a sermon preached by Tony Lorenzen

at First Parish Church in Weston, MA

Sunday, February 26, 2006

I currently spend the middle of the work week serving as Hospice Chaplain for the Gardner Visiting Nursing Association. You don’t need to spend much time doing pastoral care with hospice patients before angels, unseen visitors, and other occurrences that some might file under the heading “paranormal” become a routine part of your job. It is not uncommon for the dying to be escorted out of this existence by loved ones who have gone before them. In fact, the person who leads them home often tells a great deal about who they were and what defined them as a person - what relationships, what values, what spirituality gave meaning to their existence.

I had the great fortune this past summer and again this past fall to take seminars with a Lutheran minister and hospice chaplain, the Rev. Kathleen Rusnack. Her upcoming work, based on some of the workshops she gives on pastoral care for the terminally ill is titled, “Because You’ve Never Died Before” and contains many examples similar to this one she shared with me in a seminar this past summer:

Her husband's hospital bed was downstairs. Her bedroom was upstairs. She said she came down in the morning, leaned over the bed, gave her husband a good morning kiss, but "he could have spit in my face. He looked at me and said, 'You're awfully rude!'"

"So I asked him, 'What are you talking about?' He said, 'Can't you see my father is sitting over there on the sofa? You don't have the decency to say hello?'"

Not knowing about paranormal experiences, she nonetheless did a wonderful thing. She looked over at the sofa, and said to his father, who had been deceased for 20 years, "Hi, Dad."

She looked back at her husband and said, "Honey, what's your father doing here?" He said, "He's come to take me home, but I'd rather stay here with you." So he sent his father away. But two days later, his wife told me, he died when his beloved deceased mother came back to take him home with her.

When I first heard this story from Rev. Rusnack, I had just begun to do some hospice ministry out in the Berkshires during my Clinical Pastoral Education training. Yet as soon as I began doing some hospice ministry in Gardner, I experienced similar stories myself. I was visiting a man in his eighties. He was a Catholic, a World War II veteran, who was surrounded by three walls of family photographs, a huge high definition TV, a video game center that he loved, and who was cared for by a daughter and son-in-law that loved him and doted on him. He spoke to his one living sister via phone often. As he declined he become more agitated and it came out – he was afraid of going to hell. He had been a discipline problem in the service and spent time in “the hoosegow,” as he called it, and during the time he spent recounting his life he started to focus on all the things he’d done wrong, from things his father punished him for to the ways he could have paid more attention to his kids as they grew up. We tried a lot of things. We called in the parish priest for reconciliation. We spoke about God’s forgiveness. Nothing worked. For you see, he was having a visitor. His sister who passed away years before was coming to take him home and he was sure he didn’t want to go, because he was sure, he was going “down the chute”, not “up the stairs.” Now the hospice nurse was dismissing his “visitor” as the reaction to meds and a dying brain. Someone was coming to take him home, and he was scared and didn’t want to go. I told his daughter to start talking to him more about his fears and ask questions about his visitor. As soon as she did, his visitor changed. No longer was he being visited by his sister, but a pretty woman in a blue dress with black hair, and he wasn’t scared of going down the chute any more. He died a few days later.

When his sister came to get him, he couldn’t let go of his fears and he couldn’t go home. When an old Catholic was visited by a woman in a blue dress and black hair, his fears were put to rest and he was ready to let go of this place and go home. Who leads us home is important.

A few weeks after this incident, I visited another patient. This time a woman dying of breast cancer who was also a Catholic. A middle aged woman who by her own account had a rather “checkered past” but who became a social worker, worked at a homeless shelter, went to Mass, volunteered time with just about every good organization in town, seemed to have great relationships with her husband and children, but something was wrong.

“I know God loves me and forgives me for anything I’ve done wrong in my life,” she told me when we met to talk. “It’s just that I don’t see it that way. I never have. I was raised Catholic and all, and it means a lot to me that the priest comes over with communion, but this whole sin thing, I see it different.”

“How do you see it?” I asked her.

“Well,” she said, “I’ve done a lot of really bad things in my life, especially when I was younger – to myself and others. Took a lot of drugs - really unhealthy stuff. I was a mean thing, really hurtful. But I spent a lot of my life helping others, too. I grew up, I was a social worker, worked at the homeless shelter. The way I see it,” she said, “Is that you do some bad and you do some good and for the bad you do, you have to do some good. It’s like, well, Karma. Do you know about that?”

“Yes,” I told her. I know about Karma. And we talked about Karma, from the Sanskrit kri, meaning "to do” and the Pali, meaning action, effect, or destiny. We talked about how Buddhists believe previous actions create one’s present state and how the actions one performs in the present create one’s future state. We spoke about how this Catholic never felt at home exploring the Buddhism she had read about. We only spoke that one time. She died before our next scheduled appointment four days later. Although religiously Catholic, she needed the spiritual validation that is was okay for Buddha to lead her home.

Traditionally, Mark’s account of the transfiguration is seen as an anticipation of the second coming of Jesus and a reminder that Jesus is the Son of God, Mark having already presented and identified Jesus as the Christ in the previous chapter (8:29). Elijah is presented as a forerunner representing John the Baptist and Moses the first law giver, preceding Jesus’ New Testatment.

When I hear the story of transfiguration of Jesus, I hear the story of religious transformation and a story about being led home. I hear the story this way because through my hospice experience I have come to appreciate that we all have transfiguration moments whether we realize them or not, moments that transform and transfigure our religious awareness and imagination; moments that form the religious and spiritual lens through which we see the world and our place in it, and thus through which we see the tale of our own lives. Moments, that in the end, help decide who and what will lead us home. When I read the transfiguration story, I see it linked to the resurrection story through the non-canonical Gospel of Peter and I see a story about how someone’s life is framed by who leads you home.

