In the popular series of books centered on Harry Potter and his fellow students of magic at the Hogwarts School, Professor Minerva McGonagall is professor of transfiguration – the art of turning an object into something it is not. In author J.K. Rowling’s fanciful world, with just the right application of incantation and wizardly concentration, a desk can be turned into pig, a teapot into tortoise, or even a misbehaving student into a rather abashed ferret.
      But alas, even under Professor McGonagall’s watchful eye and pointed instruction, things do not always go as intended by the practitioners of transfiguration: a mouse turned into a snuff box retains its twitching whiskers; a hedgehog only partially completes its change into a pincushion and scuttles away at the sight of a pin; or a student misdirects a spell and transforms his unsuspecting classmate into a startled badger.
      The Christian concept of transfiguration, which predates that of J.K. Rowling’s by two millennia, is something quite different. As depicted in our Gospel reading this morning, transfiguration is not the application of intricate methods and precise thinking to turn something into that which it is not; rather, it is letting our formulaic means and misdirected conceptions fall like scales from our eyes and clearly seeing things for what they truly are.
      Transfiguration is the miracle of revelation, what the theologian Karl Barth calls “the gift of the meeting,” the gift of seeing Christ revealed in the fullness of his glory, the fulfillment of the law and prophets and the firstborn of the new creation of God’s reign of grace and equity.
      At the heart of the Christian faith is a great mystery: that eternal God became incarnate in a poor man born under highly dubious circumstances to an oppressed people on the margins of the empire of his day. And furthermore, that this fully divine, fully human being, through his life and death, has shown us the way to reclaim our heritage as daughters and sons of the Divine, in whose image we are created. As Paul exclaims in his letter to the Corinthians, we “are being transformed into the same image” – the very image of the transfigured Christ -- “from one degree of glory to another.”
      Think on this for a moment, dearly beloved:  just as in the sacraments and our Christian walk we share in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, so, too we share in his transfiguration, his revelation of who he – and we ourselves – truly are.
      But Paul also warns that we are all too often like the children of Israel, who demanded that Moses, fresh from his own direct encounter with God on the mount of Sinai, veil his face that shone with the reflected glory of the Divine. It was too much for them to bear, more than they cared to see.
      We, too, devise veils that obscure our view of the Divine. There are veils of limited thinking and willful ignorance, veils of imagined self-sufficiency and unbridled autonomy, veils of wealth and power as this world counts it, veils of busyness and striving after those things which a million voices in a million ways tell us will bring meaning and purpose to our lives, but leave us only hungry for more.
      All too often, the heaviest veils are woven in the name of religion.  So searing is the revelation of God through Christ, we seek to tame its audacious power through theologies and creeds, liturgies and ritual, through words and acts that, when given their proper place, can point us to God, but when made ends in and of themselves, become idols of obscurity.  We become like particularly poor students of the fictional Professor McGonagall, trying ineptly to conjure up, through a precise combination of words, beliefs, and acts, a transformation in ourselves and our world, when all the while the free gift of the living God surrounds us -- if we would but have the eyes to see it and take the risk to live into it.
      It is all somewhat comical, like the botched attempts of the young scholars of Hogwarts, until we as Christians look unflinchingly at our own history and see where, because of our insistence on certain words and forms, we have made martyrs where we should have been making disciples.
      About a year ago, a new dean arrived at my seminary, the Episcopal Theological School at Claremont, also known as Bloy House. We seminarians are, for the most part, people who have had a tangible experience of God’s call in our lives, often in very powerful ways. In the graduate school environment, though, we are trained in many rationally sophisticated methods to discuss the Christian faith and the experience of the Divine that lies at its root. In our eagerness to embrace this new and often exciting vocabulary, we can fall victim to intellectual pride and place great too great a stock in learned opinion and lofty words, when we would do better to recognize their limits and fall silent before Holy Mystery.
      So imagine, if you will, with me this scene: a group of seminarians leaving their morning classes, where they have perhaps been discussing “ecofeminist liberation theology” or “the influence of the Gelasian Sacramentary on contemporary Eucharistic rites,” and arriving at noonday chapel, where the new dean will preach her inaugural sermon; in effect, revealing herself to our little world and setting the tone for her tenure among us.
      After we settled in into our usual places with an appraising air, the Very Reverend Doctor Sylvia Sweeney ascended to the pulpit and proceeded to tell us in vivid detail and with heartfelt sincerity of a vision she had of Christ. She was not speaking metaphorically. He appeared at the foot of her bed -- in a suburban tract house! A titter of surprise swept through the chapel, followed by polite, but skeptical, silence.
