Jesus commanded them, “Tell no one the vision, until the Son of man is raised from the dead.” St. Matthew 17:1-9
Indeed I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. Philippians 3:7-14
In the Name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Christ on the mountaintop reveals his glory to Peter, James and John in his Transfiguration. This is shortly before his passion. It is a glimpse of his glory from eternity which will be manifest to all his disciples after Easter, but for the time being the three apostles are to tell no one until the Son of man is raised from the dead.
This Transfiguration Gospel is a precursor to the observance of Lent, the spare and penitential, I think beautiful, season when the Church invites her members to prepare to celebrate the central events of the faith – the sacrifice, death and resurrection of our Lord.
Our reading from Saint Paul’s letter to the Philippians, one of the most powerful personal yet universal passages in the New Testament, sets the tone. Knowing Christ Jesus as Lord, our, my, Lord, is the one thing of surpassing worth in this life. No matter what our station in life or stage on life’s way, this is the pearl of great price, the gift we all can have and can take with us, wherever we may be, all the way.
The gift is not secret knowledge. It is appreciation, reception, and gratitude for what God has done openly and publicly (available for scrutiny and argument), in the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. It is realization, shoulder-to-shoulder with those first witnesses who risked their lives for the testimony, that God did indeed raise Jesus from the dead on the third day. It is the permanent new lease on life, sent from the risen Lord to those who love his appearing, by the Spirit of his Father, Almighty God.
Well now! Lent is a good time to examine and purify how we live in order more fully to appreciate this gift of surpassing worth. The three traditional disciplines of Lent are prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.
Prayer stands for the whole range of activities involved in my soul’s relation to God my maker, my redeemer, my sanctifier. Saying my prayers, praying spontaneously, meditating on scripture or anything in God’s creation; going to church; praying alone, with others and in the congregation; the entire disposition to believe and to live and move and be in God’s presence – all these are part of Prayer.
Fasting applies to the whole range of what are classically called the appetites of the faculties of my body and soul. It means abstaining, reducing, pruning, balancing, regulating the things I think, say, and do. This is more than giving up meat on Fridays as past generations of Catholics and even Episcopalians and Lutherans did, especially in Lent. For example, are you obsessed with the news? Go on a “news fast” and cleanse your mind. Eliminate or modify a habit and replace it or strengthen yourself with something better. Fasting has to do with my interior peace. As Saint Augustine said, peace is the tranquility of order. Fasting helps us discover or rediscover that good order.
Almsgiving means our comportment and activity towards others. Its source is good will and its expression is charity. It includes but means more than giving to those who beg from us. It requires the conquest of evil thoughts within by a good will and the consequent removal of evil speech, words expressing envy, hatred and malice and all uncharitableness. As you fast from gossip and slander, you take up peace-making, kindness, encouragement and generosity; or, if it’s the prudent thing to do, you exercise well-meaning silence. Almsgiving is practicing “random acts of kindness” which arise from a renewed mind and heart.
In all three of these disciplines lives repentance, the great turning, turning again, to God, to authentic life within ourselves, to truthfulness and charity with others. Confession is the great assistance here. Two of the most powerful texts of English religion are the great General Confessions of the Book of Common Prayer. Confession acknowledges and bewails our manifold sins and wickedness which we from time to time most grievously have committed by thought word and deed. Confession “fesses up” that we have left undone those things that we ought to have done, and we have done those things that we ought not to have done.
Last week at evensong Father Andrew laid out the time-honored method of making an honest, precise confession. It bears repeating, and we do not pass this wisdom along without saying that we try to practice what we preach. Sit down with a big piece of paper and a pencil. Realize that our Lord Jesus is there with you. He is looking at you and he already knows it all; he is waiting for you to draw near to him. Write down the Ten Commandments and the Seven Deadly sins – pride, lust, anger (hatred), envy, sloth, greed, and gluttony. Make the deadly sins headings of blank sections to fill in with your sins.
Take your diary or personal calendar and refresh your memory on the events of the past weeks and months. That will reveal the patterns of your infirmities. Take notes as you go through the calendar and fit your sins under the right headings. If you don’t know where to put something, put it under pride. Leave other people, except as the objects of your sins, out of it. You are confessing your sins, not theirs. You are confessing what you have done, not what has been done to you. If you have an old and un-confessed sin, write it down; it has been polluting your soul for a long time. Remember Jesus is there, and the Lord knows much more about you than you do and has the perspective of your one true judge (he is the Son of man) and your one true savior (he is the Son of God). He is your Mediator and Advocate.
Then, offer the confession as your prayer to God. Bring it to church. Kneel before the altar and give your sins to Jesus. If you need a priest, go to one and use the church’s form of sacramental confession, which concludes with the blessed words of direct, personal absolution said by the minister of God’s Word. Be honest, be contrite; above all, be appreciative of the gift of supreme value, the gift of knowing Christ Jesus our Lord, your Lord, my Lord; knowing that he came to reclaim every last one of us. Don’t leave your confession lying around; destroy it. Then return, refreshed, to the matter of repair and restoration through prayer, fasting and almsgiving.
When Ash Wednesday comes with those words, “Remember, O Man, that dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return,” we begin this walk. Dust we are, yes; but redeemed dust, dust bound with Christ for glory. On Easter morning, we hear Paul again, in a few short sentences: “You are dead, and your life lies hid with Christ in God.”
So now we descend the mountain with Jesus and reserve but cherish the vision of glory till Easter. In the meantime, we can seek those things which are above, where Christ is, at the right hand of God, by attending to Lent, to the real business of our lives.
In the Name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. Amen.
