Homily: The Transfiguration [August 6, 2017] Trinity, Santa Barbara

 

Every winter I lead a retreat at our diocesan camp, Camp Stevens, in the mountains outside of Julian, California. Loving those hills as I do, I have never been big on “mountaintop experiences”. They rarely seem to last. The Rocky Mountain High we get on the hilltop often disappears once we near the ground   I don’t really trust the mountaintop experience. Give me the epiphanies on offer at sea level.

I routinely distrusted mountaintop experiences until a couple of weeks ago, when I unexpectedly had the opportunity to spend a Saturday riding up one with two friends from high school. These two guys—Owen and Phil--were in town for the wedding of another classmate’s daughter, and they called me up out of the blue to see if I wanted to go bike riding in Griffith Park with them. Though I usually see them both at our every-ten-year reunions (the next, the fiftieth, comes this October) I hadn’t known them all that well in high school. But I always liked them both a lot, and I’m still spry enough to pedal 50 miles or so, so I said, “Sure, why not?”

We met for breakfast at a coffee shop in Burbank (where we all grew up) and then made our way over to the park. Phil, the buffest of the bunch, suggested we ride the steep back road past Travel Town and the water tower up to the Griffith Park Observatory. Owen and I agreed. As we began our ride, we started talking about our own home lives in high school and the home lives of some of our friends. I was not prepared for what I learned.

We began by sharing some of the family traumas we had ourselves experienced in high school. Even though none of us grew up in Dick and Jane, Ozzie and Harriet households, the three of us came through routine family dysfunctions pretty well. All six of our parents were a bit crazy, but they loved us as best they could.

Then we began talking about our other classmates, people we each knew and admired. I was shocked by what I did not know about them. One boy had been routinely beaten by his father every other day or so. One girl had been serially molested by her father. A girl we all knew turned out to have been living in an almost Dickensian style of poverty. As we named and discussed these friends and others, we began to see that we had all gone through high school without knowing very much about each other at all.

Because all adolescents are perpetually self-involved, it appears that during our high school years we had come to school each day so obsessed with ourselves that we had not really seen each other. The more we pedaled up the hill, the more we began to realize the enormity of the unseen burdens that our friends had carried with them to school each day. As we pulled up finally to the observatory to take selfies by the bronze bust of James Dean, I saw myself and my classmates in a new and surprising way. Not only had I not known them. I hadn’t even known myself very well. I wasn’t as empathetic and compassionate as I had thought myself. The kids I had known and sometimes envied had been struggling with challenges that made mine seem small by comparison.

Today we celebrate the Transfiguration of Jesus. In Luke’s account of this event, Peter, James, and John suddenly see Jesus in a new and surprising light. Their understanding of him, like my understanding of my high school classmates, is changed in an instant. As I think about this story in the light of my own recent mountain experience, two ideas emerge. One of them concerns Jesus’s companions, the other Jesus himself.

What actually happens in the Transfiguration story? Luke tells us that, as Jesus was praying, “the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white”. When I was younger I often had a difficult time with this gospel because it seemed at best supernatural, at worst like a bad laundry detergent commercial. But over the years I have come to see—especially with the help of some conversation with colleagues—that the miracle occurs not so much to Jesus as to his companions. If we read this story with some care, it becomes clear that it is not Jesus who changes; it is his companions’ perception of Jesus that changes.

People followed Jesus for various and sometimes contradictory reasons. Some saw him as a healer, others as a teacher. Some saw him as a nationalist revolutionary who would kick the occupying Romans out of Israel. Some regarded Jesus as a teacher, others as a mere magician. No doubt Peter, James, and John brought various perceptions of Jesus and his mission up the mountain with them that day. What happened in that moment was indeed a transfiguration, but it was a transfiguration of their perception. They suddenly saw—and the presence of the Old Testament heroes Moses and Elijah helped in this—that Jesus was up to bigger things than personal wellness and regime change. They saw that Jesus’s life and ministry were about a cosmic process of redemption, renewal, and hope. Their understanding of Jesus had been too narrow. This mountaintop experience opened their eyes to see Jesus in a new and transfigured way. The one they traveled with was more than a teacher, healer, or revolutionary. He was one whose life and ministry would begin a new age of universal justice, liberation, and peace.

So the first idea asks that we reconsider and perhaps expand our own conception of what Jesus is up to. If that first idea says something about who Jesus is, the second invites us to contemplate both his destiny and ours.

In the second part of the Transfiguration story, a cloud comes and overshadows them. They all enter the cloud, and a voice comes from within it and says, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” As when we read a poem or a story, so when we read the Bible we have to ask ourselves some basic questions. What is this cloud doing here, anyway? What is it supposed to represent?

