Here's a sermon for Transfiguration Sunday.
But first, a call to worship and a prayer of invocation.
* Call to Worship The Cloud of Unknowing Excerpted & Adapted
One: Let us leave aside this everywhere and this everything;
All: Let’s exchange it for this nowhere and this nothing.
One: Never mind at all if your senses have no understanding of this nothing.
All: It is for this reason that we might love it so much the better.
One: It is so worthy a thing in itself that we can have no understanding of it.
All: This nothing can be better felt than seen;
One: it is most obscure and dark to those
who have been looking at it only for a very short while.
All: Yet to speak more truly, a soul is more blinded in experiencing it.
One: This, because of the abundance of spiritual light than for any darkness or lack of bodily light.
All: Who among us would call it nothing?
One: It is surely our outward being, not our inward.
All: Our inward being calls it All—
One: for because of it we are well taught to have understanding of all things bodily or spiritual,
All: But without any specific knowledge of any one thing in itself.
One: So perhaps it will be God’s will to send out a ray of spiritual light—
All: piercing this cloud of unknowing between us and Him;
One: and he will show us some of His secrets,
of which we may not or cannot speak.
All: Then we shall feel God’s affection all aflame with the fire of His love.
Prayer of Invocation (please be seated; in unison)
Glorious God, grant that we might enter into the secret closet of our souls, led by you; grant that we might enter and behold with the mysterious eye of our souls the Light that never changes and that rises far above mere intelligence.
This isn’t the common light that all flesh can see, or the greater light yet of the same kind, as if the light of day were to grow brighter and brighter and flood all space; neither is it above human intelligence in the same way as oil is above water, but it is higher because it formed us and (by your grace) still informs us.
When we know the truth, we know your Light; when we know such Light, we know eternity. This is the knowledge of Love. Grant that it might be ours. In Christ, which is such Light and Love, we pray. (Excerpted from Augustine’s Confessions)
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