Transfiguration – Peculiar Faith

“My Name Means Freedom”

Human experience rarely remains neatly contained in tidy boxes. Our emotions blur and bleed into each other, sometimes defying our ability to define them with any precision. I am often struck, for example, by the poignancy of beauty, as well as the luminous edges of pain. While tempted to separate and distinguish such things, I try to pay careful attention when beauty and pain seem inextricably bound together.

Emotional complexity punctuated nearly every moment on my recent trip to southern Africa, where I visited five countries over two weeks as I hoped to gain some fresh insights into the work of racial justice and ecological healing, especially how to integrate these modes of engagement more effectively. I could not have asked for a better encounter to begin that adventure than the one that capped the very first day.

After visiting the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Johannesburg, I was relaxing with a glass of wine at the hotel bar. The bartender was young, maybe in his late twenties, and his skin was a deep, beautiful black color, like midnight—actually, more like the deepest, darkest blue of Lake Michigan on a moonless night.

His name, he said, is Nkululeku, a Zulu word that means “freedom.” When he told me that—when he said “My name means freedom”—his face lit up, nearly shining, truly transfigured.

Perhaps you’ve seen this happen to a human face when someone speaks a clear and riveting truth, or because of the tender contours of the occasion, or perhaps the depth and richness of character in the encounter itself; a face can shine.

There I stood, a white man of European descent, whose ancestors had stolen so much of the freedom of that Black man’s ancestors, and not so terribly long ago.

My name means freedom, he said.

Just then, not only his face but the space between us and the air around us became radiant with what I can only call “divine glory.” I can’t possibly know whether any of this occurred to him, but I want to trust that for both of us that moment offered at least a glimpse, just a little taste of what it means to launch along a road toward healing and reconciliation after a long, traumatic history of injustice and violence.

“My name means freedom,” he said. And I nearly burst into tears.

Yesterday was the last Sunday after the Epiphany, which sits on the edge of Lent, and most churches always hear from one of the Gospel accounts of what’s called the “transfiguration” of Jesus. This is a pivot point in the gospel narratives, literally a “mountaintop experience” when Jesus radiates divine glory—the “appearance of his face changed,” Luke says (9:29), his face “shone like the sun,” Matthew says (17:2), and as many of us heard from Mark yesterday, his garments became radiant (9:3).

“The Transfiguration,” Augustin Kolawole Olayinka

This story is a pivot point for each of these gospel writers as each of them frames this moment with what Jesus will soon face in Jerusalem—betrayal, suffering, and death. Beauty and pain are bound together in this story, just as they are in the iconic story from the Hebrew Bible the lectionary also gave us yesterday—grief and glory intermingle as the prophet Elijah is caught up in a heavenly chariot of fire leaving behind his dear friend and protégé Elisha.

It’s a pivot point on the liturgical calendar as well. The story of transfiguration ushers us into the week with Ash Wednesday in it, and we recall this mountaintop glory at the beginning of the very same week when ashes will appear on our foreheads, reminding us that we will one day die.

Both biblically and liturgically the last Sunday after the Epiphany presents a peculiar confluence of beauty and pain—which is itself an epiphany. The intermingling of glory and suffering resides at the very heart of Christian faith, and the Gospel writers won’t let us avoid it, at least not for long. I don’t mean that we just happen to hear about the beauty of transfiguration and the pain of crucifixion on the same day, as if this were an accidental coincidence. More pointedly and more severely, the Christian Gospel presents these as inseparably linked.

Like many others, I have struggled for many years with the prominence of sacrifice and suffering in Christian faith, perhaps especially when these are framed with glory. And yet, for at least one, brief shining moment of encounter with Nkululeku—a young South African Black man whose name means freedom—I suddenly and rather surprisingly realized how deeply I longed for racial healing and then still more, how much I would gladly sacrifice for the sake of justice.

If this can be true for us, if mortal, finite human beings can long for new life, and be willing to give much, maybe even all, for the sake of abundant life, then surely this is true for the infinite mystery of Love we call God—the God of Jesus who would give anything and everything for healing and wholeness and flourishing life, and this is indeed glorious to ponder!

Poised as we now are on the brink of Lent once again, I feel some urgency to consider carefully how to spend my time, my energy, and my resources in this season. The world is desperate for more than just my usual half-hearted attempts to give up chocolate. To be clear, spiritual disciplines of relinquishment do offer great value, but not for the sake of sacrifice alone, as if sacrifice itself were a good thing. Surely spiritual disciplines matter most when they guide us toward that abundant life God intends for the whole creation.

Nkululeku inspired me to imagine what a Lenten season might look like if it were devoted to freedom—our own and for others. This would retrieve a compelling practice from the earliest Christian traditions that used “freedom” and “salvation” interchangeably, and it seems high time to resurrect that powerful practice (pun intended).