There are a number of possible answers, but to me the most obvious one is that the cloud has something to do with God. The divine voice issues out of that cloud. Jesus and his companions are drawn into it. Everyone is gathered into this cloudy divine presence. And then we hear God’s voice endorsing Jesus and his purpose.

The story’s first idea helps us see Jesus in a new light. The second idea suggests how he and God and we are all connected in this transformative process. In being drawn into and covered by the cloud, Jesus is taken up into God and God’s life. The teacher, healer, and revolutionary now lives and represents something of God’s own purpose. And what’s true for Jesus is also true for Jesus’s friends: Peter, James, and John are taken up into the cloud as well. Their lives now shine with a purpose beyond themselves. They, too, are part of what God is doing in the world. Their stories have meaning and significance not only in themselves but in the ways they exemplify and enact God’s purposes. Everyone leaves the mountaintop with both a new self-understanding and a new meaning. We are more than the sum of our parts. We are part of who God is and what God is doing in the here and now and in the future.

On a July Saturday this year I went up a hill with my friends and experienced a transfiguration of sorts. I saw them, my classmates, and myself in a new and transfigured way. On a similar day a couple of millennia ago, Jesus and his companions went up another hill and saw themselves, their world, and their God with similar newness. They saw that God was up to something big cosmically, socially, and personally. They understood that God’s purposes are bigger and deeper and more universal than they had previously thought. And they understood that God’s purposes extended even to them. Their lives were no longer only about themselves. Their lives now had meaning and significance and purpose because they, with Jesus, had now been taken up into God’s own life. Their ultimate destiny was assured. They could begin to risk themselves for the transformation of the world.

We come now to gather with Jesus and his companions at God’s table. Just as our lives become more than we thought they were, so do this bread and wine. There is more going on than we usually know. For all our self-reflection, you and I still rarely see ourselves or others very well. Every once in a while, our eyes and our minds are opened to see them as God does. You and I, along with Jesus, his companions, and every person with a sad or painful story, add up to more than we think we do. God is doing something in and through us that will both bring us fulfillment and lead to the redemption of the world. Just as Jesus was transfigured, just as his companions’ understanding of him was transfigured, so let our lives and minds and hearts be opened to the holiness of everything and everyone as we gather together with Jesus and take in the bread that is now more than bread, the wine that is now more than wine. As we do that, God’s gracious purpose will work itself in us, and over time we will become more than just what we thought was ourselves. Amen.

           

Homily: Roger Kirk Memorial Service [July 29, 2017] St. Paul's, Oregon, Ohio

            I’m Gary Hall, a priest in the church, and I’m here because I’m married to Kathy, who is Betty Kirk’s sister. It has been my peculiar destiny to marry into a family where the men are all expected to be super-nice. I’m not sure I inherited the same “niceness” gene shared by Norman Matheson, Roger Kirk, and Harry Zymaris, but I count it both a great sadness and a great privilege to be presiding at this memorial service for a wonderful and in his own way extraordinary man.

I met Roger Kirk for the first time on the day after Christmas in 1975. I remember this so clearly because I had just driven straight from Boston to Toledo to stay for a few days with Kathy and her family. I had met Betty and the Mathesons in Cambridge a year before, but this trip was my first meeting with Roger. I remember coming into the house on Luverne and seeing Roger, Manhattan in hand, standing by the fireplace in his Harvard sweatshirt. I was ragged and tired from the drive, and Roger offered me a Manhattan. It was the first of many acts of kindness I received at his hands.

            Tim, Joe, and Andy have spoken beautifully about their grandfather and his presence in their lives. I don’t have many stories to add about Roger, but I do have some images:  Roger with a Manhattan in hand by the fire, Roger looking out at the lake, Roger at a baseball game, Roger singing his heart out in church, Roger sitting in the Adirondack chair he helped me assemble in our back yard and reading a book about birds in California, walking with Roger on the beach in Carmel looking at the Hale-Bopp comet in the night sky after Easter in 1997. I know that Roger worked incredibly hard most of his life, but I got to see and know him principally in his rare moments of relaxation. Although we belonged to different political parties, the only serious argument he and I ever had concerned the designated hitter rule. But Roger’s values were solid and pure. He loved his family. He loved nature. He loved baseball. If that version of the Trinity was good enough for Roger, it’s good enough for me.

            We’re gathered this afternoon both to remember Roger Kirk and to give thanks for his life. We have three scripture readings to help us do that.

            Our first reading was from the Wisdom of Solomon. [Wisdom 3: 1-5, 9] “The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God,” it goes. “Those who trust in God will understand truth, and the faithful will abide with God in love.” The first thing we should acknowledge about Roger was that he was faithful. Speaking as a priest, I might be misunderstood to be talking about Roger’s religious ideas. But in calling him “faithful” I am thinking more of his behavior than his beliefs. Roger was faithful to all of his commitments. He was faithful in his family relationships, in his business practices, in his civic commitments. He gave himself over to the people and the things that he treasured. This kind of faithfulness—personal, relational, practical—is on the decline these days in our culture. Our loyalties today seem to shift with the winds. But Roger was perhaps one of the last of a generation who committed themselves early in life and then stayed with the people and the causes they had given themselves to. I have been working in the church for almost as long as I knew Roger, and it’s hard for me to express how precious a faithful man like Roger is in the work I do. He is there when you need him and even when you don’t. He keeps his promises. He takes on important yet unrewarding work for the sake of the cause.

