There is no way to tell people they are going around shining like the sun.
Thomas Merton
The vision of God is the aim of worship in sacramental traditions. Those of you who have come from Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic or Anglo Catholic Episcopalian traditions will see what I mean.
European church naves, in the visual middle ages, that is, in pre-modern Christian culture, were open spaces. People — sometimes trailed by their domestic animals — wandered in and out during mass. They milled about. (Altar rails, I am told, were first erected to keep animals from sniffing around in the holy of holies!) The people would stand or kneel on the stone floor to pray.
The great majority of worshippers were entirely unaccustomed to read. Only the educated few, and those were mostly monks, had ever read the few and precious handwritten manuscripts. The people at prayer had no bulletins to follow, no hymnals nor hymn number boards, no pew Bibles or Books of Common Prayer. Their religious experience was informed by art and architecture and image and words spoken or sung, not printed texts. To worship, they would look and listen, not read.
While at mass their gaze might wander to the rich bright stained glass windows, their colors glowing in the morning light, representing a world irradiated by otherworldly grace;
or to the statues encircling the worship space, sentinels of virtue and endurance,
or to the intricate woodcarvings of the reredos behind the altar articulating silent sermons in oak or cherry wood,
or to the shimmering mysterious icons beckoning to another world to a time out of time.
Their common prayer was encompassed by the communion of saints represented in church art — painting, or glass, or carving, or sculpture: there was Our Lady, Tower of Ivory, House of Gold, perhaps seated with the holy child on her lap, named in that pose Sedis Sapiente, Seat of Wisdom. She was Mother of Mercy, whose eyes of compassion would soften the harsh judgments of the Father. There was St. Thomas, touching with his own fingertips the wounds of Christ, answering his doubt that both suffering and transcendence were real. There were hundreds of others. Then there were the cherubim and the seraphim, angels and archangels, those winged messengers — prototypes of the internet — flashing constant communication between God and creation.
The bells, rung out at the ritual climax, would bring all eyes back to the central event unfolding in their sight: the moment when heaven and earth again joined in the consecrated bread and wine.
The sacraments themselves evolved to symbolize and communicate meaning visually, and through the other senses. Vestments, incense, and bells — as well as ritual words and gestures — engage the senses to help us participate wholly — body and mind and spirit — in the overarching meaning of the event. We behold what we are, and what we want to become.
So vivid was the sense of vision, many people would participate in the mass without actually eating and drinking the bread and the wine. They believed that to take it in visually was as real as to take it into the mouth. To take it in through the eye was to receive it in the intellectual soul — what we might prefer to call consciousness.
In pre-modern culture, spirituality was profoundly visual. The aim and goal of Christian life was the vision of God. At the end of life’s journey faithful pilgrims would be free of the limitations of this world’s time and space. No longer bound by finititude, they could behold the infinite. Consciousness, free at last from the confines of the body’s five senses, could contemplate the essence of God. You would know as you have been known. Encompassed in the divine circle of infinite understanding, generating infinite knowledge, spirating infinite love — said to be the inner relational energy of the Trinity — you would live forever in the one only eternal bliss: the vision of God, face to face.
The Renaissance and the Reformation transformed Western Christian culture.
Those of you from Protestant traditions — Lutherans, Presbyterians, low-church Episcopalian, Baptists, Evangelical, Pentecostal — may resonate more readily with this strand of tradition.
The engine of change was the newly invented printing press. In time, everyman and everywoman could get access to the sacred texts on the printed page. Now the people could read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the word of God in the Holy Bible they held in their hands. They could rely on their own reason to interpret the Word of God, no longer so dependent on the interpretations of the monks and the priests, or on the visual imagination uneducated by texts.
This began a profound revolution in religious understanding! As the middle ages gave way to the Enlightenment and to modernity, the reasoning mind became the location of encounter with God. The eye got a new focus: reading the written word! And the ear became the privileged organ for the reception of divine revelation!
Religious architecture changed accordingly. The modern enlightened quest for religious understanding was mirrored in the construction of pews, and the spatial realignment of the pulpit and altar. The church floor was no longer open space. It is lined out in pews constructed in the pattern of printed text. The design constructs the people as auditors, as learners in a lecture hall, with the preacher as lecturer. We take it to the next logical step. In every pew there are Books of Common Prayer and hymnals for you to read, and when you come in we hand you the text of the day’s worship and cantata.
