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

Nearly two decades ago, my brothers and sisters, when I was teaching at an Episcopal seminary in Pennsylvania, it was the custom in our chapel each morning that one of the seminarians would preach about a five-minute homily, just to give him practice in preaching, and the texts were always based on the lectionary in the Book of Common Prayer. One pretty young seminarian came to me. She had been assigned to preach this particular day, and the text that was chosen was the gospel we just had for the Transfiguration, and she wanted to know what to say. So she came to me and she says, “Do the Greek Fathers ever mention the Transfiguration?” I said, “Darling, they seldom mention anything else! They mention the Transfiguration all the time,” and I pointed her to some texts, and she made use of them and proceeded to preach a 30-minute homily on the Transfiguration which cut into class time that morning, and I got the blame for it. The only time I had ever heard people like Nicholas Cabasilas and Gregory Palamas being quoted in that Evangelical Episcopal seminary chapel. It was all worthwhile. She eventually became the wife of the founder of this parish, and some of you know her very well. [Laughter] I think she’s turned out okay for the experience.

I think she tried to say—do you want to turn that light back on? Thank you—she tried to say just about everything that could be said about the Transfiguration, but failed. I’m not going to try that this morning. We’re going to have only three points with respect to the Transfiguration, and these are three quite literally chosen at random. We serve Divine Liturgy at this parish every year, whether this is on a Sunday or not; we serve Divine Liturgy for the feast of the Transfiguration in this parish, so I’ve had a chance to preach on this— This’ll be my ninth time to preach on this to you.

First, let’s note that it is the body of Christ that is transfigured. It is somatic: soma, the body. This is a specifically New Testament and specifically Pauline idea, of the body. In fact, Hebrew does not even have a word that corresponds to “body.” As you look through the Old Testament, whenever they speak of bodies in the Old Testament, they’re always corpses. The Hebrew mind does not have a concept of “body” as the Greeks do.

It is the body of Christ that is transfigured. St. John says, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” He is transfigured and transformed with the divine glory in his flesh, in his body. St. John goes on. “No one has seen God at any time. The only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has declared him.” Or Jesus in the same gospel of John says to Philip, “He who sees me sees the Father.” St. Paul in the epistle to the Colossians declares of Christ that “in him all of the fullness of the divinity dwells bodily,” somatikos, the adverb, somatikos: it dwells bodily. “For it pleased the Father that in him all the fullness would dwell.”

So where is God? I hope you will not think me irreverent if I say that God is in a bod. That’s where we find him. That’s where we find him. Be careful of the god you might find out in the woods someplace. Be careful of that god. That might be Pan. Be careful of the god you find down on the oceanside. That may be Neptune. You’ve got to be very careful of any god you find and base your religious experience on this god. The one place we’re sure of is God dwells in the body of Jesus Christ. And this is what was revealed on the holy mountain to the three apostles as the kontakion said this morning, to prepare them, because these were the three apostles that were to see the agony in the garden; they were to see the supreme tapeinosis, the humiliation, of God. So where do we find God? In the body of Christ. In him dwells all the fullness of the divinity somatikos, bodily. Why, then, look elsewhere? Why waste time and energy on various religious theories? In Christ dwells all the fullness, the pleroma, the fullness of the divinity, in bodily shape.

The body of Christ is seated at God’s right hand, and that is the locus of salvation. His flesh is the dwelling-place of God. His body is the temple. Again, reading from the second chapter of John, “Jesus answered and said to them, ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ Then the Jews said, ‘It has taken 46 years to build this temple, and you will raise it in three days?’ ” And John throws in his note: “But he was speaking of the temple of his body.”

Now, the body of Christ is the locus of salvation. Salvation took place in him, in his flesh. How, then, do we have access to this? Because the body of Christ is the only place to find salvation. How, then, do we have access? The body of Christ, according to the faith of the Church in its own reading of the Scriptures—the body of Christ is the source of the sacraments. If one does not adhere to that, one not only has a Christian theology, he has a different cosmology, a different psychology—his entire view of the whole world would be different. Without sacraments, you’ve got a different brand of Christianity.

The role of the sacraments is to provide believers access to the body of Christ. That’s the role of the sacraments. In every sacrament, we touch his sacred flesh. He sanctifies us through these bodily things, which traditionally the Orthodox call the mysteria. The mysteria. For the last roughly 200 years, we’ve started to call them “sacraments,” just to adopt the Latin word, sacramenta. And that’s all right. I have no objection, as long as we’re clear what we’re talking about: the mysteria, the sacred mysteries. These are the sacred rites that Jesus himself left us and commanded us to do.

I won’t go through all the seven sacraments. That would be a much longer sermon. Let’s talk a little bit about this, though. The first of these is baptism, of which St. Paul wrote—and please listen to it carefully. You’ve heard these words a million times, but listen to them very carefully. “By one spirit, we were all baptized into one body.” What is that body into which we’ve been baptized? It is the body of Christ, the physical source of our salvation. And indeed, what else is the Church except the physical extension of the body of Christ? Not very many Americans believe this, that the Church is a physical thing. It’s an organic thing. They think of the Church as somehow or other a nebulous, invisible reality in which we’re all somehow—oh, goodness, that’s Gnostic; that has nothing to do with the Incarnation.

