Sermon: What Is Revealed, What Is Concealed

First Presbyterian Church

February 15, 2026, Transfiguration A

Exodus 24:12-18: 2 Peter 1:16-21; Matthew 17:1-9

 

What Is Revealed, What Is Concealed

 

 

Have you ever noticed how much easier it is to drive around town or perhaps across the state on a cloudy day? Not a rainy day, but a cloudy one, when the sun isn't constantly beating down and creating a glare that obscures everything? I know this is a little bit heretical to say, but sometimes cloudiness can be a good thing. 

In the Old Testament a cloud can in fact be a very good thing: it can, on occasion, be a manifestation of the presence of God. 

It happens in today’s reading from Exodus, Moses is making ready to go up the mountain called Sinai to receive instruction from God. Even from the moment the Israelites had first come to that mountain after their deliverance from Egypt (back in 19:9), God had made his presence to Moses there known by the appearance of a thick and dense cloud, from which God’s voice might be heard by the people. Even before that, during the Exodus from Egypt, a pillar of cloud had been the manifestation of God’s protection of the people as they traveled by day, with a pillar of fire taking its place by night. That cloud, in a sense, revealed God.

There are other accounts in Hebrew Scripture of cloud as manifestation of God, but my personal favorite is a little-known account from the little-read book of 2 Chronicles. In this account in chapter 5 the great Temple was being dedicated under King Solomon. At the climax of the dedication, as the priests sang a song of praise, the Temple was filled with a cloud, “so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud; for the glory of the Lord filled the house of God.” I mean, let’s face it, that’s pretty cool. And again, the cloud reveals the presence of God. (There is a parallel account in 1 Kings 8, but I prefer the Chronicles version because in that story, the cloud fills up the Temple only after the trumpeters have started playing and the choir singing. Music, after all.)

So when we get to the account from Matthew’s gospel today, along with the account of going up a mountain, and the actual glowing transfiguration of Jesus, the bright, welling cloud as a manifestation of the glory of God would not have been unfamiliar to those to whom Matthew was writing. It is a scene in a gospel, but like so much of Matthew’s gospel it contains a host of echoes and resonances with Hebrew Scripture.

Still, though, there is something interesting about a cloud as a manifestation of the presence and glory of God. Clouds, after all, aren’t exactly known for their revealingproperties most of the time. Clouds aren’t translucent; they obscure. The whole reason that the cloudiness makes that drive so bearable is that it obscures the sometimes-oppressive summer sun (or even the sometimes-oppressive wintertime sun). 

And in the account from Exodus, that’s exactly what happens. The voice of God could be heard by the people, but God could not be seen, and when Moses went up the mountain to receive the commandments of God he also disappeared. Not that the people minded; already they were quite content to keep their distance; as early as Exodus 20 they were afraid that if God spoke to them directly – face to face, so to speak – they would die. In their minds, the cloud was protection.

(As for that lovely story from 2 Chronicles 5, the glory of the Lord filling the Temple with a cloud was indeed enough to bring the dedication of the Temple to a halt; “the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud” as verse 14 describes. Not sure if it means the priests were physically unable to stand or simply couldn’t stand it.)

In Matthew, the cloud seems a little different. This event is taking place six days after Simon had made the great breakthrough confession of faith recorded in 16:16: “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God.” Jesus had followed up this confession by giving him a new name – Peter – and by launching into an extended piece of instruction on his forthcoming death. The newly-christened Peter had taken Jesus aside to rebuke him for such talk, only to get it back ten times over – “Get behind me, Satan!” 

Despite that incident, Jesus took Peter up the mountain, along with James and John, where this Transfiguration took place. Jesus himself is transfigured and glowing and shining and dazzling, and then as Moses and Elijah – the law and the prophets, so to speak – appear with him. You get a brief reminiscence of this in the reading from 2 Peter, likely written by a follower of that apostle recording his teacher's recollection. 

After this transfiguration, Peter steps into a role many of us might recognize, maybe, from times of great excitement or stress or fear in our own lives: the person whose mouth immediately starts running despite the fact that his brain is supplying absolutely nothing useful for his mouth to say. (Somehow, 2 Peter doesn't include this part.) And then, when Peter is fumbling around about building booths for Moses and Elijah and Jesus as if this were the ancient Hebrew festival known as the Feast of Booths? That’s when the cloud takes over.

