On this day of two commemorations, the sermon opens with two epigraphs. First, from this morning’s Gospel: “ . . . a cloud came and overshadowed them. And they were terrified as they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice . . . ” (Luke 9:34–35) And second: “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent.” (J. Robert Oppenheimer, on the explosion of the first atomic bomb, July 16, 1945)
In the brightness of this summer morning, our readings as well as our own history, make us envision an overwhelming sight. We gaze upon two, blindingly brilliant clouds, up, high in the heavens. Eyewitnesses said that no other clouds were ever so radiant. Yet beyond their appearance, these clouds would change the meaning of life and of death, of fear and of hope, of God’s power and of human destiny.
The first cloud on the mountaintop strikes awe as one of the ultimate symbols for the presence of God used in the Jewish Scriptures. Throughout the Bible, when a cloud settles on a mountain, it is a sign that God has arrived, and that God is about to speak. In such a cloud, Moses in his lifetime and Jesus in his were changed in appearance so drastically that their followers could hardly bear to look at them. But more than their appearance, yes, the meaning of Moses and of Jesus was changed for their followers. On the mountaintop Jesus, like Moses before him, was declared by God to be the bearer of God’s word for God’s people. These revelations also transfigured their followers, because in following Moses, the Jews were changed into God’s people. And in hearing Christ Jesus, we are transfigured as “very members . . . of his mystical body”. (BCP, Prayer after Communion) Later, in our offertory hymn, we shall sing of that revelation, “Bright the Cloud and Bright the Glory”!
Now the second cloud belongs also to August 6th and also reveals something new. I mean the atomic cloud that arose for the first time over Hiroshima on this morning in 1945, many years ago today. No one could bear to look at its radiance straight on, and every person and nation, near and far and then and since then, has been transfigured by the sickening threat of death that it unleashed. Again in the same hymn, we shall sing of this cloud, “Bright the cloud but dark the glory . . . All has changed and we shall never be the same.”
So let us open our eyes to the awesome clouds that belong to this day. Let us hear God’s voice thundering there.
* * *
The first cloud, the cloud of Transfiguration, imparts a radiant vision on a mountaintop recorded in three of the Gospels. If you go up high on a mountain in sunny weather, you really do see the jigsaw patterns of the earth with the eyes of God. The freshness of mountain air clears your powers of perception. I remember once with friends on Mount Cadillac in Maine in sunny August weather, all our senses were charged. Sounds were crisper. And so were the colors, just as the Gospels say. One of us was wearing a faded yellow shirt, but on the mountaintop, the yellow had surprising new richness and depth.
When I lived near the Alps, I learned that the Germans have a word for the mood of the mountaintop: they call it Bergstille, mountain silence, a time for quiet thoughts and deep insight. No wonder God gives visions on the mountain.
But you don’t want to be on a mountain when a cloud comes in, the way it does in this Gospel story! This happened to me, during a hike high in the Alps. With little warning, clouds surrounded me, and I could see only a few feet ahead. You cannot move forward or back or sideways, because the gravel may slide, you may lose your footing, and you can hurl down to your death. If the clouds hang on, you must stay overnight on the mountain, with the danger of chill and exposure. So it’s time for that corny old wisdom: “Don't just do something. Stand there!” Quite apart from the vision, no wonder the disciples were terrified, no wonder Peter offered to build tents — camping out is your only option when clouds cover the mountain!
In all this bewilderment, Jesus held conversation with Moses and Elijah. Moses and Elijah stand for the law and the prophets, the morality and the wisdom revealed to the Jews and that Jesus would renew for all peoples. Yet what do Jesus and Moses and Elijah talk about? They talk about his death. But why — why in these moments of glory and danger do they talk of his forthcoming suffering? Because this is the very thing that God wants now to reveal: the glory of Jesus is that God does enter into the depth of human suffering and undergoes our agony. So, in the Transfiguration, when God hears Moses and Elijah and Jesus talk about Jesus’s suffering, God interrupts the conversation as if to underline this very point: “Yes,” God says, “Yes, like Moses and Elijah, my Son Jesus will be a victim with my people and for my people. Jesus is my Son because he will share this suffering.” By God’s “yes” that shares our suffering, not only is the human face of God transfigured, but we are transfigured, made godlike by a hope that we could not have on our own.