We read in the canonical Gospels that Judas betrays Jesus, that Jesus’ friends can’t stay awake and pray with him, and that Peter denies Jesus while he is on trial. We also read that at his death and burial, the men around him virtually disappear. The beloved disciple appears at the foot of the cross in John, and Joseph of Arimathea asks for the body, but only Mary Magdalene appears in all the canonical resurrection accounts, being joined by the other Mary in Matthew, Mary the Mother of James and Solome in Mark, and Joanna and Mary in Luke. Mary Magdalene runs to get Peter in John after the fact.

Yet, the non-canonical Gospel of Peter has different witnesses to the resurrection. In the Gospel of Peter, “Two men come down from heaven in a great brightness,” and Jesus is followed out of the burial place by his cross. These two shining, illuminated male figures resemble the figures of Elijah and Moses from the Transfiguration scene. We are defined by who leads us home.

The transfiguration is also a defining moment for the three disciples who follow Jesus up the mountain. Bathed in that light, seeing their teacher in the company of Elijah and Moses, not only is Jesus transfigured, but they – the witnesses - must come away transformed. It is a defining moment all around.

Br. Thomas Dayananda and Sr. Mary Athena of the Gnostic Center in their Pastoral Letter on (what they celebrate as) the feast of the transfiguration (on August 6 this past August 2005) note that:

Peter… has no clue as to the significance of what he has witnessed. Rather than asking, "How do I also attain to this experience?" he says "Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah." Rather than seeking to also reveal the light within, he wanted to construct religious structures to honor figures from the past.

Demonstrations of the Uncreated Light should lead us to inquire ‘What can I do to experience this?’[some] say that this experience is beyond us and the best we can do is build a church building to commemorate what someone else experienced.”

A transfiguring or transforming moment of the spirit is something intrinsic to being human and we should be seeking out such experiences. We should not be content to be left at the bottom of the mountain, like the other disciples, or building monuments to someone else’s experience.

Ultimately, “religion is about transfiguration and transformation,” writes noted religious scholar Karen Armstrong. “By ritual and ethical practice we become fundamentally different. Religion is not about preparing for …Heaven; it is also about living a fully human life in this world…Like any other religious truth, immortality must become a present reality. It is a liberation from the constraints of time and space, and from the limitations of our narrow horizons. It involves a profound realization that the deepest core of our being is inseparable from what has been called God, nirvana, Brahman or Tao.”

Authentic spiritual experiences genuinely transfigure and transform us. We are never the same afterwards. A transforming spiritual experience can be life changing, a demarcation point in our pilgrim journey from birth to death. It is often a grounding event; something that gives us insight into who we really are; something that opens up a new way of looking at the world, our life and ourselves. Aftward, in times of stress or indecision or confusion, we return to the insight or path opened up for us at this time. The transfiguring or transforming experience serves as an inner home base. A beacon that guides us through the storms of life and guides us home at life’s end.

Sometimes it is difficult to acknowledge that one’s beacon has changed, that a transformation has occurred. Maybe two shining figures didn’t appear to you, maybe a chariot of fire or a burning bush didn’t appear. Maybe you didn’t have to sit under the Bodhi tree until transfiguration and nirvana happened. But then a significant event happens – you get in an accident, a divorce, you become ill – and you notice that the light you had been following seems to be leading to a rocky passage and your ship feels in danger and almost without noticing it you realize you are following another beacon through the rough seas. I think this is the story of many Unitarian Universalists for whom the religion or the religious stories of our childhood were not enough or weren’t the beacon that would get us home.

Even here at First Parish Church in Weston where we tell the Biblical story and Jesus is a beacon that guides us, as Unitarian Universalists we also recognize there are other beacons that can lead one home. Sometimes we need a transforming moment in order to see our beacon in a new and affirming way.

When Peter, James and John witness the transfiguration of Jesus, I like to believe it was a transforming encounter for them in that they were having a profound experience of realization and liberation connected to their friend and teacher. And that they could seek the light within themselves and be people who could help others find the light in their own hearts. This is no easy task. When we see Jesus illuminated in the transfiguration, or Elijah’s chariot of fire, it creates an image that seems somehow beyond us, if not a bit paranormal. I recall my hospice patient, searching through her Catholic Christian upbringing for a Buddhist version of Karma because it was the light she needed to be transfigured and transformed to be led home.

Making of yourself a light is not simple. As Mary Oliver writes in her poem, The Buddha’s Last Instruction

"Make of yourself a light"

said the Buddha,

before he died.

An old man, he lay down

between two sala trees,

and he might have said anything,

knowing it was his final hour.

The light burns upward,

it thickens and settles over the fields.

Around him, the villagers gathered

and stretched forward to listen.

No doubt he thought of everything

that had happened in his difficult life.

Slowly, beneath the branches,

he raised his head.

He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.

I imagine that Jesus must have often felt like the Buddha in this poem. Looking into the faces of frightened crowds and frightened questioning disciples – trying to be a light unto them. All of us, I think, can place ourselves in that frightened crowd – for we have all been there, some of us may be there now. People looking for who and what will guide us home to religious transformation and transfiguration. And if we have had a religious or spiritual transformation, we wonder – will it be enough when it comes time to leave this world? Enough to lead us home?

I hope that we can encounter a transfigured Jesus in this way: that we can see in Jesus some we can follow home, the way Jesus followed Elijah and Moses. Not blind followers, but fellow travelers who can mark out a path for those who came after us, fellow pilgrims on a journey of spiritual transformation, until we go home in chariots of fire to whatever heaven awaits.