The Last Sunday of Epiphany
02-15-26 Transfiguration and Philippians 3:7-14
Fr. Alan Heatherington (no audio recording)
02-15-26 Transfiguration and Philippians 3:7-14
Fr. Alan Heatherington (no audio recording)
The grass withers and the flower fades, but the Word of our God will stand forever.
Lord, make me know Your ways; teach me Your paths; lead me in Your truth; and teach me, for You are the God of my salvation. Amen. (Isaiah 40:8; Psalm 25:4,5).
What do you think about life after death? Do you think about it at all? Most of us do, especially those of us who qualify as senior citizens. In the context of life after death, unending debate has been occasioned by the appearance of Moses and Elijah at the Transfiguration. We ask how that was possible, and what it might mean for us. From where did they come and to where did they return? What did they look like? How did the disciples even know who they were? Did their presence testify to what St. Paul wrote about being absent from the body but present with the Lord? (see II Corinthians 5:6-8).
How many of you confidently believe that you are going to Heaven when you die? What is your basis for that certainty? I grew up in a Baptist church that espouses what they called “eternal security,” that is, “once saved, always saved.” But they believe that the decision is up to us. A good Calvinist is quite certain of being one of the elect, whose eternal destiny is predetermined and irrevocable. On the other hand, my older sister and I attended a Wesleyan Methodist college where a sort of “day-to-day” salvation was taught, by which we could be saved today and lost tomorrow unless we managed to achieve sinless perfection in this life, also known as “entire sanctification.” No pressure there! Yet all of us can sing, as we just did, that “He will raise us up on the last Day.”
Which of those views is correct? Our reading today from Philippians 3 may suggest a slight ambivalence on the part of St. Paul, who lays claim to “the power of Christ’s Resurrection” in verse 10, only to write in verse 11 that he hopes “by any means possible” to “attain the resurrection from the dead.” He adds in verses 13 and 14 that he does not consider that he has yet made it his own. Rather, “reaching forward to what lies ahead,” he is “pressing on toward the goal.” Was he uncertain about his eternal destiny?
We could cite many places where St. Paul lays aside any such hint of uncertainty. One of the clearest of these is found at the end of Romans 8, where Paul writes with confidence,
I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord (8:38,39).
In II Timothy, among the last letters of St. Paul written near the end of his earthly life, he stated this:
I know Whom I have believed, and I am convinced that He is able to guard what I have entrusted to Him until that Day (1:12).
Yet just a few verses later, writing about a beloved brother in Christ named Onesiphorus, he said,
“May the Lord grant him to find mercy from the Lord on that Day!” Was there a hint of uncertainty embedded in that prayer? No, when Paul wrote “may it be,” he meant that the matter was settled, more a “declaration” than a “hope.” In fact there, and often, when the word “may” is in our English translations, it is not even in Paul’s Greek at all! St. Paul would rejoice and be glad to sing with us, “He will raise us up on the last Day.”
Does this mean that we are to presume on God’s grace and mercy, His lovingkindness? By no means! We recall what Martin Luther wrote in the very first of his 95 Theses: “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, “Repent,” He willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance” (1517).
Later, in an essay called “Exhortation to Confession” (1529), Luther wrote,
If I have brought you to the point of being a Christian, I have thereby also brought you to Confession. Those who really desire to be true Christians, to be rid of their sins, and to have a cheerful conscience, already possess the true hunger and thirst. Let us, however, lift our hands in praise and thanksgiving to God for having graciously brought us to this, our understanding of Confession (1 Timothy 2:8; Exhortation 32,35).
For the Christian, Luther described confession as a “splendid gift,” an “inexpressible treasure,” and a “healing medicine.” As for the pronouncement of God’s mercy, he wrote,
What I am saying is that you are to concentrate on the Word, on the Absolution, to regard it as a great and precious and magnificently splendid treasure, and to accept it with all praise and thanksgiving to God (Exhortation 22).
Confession must be preceded by true repentance, as God does not wish to hear a recitation of sins for which we are not truly repentant. As Hercule Flambeau once alliteratively said, “Repentance requires regret.” Tim Keller, a Reformed theologian, wrote this about the difference between “religious” repentance and “Gospel” repentance:
In “religion,” repentance is self-centered; but the Gospel makes it God-centered.
In “religion,” we are mainly sorry for the consequences of sin; but in the Gospel we are sorry for the sin itself.
In “religion,” we earn our forgiveness with our repentance; but in the Gospel we just receive it.
And so, in our call to confession, we say, “All who truly and earnestly repent of your sins, draw near…” Now we see precisely what St. Paul meant when he wrote,
that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith (Philippians 3:9).
