3b, 5b

There will be no audio version of this Sunday’s post. I have a week off from preaching!

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INSPIRATION

So from the ground we felt that virtue branch
Through all our veins till we were whole, our wrists
As fresh and pure as water from a well,
Our hands made new to handle holy things,
The source of all our seeing rinsed and cleansed
Till earth and light and water entering there
Gave back to us the clear unfallen world.
We would have thrown our clothes away for lightness,
But that even they, though sour and travel stained,
Seemed, like our flesh, made of immortal substance,
And the soiled flax and wool lay light upon us
Like friendly wonders, flower and flock entwined
As in a morning field. Was it a vision?
Or did we see that day the unseeable
One glory of the everlasting world
Perpetually at work, though never seen
Since Eden locked the gate that’s everywhere
And nowhere? Was the change in us alone,
And the enormous earth still left forlorn,
An exile or a prisoner? Yet the world
We saw that day made this unreal, for all
Was in its place. The painted animals
Assembled there in gentle congregations,
Or sought apart their leafy oratories,
Or walked in peace, the wild and tame together,
As if, also for them, the day had come.
The shepherds’ hovels shone, for underneath
The soot we saw the stone clean at the heart
As on the starting-day. The refuse heaps
Were grained with that fine dust that made the world;
For he had said, ‘To the pure all things are pure.’
And when we went into the town, he with us,
The lurkers under doorways, murderers,
With rags tied round their feet for silence, came
Out of themselves to us and were with us,
And those who hide within the labyrinth
Of their own loneliness and greatness came,
And those entangled in their own devices,
The silent and the garrulous liars, all
Stepped out of their dungeons and were free.
Reality or vision, this we have seen.
If it had lasted but another moment
It might have held for ever! But the world
Rolled back into its place, and we are here,
And all that radiant kingdom lies forlorn,
As if it had never stirred; no human voice
Is heard among its meadows, but it speaks
To itself alone, alone it flowers and shines
And blossoms for itself while time runs on.

But he will come again, it’s said, though not
Unwanted and unsummoned; for all things,
Beasts of the field, and woods, and rocks, and seas,
And all mankind from end to end of the earth
Will call him with one voice. In our own time,
Some say, or at a time when time is ripe.
Then he will come, Christ the uncrucified,
Christ the discrucified, his death undone,
His agony unmade, his cross dismantled—
Glad to be so—and the tormented wood
Will cure its hurt and grow into a tree
In a green springing corner of young Eden,
And Judas damned take his long journey backward
From darkness into light and be a child
Beside his mother’s knee, and the betrayal
Be quite undone and never more be done.
— Edwin Muir, “The Transfiguration”

Phrases of men who lectured her
drift and rustle in piles:
Why don't you speak up?
Why are you shouting?
You have the wrong answer,
wrong line, wrong face.
They tell her she is womb-man,
babymachine, mirror image, toy,
earth mother and penis-poor,
a dish of synthetic strawberry icecream
She grunts to a halt.
She must learn again to speak
starting with I
starting with We
starting as the infant does
with her own true hunger
and pleasure 
and rage.
— Marge Piercy, from “Unlearning to Not Speak”

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📣 NEWS & COMMUNITY OPPORTUNITIES

LENTEN REFLECTION SERIES: Crossings

Lent begins THIS WEEK: Ash Wednesday, February 14.

The culmination of Lent is Good Friday, with Jesus’ death on a cross. The cross is the central symbol of Christian faith, a universal sign of life in Christ. Christians wear crosses, sing about the cross, reflect on the cross, and have ritual practices at the cross.

Yet many also struggle with the cross, especially with its complicity in religious violence and a theology that seems to exalt in suffering and pain. Honestly, I’ve struggled with it over the years, often wondering if I could ever voice my reservations.

A few years ago, a church asked me to preach every day for an entire week in their Lenten series based on the theme: “It’s not about us. It’s about the Cross.”

And so, I embarked on a five-sermon exploration of the cross. Much to my surprise, I gave the cross back to myself as I struggled with the theme!

I’ve always wanted to publish those sermons — but publishers don’t want books of sermons any longer. They’ve just been filed away on my computer. This Lent, I’m publishing them here. At the Cottage. The sermons have been reworked, updated, and turned into longer meditations.

During Lent, I’ll share my cross sermons each Wednesday in a series called “Crossings.” Each sermon presents a different image of the cross — the five pieces create a kind of spiritual prism to see the cross from a variety of theological angles.

I think you’ll have your vision widened.

This year, Lent won’t be a daily series (like Advent). Rather the schedule will be simplified, giving us time to read, pray, and sink into the material. The tentative schedule is:

Monday - a poem and visual to start the week
Wednesday - the sermon/meditation
Friday - five friends will present video meditations on the image from the sermon

There will be additional opportunities for conversation — and other special guests — as well.

At the end of the series, the five mediations (and some supplemental material) will be compiled into a booklet — Crossings — for you to download and re-read.

THE LENT SERIES IS FOR PAID SUBSCRIBERS. That isn’t meant to be exclusive, but provides a more intimate community for discussion and sharing. Please sign up to join in if you aren’t already a paid subscriber. There are monthly and yearly plans available.

Or, give a gift of The Cottage to a friend.

If you’d like to participate but can’t afford a subscription, just write to us at this email. No one is ever turned away for lack of funds.

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ONLINE EVENT

On Monday, February 12 at 7:00 PM eastern, you can attend an online event offered by Lumunos, “The Changing Spiritual Landscape: An Evening with Diana Butler Bass.”

I’ll be sharing a brand new talk — “The Three Paradoxical Trends Shaping American Religion Right Now.”

You can still register!

This event is NOT produced by the Cottage.

It is offered by Lumunos, an independent organization, that strives toward the integration of vocation, spirituality, and wellness. The evening involves a separate admission fee (three available levels) to support their work. Click HERE for information and registration.

➡️ ALL QUESTIONS regarding tickets, sign-up, rebroadcast, or technology should be directed to Lumunos. ⬅️

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PREACHING AT DUKE UNIVERSITY CHAPEL

On Sunday, February 18, I’m preaching in Duke Chapel as part of the university’s Duke 100: Centennial celebration. Everyone is invited! All the information is HERE.

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The new heavens and the new earth are not replacements for the old ones;
they are transfigurations of them.
The redeemed order is not the created order forsaken;
it is the created order — all of it — raised and glorified.

― Robert Farrar Capon