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Kaleidoscope                        2 Corinthians 3: 18                   February 14, 2010

I've always enjoyed kaleidoscopes - the cylinders with mirrors and colored glass or other objects at the end that convert the light you see into all sorts of shapes; changing, again and again, when you twist them around.

These optical toys, I've discovered, come in many different sizes - and price ranges. I bought this little one at the Dollar Store and, surprise, surprise; it cost a dollar. I also found one on line this week - one that was really more of a work of art than a toy - and that one, had I bought it, would have set me back more than $800.

But whether your kaleidoscope is made of plastic and cardboard or brass and hand-blown glass, the concept is the same. You look through the eyepiece, twist the movable piece at the opposite end and when you do so you can allow yourself to be mesmerized by the magic of the changing patterns and shapes.

I'm quite certain St. Paul was not thinking about a kaleidoscope when he wrote the words that comprise our Epistle Lesson for this morning. He couldn't have, actually, since the scope wasn't invented until 1816 - by a Scottish philosopher/scientist named David Brewster.

But I can't help thinking about a kaleidoscope, and the experience of looking through one, when I read Paul's words. "All of us," he writes, "see the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror."

Kaleidoscopes, for me, represent two things: On the one hand, they represent the fact that sometimes the light we see is in a form that is all refracted and reflected, so it's hard to know exactly what it really is.

And, on the other hand, they represent the fact that the future, seen through that reflected light, holds infinite and unknowable possibility.

So, on this Sunday when we reflect on two things - the Transfiguration of our Lord and the baptism of young Edie Fyke, it is fitting, I think, that we call the kaleidoscope to mind.

For those of us who spend most Sundays in church, the story of Jesus' mountaintop transfiguration is a familiar one. It's recorded in all three of the parallel Gospels, and we read it each year on this last Sunday before Lent.

Jesus takes his three best friends, Peter, James and John, to the top of a mountain to pray. And while they are there, Jesus begins to glow, almost as if he were radioactive. His garments shine brighter than those bright whites the laundry detergent people like to talk about.

The disciples cover their eyes, the light is so bright. But when they peek between their fingers, they see that it's not just the four of them any more. Jesus is no longer standing alone; he is flanked, on either side, by Moses and Elijah.

Why Moses and Elijah? Here's why: It was Moses, you may remember, whose face shined with God's glory when he received the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. So much so that he had to wear a veil when he came down to talk to the people. And it was Elijah whose journey to heaven was so brightly lit by God's glory that his chariot seemed to be on fire.

So Jesus is in good company on that mountaintop. And brightly lit company at that.

The Transfiguration, you see, is all about light. Bright, blinding light. Light that reflects the glory of God.

Most of us have never seen anything like the flash of divine light that the three Disciples saw that day. We sometimes get a glimpse of God's glory, but the light is rarely like a searchlight beam. More often than not, it's like the light we see when we look into a kaleidoscope. It's beautiful, but it's hard to know just what to make of it.

Look at the reaction of the Disciples who witnessed the events on that mountaintop. They were more frightened than anything else - and they kept their mouths shut and told no one.

My friends, the first message of the Transfiguration story is this: God reveals God's self to us in ways that are often confusing. Always has, and always will. We all see God's glory, Paul reminds us, "as though reflected in a mirror."

The second message of the Transfiguration, though, is a message of great possibility. One that reminds us that we are brothers and sisters of the one who brightly reflected the glory of God and about whom God said, "This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!" One that reminds us that we have the privilege of also reflecting God to the people we live with and work with and walk beside each day.

We humans are invited, by the transfigured Christ, to share in God's glory. Again, in the words of Paul, "we are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another."

That is why we baptized Edie this morning. Because we believe that as a member of the Body of Christ, she shares in the kaleidoscope of possibility that all of us share in following Him.

The Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet and author Seamus Heaney tells a story about something that happened to him on a Christmas day when he was a youngster:

"I had just received a Christmas present," he writes, "something my aunt gave me, something that I immediately hastened across the road to show my companion in those days, a lad called Tommy Evans."

"What I had in my hand was a kaleidoscope," he continues. "A little transformer of light and color. A little pocket marvel-maker, an eye-opener in all senses, a vision-brightener and a horizon-expander. A gift indeed.

But when I landed with Tommy Evans I began to forget the beauty and invitations of the kaleidoscope, when I was faced with the Christmas present he had been given. Tommy was on his knees beside a broad tub of water, and out on the surface of this imaginary sea there rode a brightly painted and beautifully proportioned toy battleship, all dove grey and navy blue, decorated with bright little pennants and authentic-looking lines and markings and numbers of all sorts."

"It struck me," Seamus goes on to tell, "that my own gift could compete in this arena also. It could be a little tug, as it were, adjacent to Tommy's battleship.

So there I did it. I let the kaleidoscope go, and sunk it down in the tub of water, and watched it as it grew soggy and unseemly and water-logged, and in a few minutes it became neither tug nor kaleidoscope, just a leftover spoiled opportunity, a mistaken decision, a mess generally."

"I went home disappointed," he concludes, "but in the years that followed I've gathered an important meaning from that disappointment.

Don't surrender the bright prisms of your own individual gift to the terms of the world that's around you. Don't let the so-called realism of the world of water tubs and battleships negate the reality of the thing you envisage.

Trust in the kaleidoscope of your own possibilities. Keep your plane of regard high. Credit the marvelous, keep going, make your way as the dolphins do. Be eco-sounders, searchers. Remember that you are here for good in every sense of the term."

The message Seamus Heaney learned on that Christmas day, slightly modified, is the message I would like to leave with us today - and particularly leave with young Edie Fyke, whom we baptized, this morning, into the Body of Christ.

Trust in the kaleidoscope of your own possibilities. Be open to the infinite potential of a life lived reflecting the Glory of God.

                                                                             AMEN

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