WE FACE THAT time of year when, liturgically, we begin to move from light to darkness, even though the heavens have it the other way round — each day now is longer than the one before it. My husband pointed out to me last Sunday that we have another 90 minutes of daylight than we did at the turn of the sun towards the warm months. (Actually, it’s the angle that the sun’s rays hit the earth which we experience as both brighter and warmer, but that is another digression).
But liturgically, the way we Episcopalians worship, the church moves from the light of the Transfiguration on the last Sunday of the Epiphany to the deepest darkness of Ash Wednesday in just half a week.
We begin next week celebrating the moment in which Jesus took Peter and John and James, long-term disciples of his to “a high mountain” where his clothes begin to shine whiter than the sun, and Moses and Elijah appeared with him, all shining. We’re told in Mark’s Gospel account that Jesus’ clothing was, as modern advertisers have put it, “whiter than white.” We’re told that “Jesus’s ‘clothes became dazzling white, such as no fuller on earth could bleach them’.”
We’re talking so white that what the disciples saw was technologically impossible in its day.
And that’s the end of the Christmas cycle, from Advent, when we start to anticipate Christmas’ arrival, to the Twelve Days themselves, to this last Sunday of that cycle, Transfiguration Sunday, when Christ is connected both to the Hebrew Scriptures through the figures of Moses and Elijah (that is, Law and Prophets) and to a higher understanding of Christ that is more common to the Gospel of John than it is to Luke, an account which includes the miracles but stresses Jesus’ own humanity. This is one of the points that the heavenly breaks through into our more mundane but still loved world.
That’s why the author of Luke has Peter say “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah” — not knowing what he said. First, that’s just Peter: he swings between an absolutely crystal-clear theological, faith-based understanding of Christ’s mission (“Lord, you are the Christ, the Messiah”) just six days before to this moment, when he doesn’t even know what he’s talking about: all three synoptic Gospels (those that are based on one another, unlike John, the last to come) agree that Peter is just gassing on because he is terrified. Being Peter, even though he doesn’t know what to say, he decides to talk anyway. He fills that space with nothing. Surely, he isn’t suggesting that Christ live up there with Moses and Elijah; he has no plan whatsoever, he’s merely overwhelmed. And then God once again enters the picture: “While [Peter] was saying this, a cloud came and overshadowed them; and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!”
This is not a place where humans can live permanently, and Jesus has his own work to do. So — all this on a high mountain top. For first century listeners, this would have been a way of saying that the three disciples were in a holy place, but we’re made to be in this world, if not of it. We have our work, too, it turns out.
So then “in the twinkling of an eye,” we find ourselves in yet another holy place on Wednesday. It’s Ash Wednesday, the day in which we receive ashes on our foreheads while we hear “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Remember, we’re told, you’re mortal, you will die. It’s the day we remember that we sin and that while we are forgiven of those sins, nonetheless we have sinned and no doubt, will continue to sin. That’s human nature. If we were on a high mountain top before, suddenly we are in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. As the prayer of the day for Ash Wednesday says:
Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing you have made and forgive the sins of all who are penitent: Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we, worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of you, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
This is not the kind of language we’re used to today — we don’t tend to lament sins and hardly ever “acknowledge our wretchedness.”
This is what we call heightened language, which tends to help us focus on the text as text, frankly, to make us pay attention. It’s reminiscent, at least to my ear, of the confession from our Rite 1, which uses the language of the 16th century: “We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we from time to time most grievously have committed, by thought, word, and deed, against thy divine Majesty, provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us.” Now that is language meant to draw our focus to our sins, but also to promise “perfect remission and forgiveness…”
As Psalm 51 assures us, the Psalm appointed for that day, “Purge me from my sin, and I shall be pure; / wash me from my sin, and I shall be clean indeed.” Telling us twice that way balances an earlier verse that also uses parallelism: “Against you only have I sinned / and done what is evil in your sight.”
As my Lutheran colleagues would remind me, Law first, then Gospel. That’s why Easter is preceded by Lent. First confront us with what we have done, and how we have failed. Then assure us that we are still forgiven. That harsh language has its purpose: “Remember, we are dust, and to dust we shall return.” We are deep in the valley of our sin, all of us, but we “shall be clean, indeed.”
And that assurance starts our Easter journey to Alleluia and all of Easter till Christ the King, and the end not only of the Easter season but of the Church Year itself as we move again between darkness and light, reflecting the reality of our humanity.
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Issues of Faith is a rotating column by religious leaders on the North Olympic Peninsula. The Rev. Dr. Keith Dorwick is a deacon resident in the Episcopal Diocese of Olympia.
