Year B
2 Kings 2:1-12
Psalm 50:1-6
2 Corinthians 4:3-6
Mark 9:2-9

May the words of my mouth… O God… speak your Truth…

Today is the Feast of St. Valentine…  yes…  Valentine’s Day and Transfiguration Sunday too… and as I sat at my desk a few days ago…  writing this sermon…  I wondered about what kind of connection there might be…  and although few Episcopalians…  and probably fewer Lutherans…  observe the Feast of St. Valentine…  quite a few of us will give and receive candy…  and perhaps flowers or an orchid today…  so who was St. Valentine…  

Well…  according to an article posted on Trinity Wall Street’s website…  it’s a little hazy…  he may have been more than one person…  there’s a Valentine who was a Roman priest and physician…  and who was killed by Emperor Claudius II for marrying Christian couples…  there was also a Valentine who was the Italian Bishop of Terni…  he was martyred probably sometime around 270 AD…  though other reports date his death at 267, 270, 273, 280, and 300 AD… the priest and the bishop may have been the same person who was executed for trying to convert the emperor…  or aiding persecuted Christians…  or refusing to sacrifice to pagan gods…

Pope Gelasius officially dedicated February 14th to St. Valentine in 496…  and there are a couple of possible reasons for that date…  Valentine may have been killed on February 14…  or he may have been buried then…

It’s also possible today’s date was chosen in an attempt to Christianize the pagan fertility feast of Lupercalia…  which took place around that time…  and involved sacrifices…  drinking…  and other kinds of revelry…  and this fertility rite may explain why Valentine’s Day is associated with romantic love…  because there’s also a legend that Valentine fell in love with the blind daughter of his jailer…  or judge…  depending on the source…  and he supposedly signed his letter to her…  from your Valentine…  and miraculously…  her sight was restored… 

Valentine’s Day also falls near the Norman celebration of Galatin’s Day…  and Galatin means “lover of women”…  and people may have just gotten confused at some point…  

But while one story about Valentine after another may have been layered on top of each other…  there really was a Valentine…  archeologists have found a Roman catacomb and church dedicated to him… and in addition to being the supposed reason for all those chocolate hearts and roses…  Valentine is also the patron saint of beekeepers…  engaged couples…  happy marriages…  young people…  travelers…  greetings… epilepsy…  and fainting…  

I share all of this about Valentine…  because while some of the details may be murky…  while some of them may be more legend than history…  there is a golden thread which connects them all…  and that golden thread is love…

Transfiguration functions as bridge between the season of Epiphany…  and Lent… remember…  the season began on January 6th with the story of the Magi…  and the light giving star that led them to the One Light who enlightens everyone…  and this Season of Light now ends with Elijah going up into heaven surrounded by the light from a fiery chariot…  and the Psalm proclaims that God shines forth in glory…  with St. Paul speaking of God…  the caller of light from darkness…  giving us the light to know God in the face of Jesus…  and in the Gospel where Jesus’ garments shine with a brightness no detergent can deliver…

And let’s remember that in Exodus 34:29…  the Israelites encountered the unveiled Moses… whose face shone with God’s effulgent light… Transfiguration is one of the Epiphanies…  it’s the last epiphany before we enter the desert of Lent…  but its light reassures us…  that light will come again…  

Moses and Elijah lived more than 400 years apart… Moses was associated with Law…  Elijah…  with prophecy…  Moses’ Law was more objective…  Elijah’s prophecy more subjective…  Moses…  the rational mind…  Elijah…  the intuitive heart…  the Law was more external…  prophecy was more internal…  the mind and the heart…

The Law could be argued and interpreted…  but God’s prophetic voice…  just was…  but when the Law is interpreted…  it must be interpreted by a prophetic heart…  as Solomon did…  just as in the three-legged stool…  where scripture and tradition are mediated by reason…  just as in politics…  where we must be able to perceive the signs of the times… and in our reading from 2Kings…  Elijah…  taken up to heaven…  surrounded by fire…  which in the Hebrew…  represents both judgment and cleansing…  like the refiner’s fire which discerns and removes anything which is in opposition to God’s will for us…

In Numbers 27:22-23…  near the end of his life…  Moses…  in front of Eleazar the priest…  and the whole congregation…  laid his hands on Joshua and commissioned him…  passed his mantle on to him… in our reading from 2Kings…  Elijah is taken up into heaven…  but in v. 13…  the verse immediately after our reading ends…  Elisha picked up the mantle that had fallen from Elijah…  and took it on…

In the first Temple… destroyed during the Babylonian Exile…  God’s shekinah…  the glory of the divine presence…  represented as light and interpreted symbolically as a divine feminine aspect…  God’s shekinah persisted in a cloud above the Mercy Seat in the Holy of Holies…  but at the time of the Transfiguration…  when God’s shekinah was said to be absent from the Second Temple’s Mercy Seat… we encounter God’s shekinah making the light of Christ dazzling and blinding…] and when the cloud which overshadowed all six of them disappeared…  the Law of Moses and the prophecy of Elijah were absent too…  I wonder if this is scripture’s way of telling us that law and prophecy were already established and perfectly integrated in Jesus’ mind and heart…

Bp. Satterlee puts it this way…  God is embodied and revealed in Jesus…  and Jesus is God embodied… and who reveals God…  so as we go looking for God…  we find God on the Cross…  in hospital rooms…  among health care workers… in the worst places of the world…  but God is not found as much when we run back to Temples…  and deny the realities of the world…

Like the narrative I shared about St. Valentine…  we can all parse the details…  of almost any account…  to fit the narrative that best suits our purposes…  and perhaps the greatest sin we can commit is our ability to rationalize anything to ourselves…  now I’m about the farthest thing from a Constitutional lawyer that there is…  but if we consider the Impeachment trial that just ended…  and in spite of any moral outrage we may feel… it’s possible to interpret the Constitution… to say that in this particular…  specific set of circumstances…  the Constitution didn’t allow the former President to be impeached and convicted…  or it did… and we will live with the consequences of that interpretation…

But I heard something that caught my attention…  that this trial says almost nothing about who the former president is…  and it says almost everything about who we are…  and who we are called to become…  to consider not only the Law that’s written in books and that’s interpreted by our minds…  but to consider the prophet’s Law that’s written on our hearts…  and if…  in the Transfiguration…  all we focus on…  is the blinding light that shines from Jesus…  then we’re abdicating God’s call for us to develop that same light within ourselves…

The gift of Transfiguration…  is that God’s light shines in our hearts…  the gift of Transfiguration…  is that we too possess the light of Christ…  

As Thomas Merton wrote…  At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion…  a point of pure truth…  a point or spark which belongs entirely to God…  which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will…  this little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us…  it is like a pure diamond…  blazing with the invisible light of heaven… 

And that light contains both Law and Prophets…  both mind and heart…  we can be transfigured to love as God’s loves… God calls us to become so infused with this Light that we radiate our own light…  and we do this…  not by telling ourselves over and over again how unworthy we are…  but by exercising greater compassion…  forgiveness…  grace…  and love…  so we can proclaim ourselves less and less…  and hear God’s voice…  as Peter and James and John did…  and as we proclaim Jesus more and more…  so that whatever kind of darkness we encounter…  in Lent or beyond…  we can be led by the light…  and love…  of the Gospel…