Gospel Reading
Mark 9:2-13
2 After six days Jesus took Peter, James and John with him and led them up a high mountain, where they were all alone. There he was transfigured before them. 3 His clothes became dazzling white, whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them. 4 And there appeared before them Elijah and Moses, who were talking with Jesus. 5 Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here. Let us put up three shelters—one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.”6 (He did not know what to say, they were so frightened.) 7 Then a cloud appeared and covered them, and a voice came from the cloud: “This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!” 8 Suddenly, when they looked around, they no longer saw anyone with them except Jesus. 9 As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus gave them orders not to tell anyonewhat they had seen until the Son of Man had risen from the dead. 10 They kept the matter to themselves, discussing what “rising from the dead” meant. 11 And they asked him, “Why do the teachers of the law say that Elijah must come first?” 12 Jesus replied, “To be sure, Elijah does come first, and restores all things. Why then is it written that the Son of Man must suffer muchand be rejected? 13 But I tell you, Elijah has come, and they have done to him everything they wished, just as it is written about him.”
Homily
As part of my chaplaincy training, I engaged in a class discussion in which a person in my class had a particular perspective on LGBTQ people that was rather uncharitable, to say the least. I decided to engage and offer my perspective. The conversation seemed to go nowhere, and the classmate shut down our dialogue by saying,
“I respect your opinion and love how you love people. My sister is gay and “married.” She’s battled with homosexuality all of her life. Her mental health has also been impacted as her addictive tendencies in regard to whether to act on her feelings or not. I love her more than anything, but I do not agree with her choices. Alcoholism and addiction are genetically passed down, and even though they are diseases, one cannot agree with the use of drugs and alcohol. I watched it destroy and even kill some of my family. In the same way, if one can be born gay…”
You get the rest. She ended it with, “because we love someone it does not mean that we agree or condone their behaviors. Continue loving God and others and I will do the same.”
And I may be preaching to the choir here, but I thought maybe we should have a conversation about what it really means to love. “Love” is a word we, as Christians and as humans, sometimes throw around without actually thinking of what it means. About five or six years ago now, I was standing up here in this very pulpit, preaching my first sermon, and I quoted the Jesuit priest Father James Martin, who had a way of defining sin that really resonated with me. There really isn’t one definition of sin, you could say it’s doing anything that goes against the will of God, or acting immorally or against divine law, But, Father Martin defines sin as “the failure to bother to love.” Not even the failure to love, but the failure to be bothered to love, as it is too inconvenient, too much work, or requires us to give up too much, or God forbid, listen with an open heart and mind. Or sacrifice that which will value more than love, like our worldviews or prejudices against others. We desire for the people we love to fit into neat little boxes, perfectly within the status quo, so that they are easy to love. We desire to sacrifice as little as possible in order to love. For better or worse, reality simply does not bend to the will of what we desire.
Lent, the season that were in right now, is really about love if you think about it. Sure, it’s a season where we are penitent, where we are asked make sacrifices, but why? Lent isn’t a season where we suffer simply for the sake of suffering, but give things up in order to grow closer to God. In Buddhism, desire is seen as the root of suffering, and by giving up that which we desire, we are intentionally leaning into our identity as sacred beings, proving to ourselves that the things we desire not only do not have control over us, but that they are not what will make us happy or fulfilled, and they certainly do not define who we are. In today’s culture, we spend so much time building our identities around what we have, and what we consume. We identify ourselves by political labels, with political parties, or by ideology or religion. Strip that all away and we’re left only with ourselves and the way God sees us, the love that God has for us and the love that we give to others. Everything in this world is transitive, temporary, even the mortal bodies we live in. After all, whether we are rich or poor, have a closet full of luxury clothing or struggle to make ends meet, live in mansions or halfway houses, our graves are all the same size. It all comes from dust and will someday return to dust, but it’s God’s love and our love for one another that is endures, is eternal. So, if we don’t have love, we really have nothing.
So, how do we love? And how do we orient ourselves towards the love of God?
Well, one way is by looking towards the story we heard in the gospel today.
The gospel reading from Mark you heard is the story of the Transfiguration of Jesus, where God and humanity meet with Jesus as the bridge, where Jesus is transfigured, and becomes shining and radiant with light. And in this meeting of the temporary and the eternal, of earth and heaven, the message is that God in Christ is both human and divine, and that humanity, too, can become divine. The New Oxford American dictionary defines the word “transfigured” to mean, “a complete change in form or appearance into a more beautiful or spiritual state.” The Greek word used in these passages is metamorphomai, metamorphomized or transformed. In a similar way, to love is to be transfigured—to join our humanness with our divinity, to be changed by love. You cannot truly love anyone or anything and not be changed by it. Never have I loved, whether it was a friend, a pet, a partner, and come away from it exactly the same as I was before. And that’s a good thing. This transfiguration is a gift, an invitation to grow in ways that bring us closer into communion with each other and with God. The way to love a love that is transfigured is to look for it, to hear it and see it and feel it not just when we’re up on the mountain top like the disciples, metaphorically speaking, during our best moments or when it’s right in front of our eyes, but when it maybe isn’t as obvious, or when it presents a challenge. Just like the person I spoke about about in the beginning of this sermon, who may not be able to love me, but I can try my best to hold love for them. Because, in the end, we are all called to be transfigured by our love, like Christ.
Our Lady of Light 