Ninth Sunday after Trinity following the Feast of the Transfiguration

Date:9th August 2009

Preacher: Revd David Carpenter

The Runaway Nun

In the name of God: our wisdom and our truth.

She is former Nun who left her convent in a faith crisis. Tagged the “runaway nun”, the “rebellious ex-Catholic with outspoken opinions”, she would for some years have nothing to do with religion. She says her reaction was so strong that if she saw someone reading a religious book in a train carriage she would have to get up and leave. She has described her earlier writing as ‘Dawkinesque’.

Now some twenty years later she writes that she felt compelled to revise her earlier opinions, and in her latest book, ‘The Case for God, she has this to say, ‘One of the conditions of enlightenment has always been a willingness to let go of what we thought we knew in order to appreciate truths we had never dreamed of. We may have to unlearn a great deal about religion before we can move on to a new understanding’. (Pg. 10 The Case For God - Armstrong)

I’m speaking of the religious commentator and writer Karen Armstrong and these words only allow us a hint, a glimpse of her personal struggle.

I also find In this quotation echoes of my own experience, and the truth that letting go can often be painful.

Letting go, of course, is not always a planned action. Sometimes it comes unbidden as for example in an unexpected death, disability or unemployment. It brings a radical change that can leave you at sea. Some of you may know of this from your own experience, and there will be others who will say that there has been no sense of renewal or rediscovery, only a living of the pain.

Speaking of letting go of what we know or thought we knew and embracing change is all very well and good, but what exactly does it mean?

What is it that I am to let go of?

The answer of course will be different for each of us: as many answers as people who ask the question. But perhaps we could start by abandoning the belief that there is nothing for us to relinquish, nothing about ourselves that needs changing: nothing about our lives or our relationships that we could question. We could even perhaps ponder our reliance upon our own comfortableness and self-assuredness.

In terms of my faith, letting go of God wasn’t actually that difficult, especially when I came to realise that what I was letting go of was largely of my own construction in the first case.  To the God ‘out there’, ‘somewhere other,’ the interventionist God that I had learned about as a child I have had to say goodbye: I find him now on the inside not on the outside and see his face in other people, and it is often a tragic face.

My son’s journey has been a painful one and it has taken him from the Anglican Communion into which he was born to the Roman Catholic Community. Currently he lives alongside a small Orthodox Fellowship at Keswick in Cumbria. When I visit, I join that small group for vespers, and I stand in the tiny attic chapel facing the large wall painted Icon of Christ in Glory with my back to the Transfigured Christ. By my side is the icon of Jesus crucified.

Could the point be more simply and poignant made?

Each of us is called to glory through transfiguration; and the prerequisite for this has to be ‘a willingness to let go of what we thought we knew in order to appreciate truths we had never dreamed of’. But the glory and the transfiguration come only if we are committed to a sacrifice that can be both painful and devastating.

It is perhaps true to say that often we want God-discovery without self-discovery, and the reason for this, is that this self-discovery is painful.

I can’t source the quotation, but I understand that the Archbishop of Canterbury recently commented that we are too concerned about our ‘stuff’ and not enough about holiness. He was, I believe, thinking about the Anglican Communion as a body, but his observations are equally true in the wider aspect of our Christian life.

But back to Vespers in Keswick: there I am challenged to stand in intimacy before the Holy; to come, as I am, but in repentance, to stand with the saints before Glory. ‘Nothing in my hand I bring’, states the hymn. Fundamentally it is about allowing the Holy Glory to transfigure.

The former Archbishop of York, David Hope urges people to seek God’s vision and not to follow their own. He says, ‘We desperately need to recover this vision of the Church which is God’s not ours; where yes, we recognise readily the brokenness and sinfulness of our frail humanity – knowing our need for God – yet, at the same time, rejoicing in the abundant mercy and grace of the God who in Christ has come among us and alongside us; who accepts us just as we are, and whose Holy Spirit is already at work in and through each one of us in this sacramental celebration for transformation and change, the dust of all feebleness, frailty and sinfulness, into the gold of his glory.’   (Pg. 102 HOPE the Archbishop a portrait - Marshall)

To return to Armstrong, she notes that the Aryan tribes that inhabited the Caucasian steppes some 4,500 BC, called their gods ‘the shining ones’ because Spirit shone through them more brightly than through mortal creatures. (Armstrong Op. Cit. Pg. 21)

This is a wonderful analogy to take and use. To understand ourselves as people through whom the divine light can shine. Not just transfiguring ourselves, but to illuminate in such a way that the transfiguring light can light up others. To be the glory of God that allows the transformation of other peoples dust into the gold of his glory.

To bring this into some context: all that I can truly see of God, I see in Jesus. The measure of my own life has to be made in the context of the gold I see in his. The measure of your life has to be by the same yardstick.

I am compelled therefore, to find God in the face of those I meet on a day to day basis. To discover the gold of God’s glory in those with whom I share this human existence.

Church is community: so I would like you consider for a moment, a few things about this place.

Is our little community here a transfiguring community?

Is this a reconciling place?

Ask yourself: Have my words or actions of the last few days or weeks been reconciling ones, or have they sought to perpetuate events, grudges, and personal differences in a way that has hidden the face of God and obstructed his presence and glory for others?

Is it a place that changes dust to the gold of God’s glory?

Somewhere in the honest answer to these questions may lie the clue as to what you have to let go of, what needs changing, what needs to be discovered.

As a text for this sermon I considered using two words from the second reading at Evening Prayer, from Hebrews chapter 12. ‘Consider him’. For if, at the end of it all, when we draw close to Jesus we cannot say that we are desirous to be transfigured and to shine with the glory of God, and if we have not at least striven to have a transfiguring effect for others then we have to ask ourselves what we are about.