Sorry, Schleiermacher

Transfiguration: Matthew 17:1-9

Our world today is a flat, two-dimensional, opaque world. That is the sense of most observers of history. Gone is the enchanted world of the Middle Ages, where God, spirits, and the sacred saturated every aspect of life. In its place is a disenchanted world, where the idea of anything, any reality beyond this one, besides the material world we can see and touch, is all but impossible to maintain. It’s not just that people aren’t religious, but that they live as though there is no transcendent quality to life at all.

How we went from being unable to think outside of the reality of God to a place where it’s next to impossible to think of the world within it is a matter of much dispute. Some attribute it to the Enlightenment, some point to the rise of science and new technologies, to our new-found ability to peer into the mysteries of the smallest particles and to the deepest reaches of outer space. And others think the fault lies with modern philosophies like liberalism or communism.

It's hard to pin the blame on any one thing, but if you ask me, I think the good bit of it belongs to Friedrich Schleiermacher. You know Schleiermacher, don’t you? The 18^th century German Romantic and theologian, the man considered the “father of modern liberal theology.” No? Well, if the name doesn’t ring a bell, I don’t fault you. Few people outside of academia have ever heard of him. But that doesn’t mean that Schleiermacher and his ideas haven’t had tremendous influence on modern society. Indeed, in many ways, we are living in a world created by Schleiermacher.

You see, back in the 18^th century, Christianity was attacked by Enlightenment philosophers for not being “rational." And so Schleiermacher tried to make the case for Christianity, not on the grounds of its reasonability, but on its irrationality, explaining the faith as the product of “religious feelings.” He argued that all of us have an innate religious sensibility, an awareness of God, and yet we cannot know God, not directly. We can sense him, can feel in our consciousness the existence of the Divine. But there exists a great, impenetrable barrier between us and God. We might press on that barrier, and so perhaps “feel” the outline of God on the other side, but we can’t get to God and God can’t come to us. And so if God can’t affect anything on our side, that rules out things like miracles, sacraments, and the Bible, because God’s speech cannot cross the gulf. Rather, he said, when the biblical authors recorded the “words of God,” what they were describing were really just attempts to make sense of “religious experiences.” God didn’t actually speak objective words. They heard a noise, thunder, and they put words into God’s mouth that made sense to them, that made sense of their experience of the Divine.

And so according to Schleiermacher, God is “out there,” smiling at us perhaps, but not involved in our lives, not communicating with us, not really doing anything for us. Does that not describe the view of many people today, how they imagine God? God exists but He is inaccessible, incomprehensible, and thus inconsequential to their lives.

Now contrast that Schleiermachian view with the story we just heard from the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus, while on a preaching circuit, decides to take a side trip, to hike up a mountain with a handful of his disciples. There at the top, Jesus is transfigured, changed, becomes dazzling white, lit up brighter than the Christmas tree in Times Square. Only it’s not incandescence or atomic radiation that gives him this glow. Rather what the disciples see is Jesus’ divinity shining through him, his body transparent to the uncreated energies of God, his humanity revealing the transcendent glory of God. According to Matthew, the disciples didn’t just have a “religious experience” on that mountain, as Schleiermacher would have it. They saw God!

Whatever barrier that exists between us and God, between heaven and earth, has been penetrated. Whatever veiled the disciples’ eyes to divine reality has been pushed aside and God became visible. More than that, God’s words, though surely thunderous, were audible and intelligible: “This is my son, my beloved. Listen to him!” Schleiermacher’s interpretation just doesn’t do justice to what the disciples experienced. At the Transfiguration, divinity refused to be contained to heaven but erupts into this world, making clear to the disciples and to us, that the transcendent world, the world of God and spirits, is real, just as real as the one we can touch and see and taste, and just as present.

Most people today are stuck in a Schleiermachian frame, where God has been removed, and heaven cordoned off. But the Transfiguration directly challenges this view. It invites us to open our eyes and see not just Jesus, but indeed the whole world as transparent to God’s glory, to see all of creation as a burning bush, aflame with God’s glory but not consumed, to take all matter as a sacrament, a vessel for God’s grace, to experience all beauty, natural and manmade, as radiant with a loveliness that comes from God.

I know, this all sounds poetic and dreamy and a little “wu-wu.” Not something, in any event, that has much to do with real life, the life of commuting and coworkers, diaper-changing and doctor’s visits. Yet that is precisely the point—the world that the Transfiguration reveals is the same world that you and I live in, only now it has a new quality, a new dimension, a luminescence. In light of the Transfiguration, the world becomes not other than it is, but rather more itself, not less real but more real. It’s the same world we know but now opened up to another, deeper reality, opened up to the presence of God. This is the kind of world that the Transfiguration shows us—one which is not opaque but transparent to God, where you can see God everywhere, can see Him in everything, or more properly through everything, the world as a window to heaven.

Such a vision has long been held to be the ultimate goal of Christianity. The highest ambition of the Christian, the Church has taught, is not to become a good person or to know all truth or to make the world a better place or even to be “saved.” Being “saved” is just the start. The end of life is the vision of God. In the Middle Ages, the vision of God was known as the “beatific vision,” the ultimate state of happiness that believers experience in the sight of God. But the idea actually goes back much earlier, to St Irenaeus in the 2^nd century who wrote: “The glory of God is man fully alive; and the life of man is the vision of God.”

