The Transfiguration & Reductionism
26th February 2006, Parish Communion
2 Kings 2: 1-12 Elijah and Elisha
2 Cor 4: 3-6 The veiled Gospel and the Light.
Mark 9: 2-9 The Transfiguration.
1. Our Gospel story this morning is the story of the Transfiguration of Christ.
2. I want to suggest that the transfiguration is an important symbol of the difference that it makes to have a faith, and specifically to be Christian, in a culture that is increasingly impatient and intolerant of faith of any kind.
3. One of the leading characteristics of our culture is that we live in a reductionist time. This may not be a word that you have come across, or it may be something to know about and see everywhere.
4. Reductionism is the attempt to see the world, and experience, wherever possible, in the simplest possible terms. Only explanations and understandings of experience in these terms are accepted.
5. Thus, for example, a Marxist is committed to understanding all experience in terms of class struggle. When a Marxist looks are religion, he or she is inclined to see it as an ideology created by the rich to comfort the poor, so that they will not have revolutionary thoughts, but content themselves with the hope of a future world in which the last shall be first and the first last. That is a Marxist reductionist understanding of faith.
6. An evolutionary biologist may be committed to understanding experience in terms of what makes for the survival and reproduction of the individual, or the gene. He or she may be inclined to see religion either as the means by which religious officials, like myself, get authority, prestige, and the means to reproduce ourselves. Alternatively, an evolutionary reduction of religion would suggest that groups who used religion to help them cooperate tended to kill or supplant groups who do not have the glue of religion, could not hang together, and would therefore hang separately.
7. We live in a reductionist age, and you can usually spot reductionism because the reductionist will tell you that x is “Nothing But” y.
a. Thus a reductionist will tell you that Human beings are “nothing but evolved apes”, with the implication that any claim for anything more for humanity is pretentious and unrealistic.
b. A reductionist will tell you that religion is “nothing but good human morality”, with the implication that it is slightly childish to dress up something so simple in such fancy dress – surely we have outgrown such fantasies, and common sense tells us we should be decent to our neighbours, without the help of the Vicar.
c. A reductionist will tell you that a Church is “nothing but” a group of people who like to come together for a bit of community singing, that the Eucharist is “nothing but” bread and wine, which we eat to remind ourselves of being a community, and Jesus was “nothing but” a great moral teacher, who would probably be appalled at the song and dance that is made about him and his teaching 2000 years after his death.
8. I have talked at some length about reductionism, because it is so pervasive, and because it is part of the “common sense” which surrounds us.
9. At first glance it seems attractive and mature, and it seems to invite us to put behind us vivid but unfashionable beliefs, as though the contents of our faith might really be the hangover of the childhood the world, and no more worthy of our adult belief than the notion that there are fairies at the bottom of the garden.
10. 2 Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, 3 and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them.
11. Unlike our current culture, Faith is fundamentally anti-reductionist. When faced with something complicated to understand or explain, faith does not seek for one simple explanation. It tends, at least in the forms that I have known it, to reach out for as many as possible. Faith does not talk about “nothing but”. It talks about “both and”.
12. This is very clear in the story of the Transfiguration. The disciples knew Jesus as a human being, and it was as a human being that Jesus takes his closest friends aside, and climbs a hill. On the hill he is transfigured, and shines with the light of his divine nature, and God speaks, so that his friends are confused and filled with awe. But he does not remain the shining and divine presence, but becomes once more the teacher, explaining that he must suffer and die, and as the story moves on he is once again in the heat and dust of Palestine, struggling with a faithless people, and a demon of epilepsy.
13. By faith we can see more than we could if we were reductionists. Jesus was fully human, but at the Transfiguration we see how much more than this he was.
a. In the same way we can happily believe that human beings are evolved apes. We do not have to say that we are “nothing but” evolved apes – because we are both evolved apes, and God’s creatures with immortal souls, infinitely precious and valuable to our creator, just because he chooses that we shall be.
b. In the same way, we can happily accept all the human parts of church life, the finances, the committee meetings, the occasional bad temper and innumerable shortcomings. But we can go on to say that the Church is both this, and preparation for heaven. We come to Church and to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, 23 and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, 24 and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.
c. In the same way, the bread the wine that Dorothy will bless and we shall share is both bread and wine, exactly the same in chemistry and composition at the end of communion as it was at the beginning – both this and the Body and Blood of Christ, his real and living presence.
14. There is a danger with reductionism, that we shall cease to hope and cease to look for the transfigured realities with which God surrounds us. We will come, with time, to think that life and people are “nothing but” the rather mean and paltry things our reductionist culture would have us believe.
15. Seen with faith, our world is saturated with Glory and Meaning. We need to climb the hill with Jesus of Nazareth, with St Andrew’s Church, with our Lent Books and our small attempts and prayer and charity, knowing that God in Christ has the will and the power to make them shine with Glory and Meaning.