From every seat one can see the pulpit in order to hear the preacher — because in our modern tradition it is essential to have the mystery expounded for our rational understanding. We hunger for the reasons for belief to be set out and elucidated, for the ancient texts and rituals to be explained, so that by understanding we can enter and engage their worlds of meaning so distant from our own.
One of the things I love about Emmanuel Church is how it embodies all these traditions — sacramental, reformation, and modern. Holding them all together may not be simple, and the struggle to do so may explain some of the paradoxes and ironies that characterize the Emmanuel experience.
Still, the stained glass saints burn brightly — at least where they have been cleaned and restored. There are statues of many saints and martyrs — and of several revered New England ancestors! St. Mary is here in Lindsey Chapel, and St. Thomas the twin, also known as doubting Thomas, the patron saint of many an Emmanuelite!
It makes me laugh that people wander in and out and mill around during our long service, harkening back to medieval practice, although you rarely see any accompanying animals, domestic or wild, except in the guise of puppets. Yet here too are the reformation pews, and the pulpit jutting out like the prow of a ship ahead of the altar, word before sacrament, hearing before seeing. Also here, in the culture of the place, is the requirement for clear reasons for belief that can withstand the acid test of critical thinking. At best, it is a constant awareness that faith without doubt is no faith at all. “We walk by faith and not by sight,” wrote St. Paul. Certainty, not doubt, is the opposite of faith.
We have arrived at the end of the Epiphany season. It has been a season of seeing — seeing the star of Bethlehem that guided the Magi; seeing the dove descend on Jesus as he was baptized; seeing him change water into wine; seeing him teach with amazing authority about justice between the rich and the poor. In this gospel passage today the season of Epiphany is summed up when the disciples see Jesus in light of their Jewish tradition. This is a moment of vision, a flash of glory — when this son of God/son of man was seen to shine like the sun. It is an epiphany! We see Jesus through the disciples’ eyes, as an incarnation of their primordial covenant with the Holy One of Israel. In Luke’s telling, the disciples “kept silence” at this sight. They say nothing to anyone “at that time of what they had seen.” The implication is that they would need to see more, and experience much more, before they could begin to understand the meaning of Jesus’ transfiguration, what it meant that he shone like the morning sun.
On the news from the current Anglican Communion meeting of national heads of churches: the insult to our Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori.
Seven of the primates refused to take communion with her on account of the Episcopal Church’s support for the consecration of Bishop Robinson, an openly gay bishop, and our refusal to rule out blessing of same sex marriages, despite the threats of excommunication. What Delaware Bishop Wayne Wright said to me a few weeks ago: the Episcopal Church was originally and always a national church. The Anglican Communion was first conceived in the mid-19th century; it only gained strength in practice after WWII, at the time the United Nations was formed, as part of a hope for worldwide community. Such community remains a noble ideal and a goal to be worked toward; our leaders have been working hard and patiently to that end. We will continue to reach out in love and in humility, learning more about our own cultural blindness as we continue in dialogue. But not at the sacrifice of conscience or of gospel justice. Not at the expense of people who are seeking the help of community and the healing strength of the sacraments for the sanctification of their lives and relationships.
Once Jesus asked people rhetorically, “What father, what mother, among you, if your child asked for bread, would give them a stone? Neither will your Father in heaven...” Jesus always took the part of those who were unfairly excluded from community, and he always brought them to his table to eat and drink with him. If, on account of hardness of heart, our brothers and sisters in the Anglican Communion insist on excommunication of some of us, then they will have to excommunicate all of us. We will walk apart for a while, rather than turn our backs on our sisters and brothers who are asking for bread, not stone, from the Christian community.
The transfiguration. I associate it with something St. Irenaus wrote: the glory of god is a human being fully alive. Whatever you think about Jesus, you will no doubt agree that this was a human being fully alive. That is why we still speak of him today. And I associate it with something the 20th century writer Thomas Merton observed, emerging from many seasons of contemplation of God: there is no way to tell people they are walking around shining like the sun! Jesus shone like the sun; you too, and I, and all God’s children shine like the sun in the eyes of God and in the eyes of those enlightened by graceful love.