But that is glorious

Seminarian Justin Carlson + February 19, 2023 + The Transfiguration of Our Lord

The flame of these torches looks deceptively simple. 

After all, fire is not a thing. Fire is a process - a process of rapid transformation triggered by heat in which vaporized fuel - [Saturday: beeswax - esters exuded from the abdomen of newly metamorphosed honeybees - beeswax] [Sunday: kerosene, a mixture of hexadecane, pentadecane, and tetradecane distilled from crude oil] - combines with oxygen and transforms, chemical bonds breaking and reforming until just carbon dioxide and water remain. Each of these transformations, through each intermediate state, with each bond that breaks and reforms, emits light! So much light - enough to fill a room, to dazzle our eyes, to produce heat, heat which [melts more of the solid wax below into liquid fuel], heat which vaporizes the liquid fuel traveling up the [fiberglass] wick, heat which provides the energy for the [beeswax][kerosene] to combine with oxygen and combust and transform and emit light!… So much light!

This pattern of transformation continues so long as there is fuel traveling up the wick and oxygen in the air. And it is glorious. 

In each of today’s scripture readings, glorious light dances and dazzles:

A lamp shines in a dark place, the glory of the Lord settles on a mountain like devouring fire, and Jesus’ face shines like the sun while his clothes become dazzling white.

His face shines like the sun…

The light of our sun comes from a very different transformation than the light of these torches. Unlike the chemical rearrangements, the changing of bonds between atoms that we see as flame, sunlight comes from elemental transformation: nuclear fusion! Plasmatic hydrogen nuclei combining and transforming into unstable isotopes of hydrogen and helium that continue combining and transforming until stable helium is formed, each transformation releasing immense amounts of energy, accelerating charged particles, emitting light: So much light!

Visible light, which our eyes evolved to sense, but also infrared light which we feel as heat and radio waves, ultraviolet light, and gamma rays which we cannot sense. There is so much light we cannot see.

Light comes from transformation, from change. It is glorious. And it moves so fast.

Consider our sun. 93 million miles away, and its light only takes eight minutes to get here. 

[Sunday: Look behind you! The light streaming through that stained glass window left the sun while we sang the psalm!]

93 million miles. Eight minutes.

That is glorious.

But that’s just from my frame of reference, my perspective as a human on earth. Special relativity means different perspectives see things differently. Humor me, and imagine yourself as sunlight.

From your perspective leaving the sun’s surface? Earth’s one yard away and it takes 3 nanoseconds to get here. Earth and Sun are basically the same place! One yard! Three nanoseconds! 

If we look through a telescope and see the Orion Nebula, we see it as it looked 1,344 years ago, but the light that hits our eyes hasn’t aged even one second since it left the Nebula.

Why am I bothering to share this trivia, these bits of information related to special relativity and time dilation and length contraction and electromagnetic fields? 

Relativity isn’t even reconciled with the standard model of particle physics yet, so why would I attempt to reconcile it with scripture? 

I don’t even have time in this sermon to explain things so it feels like I’m just listing facts and recycling jargon and honestly, if I weren’t speaking from a manuscript I probably wouldn’t be getting any of these details right anyway.

I’m not only sharing them because I find them fascinating and fun, though that’s true, and I’m not only sharing them because I consider Creation God’s first word so a responsible reading of scripture requires an understanding of Creation. 

As we just heard in second peter, “No prophecy of scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation.” We can’t only interpret scripture from our human perspective.

I share this knowledge because the effects of special relativity and the nature of light are central to the good news of God’s immanence and to understanding our relationship with God and one another. 

At a deep, fundamental physical level, we are so closely connected. The heat, the light that we each emanate simply through being alive and maintaining homeostasis collapses distance and time between us all. Every time you take communion, every time you metabolize that bite of bread, you transform it into light. 

Light that you cannot see, but light nonetheless. 

And through that light, God says I AM HERE. I AM NOW. 

And that is glorious! To feel God’s presence is glorious!

When we can consult with Moses and Elijah and the rest of our elders - when we can see that Jesus is the way and the truth and the life and we know who we are as Disciples of the Christ, It is good! It is good for us to be here! There is so much light here!

But… we don’t stay there. We can’t. We are only human and if anyone says they see the glory at all times… they have been blinded. 

I sense light in my eyes through an unwieldy few molecules that flip from cis to trans when a photon happens to hit just right… and it takes a while before the molecule flips back, trans to cis - when the camera flash goes off and all our retinal sensors become trans at once, we are briefly blind. There is so much light we cannot see.

Even though I know that light collapses time and space and brings all things together, even though I know that is a fundamental truth of our universe, I am human. I can’t feel it. I can’t see it. 

Like the disciples, when I lift up my eyes, I see no one except Jesus alone. Jesus, human. I have to come down from the mountain.

There is so much light we cannot see. 

This week, we transition to lent, to a period of introspection and repentance. 

We symbolically, liturgically, methodically, blot out the glory. 

I guess what I’m trying to say is: it’s okay if you can’t see Jesus’ glory, if you don’t feel inspired at all times, if you feel utterly disconnected even while it seems everyone around you just gets it, when the whole liturgy is a celebration of light and glory and the obvious goodness and holiness of Christ but you are wrapped up in grief and worry and detachment and anxiety and have you seen the news recently? 

When the preacher is going on and on about electromagnetic radiation when all you need is to hear God loves you.

“Get up and do not be afraid.”

There is so much light we cannot see.

Almost six years ago, my dad and I traveled to Grand Island, NE, gathering with thousands of others to witness a cosmic coincidence: a solar eclipse. As the moon orbited past the sun, less and less light reached us. The sky dimmed and the horizon in all directions transformed from blue to orange.

Darkness fell across the plains and we looked up. Where the sun should have been was instead a circle of pure black, utter darkness.

But surrounding the darkness, revealed to my eyes for the first time, was a hazy glow: our Sun’s corona, normally drowned out by the surface’s blazing glory, was finally visible. I could see it with my own eyes.

There is so much light we cannot see.