Sermon for the Feast of the Transfiguration, August 6, 2023

Exodus 34:29-35+Psalm 99+2 Peter 1:13-21+Luke 9:28-36

Long before August 6 took on a different meaning in 1945, it was the date designated as the Feast of the Transfiguration of Our Lord on the Church calendar. Every so often, this day falls on a Sunday, and by the rules of our prayer book, today we observe Transfiguration rather than the 10th Sunday after Pentecost, our Gospel switches from Matthew to Luke, and our color changes from green to white.

It is good, I think, for Transfiguration to fall on a Sunday from time to time. Even though we speak of Christ’s transfiguration on the mountaintop today, our world was certainly transfigured on that Monday in 1945 when the first atomic bomb was dropped.

In the recent film about the so-called father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, there is an interesting exchange that may be missed unless you happen to have a keen interest in 17th century English devotional poetry. In a conversation between Lt. General Leslie Groves who directed the Manhattan Project (played in the film by Matt Damon) and Oppenheimer, Groves has been pressing Oppenheimer to have the explosive device ready to test, and when he finally indicates that they are ready to do that, Groves asks him what name he will give to that test. Oppenheimer says, "Batter my heart, three-person'd God." Groves is like, "huh?" and Oppenheimer then says, "Trinity."

This "three-person'd God" is taken from Sonnet XIV by priest and poet John Donne who was an intellectual who struggled with the certain failure of his intellect, of reason, to save him from the wiles of Satan. Oppenheimer may not have had that particular worry, but this reference to "batter my heart" in a poem that ends with the words

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

makes one wonder if Oppenheimer was not, in some sense, hoping that this bomb would "batter" the enemy into submission. [1]

Oppenheimer was something of a savant, a polymath, who could learn languages easily and who read major works in original languages. His New York times obituary in 1967 contains another religious reference, this time to the sacred Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita, written in Sanskrit, which he could read. This is how his obituary put it:

As he clung to one of the uprights in the desert control room that July morning (the day of the test) and saw the mushroom clouds rising in the explosion, a passage from the Bhagavad-Gita, the Hindu sacred epic, flashed through his mind. He related it later as:

"If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One."

And as the black, then gray, atomic cloud pushed higher above Point Zero, another line--"I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds"--came to him from the same scripture.[2]

“We knew the world would not be the same,” he later recalled. “A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent.”[3]

"Jesus took with him Peter and John and James and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white" (Luke 9:28-29). Maybe his face was like a thousand suns, but whatever happened, we know that those who were with him would never be the same. This friend of theirs whom they had followed around the Galilee was there, accompanied by Moses the Deliverer and Elijah the Prophet, together - transfigured - on a mountaintop. They heard a voice from the heavens saying, "This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him" (9:35), and when it was all over, they, too were silent.

In the middle of this scene on the mountaintop as Jesus was speaking with his ancestors, the text says, "They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem" (9:31). The word used for this "departure" of which they speak is ἔξοδον, exodus. Moses, the liberator of the Israelites from enslavement in Egypt, Jesus the liberator of Palestine from the yoke of Rome. Moses was not permitted to enter into the Promised Land; Jesus died on a cross to free us. Our liberation came at a great price.

I've reflected on that in light of this Oppenheimer film. Our liberation from a costly war also came at a great price. One that we did not have to pay but hundreds of thousands of Japanese people did. It was something with which Oppenheimer was never able to reconcile himself. What was unleashed in Los Alamos and used with deadly effect in Japan may have transfigured our world, but not in a liberating way. We have been enslaved to fear of that power, of nations being able to use that power against each other, ever since. We have invented our way back into bondage.

Thanks be to God for the loving, liberating, and life-giving love given freely to us in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. There is a different way of being, of living. May we be the ones who beat our swords into ploughshares and our spears into pruning hooks, to not lift of our swords - our bombs - against any nation, nor study war anymore (paraphrase Isaiah 2:4).

[1]https://betterlivingthroughbeowulf.com/oppenheimer-and-metaphysical-poetry/?fbclid=IwAR260QtrgUdNiqxEDBjIVB2dyUt7SdKmzOnml5MGUpfxdM_L5gp17SCdFQw

[2]https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0422.html

[3]https://www.wired.com/story/manhattan-project-robert-oppenheimer/