      Now in the year since this sermon I’ve come to know Dean Sweeney and appreciate her keen intellect, her exegetical gifts, her passion for the Gospel, and her great heart for ministry, both lay and ordained. I also do not doubt her vision.
      But I believe I can speak for my classmates and say that we all were quite unprepared for this type of sermon in our oh-so-rarefied Episcopal seminary chapel. At the end of the service, while we still sat there astonished, the registrar and backbone of our small school, the Reverend Judy Turberg, made the usual announcements, and then, just before dismissing us for lunch, thanked the new dean for her sermon and said, “Perhaps we should all consider sharing our experiences of seeing Christ and see where that takes us as a community.”
      Now, while I cannot truthfully report a sudden rash of reported Jesus sightings at that or any subsequent lunch, I can attest to the transformative power of that thought: What would happen in our lives and life of our community if we lived in anticipation of seeing Christ? Where would it take us as community if we openly shared both the expectation and experience of encountering the Divine?
      Perhaps Christ has not appeared at the foot of your bed. Perhaps he never will. But we are assured by scripture and the experience of millions of faithful people over the millennia that God’s presence is revealed to those who are receptive to it. And while that revelation is God’s gift of God’s self given in God’s own way and time, we can draw on the rich tradition of Christian spirituality, in which there are many practices to prepare oneself to receive that gift. But we begin – and begin and begin and begin again throughout our lives – in the same way that Peter, James, John and other disciples began: simply by being willing to follow Jesus where he leads.
      This coming Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. It is an ancient spiritual practice in Lent, the season of penitential preparation for the great feast of Easter, to fast by giving up something, perhaps a favorite food or diversion, to create an absence in our lives that might be filled with God’s presence.
      I would encourage you to embrace this discipline of denial and also cultivate with it an attitude of expectation, an expectation is God is moving and revealing himself in your life and the life of this spiritual community.
      We are in period of transition in our parish. What for many years has been our primary mission outreach to the Ventura community, the Parish Day School, has now closed its doors and we, on this World Mission Sunday, sit in discernment as to where our new mission outreach might lie. We have also recently learned we are in our final months under the spiritual leadership of our beloved rector, who will retire from his ministry with us at the end of 2010. Here, too, we will be moving into a period of discernment as we seek to call a new rector.
      While such times are can be tinged with sadness and fear, they are also opportunities for transfiguration – to see ourselves and each other outside our usual frames of reference and in the light of the revealed Christ.
      This is the Christ who, in the words of the baptismal covenant we will reaffirm in a few minutes as we welcome Helena Maggio into the family of faith, we vow to seek and serve in others.
      Look around you, dear friends, and see where Christ is appearing.
      The great Renaissance artist Raphael was, at the time of his death, creating a monumental painting depicting the Transfiguration. It was later finished by his students. If, like me, you’ve not been afforded the blessing of seeing it where it hangs in its full 10 by 13 foot glory in the Vatican Museum, seek it out in an art history book or on the World Wide Web. It speaks even there with a powerful beauty. The upper part of the painting shows Christ floating above the mountain top in front of softly illuminated clouds between the prophets Moses and Elijah, representing the law and the prophets, and with whom he is engaged in dialog. Peter, James, and John lie prostrate beneath them. The effect is one of serene transcendence. No wonder Peter wanted to pitch some tents and stay there!
      But mirroring the last half of today’s Gospel reading, the lower part of the painting, in contrast, is all tumult and disarray, as Raphael depicts the disciples attempting, unsuccessfully, to free the afflicted boy from his demonic possession -- one frantically consults a book, others debate vigorously with each other, two huddle in the darkness, one points unheeded by all to the transcendent Christ.
      Luke’s account of the scene has Christ stepping into the disorder, scolding the disciples for not living into the power he has given them, and setting things right, descending from on high to the seemingly hopeless plain of human limitation.
      But as we gaze more closely at the picture Raphael has painted, we can see the entire frame is filled with Christ’s presence, not just the mountaintop of transcendently clear vision, but also the plain of confusion and ambiguity. The light of the revealed Christ shines forth on it all without exception.
      Sometimes, in our lack of vision, we may feel captives of what the poet Matthew Arnold called “a darkling plain where ignorant armies clash by night.” Sometimes we are given the gift of the meeting, the gift of the mountaintop, the clarity to perceive the working out of God’s purpose in our lives.
      But at all times, dear friends in Christ, we have the opportunity see ourselves and our community as we truly are in God’s transfiguring light, as beloved daughters and sons in whom God is – despite all our brokenness – well pleased and through whom God will do his work in the world, not through any merit or attainment of our own, but through the power revealed and given to us by Jesus Christ, our redeemer and our friend, who is shining forth among us now and until the end of the age. Amen.