On this bright summer morning, our readings as well as our own history, make us envision two overwhelming sights. We gaze at two blindingly brilliant  clouds, up, high in the heavens. Eyewitnesses said that no other clouds were ever so radiant. Yet beyond their appearance, these clouds would change the meaning of life and of death, of fear and of hope, of God’s power and of human destiny. 

The first cloud on the mountaintop strikes awe as one of the ultimate symbols that the Jewish Scriptures use for the presence of God. Throughout the Bible, when a cloud settles on a mountain, it is a sign that God has arrived, and God is about to speak. In such a cloud, Moses in his lifetime and Jesus in his were changed in appearance so drastically that their followers could hardly bear to look at them. But more than their appearance, yes,  the meaning  of Moses and of Jesus was changed for their followers. On the mountaintop Jesus, in the tradition of Moses  and Elijah  before Him, was declared by God to be the bearer of God’s word for God’s people – and his followers could hardly bear to look upon him. These revelations also transfigured their followers, because in following Moses, the Jews were changed as God’s people. And in hearing Christ Jesus, we are transfigured as “very members ... of his mystical body”.  (BCP,  Prayer after Communion)

Now -- the second clouds belongs also to August sixth -- and also reveals something new. I mean the atomic clouds that arose for the first time over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, sixty-five years ago last Friday and tomorrow. No one could bear to look at their radiance straight on, and every person and nation,  near and far and then and since then, has been  transfigured by the sickening threat of death that it unleashed. A hymn for this week’s feast put it wel:  “Bright the cloud but dark the glory ... All has changed and we shall never be the same.”
So let us open our eyes to the awesome clouds that belong to this day. Let us hear God’s voice,  thundering there.

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The first cloud, the cloud of Transfiguration, imparts a vision on a mountaintop recorded in three of the gospels. Of course, if you go up high on a mountain in sunny weather, you really do see the jigsaw patterns of the earth with the eyes of God.

When I lived near the Alps, I learned that the Germans have a word for the mood of the mountaintop: they call it  Bergstille , mountain silence, a time for quiet thoughts and deep insight. No wonder God gives visions on the mountain.

But you don’t want to be on a mountain when a cloud comes in, the way it does in this Gospel story !   This happened to me, during a hike high in the Alps. With little warning, clouds surrounded me, and I could see only a few feet ahead.  You cannot move forward or back or sideways, because the gravel may slide, you may lose your footing, and you can hurl down to your death. If the clouds hang on, you must stay overnight on the mountain, with the danger of chill and exposure. So it’s time for that corny old wisdom: “Don’t just do something. Stand there!”   Quite apart from the vision, no wonder the disciples were terrified, no wonder Peter offered to build tents   -- camping out is your only option when clouds cover the mountain !

In all this bewilderment, Jesus held conversation with Moses and Elijah who represent the law and the prophets, the morality and wisdom revealed to the Jews. Jesus’s appearance with them guaranteed that he was in continuity with the sacred Jewish tradition and would extend it in a new way to all peoples.  This is a key to our Christian and Jewish dialogue.

Yet what do Jesus and Moses and Elijah discuss? They talk about his death.   But why—why   in these moments of glory and danger do they talk of his suffering to come?  Because that is the very thing that God needed to reveal: for the glory of Jesus is that God does enter into the depth of human suffering. God undergoes our agony. So, in the Transfiguration, when God overhears Moses and Elijah and Jesus talk about Jesus’s suffering, God interrupts the conversation as if to underline precisely this point:  “Yes,” God says, “Yes , like Moses and Elijah, my Son Jesus will be a victim with my people and for my people. Jesus is my Son because  he will share this suffering.” By God’s “yes” to share our suffering, not only is the human face of God transfigured, but we are transfigured, made godlike by a hope that we could not have on our own.

