+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Several years ago I introduced you to a Greek word which has special significance on this Transfiguration Sunday. Since not all of you were here then, and since I don’t expect my little Greek lessons to take the first time, I wanted to highlight it again. Your word for the day is prolepsis. It’s from a Greek root pro-lambanein which means anticipation, and it means the breaking-in of a reality before it has been accomplished in the time-line as we perceive it.

Prolepsis is not simple foreshadowing. Most of us know what foreshadowing is. Since we just celebrated Valentine’s Day, here’s an example from Romeo and Juliet. In the famous balcony scene, after Juliet expresses fear for Romeo’s safety, Romeo replies “life were better ended by their hate/ Than death prorogued wanting of thy love.” This is a foreshadowing of what will actually take place, as (spoiler alert) Romeo dies at the end of the play.

That’s foreshadowing, but prolepsis is something different. The future is not merely hinted at, not merely suggested, but rather it breaks in to the present. As Christians we live proleptically; we allow the sure and certain future of the Kingdom of God to break in to the present. We cannot fully perceive the Kingdom of God, it hasn’t been fully accomplished in our time-line, and yet the Kingdom of the world to come is made real and present at the altar. From our human perspective, the dead have not yet been raised to enjoy eternal life with God, but from the perspective of God, who functions outside of time as much as within it, the faithful departed are already in God’s presence. It can get confusing, but it will suffice to say that the mystery of redemption is beyond our capability to perceive because our minds simply cannot function without positing the passage of time. More about that in a minute.

This morning’s Gospel reading is an example of prolepsis. What happened on the Mount of Transfiguration was in fact an incursion of the future into the present. Specifically, the reality of the Resurrection was not just foreshadowed, but made really present in Christ’s miraculous mountaintop transformation.

Let’s take a closer look at the text. When on the mountain top, Jesus’ clothes became dazzling white. Mark’s version is even more striking, interesting since he is usually the least descriptive of the evangelists: “His garments became glistening intensely white, as no fuller on earth could bleach them.” Even somebody whose whole livelihood was to bleach clothes, a fuller, couldn’t have got any clothes this white. This should stir up in our minds the men at the tomb on the day of the Resurrection, whose clothes are described by all of the Gospel writers as being extraordinarily white.

Likewise, we learn from today’s Gospel that at the Transfiguration “the appearance of [Jesus’] countenance was altered.” This is what “transfiguration” literally means- to change appearance. Compare this with all of those accounts of the Resurrection, where Jesus is not recognized. Mary Magdalene didn’t recognize Jesus until he called her by name; the disciples on the road to Emmaus didn’t recognize him until he broke bread with them; the apostles didn’t recognize him until he said “peace be with you.”

All of this is to suggest that though Christ was still on his way to Calvary, though he had not yet even died, he and his disciples experienced a foretaste of the Resurrection that day on the mountain. The Father wasn’t simply foreshadowing what was going to happen after Jesus’ death; rather, God let a little bit of the future, a little bit of the greatest event in human history in fact, impinge upon the present of Jesus and his disciples. Jesus had a “little resurrection” that day which was intimately connected to the resurrection as it was to take place several days later. Perhaps it was to give hope to the apostles. Perhaps, it was to give Jesus himself the strength to suffer the agonies of the Cross, knowing that the transforming power of the Resurrection would ultimately triumph.

In any event, we have something to learn from this, too. We still live in a world beset by sin and suffering. We still live in a world where death is a reality. The experience of pandemic and the current Russian warmongering stand as two very powerful examples for us today. We still need forty days of Lent—that ever looming church season which commences Wednesday—to remind us that things aren’t right.

But we can nonetheless experience the Resurrection and the Kingdom of God among these things that are passing away. We must acknowledge the “not yet” nature of the Resurrection and the Kingdom. We still have a shift in verbs in the Creed. “We believe in one God” and so forth, while we “look for”, or prosdokō to use the original language of the Creed– “await”, the Resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. They are still future events, but we Christians are proleptic people. We look for the Resurrection of the dead, but we also experience it in the here-and-now. We experience it in Baptism. We look for the life of the world to come, but we also experience it in the here-and-now. We experience it in the Eucharist.

