Sermon. The Transfiguration. On Things Awesome.

Sermon. 26 February 2017. St Michael and All Angels. Little Ilford.

Sunday Next Before Lent (Year A)

Matthew 17.1-9 (The Transfiguration)

I have a friend who says she is not an atheist, she is an antitheist. This means that for her that Gd does not exist is the least of it. It is as important for her to make it clear that she finds the character of Gd to be (brace yourselves) difficult, unattractive, even repugnant, evil. She is 'ethnically' Jewish, of Jewish heritage. So she is thinking in the first place of Gd as portrayed in what we call the 'Old Testament'. But she doesn't think things improve with the New Testament, or the Qur'an for that matter. In all of this of course she is not alone – far from it.

One principal way in which she finds Gd a disreputable character is to do with all the talk – and there is a lot of it, to be fair – about 'the fear of the LORD' in the Bible. She says that people of faith overcomplicate matters. When the Bible talks about the 'fear of the LORD', the words have their normal meaning. So Gd wants to frighten us, is a supernatural monster, as it were, who wants us to be scared of Him.

You won't be too surprised to hear that I disagree. And if I were to look for a text to help us towards a different interpretation, I could do worse than turn to today's gospel. The Transfiguration. A mysterious event right in the middle of the gospels. A dramatic incident for Peter, James and John. A lot going on - but we can draw out two things.

Peter is clear: 'It is good for us to be here'. It is good or attractive or even beautiful for us to be here (says the Greek). And all three disciples 'fell on their faces and feared greatly' (that's my translation). Now you might say this refers to two stages: first the disciples were overjoyed; then they were terrified. But I don't think that works narratively. I think it's more natural to see the whole experience as one which the disciples found both attractive-and-wonderful and unsettling-and-frightening. At once.

We have a word for this. The word is awe. It was an awesome experience. But as I say that, it is already clear that there is a problem here. It's the way the word 'awesome' has come to be used. It has come to mean, well, 'nice'. I mean: it's quite plausible to hear:

'I'm going to the supermarket.'

'Awesome. Can you get me some teabags?'

A cheapening of the language no doubt, but you can't fight language-change.

We can still insist that, as in this example, 'fear of the LORD' can mean and often does mean 'being in awe of the LORD', rather than 'being terrified of the LORD'. It draws us in at least as much as it repels us. And if we do want another word, well, why not say 'excitement in the LORD'. Excitement too has an element that is like fear, doesn't it? The heart beats faster, our attention is keener, the adrenaline flows. Yes, today we are about 'the excitement of the LORD'.

It is surely good to be excited by Gd. It is something we can hope for. I want to suggest three possible ways in which we can just nudge ourselves in the direction of excitement in Gd, or being open to such excitement.

Firstly, if I am asked to pray before a eucharist service I may well say words like 'may we meet Christ as if for the first time, in his word, in his sacrament, in the company of each other and in the secret place...'. For we are free to think of each meeting at the altar as being as-it-were our first time. The Christ we are meeting is outside of time, and we are called upon to be converted every day, and so every spiritual encounter is in a sense utterly new. Pristine. Not limited by anything in our past. If we think: 'Now, for the first time, I am going to meet with Gd' – would we not be a little bit excited?

Secondly, it is not an accident that we have this reading just before Ash Wednesday, and the start of Lent. I've already emphasised for some years now that Lent is not a sombre or glum time. We should not be praying anything like 'Gd, may I have a boring Lent, as that's all I deserve' or even 'because that will be a proper challenge'. Lent is a time laden with hope. It is a season which insists that human beings are always capable of deep-down change. Or it makes no sense (why bother?). Forgiveness, for growth, to make a difference. All ours for the taking. If we can get a sense of that, is there not something exciting right there?

Thirdly, as today is a preparation for Lent, so Lent is of course a preparation for Easter. And Easter is meant to be – and cannot be other than – 'the' season of excitement for Christians. I am not above a bit of early advertising: if we can really go through the whole story from Palm Sunday to Maundy Thursday to Good Friday to the Easter Vigil, we will be inhabiting the most exciting narrative in the universe. Because it is a story of death, real death, and life out of death, real and unimaginably new life.

So we can hope and even pray that we have a measure of excitement

• each time we gather
• as we journey through Lent
• as we experience Holy Week and Easter.

Yes.

All of that said, it would not do if we only come to church when we feel a sense of excitement, or if we feel we have failed if we leave church unexcited. No. After all, in today's story, the disciples themselves have to descend, to come back down from the mountain, to return to their ordinary, mundane lives. Indeed, to tell no one about the light-filled wonder until after Jesus is raised. They can only take it in, stay with it, silently.

Now, this is important: we are not a church that insists on excitement or other intense emotion, each time we meet. And that is all to the good. Churches that do have such expectations can explode briefly and then collapse in on themselves. Or else they develop ways of manipulation. We don't want that; anything but that. Nevertheless, as we are on the threshold of Lent, we are still free to pray for some measure of excitement about our walk with Gd, in the ways that Gd knows best.

We can – and why do we not – pray that Gd will give us occasion to say with Peter,

it is good (it is attractive, it is beautiful) for us to be here'.

Amen.