As should be obvious, this vision involves more than just “seeing God.” It entails the direct encounter with the Divine, being in God’s awesome presence, seeing Him face to face, enjoying immediate communion with God. When this happens, it’s always a gift, the ultimate gift, this vision of God.

Now, if you are the sort of person who comes to church expecting to come away with practical life instructions—three things to improve your marriage, three habits to work on this week—you’re probably a little confused. You’re thinking, this is nice and all but what do we “do,” where’s the “so what”? Only, there is no “so what” to the Transfiguration, no “go and do likewise,” no clear command or ethical directive that follows from this story. When Peter tries to come up with something to do in response to the Transfiguration—build some tents, some tabernacles, to memorialize the event—God will have nothing of it. He interrupts Peter mid-sentence, telling them only to “listen to Jesus.” Because it’s not about us, anything we do, but all about Jesus, who he is as the revelation of God.

You see, before it is anything we do, before it involves any ritual or theology or morality, the Christian faith is about what God does, a gift, a self-giving, a revelation. To reduce faith to mere morality, to boil down this uncontainable fire to the essentially ethical, is to demean it. Try to lasso a wave, go hold a burning coal in your hands, put out to sea in the middle of a hurricane — that’s closer to the Christian faith than the merely moral.

At the center of our faith, you see, is not a list of teachings or ethical behaviors, but an encounter with God, the experience of the fearsome and fascinating mystery that is the Holy One. In the presence of God, all our efforts—to serve others, to educate, to welcome the stranger, to witness the truth—all of that takes a back seat. Faced with the awe-inspiring vision of God, all our strivings cease, and our best works are shown to be inconsequential.

Such was the conclusion reached by Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas was a famous Medieval theologian who was known for writing the Summa Theologica, one of the greatest works of systematic theology ever written. Containing 2000-plus pages of the most thoughtful and comprehensive reflection on God, the Summa remains the textbook for the Roman Catholic Church and is perhaps the most influential theological writing for Christians in the West, apart from the Bible itself. As impressive as this work was, one day as Aquinas was celebrating the Mass, he received a revelation. We don’t know what it was, but afterwards he gave up writing, left his great masterpiece unfinished. When friends encouraged him to resume his work, he replied, “The end of my labors has come. All that I have written is so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.” Aquinas’ great work, his magnum opus, a work that has yet to be surpassed in comprehensiveness and depth—so much straw!

Something not dissimilar happened to the famous 17^th -century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal. When Pascal died in 1662, his servant found a small piece of parchment sewn into his coat. At the top of the paper Pascal had drawn a cross, and beneath that were these words:

In the year of the Lord 1654, Monday, November 23

From about half-past ten in the evening until half-past twelve.

Fire

God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob

Not of philosophers nor of the scholars.

Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy, Peace.

God of Jesus Christ, My God and thy God. “Thy God shall be my God.”

Forgetfulness of the world and of everything, except God.

He is to be found only by the ways taught in the Gospel.

Greatness of the soul of man.

“Righteous Father, the world hath not know thee, but I have known thee.”

Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy. Jesus Christ.

I have fallen away: I have fled from Him, denied Him, crucified him.

May I not fall away forever.

We keep hold of him only by the ways taught in the Gospel.

Renunciation, total and sweet. Total submission to Jesus Christ and to my director.

Eternally in joy for a day’s exercise on earth. I will not forget Thy word. Amen.

That was Pascal’s record of an intense two-hour revelation, which he kept secret until his death. He stored his record of it in the lining of his coat, and when he changed coats, he would unsew and sew it again in the new one, ever close to his heart.

Aquinas and Pascal, two utterly brilliant thinkers, nevertheless came to see that all their work, all the laborious writing, all the abstract systems they constructed to house the truth of God, to tabernacle the Mystery, were in the end …well, not worthless, but wholly inadequate. They were like a man who builds a skyscraper to reach the sun. No matter how tall or impressive the building is, in the end he still remains millions of miles short of his aim. And so, as impressive as these two thinkers were, any pride they might have in their accomplishments was undone by the revelation of the living God, the vision of the Holy One of Israel.

Contrary to Schleiermacher’s claim, our faith is not based on some vague feelings of divinity but on the fearsome, lifechanging encounter with God. Nothing we do make any sense without that, apart from it. Seeing God is the beginning of our faith, but also the end of it, the culmination of all our words, all our deeds, all our fears and desires, and their abolition. For all is accomplished, all is resolved, every good realized, in the face of God.

In a world that is blind to this reality, or at best that feels only a vague sense of its existence, the Transfiguration makes no sense. But for those of us who have seen the glory it reveals, who’ve caught a glimpse of it, we only want more. We’ve seen fire appear at the corner of our eye, we’ve caught strains of an otherworldly melody in the air, we’ve been struck by a beauty that goes beyond anything we might call pretty. In these moments, we recognize, God is teasing us, flirting with us, tantalizing us with just enough to leave us yearning for more.

And that’s why we come here, to worship—in the hope that God might pull back the curtain just a bit further and we might see a little more of God, that we might encounter the awful, awesome power of God again. Such is our hope, our desire, our expectation. May we never stop desiring it and may we teach others to want it too. Thanks be to God!