And it is in this context that we can understand his expressing a desire “to attain the resurrection from the dead” by “any means possible.” He painfully acknowledged that his own efforts had amounted to “rubbish,” a sanitized way of translating into English Paul’s unabashed Greek word for excrement.
Now that Paul could see himself as the recipient of an infused righteousness that he could not obtain on his own, does he suggest that he is just going to sit back, retreat into a life of ease, and wait it out until he does “attain the resurrection from the dead?” No, rather by recognizing that the call of God is a “high” calling, one “from above,” one that directs us “upward,” Paul responds by straining forward, going all out, pressing on toward the goal for the prize. We see a lot of that “straining” in the Olympics, and Paul wants to capture that image. He is determined to be a spiritual athlete, a spiritual Olympian, not imagining that he had attained perfection on his own, nor thinking that he ever could attain it apart from the fact that Christ Jesus had made him His own.
As you heard, Ash Wednesday is this week, and it ushers in Lent, the “forty days” when we are all called to heightened spiritual disciplines, exercises in the traditional forms of prayer, penitence, self-examination, abstinence, almsgiving, self-denial, and reading and meditating on God’s holy Word. The words “penitence” and “repentance” occur with some frequency in the Ash Wednesday liturgy. They serve as reminders that our regular worship is itself highly penitential.
There are at least 20 times in each Sunday service that we call on God’s mercy; and sometimes, as on the first Sunday of Lent, we even do it more than 30 times. But each time that we ask, “Lord, have mercy,” we are affirming that He will have mercy on us when we call on Him in repentance and confession. We are able to see those things not as onerous tasks, but as means by which we can bask in His abundant lovingkindness.
Lent used to be a time when people asked each other what we were “giving up” for Lent. By emphasizing instead what it is that we “add on” in Lent, we may have diminished if not extinguished the idea of giving up anything. Self-denial does not mean complete abnegation, putting ourselves down; rather, it means denying ourselves of something we know we can do without, something that has taken on excessive importance to us. It means emptying ourselves of the distractions that may keep us from obeying the requirement for discipleship so clearly stated by Jesus:
If anyone would come after Me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it (Luke 9:23,24).
In our Collect we prayed, “Grant that we beholding by faith the light of His countenance, may be strengthened to bear our cross.”
There is often an element of self-sacrifice in that sort of self-denial, our cross-bearing, but it is cast in the light of willing surrender, of self-limitation. In Romans, St. Paul challenged us to “present ourselves a living and holy sacrifice, pleasing to God” (12:1). For you, that sort of self-limitation may mean making more room for prayer and for service in Christ’s Name. For some, giving up surfing the internet, reading Facebook posts, watching podcasts, and being tied to our cell-phones could be the ultimate sacrifices among our Lenten disciplines. For others, it could be giving up ice cream.
What spiritual disciplines might you consider adding on during this Lent? One of you has taken on visiting shut-ins rather than leaving that to the paid clergy. Others of you take meals to those who are unwell or run errands for them. You might add Morning Prayer or Evening Prayer to your daily schedule. Some of you are prayer warriors for those whose special needs are brought to your attention through the weekly prayer request emails. Prayer warriors are people who devote significant numbers of extra hours to prayer.
Some of you contribute generously both to the ministries of Grace Anglican Fellowship and to the ministries of various other Christian entities. A few of you commit time to volunteer at Love, INC, Love in the Name of Christ, a Christian social agency working in Lake Country and across the US. More helpers are needed. Some of you take time whenever you are out in public to stop and speak to complete strangers, looking for ways to let them know about the love of God and about your faith in Christ. Those are just a few of the ways we can take on spiritual disciplines, do our spiritual exercises, and thereby reach out to others, both in our church family and in our very needy world.
I am certain to have left out some of the things you already are doing, and I was not trying to be exhaustive or exhausting. I have only named the ways that I know some of you are getting spiritual exercise as a Lenten warm-up. And even you might take on one more thing for these 40 days. It might actually become habitual, in a good way!
Every year, Lent gives us a renewed opportunity to join St. Paul in affirming what he wrote in our epistle reading:
I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.
Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own.
Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal, for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.
Only let us hold true to what we have attained.
Our Lord set aside 40 days of fasting in the Judean desert to prepare Himself for His strenuous spiritual exercise. He added 40 days after the Resurrection to make Himself and His teaching known to hundreds of people, as reported by St. Paul, when He could have said, “My work is already done” (I Corinthians 15:1-8).
When you take these 40 days of Lent to do His work, you are imitating Jesus and His 40 days of preparation. Thereby, as we also prayed today in our Collect, you are being “changed into His likeness from glory to glory.” You, too, are “pressing on toward the goal for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:14).
