Archive for August, 2006

Today’s Sermon

Sunday, August 6th, 2006

I gave another sermon at St. John’s Larcom Street this morning. Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration, so I talked about change. We had lunch for about 15 afterwards (buffet): one of the many reasons I love preaching at St. John’s is the lunch afterwards.

Here it is, for those of you who like this kind of thing.

August 6, 2006 Feast of the Transfiguration
Sermon delivered at St. John the Evangelist, 10 am.
Readings: Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14; II Peter 1:16-19; Mark 9:2-10

In the name of God, the one, the Undivided Trinity. AMEN.

A woman was talking to her Vicar about the transformation that religion had brought about in her life. She declared, “I’m so glad I got religion. I have an uncle I used to hate so much I vowed I’d never go to his funeral. But now, why, I’d be happy to go to his funeral any time.”

The Greek word that we translate as “transfiguration” in the Gospel is “metamorphosis”-a perfectly sound English word. Caterpillars go through metamorphosis to become butterflies-did you ever wonder how they do it? I looked it up. The caterpillar sheds its skin and becomes a chrysalis, and then busily disassociates its cells each from the other. It digests the cells it won’t be needing as a butterfly, and uses the nutrients to build up its new body. A few days or weeks later, it emerges with a new, more glorious body.

This change is fundamental in the life of the insect. Without this change, the insect cannot reproduce, and were it not to happen, the species would die out. I can’t imagine that it’s very pleasant: having much of one’s body dissolved and digested doesn’t sound very good to me. But for the butterfly, it’s crucial. The caterpillar must effectively die in order to be transformed into the butterfly that will mate, lay eggs, and produce young caterpillars again.

Change in our own lives can seem as traumatic as metamorphosis must seem to a caterpillar. We have recently seen on our TV screens the upheavals that have taken place in the Middle East-wholesale change from a relatively prosperous place to one that is unsafe for civilians to live in.

But change can also be exciting and stimulating as well. Many of you will remember when the tired old government lost the election of 1997, and a brand-new energetic government emerged. How exciting that day was! We all thought it was going to be a new beginning, and a change that would make our lives better.

So when Peter, James, and John accompanied Jesus up the mountain and saw him transfigured before their eyes, it must have been exciting and scary as well. It is interesting that the only transfiguration the Gospel tells us about specifically is that which affects Jesus’s clothing. The Gospel doesn’t tell us whether Jesus himself changed into something different, although we assume he did.

So what is the reaction of Peter to all this. Instead of falling to the ground and worshipping Jesus, or shading his eyes from the dazzling light, or recording what Moses and Elijah were saying to Jesus (were they discussing the weather up on the mountain, perhaps: Moses might have compared it to the top of Sinai), Peter assumed that Elijah, Moses, and Jesus would be up there for a while. The festival of Booths comes just after the Day of Atonement, in mid-autumn. It’s a harvest festival, and a booth is constructed for each Jewish family with a roof of branches; they eat their meals there and in some cases sleep and study there as well. At the meals, it’s customary to invite symbolic guests to the table, such as Moses. These are given a special chair and celebrated by the guests. Perhaps Peter was mindful of this custom and assumed that Jesus had invited his symbolic guests to the festal table, thus he felt it was important to build the booths under which they would be living for seven days.

Once Peter spoke, the spell was broken and the voice from the cloud tells them who Jesus is and commands them to listen to him. Moses and Elijah disappear, and Jesus loses the dazzling white colour of his clothing and reverts to his look from before.

So the change was not permanent, but temporary. Change is even more unsettling when more change is seen to be around the corner. The question for us all is: how do we cope with change?

One way of coping with change is to try to avoid it. People often try to stave off change as long as possible. They resist it. People often sit in the same places in church every week, and feel slight resentment if a visitor is sitting in “their” seat. They get even more agitated if a fellow parishioner has sat in “their” seat, and may ask them to move. Church furnishings that are moved around or that disappear create havoc in the parish: why is that lectern over to the right; it has always been on the left! How many sextons does it take to change a lightbulb? Two: one to change the lightbulb and the other to say how much better the old lightbulb was.

We can get set in our religious ways just as easily. When change occurs, in our lives or the lives of others, do we pray for the status quo to return? Do we pray for the strength to endure the time of change? Or do we pray for the strength of mind to welcome the changes, and almost joyfully integrate them into our lives?

I suppose that a caterpillar about to become a butterfly sees that radical change as natural, and something to be welcomed. Not only is he going to be freed from the bonds that have tied him to earth, but he is going to be able to fly from plant to plant, drinking nectar and looking for a mate to perpetuate his species. How would we react to such a radical change in our lives?

Not all change is good, unfortunately; our lives may be changed by disease, unemployment, or death. Those kinds of changes need to be endured, not normally welcomed. And yet, these changes can bring out sparks of the divine in people; who has not heard of persons enduring a debilitating illness with great dignity and strength of character? A story in the newspaper this week told of a couple who were blind from an early age but in spite of that raised a large and healthy family. Blindness is a change not to be welcomed; however, the changes that blindness brings to a person may coax hidden reservoirs of strength from the person who is so afflicted.

Most of us are familiar with Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer, but only with the first three lines:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

Most people aren’t aware that it goes on like this:

Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him forever in the next.

Change is indeed scary, but at the end of this life, a change we cannot avoid will come; the whole of our life is preparation for that change, and we trust that, like the caterpillar, we will be changed for the better, forever.

Amen.

Today’s Disciplinary URL

Tuesday, August 1st, 2006

…in which Rowan Atkinson shows why the English public school system is so loathed.

Windows Vista has recognition difficulties…

Tuesday, August 1st, 2006

…in this video. I have the beta but haven’t installed it yet because it wants me to uninstall (not just turn off, uninstall) my anti-virus software. Do I trust Uncle Bill to protect my machine while the anti-virus is uninstalled? The hell I do!