How, for example, can we more intentionally promote freedom from the economic hierarchies that turn living beings into commodities, whether as human slaves or poached ivory from elephants?

Where we do we still need freedom from colonial classification schemes that make the color of our skin, or whom we choose to love, or the species into which we just happen to be born the basis of our value?

What can we do to facilitate a deeper freedom from the dynamics of cultural shame that keep so many trapped in unseen prisons of loneliness and a relentless, quiet despair?

Ash Wednesday will remind us that we are made from dust and that we shall return to dust, so perhaps we can help each other likewise remember the precious freedom Jesus offers from the fear of death.

That fear—and all the anxiety that attaches to our own mortality—that fear expresses itself in so many destructive ways, both individually and socially, from an epidemic of opioid addiction to the relentless burning of fossil fuels.

As God’s own beloved, we are held and embraced by God forever. This matters more than I usually imagine or can bear to conceive. I don’t know why just yet, but this conviction of God’s embrace deepened dramatically as I stood on a southern African savannah with elephants and buffalo and zebras and giraffes. As tears streamed down my face as I watched the sun set behind rolling hills and African teak trees, I knew—I just knew with unshakable certainty—that we never have to fear death again, not ever.

Freedom from death’s terror gives us the freedom to live fully, and then to offer even our very lives for the sake of a world of peace with justice.

Every year the story of transfiguration launches us toward Lent. In this story, the Jesus who is about to suffer and die is also the Jesus who shines with divine glory. A voice comes from Heaven in this story and calls this Jesus “the Beloved.”

I understood this story better when a young South African man said to me, “My name means freedom.”

A Transfigured (Black) Jesus and a Eucharistic Solidarity

As Black History Month draws to a close, Women’s History Month begins this week on March 1. This moment on the calendar invites deeper reflection on the potent intersection of race and gender, and how that kind of reflection might shape the season of Lent, which also begins in this coming week.

To do that work—especially as a white man—I’m particularly grateful for the insights of M. Shawn Copeland, an American womanist and Black Catholic theologian who taught for many years at Boston College. She helped me think differently about a foundational question in Christian theology: what does it mean to be human in relation to God? How one answers that question shapes so much else of Christian faith and practice.

For many centuries, the European (white) male was considered the “standard issue” human and thus the primary reference point for answering that key theological question. The whiteness of Jesus himself became a question in new ways during the 1960s, which Copeland writes about in relation to the (Black) Jesus of Detroit.

Among the many moments of Black American history that white people (among others!) should not forget, Copeland draws our attention to the “rebellion” of 1967 not far from where I currently live. The following is her synopsis of that moment and the blackness of Jesus that it surfaced (taken from her essay on the Black Jesus in the collection edited by George Yancy, Christology and Whiteness: What Would Jesus Do?):

“In the early morning hours of July 23, 1967, a routine police vice-squad raid on an after-hours drinking club in a predominantly black neighborhood of Detroit, Michigan, escalated into one of the most furious racial rebellions in modern times. Five days later 43 persons were dead, more than 450 injured, more than 7,200 arrested, and more than 2,000 buildings destroyed.

“A little-known, yet highly symbolic, incident during those days involved a statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on the grounds of the major seminary of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese. At the intersection of West Chicago Boulevard and Linwood Avenue, two blocks west of the site of the rebellion, stands a statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which looked out on a then increasingly black neighborhood, even as the seminary faculty and students remained predominantly white.

“On the second day of the disturbance, an African American housepainter reportedly applied black paint to the hands, feet, and face of the statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. At least twice, the color was removed, but black paint prevailed and, over the past four decades, the seminary has kept it fresh. In an interview during a 40th anniversary commemoration of the rebellion, the Assistant Dean of Sacred Heart Seminary’s Institute for Ministry, John Lajiness, said, ‘the City really has no other positive visible symbol like it. The painted statue speaks less of violence and more of the internal struggle for identity and the human tension which, intentionally or not, bled into making this statue an icon.’”

“Black Jesus” at Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit

If a white man cannot represent the sacred heart of Jesus (much less in marble), then the European male certainly cannot stand as the only, or even the primary answer to the question of what it means to be human. The (brown and Middle Eastern) body of Jesus resides at the center of the Gospel, Copeland reminds us, a body that was tortured and killed by the Roman Empire and raised to new life by God. To understand and embrace such a Gospel, especially given the social, economic, and political history of Western society, Copeland argues that women of color belong at the center of our theological work.

I’m not entirely sure what the consequences of that claim are for how I live, but I am convinced of how crucial it is that I keep reflecting on it and shaping my life because of it. Her book—Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being—helped convince me of this, and as Lent begins, I’m especially mindful of her work on the Eucharist.