We should be open to experiencing the risen life, but we must also live in the real world, and we can hold these two truths together. Like Peter, we might want to build huts for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah; we may want to remain in the joy we experience in the risen life made so real and present in the Sacraments and in our lives as Christians, but like Jesus and like the disciples, we’ll eventually have to go back down the mountain. We shall all have to go back out into the world to love and serve the Lord, and humbly walk in the way of the Cross. The mountain-top experiences are fleeting, but like Jesus and the disciples they give us strength. They give us the strength to do God’s work in a broken world, to live lives of sacrifice, knowing that some day we shall experience the risen life, the life of the Kingdom uninterrupted for ever. May we hold on to that blessed hope, and thus be strengthened to live in love and do God’s work with even more resolve.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Here’s a bit of liturgical trivia. The number of Sundays which fall between Epiphany and Ash Wednesday (as well as the number of Sundays which fall between Pentecost and Advent 1 is variable), since the date of Easter is itself variable (it’s always the Sunday following the first full moon after the vernal equinox for complicated reasons). That being the case, and because we have been on a three-year lectionary since the 1979 BCP replaced the one-year pattern of previous prayerbooks, there are some lessons we just don’t get to hear very often, because they occur in late Epiphanytide or early in the season after Pentecost on Sundays that frequently don’t get observed. Anyway, this week provides us one of those rarely heard sets of lessons since Ash Wednesday fall pretty late this year.

It’s a shame we don’t hear it more often, because the message our Lord delivers in today’s Gospel–in his continuation of the Sermon on the Plain, whose beginning we heard last week–is one each of us needs to hear over and over again.

So what is the message we don’t hear enough because of this peculiarity in our calendar? “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” Maybe I’m the only one here with this problem; it’s entirely possible I am the greatest sinner in this regard in a room full of honest-to-God “capital S” Saints, but somehow I doubt I’m the only one with this difficulty. Of all the moral demands of the Gospel, I find this to be the most difficult, personally.

But let’s take a step back. Who is this enemy we’re supposed to love? I suspect that most of us most of the time don’t have people of ill will who are actively attempting to do us harm. Now, sometimes we do. I think the way we interact with each other on social media as well as the polarization of our national politics has made this worse in recent years. This happens in all sorts of arenas–in families, in politics, even in churches–and if your perceived enemy is a straight-up combatant wishing you harm and possessing some capacity to actually inflict it, the task of loving them is certainly more difficult, and perhaps more important for the well-being of your own soul, if for no other reason than having such an enemy can lead to resentment, which in my experience manifests as a kind of obsession in which said enemy’s existence in your mind is so consuming that it can be like a bit of acerbic poison which makes everything in one’s heart bitter.

But, like I said, most of us don’t always have such adversaries hounding us all the time. More commonly, it is somebody we just don’t particularly like, somebody whose personality irks us or whose approach to us is condescending or with whom we have some difference of opinion in politics or religion with which we so vehemently disagree that they irritate us more than we should let them. We all have personal buttons which some are expert in finding and pushing, intentionally or unintentionally.

I’ll tell you what mine is. I have trouble with people who are either bossy or whom I perceive as being “know-it-alls.” You know why? Well, it’s because when I’m not keeping myself in check and striving through prayer to have the Lord help me in restraining myself, I can be a bossy, know-it-all. Some of my colleagues, I think, put too much faith into Carl Jung’s analytic theories, but one thing I think Jung got right was in his identification of the shadow side, and the recognition that what most irritates us about others is likely what we most dislike about ourselves. This is a liberating idea, because it helps us identify something we can, with God’s help, affect (namely, our own reactions), rather than something we usually cannot (namely others’ actions and perceptions of us).

So, what do we do about this, whether we have a full-on adversary gunning for us or just somebody who bugs the fire out of us? Well, Jesus tells us in this morning’s Gospel, right? Love them and do good for them. But how? Perhaps the second most practical bit of advice I’ve ever received along these lines outside scripture (and I’ll mention number one in a minute), is the following from C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity:

Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.

Here’s one of my homiletical hobbyhorses again. Remember: Christian love isn’t about warm fuzzy feelings. You might eventually get there, but that’s not the goal. Love is a set of intentions and actions centered on placing the good of another above one’s own good. So behave lovingly to your enemy, and presently you will come to love him.

But what if you’re not in a position to do anything practically loving for this enemy of yours? Again, Jesus gives us the answer in this morning’s Gospel. Bless them and pray for them. When I am counseling somebody about a resentment he or she has, I will generally tell that person to pray not that their enemy change their heart or reap the fruits of God’s judgment, but to simply pray for them without any agenda. I advise this, because I need to hear it myself. It’s not an easy thing to do. I try to do it every day in my private prayers. Sometimes I succeed; sometimes I find myself reverting back to praying for God to change somebody else or (worse) to heap judgment on my enemies, and then I realize I have a lot more work to do in order to pray aright. But I keep at it, and my prayer is that you will keep at it, too.