Why would you do that? It is because you can say with Paul:
Christ Jesus has made me His own.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Lord, make me know Your ways; teach me Your paths; lead me in Your truth; and teach me, for You are the God of my salvation. Amen. (Isaiah 40:8; Psalm 25:4,5).
What do you think about life after death? Do you think about it at all? Most of us do, especially those of us who qualify as senior citizens. In the context of life after death, unending debate has been occasioned by the appearance of Moses and Elijah at the Transfiguration. We ask how that was possible, and what it might mean for us. From where did they come and to where did they return? What did they look like? How did the disciples even know who they were? Did their presence testify to what St. Paul wrote about being absent from the body but present with the Lord? (see II Corinthians 5:6-8).
How many of you confidently believe that you are going to Heaven when you die? What is your basis for that certainty? I grew up in a Baptist church that espouses what they called “eternal security,” that is, “once saved, always saved.” But they believe that the decision is up to us. A good Calvinist is quite certain of being one of the elect, whose eternal destiny is predetermined and irrevocable. On the other hand, my older sister and I attended a Wesleyan Methodist college where a sort of “day-to-day” salvation was taught, by which we could be saved today and lost tomorrow unless we managed to achieve sinless perfection in this life, also known as “entire sanctification.” No pressure there! Yet all of us can sing, as we just did, that “He will raise us up on the last Day.”
Which of those views is correct? Our reading today from Philippians 3 may suggest a slight ambivalence on the part of St. Paul, who lays claim to “the power of Christ’s Resurrection” in verse 10, only to write in verse 11 that he hopes “by any means possible” to “attain the resurrection from the dead.” He adds in verses 13 and 14 that he does not consider that he has yet made it his own. Rather, “reaching forward to what lies ahead,” he is “pressing on toward the goal.” Was he uncertain about his eternal destiny?
We could cite many places where St. Paul lays aside any such hint of uncertainty. One of the clearest of these is found at the end of Romans 8, where Paul writes with confidence,
I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord (8:38,39).
In II Timothy, among the last letters of St. Paul written near the end of his earthly life, he stated this:
I know Whom I have believed, and I am convinced that He is able to guard what I have entrusted to Him until that Day (1:12).
Yet just a few verses later, writing about a beloved brother in Christ named Onesiphorus, he said,
“May the Lord grant him to find mercy from the Lord on that Day!” Was there a hint of uncertainty embedded in that prayer? No, when Paul wrote “may it be,” he meant that the matter was settled, more a “declaration” than a “hope.” In fact there, and often, when the word “may” is in our English translations, it is not even in Paul’s Greek at all! St. Paul would rejoice and be glad to sing with us, “He will raise us up on the last Day.”
Does this mean that we are to presume on God’s grace and mercy, His lovingkindness? By no means! We recall what Martin Luther wrote in the very first of his 95 Theses: “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, “Repent,” He willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance” (1517).
Later, in an essay called “Exhortation to Confession” (1529), Luther wrote,
If I have brought you to the point of being a Christian, I have thereby also brought you to Confession. Those who really desire to be true Christians, to be rid of their sins, and to have a cheerful conscience, already possess the true hunger and thirst. Let us, however, lift our hands in praise and thanksgiving to God for having graciously brought us to this, our understanding of Confession (1 Timothy 2:8; Exhortation 32,35).
For the Christian, Luther described confession as a “splendid gift,” an “inexpressible treasure,” and a “healing medicine.” As for the pronouncement of God’s mercy, he wrote,
What I am saying is that you are to concentrate on the Word, on the Absolution, to regard it as a great and precious and magnificently splendid treasure, and to accept it with all praise and thanksgiving to God (Exhortation 22).
Confession must be preceded by true repentance, as God does not wish to hear a recitation of sins for which we are not truly repentant. As Hercule Flambeau once alliteratively said, “Repentance requires regret.” Tim Keller, a Reformed theologian, wrote this about the difference between “religious” repentance and “Gospel” repentance:
In “religion,” repentance is self-centered; but the Gospel makes it God-centered.
In “religion,” we are mainly sorry for the consequences of sin; but in the Gospel we are sorry for the sin itself.
In “religion,” we earn our forgiveness with our repentance; but in the Gospel we just receive it.
And so, in our call to confession, we say, “All who truly and earnestly repent of your sins, draw near…” Now we see precisely what St. Paul meant when he wrote,
that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith (Philippians 3:9).
And it is in this context that we can understand his expressing a desire “to attain the resurrection from the dead” by “any means possible.” He painfully acknowledged that his own efforts had amounted to “rubbish,” a sanitized way of translating into English Paul’s unabashed Greek word for excrement.