So the Transfiguration calls us to face into our own suffering with the promise that God goes into it with us. And God will emerge with us, and raise us up in a new way. Even when we lose our health or our job, or when we can’t get around on our own any more, or when we betray our moral center through habits of addiction or sin, or when the legal system betrays us, or when even our spouse or our child or our father abandon us—in all that suffering, the heart of God grieves with us. The divine compassion goes to work in our emptiness to create us anew.  For the glory of Transfiguration is the hope that God will,  in the words of the poet Auden,

Yet does this mystery of Transfiguration help us to gaze upon that other cloud --  the cloud of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima that arose sixty-five years ago on Friday morning, the cloud over Nagasaki sixty-five years ago tomorrow? As Christians, we must face that question . . .
. . . but the question of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not the familiar moral and political question of whether such force was justified to end the war, or whether a one-time use of atomic power has been a deterrent to further use. Patriots and scientists may argue on both sides of those questions, and ours is not to resolve them.

No --  the question of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – a question that no one can avoid-- a question that we must ask but which may not have an answer –is the deeper existential question of whether we can survive — survive our own ingenuity, our lust to dominate creation. Throughout the Bible, throughout history, when we play God, we end in destruction.

 “My God,” cried Lieutenant Colonel Tibbetts as he flew the Enola Gay looking down on the first explosion, “My God, what ... have ... we ... done?” 2   When he published his comment sixteen years later, the Pentagon censured him for being politically incorrect . But he was religiously correct to put the question to God, because, in breaking the atomic elements to destroy life, humanity put asunder what God had joined together.

Can we survive? We might feel able to ignore Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because those bombs was little and it all happened over there, back then.  But we know that many governments, including our own, conceal the effects of nuclear tests that hurt our health and our planet. We know that recent administrations were determined to resume nuclear testing and abandon other life-nurturing treaties. We know, thanks to a piece in the New York Times on Friday by the Japanese Nobelist Kenzaburo Oe that our government wants Japan to violate its anti-nuclear policy b agreeing to transport nuclear materials across sovereign Japanese territory.
We also know that unstable nations have the bomb and foolhardy leaders could launch one.

Can we survive? Will our children and grandchildren survive? We do not know the answer.   We can only live with the question. . . under the cloud.  We have lived every day for sixty-five years with the knowledge that we can wipe out millions—we can be wiped out by the millions.

God never promised to preserve us from an apocalypse. And since we have grown accustomed to expecting the unspeakable, the clouds of August, 1945, lie not in the past. They arise as question marks on the horizon of all our future.  We all live under the clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.    
        
Yet this cloud can be overshadowed by the cloud of Transfiguration, where God extends to us the self-control and forgiveness and humility at the heart of Jewish wisdom, which is now extended to all through the saving power of Christ’s  peace.  Here is the source of our hope. Even in our age, God’s prophets echo the commandment of peace:  Gandhi, King, Archbishop Tutu, Hans Blix, Richard Goldstone, Eve Spangler, the Irish mothers for peace,  and  among the families of faith, first and last the Society of Friends, the Quakers. We hear the passionate words of Pope Paul VI, who also died on August 6. As the first Pope to speak before the United Nations in 1965, Pope Paul seemed to depart from his text and cry out “Never again war! Never! Never again!  It is peace, peace, that must direct the destiny of humankind.”

So it is a high and holy irony that  on August 6, the Feast of Transfiguration and the Anniversary of Hiroshima will fall on the same day for as long as history endures.  It is a high and holy irony that  our liturgical color is white for the feast of Transfiguration, yet at the same time white is the Japanese color for mourning.
If I could give you anything else this morning, I would wish to give you each an origami crane, which Japanese children have made a universal symbol of the desire for peace . . . and which a Japanese woman gave to Glenn and me when we visited Hiroshima four years ago last Friday. The hospitality of the Japanese was overwhelming as they wept with us and invited us to share in their families’ observances. We also celebrated Eucharist on that occasion in a quiet grove in the Peace Park.

Thus the meaning of August 6 is forever plunged into paradox—can we rejoice whilst others mourn? If we must face the terrors of August sixth and  ninth, we must also face the hope that  God offers us from the mountaintop.  And that is, most simply, again to cite Auden, “We must love . . . or we shall die.” 3

As we hear God’s voice from these clouds , and as we hear the screams of victims, their bodies burning and melting beneath the clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we are brought to the uttermost depth of our need as a human community. Let us fall to our knees. Let us pray again as our Japanese sisters and brothers do each year and did on that day: Watashini Heiwao Kudasai! Watashini Heiwao Kudasai, Kamisama! Grant us peace!  O God, grant us peace!