Christ tells us today to give, to forgive, to withhold judgment, and above all, to love and to pray, with no expectation whatsoever that there will be any reciprocation. You see, the economy of the Kingdom of God is not transactional. The only transaction that ever mattered was the full payment of our sin debt on the cross, the account is closed, and we are called to live as those who, in everything that really matters, are neither debtors nor creditors. So we are called to approach our enemies with Grace and Grace alone. Just as righteousness has been imputed to us, we treat as lovely those who have been ugly to us, because, just like us, they have been made lovely by the beloved Son of God.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I like to think I am a relatively sophisticated thinker when it comes to theological matters. This, I hope, is generally to the good, but it comes with a bit of peril. Sometimes the “theologically sophisticated” can live in a sort of echo chamber and, because of the sin of pride, can look down on popular or putatively “un-sophisticated” spirituality. All of that is to say that I’m turning over a new leaf, and I’m going to stop making snide little jokes among friends about the habit of some to append “#blessed” to everything they put on Twitter. Yes, it’s perhaps overused–and the release of “Hashtag Blessed: The Movie” a couple months ago didn’t help–but it’s harmless and it’s usually totally genuine and sweet. If only I could recognize that I am blessed at every moment and in every experience in life, I’m sure I’d be a better, happier person.

On the other hand, there is one popular turn of phrase which I cannot come to terms with, not because it’s a little trite, but because it strikes me as potentially genuinely harmful. I’ve seen it pop on social media and inspirational posters and I could swear I’ve seen it in needlepoint, but maybe that’s some kind of hallucination. It is the phrase “too blessed to be depressed.” However well-meaning, this strikes me as a rather cruel sentiment when one interrogates it. It suggests that counting one’s blessing, cultivating gratitude (wonderful practices in themselves) somehow prevents depression, and thus it implies that somebody struggling just needs to be more grateful already.

This is pure victim-blaming. I know that’s not the intention, but it can dismiss the reality of lots of folks- namely, that past trauma, present obstacles to thriving, and basic chemical problems in the brain can’t just be magically erased by coming up with a gratitude list. I believe that therapy, medication, social support, and spiritual practice can and should all work together to address depression. So, basically, I’d like the phrase “too blessed to be depressed” to be put in the bin.

One may counter, here, that the word translated “blessed” in the beatitudes, μακαριος, can be translated literally as “happy.” This is true, but here Jesus, I contend, must mean something more than what we commonly refer to as happiness. Take the first of the beatitudes in St. Matthew’s version. “Blessed are the poor in spirit” could be translated “happy are the sad.” So either blessedness means something more than mere cheerfulness, or Jesus is speaking in riddles or koans or something. Christ did not come to confuse us, but rather to give us the truth that we might be free, so I believe it must be the former.

What, then, is blessedness? Rather than a subjective feeling it is, I contend, an objective status–namely, the quality of being favored by God. To the poor, the hungry, the grieving, the excluded, and the persecuted Jesus is not saying “just look on the bright side.” Rather, he is saying “God has favored you. You have a special place in God’s heart and in his plan for salvation, and you will be justified.” It is right that those going through difficulty should take hope in this, but God’s blessing, his pronouncement of Grace and his promise, abide with those upon whom he pronounces it, whether or not they subjectively experience happiness or hope from it.

I suppose that this is what distinguishes both sacramental and traditional reformed Christianity from more evangelical or pietist or pentecostalist versions of Christianity. This is not to deny the good points of those latter Christian traditions; God knows that the “frozen chosen” such as myself can sometimes benefit from a less intellectual and more heart-felt faith. That said, I still contend that how God’s blessing “hits us in the feels” is less important than the fact that God has objectively made us worthy to stand before him.

I know I’ve said this perhaps a hundred times from the pulpit, but it bears repeating as frequently as possible: the Grace of God, the free gift of his favor bestowed on us, is objective and indissoluble. We were, most of us, baptized as infants before we knew anything or had a free will to accept or reject the blessing, and God made us his own for ever. We receive the Grace of God in the Eucharist at this altar week after week, and it works a miracle in and for us, whether or not we can get our minds and hearts around all that that means. And we are reminded today in the beatitudes that God’s special blessing comes down upon the heads of the most weak and marginalized among us, and he gives them a promise which cannot be revoked.

It is, of course, all the more wonderful when we can recognize and respond to that Grace. It is “icing on the cake”, as it were, when we find subjective strength and comfort and (yes) happiness in that Grace so freely bestowed. Let’s be open to that, but let’s also recognize that even when that joy seems illusive, even when we’re not “feeling it” God is still at work in us and he is still for us.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.