Feast of the Transfiguration & Hiroshima Day Year A

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O God our Strength and our Redeemer.

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This week the church calendar has us weaving together some very different threads, different themes that jar our senses.

One is the story of the Transfiguration, that very strange ‘time out of time’ moment when Jesus took three of his disciples and climbed a mountain to pray. And then – as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world when one sets off to say one’s prayers – Jesus’ face changed and his clothes became dazzling white, and Moses and Elijah, those giant figures of the Hebrew scriptures, appeared beside him.

The disciples were overwhelmed by the glory, with Peter left grasping at mundane practicalities because he doesn’t know what to do with himself – “well, er… um…. what we ought to do is build something…”

But a cloud descended around them, and we know that often in the scriptures a cloud is a metaphor for the presence and holiness of God coming so close that human vision and understanding becomes impossible – and a different kind of understanding, a different way of knowing, is gifted. Remember that Moses climbed up into the cloud on Mt Sinai and there, where the glory of God rested on the mountain, he received the ten commandments, representing a new understanding of how the Israelites were to live as God’s people.

With Jesus, the disciples heard a voice in the cloud that also brought them new awareness… the voice of God said, ‘This is my Son, the Chosen, listen to him!’ If they had been in any doubt of Jesus’ identity as God’s anointed, they were not any more… although the experience of that encounter was so profound and bewildering, they seemed not to know how to speak of it to anyone.

And alongside this extraordinary story of new vision and the love of God, celebrated on 6 August for many centuries, we hold a different story, a 20th century light, a 20th century cloud and a different and terribly devastating type of knowledge.

The 6th of August is also Hiroshima Day,  also known around the world as World Peace Day – the 81st anniversary of the day when the American B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima in Japan, the first time any population had been targeted with one. It was not the last – three days later, on the 9th August, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. The Hiroshima bomb killed at least 70 000 people instantly and perhaps another 60 000 by year end, of a population of some 345 000. Faced with the terrible knowledge of what these bombs could do, Japan surrendered on 15 August 1945, ending WW2.

It seems extraordinary that history and circumstance have had these two days, these two stories, land together. The dazzling light and the cloud of glory that surrounded Jesus on the mountain, revealing his identity as the beloved Son; and the bright burning cloud that enveloped the city of Hiroshima, erasing the identities of so many, leaving behind shadows stencilled onto walls and pavements, and radiation burned into cells.

It is almost as if we are offered a choice, or a powerful illustration of what our choices mean. Humanity truly has so much power, so much knowledge – we are capable of so much destruction. That is true on the large scale – we think of wars and financial crises that criple nations, and the climate crisis. And also true on a more personal scale – the often hidden devastation we are capable of wreaking on one another, our inattention to the waste of resources, the unchecked privilege we live with, our casual racism and every other -ism we carry unawares.

But as Christians, as the baptised people of God, we know those things don’t define us. We also have the knowledge of Christ’s reconciling love, Christ’s grace, and we have the choice to work at shedding that love and grace abroad around us. Sometimes we have opportunity to do that on a large scale, but more often on a personal scale.

Never has there been a period of human history when we know so much about the culture and beliefs of others. Never have those differences of identity and patterns of belonging been so relevant to our daily lives.

Questions of identity, belonging and the nature of a genuinely plural, just and inclusive society are critical to peace and stability – this is the truth of our world, our city of Auckland, and our little part of it here in Mt Albert. As Christians, if we can’t find the grace to celebrate the rich diversity that God has created in people who are like us and who are not like us, then we have no hope to offer.

If you visit Hiroshima today, you will find a bustling city of over a million people. And very quickly, you will encounter a people who have taken a story of utter horror and devastation, and transformed it into a narrative for peace. By 1949 the city was already planning the Peace Park which now occupies a huge swathe of central Hiroshima; its museum and memorials have the dual purpose of remembering those who died, and advocating for world peace and the abolition of nuclear weapons.

It is a deeply sobering place to visit, which I have done once; there are still some living hibakusha, survivors who were children and teenagers when the bomb was dropped – they are now in their 80s and 90s. In other words, the experience of the bomb is still held in living memory in that community.

But in the face of such terrible knowledge and terrible harm, Hiroshima has dedicated itself, decade after decade, to telling the story so that humanity would never take that path again. Every day, busloads of Japanese school children and tourists visit; trees around the park are festooned with thousands of tiny paper cranes. On the Cenotaph at the center of the park is an epitaph in Japanese that is a prayer for the peaceful repose of the victims and a pledge on behalf of all humanity never to repeat the evil of war. It expresses the spirit of Hiroshima — enduring grief, transcending hatred, pursuing harmony and prosperity for all, and yearning for genuine, lasting world peace.

As Christians we are named for the Christ who stood on that mountain, wreathed in bright glory. As the baptised people of God, we know that those words spoken in that cloud, and spoken over Jesus at his baptism, are spoken over each of us as well: “You are my child, the beloved – with you I am well pleased.”

What an extraordinary thing it would be to learn to live our lives according to that knowledge, instead of the world’s ways of being and knowing – of scarcity and grasping for power and control, of the fear of difference…

Imagine, for a moment, having that knowledge soaking into your deepest heart, your deepest being, your cells: “You are my child, the beloved – with you I am well pleased.”

And imagine what it would be like to live out of that knowing. That is our calling, our task, our identity, just as the people of Hiroshima live out their calling to strive for peace.

Amen