Sermon

Listen to Him

by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer

I was maybe 10 minutes into my riding lesson, high atop my instructor’s own horse – a bay thoroughbred named R.G. –  when I heard the fateful words, “OK, put him together.”

Putting a horse together is a basic technique in dressage. Dressage is an equestrian discipline that involves rider communicating to her horse through subtle changes in knee pressure and placement of hands. To put him together, in this context, meant pulling up slightly on the inside rein to draw his head up and in. This would round his neck which, in turn, would lift his shoulders and open his haunches, resulting in a smoother, more powerful, more “put together” gait.

That is, theoretically this would happen. You understand that up to that point, I had never actually put R.G., or any other horse, together successfully. Oh, I knew what I needed to do. I was reasonably clear on equine physiology. But somewhere between head and hands, I lost it every single time. It wasn’t that I lacked the desire. I lacked the capacity to connect what was in my head to what my body then needed to do.

But on that day, the stars must have aligned in the heavens because it worked. “Good!” my relentless instructor hollered. “Now pick up a posting trot and keep him together,” And it had to have been properly aligned stars, because again, it worked. R.G. seamlessly moved into a collected trot. It was amazing! Maybe this is how golfers feel when they shoot a hole in one, or how a basketball player feels when the winning shot is sunk. When head and hands work together, theory and praxis informing one another, the experience takes on an almost mystical power, not to mention floods you with endorphins.

So when I think of the experience of the Transfiguration for Peter, James, and John, I find myself wondering if they had one of those amazing, mystical moments too, where everything they had learned from their beloved teacher came together in a blinding moment of perfect clarity. Jesus with Moses and Elijah – the perfect fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets! It all connected – their own sacred history, Jesus’s teachings, his miracles of healing and restoration – it all came together for them. Jesus was indeed who Peter had identified him to be only 8 days earlier – the Messiah of God! No wonder Peter suggested enshrining this moment by building three booths. Who wouldn’t see this moment as a culmination?

Well, God, for one. God enshrouds the scene with a shining cloud and redirects the disciples’ energy away from encampment and toward something that is a bit more active and certainly a bit more ongoing: This is my Son, my Chosen, God says. Listen to him.

Listen to him. The Transfiguration was a theophany, or a manifestation – a showing forth – of God. Throughout Scripture – and our reading from Exodus is a good example – theophanies happen for a reason: to instruct, to inspire, to reassure those who participate because God’s final purposes have not yet been revealed. Throughout Scripture, those who experience a theophany are charged with carrying out God’s purposes.

What Peter, James, and John are to do is to listen to God’s Son, the Chosen one. And listening, in scriptural context, is always understood as an active, rather than passive task. The Latin word, oboedire, which means to hear, is the root of our English word, obedience. To listen to Christ meant that they, too, were to be about the business of healing and restoring all who were on the margins of society, all whom poverty or disease or misfortune had rendered ritually unclean and thereby removed from official avenues of access to God.

But the disciples didn’t do so well on their first attempt, post-Theophany, did they? They attempted, but failed, to exorcise the boy who was possessed by an unclean spirit. I get it. On my very next lesson following my triumphal experience of putting R.G. together, I couldn’t for the life of me replicate my earlier actions. So I’m inclined to cut Peter, James, and John some slack here. They didn’t lack the desire to engage the ministry that was set before them. They lacked the capacity to connect what was in their heads and in their hearts with what they needed then to do.

Why was this so hard for them? Better we might ask, why is it so hard for us? After all, we know in our heads what the mission of the Church is: to restore all people to unity with God and one another through Christ. We know that when Christ is made present in the Sacrament and when we partake of the Sacrament, we are made one Body with him. And we know that, nourished by this great love, we are sent into the world in witness to his love. We know it. We just don’t always do it. Some days we fail as miserably as the disciples did when they came down the mountain, when they were not able to deliver the boy of the demons that possessed him, when fear or befuddlement or misplaced pride or God knows what gets in the way of us doing the ministry that is ours to do. We don’t always get it right, but we need never fear that Christ will abandon us in exasperation. We know by faith that Christ will be with us always to the end of time itself. It is our earthly lives that are limited – far too limited to throw up our hands in frustration and say, “Forget it.”

This is my Son, the Chosen One. Listen to him, God said. Listen to him. Actively. Not just in those glorious moments when head and hands work together, but daily as we practice our faith.

© Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral