Transfiguration/Racial Justice Sunday
2 Kings 2:1-12
Mark 9:2-9
On the night of December 2nd, 1577, a group of Carmelite friars broke into a religious community in Ávila, Spain and took another Carmelite friar, John of the Cross, prisoner. He was tortured and held in brutal conditions for eight months before he managed to escape.
John’s crime was joining in a Carmelite reform movement led by Teresa of Ávila, a movement that would come to be called “Discalced,” meaning barefoot, as one of the matters in dispute was whether members should wear covered shoes or simply sandals.
It was all rather stupid, like so many religious disputes, but as Monty Python famously declared, “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!”
Today, few have heard of John of the Cross, unless their local parish in the Roman communion happens to be dedicated to him, for he was eventually canonized. If folks have heard of him at all, it is not due to the Battle of the Birkenstocks, but is instead for his writing, especially the poem “The Dark Night of the Soul,” composed during or immediately after his captivity.
The phrase “dark night of the soul” has become a trope, used today to mean a crisis of faith, but that is not quite what John meant. The opening stanza goes like this:
On a dark night,
Kindled in love with yearnings
–oh, happy chance!–
I went forth without being observed,
My house being now at rest.
Note the line “Oh, happy chance!” John was a mystic, and “Dark Night of the Soul” is a love poem to God. It reflects a theological position expressed a century earlier in the anonymous work “The Cloud of Unknowing,” what theologians call the “via negativa,” where we stop trying to posit divine attributes, and instead accept God as ultimately mysterious and unknowable. Mysticism and the “via negativa” were post-modern theologies before post-modernism, or for that matter, even before modernity.
Now, hold that thought a moment, because we are going to circle back. But let’s first turn our focus to our scripture readings. The first is the story of Elijah, that great prophet of the Northern Kingdom, being taken up by a flaming chariot. Elijah is one of only two individuals in scripture who do not die. The other is Enoch, an obscure figure in Genesis. Everyone else dies, including Jesus, for you have to die in order to be resurrected.
This sets up the expectation in the Second Temple period that Elijah would play a future role in the restoration of an Israelite kingdom. There was speculation that John the Baptizer might be Elijah, or maybe Jesus was Elijah, or that it was Elijah to whom Christ called from the cross when he cried “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?,” which is actually the first line of the 22nd psalm, and has nothing to do with Elijah.
Folk myth around Elijah was so strong that even during the medieval Ottoman Empire, Suleiman the Magnificent had the eastern gate of Jerusalem walled off and a cemetery placed in front of it in the mistaken belief that Elijah was a kohen, a priest in the line Aaron, and therefore could not enter a cemetery. If no false Elijah could enter from the east, as tradition demanded, then no false messiah could follow.
It is the “not dead yet” Elijah and the very dead Moses that appear with Jesus on the mountain top in today’s gospel reading, always the last before Lent, and traditionally called the “transfiguration,” though Mark is not at all clear what he means when he says “transfigured,” other than everything becoming shiny and white.
And there is our problem, this whiteout, this idea that whiteness is good. And I get that there is a primitive fear of the dark, but the creation myth does not offer us day as good and night as evil. God creates both. We have evolved on a planet that spins on an axis, alternating periods of light and dark, and that rhythm is hard-wired and necessary for our health. Keeping the lights on is a form of torture.
Every time we hold out the idea that whiteness is good, even in this sort of abstraction, we reinforce the pernicious lie of race. And race does not even exist in the ancient context! It is a modern category that was invented to justify the enslavement of Africans and involved a lot of Enlightenment pseudo-science.
And in the Oompa Loompa Paradox, some of America’s worst racists pride themselves in their whiteness while also spray painting themselves orange to look like healthy people of leisure.
Which is kinda nuts.
That is not to say that people were all one happy universalist family in the Ancient Near East. Sadly, humans have constructed “us versus them” since Cain murdered Abel, a myth that is really about conflicts between shepherds and farmers.
A significant portion of the Hebrew Testament is about constructing oppositional identity, defining who is not us, often chucking out folks who had been in, so that Judeans hated Samaritans, including those descended from the Northern Kingdom who were Yahweh-worshipping children of Abraham, and those returning from captivity in Babylon found reasons to other the peasants who had been left behind. But identity was not constructed around skin color, it was constructed around clan and custom.
Even then, the best of the ancient world was the move beyond tribalism, beyond clan. The Roman Empire was fundamentally an empire, and therefore exploitative, and Romans thought themselves superior to non-Romans, mostly because they were more violent, the Romans not the others, but non-Romans could become citizens, even a pharisee from Tarsus. And it was that same pharisee who translated the religious reform of an un-credentialed prophet from Galilee so that it might bring good news to people of other tribes and clans and customs, an un-credentialed prophet who was transfigured on a mountain top. Some contemporary and even secular philosophers hold up Paul as a universalist saint of sorts.
Darkness is not bad, and John of the Cross is absolutely right when he leaves space for God to be God in mystery, in the dark, wrestling with Jacob. Religious life is not always shiny and bright. If we are going to let God be God, we should stop trying to stuff mystery into the fragile husk of some old white man in the sky who acts like an old white man in the sky, doling out blessing and curse in an arbitrary and capricious way, co-dependent and toxic, firing off angry emails and spending too much time on social media, ’cause ain’t no truth to be found there.
If the white hats were always perfectly good and the black hats always perfectly bad, our stories would be boring. Fear and doubt and temptation are real, and victory is in overcoming them. The transfigured Christ would soon find himself in a garden, praying and weeping, as the police encircled the grove, ready to terrorize him and those he loved.
In the real world, our hats are gray, always, and our claim is that God who is God of the day and God of the night, is the God of grace who loves us in gray cowboy hats and church bonnets and scally caps, though maybe not if you’re wearing a Chiefs hat this weekend.
Besides, they have Taylor Swift, so maybe the 49’ers could use an angel or two in the backfield.
God, our God, is with Superman, that goody-two-shoes, and with Batman, that darkest of knights. Though seriously, can we get that man into therapy? And maybe that Kryptonian as well.
God is God, in the raging darkness of Golgotha and in the sunrise of Easter morning, always good, always alive, in symphonies and silent prayers. God is.
Amen.