Total Trasparency

Sermon by Rev. Gusti Linnea Newquist


Luke 9: 37-43a


I had just begun my second year of seminary when news of yet another mass shooting reached our community. It was an Amish School for girls this time. Do you remember? It was October 2006. Half of the girls were killed. Half of them were wounded.

One of my sister students was heartsick and none of her normal coping mechanisms were working. So a few days after the shooting she called out to anyone on campus with eyes to see and ears to hear to gather with her in the chapel for a time of prayer and supplication.

Sarah was one of the most politically active students on campus, someone you would expect to rally the rest of us for something more like gun control legislation than for a prayer vigil. But this shooting had gotten to her. So we gathered and we prayed. We lit candles, we sang songs, we cried, we held each other tight.

And our chaplain, the Rev. Kerry Maloney, said the following words that have guided my understanding of prayer ever since: “My belief about prayer,” she said, “is that it transcends time and space. In prayer,” she said, “we are totally transparent, with God and with one another and with the total transparency of all creation. In prayer we have nothing more to hide. And the truth of who we really are—the good, the bad, and the ugly—is already transformed in the light of God’s never-ending love.

“When we pray,” she said, “we step out of chronological time and connect to the entire cosmos throughout the ages. With everything and everyone that has already occurred. And with everything and everyone that will one day come to be. So in this moment, as we pray, we are standing right beside those girls. We are with them in our prayer. Bearing witness, which is what the word martyr really means. Just as God is with them, bearing witness. Even in the moment they feel most alone, most afraid, most forsaken by God and by humanity. And these candles we light in the midst of this darkness surround them in their fear with light and with love. And they are transfigured with Christ.

And they are not ever alone!”

I have been thinking of that prayer vigil for a long time now, and the prayer vigils that emerge across the world after any tragedy, including the one here at Madison Square after the Sandy Hook shooting last December. A prayer vigil is one of the few things we know how to do when there really is nothing we can do to make sense of the senseless violence swirling all around us.

But if we do it right a prayer vigil is far more than a fairly benign act of comfort. If we do it right a prayer vigil is a radical moment of transformation. Or transfiguration, to use the language that is given to this particular Sunday in our liturgical year. Because if we do it right a prayer vigil creates the space for total transparency, before God and one another. As we drop the masks we wear that pretend to keep us secure and own up to our own feelings of guilt and rage and despair and violence. And trust them to the compassionate heart of God in the hope of a resurrection redemption.

If we do it right a prayer vigil insists we are not alone in the fractures and the fragments of a violent and vindictive shattering. Because all that has ever been and ever will be surrounds us with grace and healing and wholeness and hope. With fuel for the journey of faithful action that must—without question—come next.

This is what is happening in the story of the transfiguration of Jesus we have just heard in Luke’s Gospel.

In the passage that precedes the lectionary text for today Jesus has warned his disciples of the violence that is to come when they head toward Jerusalem. Now he may have known full well exactly what was going to happen on the cross. Or he may simply have known that his way of radical justice and love would draw the wrath of the world he came to heal.

But either way the violent rage that rips through his flesh on the cross that is to come . . . most certainly requires a prayer vigil in response. Which is, if you think about it, what Christian worship is all about.

With an eye toward this cross, in total transparency about the violence in our midst (that would claim even the very flesh of God), we gather every Sunday . . . to pray. In a very real sense every act of Christian worship is a vigil of prayer in the face of violence, trusting the total transparency of who we really are into the light of God, who will transfigure our violent ways. Meaning that in our prayer vigil called worship God holds the violence of the world in healing hope and transforms it into a glimmer of gleaming grace.

If my seminary chaplain is right, then the prayer vigil that Christian worship has been about for these two thousand years is right now pulling us out of space and time and connects us to the whole of the cosmos. And we are RIGHT NOW on that mountain with Jesus, as he prays for the strength to confront the chaos that surrounds him.

And we are, like Jesus, surrounded with the wisdom of the ages: the light of Moses and Elijah and all who have come before. Gathering the strength and perseverance and trust we need to come back down off that mountain of prayer as the beloved and chosen children of God to confront the convulsing spirit of violence within our own crowd. And heal it. And restore it to life.

This is where we find the boy in Luke’s post-transfiguration story. A child who is gripped by a spirit of violence. A parent who is desperate for healing and has nowhere to turn. And have we not heard that story over and over and over again. A parent of a child with a violent spirit begging the disciples of Jesus to cast it out. But they could not. Because they . . . and we . . . are still too afraid.

The violent spirit is beyond the boy’s power to control it. And beyond the parent’s power to confront it. But Jesus, whose violence has already been transfigured into nonviolent radical love, in this vigil of prayer, is beyond fear. Jesus, who has come down from that mountain, is surrounded for all time by the light of the love of God in our prayers for him. And he can heal this poor conflicted boy and restore him to a life of peace in community because he has already known the grace of transfigured violence.

And we can, too.

Imagine if we entered this Discernment of Peace in the Season of Lent in the same attitude as the vigil of prayer that accompanied the Transfiguration of Christ and allowed him to rebuke the violent spirit in love? Imagine if we live in Lent in the light of the love that will not ever let us go, in a true vigil of prayer, in total transparency of who we really are, sorting through the fear the anger the pain the despair and the violence that grips us, like the demon that grips this young boy in Luke’s Gospel?

Imagine if we came through this prayer vigil in the Season of Lent with the courage to stand with Jesus, in the light of God’s transfiguring love, and love the boy who is gripped beyond his own control instead of condemning him out of our own fear and anger?

Imagine if we could find another way to face the fury of the violent spirit that rages in our midst. Because we have already faced the violent spirit that rages in our selves. And known it to be transfigured in the healing light of God

This is what our Lenten Process of Peace Discernment is trying to find out.

Presbyterians across the nation in this Season of Peace Discernment are invited to “meet the Prince of Peace, as if for the first time.” To discover again his life of radical, non-violent love in the face of fear. To return again and again to this vigil of prayer that surrounds the violence of the cross with light and love. Not as the will of a vengeful and violent God, but as the truest symbol of God’s suffering solidarity with the violence of humanity. A suffering that God has already transfigured into a nonviolent witness for justice and peace.

If we do it right, this Season of Lenten Discernment for Peace will require total transparency. Standing in the light of the violent deaths of our children and rebuking the convulsing spirit of rage that has made it so commonplace. We will have to take a hard, long look in the mirror of our own violent rage in response and pray for Christ to cast it out.

And we will have to journey to Jerusalem with Jesus, in our own way for this day, loving our enemies and praying for those who persecute us, in exposing the truth of the violence all around us.

But if we do it right this prayer vigil we call Christian worship in the Season of Lent can transform our violence. And heal it. And make us whole. And we will all be “astounded at the greatness of God.” Just like the ones who watched this boy being healed in Luke’s Gospel today.

And we will not be alone. And we will find what we seek.

So let the prayer vigil of our Lenten discernment for peace begin . . .

Amen.