This is why we insist that the Church, founded by Christ, is an organic and physical reality, not some shapeless figment of religious imagination. And we join this Church by a physical act. The sheer physicality of it is certainly obvious to me when I do it. I’m holding a real baby in my hands. At least, they’re the ones that squawk; the adults are usually more cooperative. Real. And this little baby knows something physical is happening to him. He’s being immersed in water, over which we’ve invoked the Holy Spirit. It’s very, very physical. To join the Church is a very physical thing.

And why can we do this? Why can we do this? It has to do with my body: my body, me! Something happened to my flesh. Somebody else laid his flesh on my head, put his hands here: the fleshly contact. And this fleshly contact goes back, unbroken, to those whom Christ himself touched. The hands that were laid on my head, these same hands which baptized your babies, goes back by an unbroken physical touch to the very hands that felt the place of the nails and were laid into the side of Christ, the Word of God, who was seen and touched and their hands have handled. The same hands, down through the centuries, have handed on the body of Christ.

And why are we baptized, my brothers and sisters? What is the reason why we are baptized? So that we may feed on the body of Christ and become members of it. Baptism is preeminently the door to the holy Eucharist. “For the bread which we bread,” says St. Paul, “is it not the communion in the body of Christ? For we, though many, are one bread and one body. For we all partake of this one bread. This holy communion in the body of Christ is the means and the instrument of our salvation.” This is a completely different view of salvation than that entertained by most American Christians. The body of Christ is the source, because unless we eat his flesh and drink his blood, we have no life in us. “I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I give is my flesh, for the life of the world.”

The holy Communion that we receive is the body of Christ, transfigured in the eternal light. It’s a mystic participation in the body that is seated at the right hand of God. And from this body of Christ in which we participate the divine energies flow into our own flesh—I’m paraphrasing Chrysostom—filling us with the transforming grace of the Holy Spirit. “As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me, feeds on me, shall live because of me.”

Now, it’s the same with the other sacraments, but I don’t plan to go through them all. Each in its own way provides the believer with a living communion in the transfigured body of Christ. The various ways of anointing, the other physical things we do, all the way down to putting crowns on our heads in marriage—these are all ways of attaining contact with the only source of our life, which is the body of Christ—which brings me to point three.

I think it was in the eighth ode this morning, if I’m not mistaken, which spoke about the Transfiguration of Christ as the foreshadowing and the promise of our own transfiguration at our resurrection. What we see on the holy mountain in Christ is the promise that’s given to our own flesh: the transfigured body raised by the glory of God.

There is no holiness, my brothers and sisters, without holiness of the body. The Transfiguration of Christ is the hope of our holiness. If our bodies are the living members of Christ’s own body, then these bodies of ours belong to him and not to us. Over our bodies we do not have ownership. If we abuse our bodies in any way, we’re abusing property that belongs to another. Over our bodies we have only stewardship, because these bodies belong to the One who paid the price for them.

Now, the Corinthians forgot this, so Paul had to write them epistles and remind them of it. He says to them, “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?” You see, Paul expected the Corinthians to know this. They had been taught this during the 18 months that he spent with them, evangelizing them. But the Corinthians forgot this truth. They began to act as though their bodies belonged to themselves, so Paul had to spell it out for them more clearly. He asked them pointedly. I don’t know that I would even— If I wrote this in a “Pastoral Pondering,” just as my own expression, I’m sure I’d get some flak on it. He wrote it in a public epistle, directed at a congregation where everybody knew what was going on! “Shall I take the members of Christ and make them members of a whore?” God’s divinely inspired word. Put it right out there. [Laughter]

Many American Christians imagine that sanctification is a matter of the soul, or at least it begins with the soul. That’s not the view of the Church. In this other view, the body is accidental almost. In fact, sometimes it’s simply called a shell that’ll be sloughed off; the soul is where God really dwells. That’s why it doesn’t bother most American Christians to burn a dead body—to burn it, like you’re a Hindu or something! To burn it! That’s the temple of the Holy Spirit! Whether the soul is there or not, that’s the temple of the Holy Spirit.

These bodies we have belong to Christ. According to Scripture, then, there is no holiness which is not bodily holiness. If you’ve got a spiritual holiness that doesn’t belong to the body, it belongs to a different religion. These bodies are the members of Christ’s own body. They are rendered holy through the glory that passes from his flesh into ours.

Now this, my brothers and sisters, is a major component of Christian stewardship. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “Now the body is not for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.” There is no salvation without the cultivation of holiness. And the Christian cultivation of holiness includes holiness of the body. Therefore, it includes everything that we do in the body. All of this activity belongs to God.

Note for instance in this morning’s gospel, it is not just the flesh of Christ that’s transfigured: it’s his clothing—his clothing! The most elementary, fundamental cultural form: the clothing. His clothing is transfigured. Oh, that says volumes! Clothing is made by human hands. Clothing from sheep that are shorn by human hands. Clothing from cotton that’s picked in human labor, put together. Clothing. Manufacturing. The economy. Work. This mystery pertains to everything we do in the body. Clothing, work, play, eating and drinking, everything we do—all of economics and culture—all of this is to be transformed by the glory of God. Because our bodies belong to Christ, all the activities we do in the body are part of our service to Christ, until the whole of our lives are transformed in his glory.