A sermon preached by Canon Paul Oestreicher
at St. Peter’s Church, Wellington on 6 August 2023
May what I say and what you hear reflect the heart and mind of Jesus who chooses us as his friends. Amen.
We are going this morning on a long, long journey. We will still be the people of St. Peter’s. But not only that. We will use our imagination to its limits. We will journey to heaven and back to this place — and then we will travel to hell and still come back to ourselves.
Every religion wants to celebrate. And so do we. This is a celebration of the feast of Transfiguration. I would not be surprised if some of you—maybe all of you—haven’t a clue what this is all about. Because the church has actually kept it at arm’s length. We celebrate births at Christmas, death and life beyond this at Easter. At Pentecost, we celebrate the presence of the Spirit of God in our midst. And then Transfiguration, where does it fit? It doesn’t. It could be anywhere in the New Testament, because it’s not part of the history. It is about spiritual poetry. The artists can make a lot of it. They have painted marvelous icons of Transfiguration. It requires huge imagination to get our minds and our hearts around it. So let us go with Jesus into the real celebration of nothing less than heaven.
Jesus chooses just three of his close friends, Peter, John, and James and says to them, “Come with me, climb this high mountain.” And they haven’t a clue what’s going to happen. So they climb the Mount of Transfiguration. And when Jesus gets there, he meets old friends. He meets Moses and Elijah the prophet of ancient Israel. Know this isn’t history. This is spiritual poetry. And Jesus himself is transformed. Surrounded by luminous light and light so bright that it shines like a 1000s Suns. And the three friends of Jesus are totally confused. They are in a cloud of unknowing. They fall down with fear at what’s happening. It’s totally extra ordinary. It’s another world to which Jesus has just chosen three to go with him to experience what we don’t really have words for. But it’s marvelous. It’s creative. It’s something that the artists can deal with. Can paint wonderful icons of it, and there are many of them. And we are left wondering. They have to come down from the mountain to reality. And they do. And as they come down a voice from Heavens says, “This is my beloved Son, my chosen. Listen to him.”
Listening to him is really the only reason why we should be in this place at St. Peter’s. What does he say to us? He says to us, “Don’t be afraid, little flock. It is my Father’s pleasure to give you the kingdom.” That’s what it’s all about. Journey into a heaven we cannot really imagine. But we are challenged to do just that. And to hear this Jesus guiding us on our paths.
But now I challenge you to leave St. Peter’s. I challenge you to go to your local cinema. And to watch a film simply, yes, simply called Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer, one of the great nuclear physicists of the 20th century, a great scientist. And he set out with a team of other scientists in the quest of creating a weapon that would win and end the Second World War. They were fighting against time. But they just made it. They went into the desert, the desert of New Mexico having worked and experimented and finished up with this weapon, which had never been used. They exploded it in the desert. It was a terrifying experience. And then they had done their work. Or at any rate part of it. The politicians then picked up their work and said, “You have done what we asked you. We will now act on it.” And they did. They sent one crew on an American bomber to take this fearsome weapon to the Japanese city of Hiroshima. And on this day, in the year 1945, on this sixth of August, in the middle of the morning, they dropped the first atomic bomb in history in a split second, a terrifying blast, brighter than 1000 suns like at the top of the mountain, and yet so terribly different. And in that split second, something like 100,000 children, women, and men, and the city in which they lived, was turned to ashes.
But science has no boundaries. So they went on experimenting and testing more. Testing them in the Australian desert, in the South Pacific, to create not just another atom bomb, but this time a hydrogen bomb, infinitely more terrible in his destructive power that is Hell. On. Earth. A human creation using the science of creation, to destroy creation. All on the feast on the feast of Transfiguration. Jesus seen in all his glory, and Jesus going with us to hell—we say it actually, when we recite the Creed, that’s the reality of our life.
In the twilight zone, between heaven and hell, this life is a bit of both a bit of heaven in each of us and a bit of hell in each of us and we live in between in a timezone before the ultimate coming of the kingdom. No we do not understand. But if we listen to the chosen of God, to this simple Jesus—this carpenter from Nazareth, this man among his fellow humans—and he can teach us about what he called the kingdom. That Kingdom is in fragments already present here now, but yet to be fulfilled. The journey to Heaven is offered on this feast of which the church sadly makes very little of. And on that very day, the hell that destroyed and may go on destroying, if we do not take peace, the peace of Christ seriously and say no to the inventions that we can make. But having made them, we can unmake them and we can prepare. Prepare for the kingdom and be part of it.
The Privilege is endless. The joy is endless. The grief is endless. No, it isn’t endless, but it will end in the triumph of love. For a moment, a final moment of silence. Imagine the brightness, the luminous glory of God and that very glory used to wipe out our fellow human beings.
Lord, have mercy.
Christ, have mercy.
Lord, have mercy.
Amen.
And now I’m going to ask you to get up from your seats and join Jean and all the rest of us in blessing the icons that are symbols of what we are here for, to celebrate Eucharist, to celebrate Thanksgiving, to celebrate Jesus presiding at this Eucharist and at every Eucharist. But before he does that, Jesus, our servant, washes his disciples feet, washes our feet, as he challenges us to serve each other. So get up from your seats and come and crowd into the sanctuary here, right up to the end of the church, where the icons that are going to be blessed now have found a place for the future. Come and join us.