So the Transfiguration calls us to face into our own suffering with the promise that God goes into it with us. And God will emerge with us, and raise us up in a new way. Even when we lose our health or our job, or when we can’t get around on our own any more, or when we lose our moral center through habits of sin, or when the legal system betrays us, or when even our spouse or our child or our father abandons us — in all that suffering, the heart of God grieves with us. The divine compassion goes to work in our emptiness to create us anew. For the glory of Transfiguration is the hope that God will, in the words of the poet Auden,
“Follow . . . follow right
To the bottom of the night, . . .
In the deserts of the heart,
[Will] Let the healing fountain start
[Will]In the prison of [our] days,
Teach [us once more] how to praise.” (1)
* * *
Yet does this mystery of Transfiguration help us to gaze upon that other cloud — the cloud of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima that arose once on this morning, the cloud over Nagasaki on August 9th? As Christians, we must face that question . . .
. . . but the question of Hiroshima is not the familiar moral and political question of whether such force was justified to end the war, or whether a one-time use of atomic power has been a deterrent to further use. Patriots and scientists argue on both sides of those questions, and ours is not to resolve them. No — the question of Hiroshima is the existential question of whether we can survive — survive our own ingenuity, our lust to dominate creation — in the words again of the hymn that Patrick Michaels chose for us, we have “power grasped but far from mastered, knowledge keen but not yet wise.”
When God creates us in God’s own image, God invites us to share God’s creative power. But God also reminds us that we are not God, and God gives us an awareness of our limits. Throughout the Bible, throughout history, when we play God, we end in destruction. And what humanity did in creating the atom bomb and its offspring, was to figure out how to undo the basic element of matter, how to set up a chain reaction destroying the structure of life itself.
“My God,” cried Lieutenant Colonel Tibbetts as he flew looking down from the Enola Gay upon the explosion, “My God, what . . . have . . . we . . . done?” When he published his comment sixteen years later, the Pentagon censured him for being politically incorrect. But he was religiously correct to put the question to God, because in breaking the atom to destroy life, humanity put asunder what God had joined together.
Can we survive? We might feel able to ignore Hiroshima, because that bomb was little and it all happened over there. But we know that many governments, including our own, conceal the effects of nuclear tests that hurt our health and our planet. We also know that unstable nations have the bomb and crazy leaders could launch one. And we know the insane drain on our economy by potential programs for defense against nuclear weapons — programs dear to both political parties but with meagre promise, costing billions that might otherwise serve education, health care, and real human need.
Can we survive? Will our children and grandchildren survive? We do not know the answer. We can only live with the question . . . under the cloud. We have lived every day for fifty-five years with the knowledge that we can wipe out millions — we can be wiped out by the millions. Since God does not promise to keep us from an apocalypse, and since we have grown accustomed to expecting the unspeakable, the clouds of August, 1945, lie not in the past. They arise as question marks on the horizon of all our future. We all live under the cloud of Hiroshima.
Yet this cloud can be overshadowed by the cloud of Transfiguration, where God extends to us the Jewish law and prophets, and the saving power of Christ’s peace, self-control, and forgiveness. Here is the source of our hope. Even in our age, God’s prophets echo the commandment of peace: Martin Luther King, Archbishop Tutu, the Irish mothers for peace, and first and last the Society of Friends, the Quakers. We hear the passionate words of Pope Paul VI, who also died on this day. As the first Pope to speak before the United Nations in 1965 — and how vividly I remember this — Pope Paul seemed to depart from his text and cry out “Never again war! Never! Never again! It is peace, peace, that must direct the destiny of humankind.”
It is a high and holy irony that the Feast of the Transfiguration and the Anniversary of Hiroshima will fall on the same day for as long as history endures. It is a high and holy irony that our liturgical color is white for the Feast of the Transfiguration, yet at the same time white is the Japanese color for mourning. Thus is the meaning of this day forever plunged into paradox — can we rejoice whilst others mourn? If we must face the terror of August 6th, we must also face the hope that God offers us from the mountaintop. Most simply, in the words of Auden, “We must love . . . or we shall die.” (2)
As we hear God’s voice from these two clouds, and as we hear the screams of victims, their bodies burning and melting beneath the clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we are brought to the uttermost depth of our need as a human community. Let us fall to our knees. Let us pray again as our Japanese sisters and brothers did on that day: Watashini Heiwao Kudasai! Watashini Heiwao Kudasai, Kamisama! Grant us peace! O God, grant us peace!
(1) From his poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (Another Time, Random House, 1940)
(2) From his poem “September 1, 1939” (Collected Poems, Random House, 1940)