Transfiguration and Real Presence

The Rev. Paddy Cavanaugh, Last Sunday after Epiphany, Year B, 2/5/24

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, amen.

Today is the last Sunday of the season of Epiphany. Sandwiched between Advent and Lent, Epiphany is sometimes one of those seasons whose purpose can be unclear, so before we enter into Lent next week, I wanted us to take a look back on Epiphany to understand how it fits into our understanding of who Jesus is. First of all, the seasons of Advent, Epiphany, and Lent all go together in that order. They each walk us through three distinct periods in Jesus’s life. Advent of course is about preparing for Jesus’s birth and arrival in the world. Lent is about preparing for Jesus’s death and resurrection. And Epiphany is about everything in Jesus’s life in between. His public ministry, his teaching, his casting out of demons – lest we forget that – and most importantly, the small and large epiphanies his followers discover along the way about who exactly Jesus is, and how he shows up for them.

And just like Christmas is the grand finale of Advent, and Easter is the grand finale of Lent; Epiphany culminates in the incredible event known as the Transfiguration.

Today I thought about telling you about the Transfiguration, but seeing as how I’m a failed art historian, and seeing as how we have a gigantic stained glass window on the subject, I thought it’d much be better if I showed you. So I invite you to turn around in your seat for just a moment and direct your gaze upward.

What we notice first is Jesus, robed in dazzling white with his arms upraised as the disciples Peter, James, and John lay in awe before him. Slightly behind Jesus, to his left and right, are Moses the lawgiver and Elijah the prophet, who reveal that Jesus is the fulfilment of both the law of the Old Testament and the one of whom the prophets foretold.

At the bottom of the window, God the Father gingerly cradles Jesus’s crucified body while Jesus’s much larger, transfigured body towers above, revealing that the transfiguration is in some ways a sneak peak of the resurrection. Finally, at the very top we see the Holy Spirit, represented as a dove, descending upon Jesus as angels sing and the words “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” are written above. (Matt. 3:17)

This concludes the visual analysis portion of the sermon, you may turn around.

Everything in this image we have seen points towards one thing, and that is the words at the very top. The words of God the Father saying “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” That is the epiphany of epiphanies that leaves the disciples and us in awe two millennia later. This is God’s definitive response to the disciples growing suspicion that Jesus is more than the average prophet or teacher. What they see for the first time beneath ordinary flesh and blood is something extraordinary.

I’d like to tell you the story about my own transfiguration moment, when I first came to see the extraordinary reality of God beneath the ordinary. Years ago, when I was working at a nonprofit in Boston, I came across a Franciscan monastery. It was an unassuming building in the heart of the city nestled between an office building and a sandwich shop. I’d walk by it every day on the way to my subway stop, rarely paying it any mind. Then one afternoon, during my early ponderings about the priesthood, curiosity compelled me to wander into the chapel.

It wasn’t a particularly beautiful chapel; it was one of those 1960s experiments in modern architecture that can feel a bit like a government building. A place where holy bureaucrats go about managing the internal affairs of Kingdom of Heaven.

As I looked down the nave, the pews were nearly empty except for a handful of elderly women who were kneeling around the altar, enraptured by a strange metal object on top of it that looked like the sun. I slowly realized what was happening in this unassuming place and it was something I had only read about in my art history books in the chapters on the Middle Ages.

These women were practicing a very old and peculiar devotion found in some Catholic and a few Episcopal churches known as Eucharistic adoration, which is exactly what it sounds like. It’s sitting in adoration of Christ’s true body made present in the consecrated Communion bread which is displayed in this odd, beautiful object called a monstrance.

And let me tell you these women were lost in adoration. The looks on their faces were more captivating to me than the bread in the object before them. They looked as if they were utterly and hopelessly in awe. Really, they looked like they were in love. There was no doubt that they felt that God was truly before them in a way that I had never quite experienced myself.

Now I grew up a good Episcopalian boy and was taught in my confirmation class by a kindly priest about the Real Presence. Our belief that Jesus, in some mysterious way, not really understood by anyone except maybe Mother Theresa, becomes truly and extraordinarily present in the ordinary things of bread and wine during the Eucharist.

For most of my life I held onto this thought lightly, receiving the body and blood of Christ with reverence but not really feeling in my heart what was said to be true about what I was consuming.

But let me tell you, when I saw the looks on these women’s faces, I felt for the first time that what I was taught could actually be true. The way that they looked in utter awe reminds me of how Peter, James, and John look in that window as they see Jesus transfigured as the Son of God for the first time. It was as if light shining from the wafer had been hidden from me and was now reflected from their faces and onto mine. Their belief that Jesus really shows up for us helped my unbelief and I have never approached the Holy Eucharist in the same way since.

Now, like my confirmation priest, I’m not telling you what you should or shouldn’t believe about how Jesus shows up in the Eucharist. Whether you believe in transubstantiation, consubstantiation, transignification, the Pneumatic presence, or if you’re like most of us and you don’t really know what’s happening but you’re still showing up for Jesus anyway… then all you need to know is this: Jesus is also showing up for you. Reliably.

And if we take seriously that possibility that God’s son, Jesus has the power to transfigure ordinary things like bread and wine, then there’s hope that God can transfigure ordinary folks like us to look more like Jesus.

These Franciscans in Boston surely did. You see, they had a reputation in town. Like Jesus, they did things that didn’t sit well with the religious authorities. They were a minor institution in the gay community because they were known as one of the only Catholic churches where folks could show up as God had created them. And they could stay that way, even while been transfigured more and more into the image of Christ.

They ran one of the largest outreach ministries to the unhoused in the neighborhood because they saw the presence of God in the person sleeping in on their doorstep as much as they saw God on the altar.

They embraced the fullness of what it meant to be transfigured by the love of God who turns the ordinary into something extraordinary.

And that’s what the Transfiguration is about. It’s about us showing up for Jesus, and Jesus really and truly showing up for us, and transforming us. And because we are transformed by that experience we don’t just stay in that moment, though Jesus’s disciples were tempted! They were lost in wonder, love, and praise, like those women I saw, and they wanted to set up tents and stick around a while on the mountain where Jesus was transfigured. But Jesus said no. Jesus told them to go down from that mountaintop so that the light which had shined upon them could be reflected in all the world.

The lesson for us in Epiphany is that Jesus shows up in ordinary things so that ordinary people like you and me can get caught up in something extraordinary. That’s transfiguration. That’s real presence. Amen.