            The Wisdom of Solomon tells us, “the faithful will abide with God in love.”  Faithfulness is one of the attributes we prize so highly in God, and it is one of the attributes God prizes so highly in us. Whatever else we might have to say about Roger Kirk, the first thing we need to acknowledge is this: the steady, committed, generous faithfulness that Roger exemplified cannot be overvalued. His life of service to the people and the causes he loved shows us the very definition of what the Bible would call a “good life”: family, nature, baseball; and, of course, friends, community, and church, and work. This is not a glamorous list of commitments, but they’re at the center of the Bible’s description of what it means to be a faithful and righteous human being.

            But it is one of the mysteries of existence that righteous, faithful lives do not always run smoothly. Roger celebrated the joys of family, nature, and community even in the midst of business difficulties and personal suffering. The last decade of his life was overshadowed by his experience of Parkinson’s disease, and those of us who knew and loved Roger felt the cruelty of an affliction that took away some of the basic joys that meant so much to him.  In our second scripture reading from Romans, [Romans 8:14-19, 34-35, 37-39], Paul speaks to an early generation of Christians who also experienced suffering, and while Paul does not attempt to answer the question we all pose (Why?) he does get at what suffering reveals to us about ourselves and God. At the end of our passage, he asks:

Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Nothing can “separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord”. Not even illness. Not even death. One of the things a long, faithful life reveals to us is the way God’s universe actually works. Over the course of his life, Roger’s faithfulness was not paid back in good luck or “earthly rewards”. But over the course of his life Roger’s steadfast commitments revealed the depth and extent to which his love of God had patterned his life. Roger’s love and faithfulness revealed both to him and us something about how things finally are.

We spend our lives in the psalm’s words living “in the valley of the shadow of death”. We fear death as the worst thing that can happen to us. But as the 23^rd psalm and Paul’s letter remind us, there is always someone alongside of us as we traverse that valley. That one is committed to us. That one is faithful. Roger’s lifelong faithfulness is for each and all of us a sign of God’s unbreakable commitment to us. We are precious to that one, and not even the thing we fear most can alter or cancel that commitment. From our vantage, death looks like a defeat. From God’s vantage, death is just one point on a journey in faith and love and hope.

And that, finally, is where the third reading, our gospel [John 11:21-27], comes in.  Jesus tells Martha as she mourns the death of her brother, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” Martha has complained to Jesus that if he had only been there, Lazarus would not have died. Jesus responds that even those who die are part of the resurrection now.

Those of us who follow Jesus have so gotten used to talking about resurrection in the future tense that we have forgotten to look for signs of it in the here and now. I have no doubt that Jesus’s promise is real, that in and through him and the one he calls his Father you and I and all creation will participate in God’s future. And if read the scriptures aright, I also know that nothing—not even his death and separation from us and not even the pain of his final days—can separate Roger Kirk from the love of the God that he knew and served all his life.

But here is something else I know, and it is something we often miss at occasions like this. I know that every once in a while someone like Roger comes along who shows you what resurrection actually means. When we’re lucky enough to know someone who lives as Roger lived, we get a sense of resurrection not only as a future promise but also as a lived reality now. In all this I am not trying to make Roger holier or nicer or better than he was. I am not saying that Roger was perfect or anything like that. But I am saying that his steadfast, faithful, righteous qualities add up to something like an image of life as it can be lived on God’s terms in the here and now.  Jesus’s resurrection means not only liberation from the fear of death. Jesus’s resurrection means freedom to live as risen people in the midst of life now. Roger Kirk showed at least me what a life lived on God’s terms might look like. And I’ll bet he showed you that, too. For this gift, we will always be grateful.

            We come now to the Eucharist, the meal of bread and wine which Jesus gave us as a way to remember both himself and the kind of living he calls us into. As we gather around God’s table with each other, with Jesus and with Roger (and with Harry Zymaris who was a blood brother with Roger in faithfulness and generosity) let us remember and recommit ourselves to the things in life that really matter. Family. Nature. Community. And, yes, even baseball. If the rules of the church would let me, instead of the wine I would fill the chalice with Manhattans. But you get the idea.

            Roger, we love you. We miss you. We have learned so much from you. And we commit ourselves, each in our own way, to living the faithful, steadfast, generous life that you and your son-in-law Harry have shown us.  Amen.