Copeland recalls the gruesome history of lynching in the United States and how it prompted the same kind of terror as crucifixion did in the first century. Rather than avoiding that painful history, or feeling a vague sense of guilt about it (especially as white people), Copeland urges a practice of “divine solidarity.” To stand with and for those who are poor, outcast, and oppressed is to bear witness to the Gospel hope for a new world, a hope that shapes Eucharistic worship in Christian communities. Copeland expresses this in a powerful way:

“A Christian practice of solidarity denotes the humble and complete orientation of ourselves before the lynched Jesus, whose shadow falls across the table of our sacramental meal. In his raised body, a compassionate God interrupts the structures of death and sin, of violation and oppression. A divine practice of solidarity sets the dynamics of love against the dynamics of domination—recreating and regenerating the world, offering us a new way of being in relation to God, to others, to self” (Enfleshing Freedom, p. 126).

Perhaps one of the ways I can take Copeland’s urgent call for solidarity to heart is to resist how I usually imagine the transfigured Jesus—with a shiny white face. As I prepare to preach tomorrow on the Transfiguration, a story often told on the last Sunday after the Epiphany, I’ll keep that Black Jesus of Detroit in mind instead, and even more as we move into the season of Lent.

Following Jesus on the road toward the Cross can itself be an act of solidarity if, as Copeland would urge, we see in him all the countless women of color strewn through so many forgotten stories of American history. Remembering them, even though we cannot now know their names, could contribute to how a “compassionate God interrupts the structures of death and sin.”

May that be the hope that breaks open an Easter dawn.

Transfigured Love in the Nuclear Age

The contrast could not be starker: on the one hand, a moment of transfigured splendor on a mountaintop, and on the other, a moment of unimaginable destruction and annihilation. I’m referring first to the story of the transfiguration of Jesus, witnessed by Peter, James, and John; and then second, to the detonation of the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima. I’m pairing these because of our calendars: today is a “Feast of our Lord” when we celebrate the Transfiguration of Jesus; it is also the anniversary of the first atomic weapon used in wartime.

Yes, the contrast is stark, but the similarities are also striking: both of these commemorations include a brilliant, blinding flash of light. In Matthew’s account, Jesus was “transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white” (17:2). Horrifically, we could say the same thing about the skies above Hiroshima seventy-six years ago today. Not long after becoming an Episcopalian, when I was learning about the liturgical calendar and the rhythm of common prayer, I was dismayed when I realized this confluence on the calendar—how could we possibly celebrate that wonderful Gospel story on a day with such a terrible wartime history?

Over the years since then I have come to understand that question differently as I realized that religion is not supposed to be kept “pure and untainted” by the world. To the contrary, as people of faith we’re supposed to “get our hands dirty” as we show up in the public square and at city hall and wherever power is marshalled for hate and violence rather than love and peace. Religion that’s kept separate from the world is not a religion rooted in the incarnation of the divine word, whose transfigured splendor is meant to inspire and illuminate our participation in God’s own mission of transformation in the world around us.

So the question is how we live our faith in the world, not whether we do, and that will always mean engaging faithfully with politics. I do not mean partisanship—the politics of one party over another. I mean politics in the broadest sense, which is what all of us do every day as we interact and relate with each other and the communities around us for the sake of shared interests and the common good, and ultimately for the thriving and flourishing of God’s whole creation.

The gospel writers invited this kind of analysis in their accounts of the Transfiguration, which functions as a pivot point in their storytelling. As soon as Jesus is transfigured and comes down from the mountain, he “sets his face to go toward Jerusalem,” as Luke put it (9:51), to that city where imperial politics and institutional religion were deeply entangled.

“Entangled”? How about testing the first atomic bomb at a place called “Trinity”?

Roughly three weeks before the detonation over Hiroshima, the technology was tested at a site in New Mexico with the code name “Trinity.” J. Robert Oppenheimer, the lead scientist for the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb, was the one to name that site. He was inspired to do so by a sixteenth century poem by John Donne, including these lines:

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

Oppenheimer was eventually horrified by the weapon he had helped to create and lived with nearly unbearable regret. As he would later recall, as he witnessed the first explosive test, he thought of a famous line from the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

The explosive force of an atomic detonation is truly overwhelming and gruesomely destructive. Nearly everyone knows this, but what the world does not appreciate nearly as much is the far greater power of love. I don’t say this sentimentally, as if a loving feeling conveyed such energy. I mean instead the kind of love that speaks the truth, heals wounds, confronts injustice, and breaks down even the longest-standing barriers to harmony and peace.

So on this day, the Feast of the Transfiguration, a day that coincides with atomic destruction, offers a compelling invitation to ponder together what kind of power we wish to release into the world.

As I reflect on these powerful intersections, I’m reminded of another writer, a scientist, theologian, and poet of the early twentieth century, Teilhard de Chardin. He was convinced that in this dynamic, ever-evolving universe, God and humanity working together would one day transform—let’s just say transfigure—the world with love. May we remember that hope and confidence with the words Teilhard himself wrote:

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, humanity will have discovered fire.