Now that Paul could see himself as the recipient of an infused righteousness that he could not obtain on his own, does he suggest that he is just going to sit back, retreat into a life of ease, and wait it out until he does “attain the resurrection from the dead?” No, rather by recognizing that the call of God is a “high” calling, one “from above,” one that directs us “upward,” Paul responds by straining forward, going all out, pressing on toward the goal for the prize. We see a lot of that “straining” in the Olympics, and Paul wants to capture that image. He is determined to be a spiritual athlete, a spiritual Olympian, not imagining that he had attained perfection on his own, nor thinking that he ever could attain it apart from the fact that Christ Jesus had made him His own.
As you heard, Ash Wednesday is this week, and it ushers in Lent, the “forty days” when we are all called to heightened spiritual disciplines, exercises in the traditional forms of prayer, penitence, self-examination, abstinence, almsgiving, self-denial, and reading and meditating on God’s holy Word. The words “penitence” and “repentance” occur with some frequency in the Ash Wednesday liturgy. They serve as reminders that our regular worship is itself highly penitential.
There are at least 20 times in each Sunday service that we call on God’s mercy; and sometimes, as on the first Sunday of Lent, we even do it more than 30 times. But each time that we ask, “Lord, have mercy,” we are affirming that He will have mercy on us when we call on Him in repentance and confession. We are able to see those things not as onerous tasks, but as means by which we can bask in His abundant lovingkindness.
Lent used to be a time when people asked each other what we were “giving up” for Lent. By emphasizing instead what it is that we “add on” in Lent, we may have diminished if not extinguished the idea of giving up anything. Self-denial does not mean complete abnegation, putting ourselves down; rather, it means denying ourselves of something we know we can do without, something that has taken on excessive importance to us. It means emptying ourselves of the distractions that may keep us from obeying the requirement for discipleship so clearly stated by Jesus:
If anyone would come after Me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it (Luke 9:23,24).
In our Collect we prayed, “Grant that we beholding by faith the light of His countenance, may be strengthened to bear our cross.”
There is often an element of self-sacrifice in that sort of self-denial, our cross-bearing, but it is cast in the light of willing surrender, of self-limitation. In Romans, St. Paul challenged us to “present ourselves a living and holy sacrifice, pleasing to God” (12:1). For you, that sort of self-limitation may mean making more room for prayer and for service in Christ’s Name. For some, giving up surfing the internet, reading Facebook posts, watching podcasts, and being tied to our cell-phones could be the ultimate sacrifices among our Lenten disciplines. For others, it could be giving up ice cream.
What spiritual disciplines might you consider adding on during this Lent? One of you has taken on visiting shut-ins rather than leaving that to the paid clergy. Others of you take meals to those who are unwell or run errands for them. You might add Morning Prayer or Evening Prayer to your daily schedule. Some of you are prayer warriors for those whose special needs are brought to your attention through the weekly prayer request emails. Prayer warriors are people who devote significant numbers of extra hours to prayer.
Some of you contribute generously both to the ministries of Grace Anglican Fellowship and to the ministries of various other Christian entities. A few of you commit time to volunteer at Love, INC, Love in the Name of Christ, a Christian social agency working in Lake Country and across the US. More helpers are needed. Some of you take time whenever you are out in public to stop and speak to complete strangers, looking for ways to let them know about the love of God and about your faith in Christ. Those are just a few of the ways we can take on spiritual disciplines, do our spiritual exercises, and thereby reach out to others, both in our church family and in our very needy world.
I am certain to have left out some of the things you already are doing, and I was not trying to be exhaustive or exhausting. I have only named the ways that I know some of you are getting spiritual exercise as a Lenten warm-up. And even you might take on one more thing for these 40 days. It might actually become habitual, in a good way!
Every year, Lent gives us a renewed opportunity to join St. Paul in affirming what he wrote in our epistle reading:
I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.
Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own.
Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal, for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.
Only let us hold true to what we have attained.
Our Lord set aside 40 days of fasting in the Judean desert to prepare Himself for His strenuous spiritual exercise. He added 40 days after the Resurrection to make Himself and His teaching known to hundreds of people, as reported by St. Paul, when He could have said, “My work is already done” (I Corinthians 15:1-8).
When you take these 40 days of Lent to do His work, you are imitating Jesus and His 40 days of preparation. Thereby, as we also prayed today in our Collect, you are being “changed into His likeness from glory to glory.” You, too, are “pressing on toward the goal for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:14).
Why would you do that? It is because you can say with Paul:
Christ Jesus has made me His own.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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