The cloud “overshadowed” them. And, as it was back in the days of Exodus, a voice (the voice of God?) spoke from the cloud, to the effect that the disciples fell to their knees in fear (not unlike their Hebrew ancestors at the prospect of the voice of God). What the voice said sounds familiar – “this is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased” is an exact echo of what the voice from Heaven says at Jesus’s baptism, back in chapter 3. But there is added a command: “Listen to him!” (And don’t miss that exclamation point.) Only at the touch of Jesus (“Get up and do not be afraid”) do they look up to see the cloud gone, Moses and Elijah gone, and Jesus – “Jesus himself alone” in Matthews’ emphatic Greek construction – is there. The cloud, the glory of God, has removed the distractions of Moses and Elijah, the safe and comfortable heroes of the faith Peter and James and John knew, and left them with “Jesus himself alone,” whom they have just seen as they had never seen or heard or understood him before. 

In concealing Moses and Elijah from the overly enthusiastic disciples, the cloud also reveals; Jesus is revealed not merely as an equal to those two, but something completely other, something so far beyond what either of those figures could represent or offer. The Son of God, the Eternal, is revealed by what the clouds conceal. 

As the eminent twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth describes in his The Faith of the Church:

Eternal does not mean "that which has no end" but "that which belongs to the world to come". Eternity is not defined by its unlimited characteristic but by its relation to the world to come, to the glorious kingdom of God.

 

“That which belongs to the world to come” – a world without end. 

At a challenging time for the disciples, when Jesus insisted on his own death and severely rebuked those who could not accept it, these disciples are given a glimpse, however fleeting, of Jesus the Eternal, Jesus of The World to Come. At a time and season nearly impossible for us to bear, we receive this glimpse of Jesus the Eternal, Jesus of The World to Come. Death does not, cannot, have the last word, no matter how dark our despair might seem, how much madness might seem to hold sway in the entire world, no matter how bleak the night. The clouds pull back and conceal what is not eternal, revealing the One who is eternal. And that, strange and puzzling as the story might be, is why Transfiguration Sunday is a day of great hope. 

This is God’s Son, the Beloved, in whom God is well pleased. Listen to him!

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #189, O Wonderous Sight, O Vision Fair; #---, Upon a holy mountain; #11, Source and Sovereign, Rock and Cloud

 

 

Sermon: In Light Inaccessible

First Presbyterian Church

March 2, 2025, Transfiguration C

Exodus 34:29-35; Luke 9:28-36

 

In Light Inaccessible

 

 

For our last hymn today we will be singing a pretty familiar hymn, "Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise." The opening words of that hymn put before us an image that might seem counterintuitive, on the surface;

Immortal, invisible, God only wise,

In light inaccessible hid from our eyes...

 

Think about that for a moment. Particularly in scripture or in theology or preaching, "light" is almost always about illuminating, making things seen or more clearly visible, undoing darkness in some way. Think of the prologue of the gospel of John, in which "the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." Or consider the image invoked in Isaiah 42:6, in which the people are promised that "I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light for the Gentiles..." (an image repeated in Isaiah 49:6). Or consider a simple image like that of Matthew 5:14, "You are the light of the world," after which Jesus points out that one doesn't cover a lamp with a bushel but rather puts it on a lampstand so that it "gives light to everyone in the house." That's just for starters.

Even the more general usage of our language suggests such a lean towards light as illuminating - even that word carries such a shade, not to mention such a word as "enlightened." We speak of a whole epoch of history as "the Enlightenment" because of the supposed benefit of greater learning and reason that was attributed to the age.

So what's with that phrase in the hymn, "in light inaccessible hid from our eyes"? 

Think of what happens when a solar eclipse comes around, like we had just a year ago. The one warning you get again and again is don't look directly into the sun during an eclipse. Frankly, that's not a thing you're supposed to be doing any time, but the warnings about eye damage come out especially intensely around an eclipse. 

There is such a thing, evidently, as too much light. It isn't that common, but a thing can be so brightly illuminated that the thing itself is no longer visible, only the overwhelming light illuminating it. Such a phenomenon doesn't have quite so much scriptural precedent behind it, but a telling example can be found in 1 Timothy 6:16, in which the Lord is described as the one who "alone is immortal and lives in unapproachable light." One gets a feeling that Walter Chalmers Smith might have had that passage in the back of his head in penning the words of that hymn. 

Maybe this is something we should keep in mind in approaching the two readings we have heard today. The curious reading from Exodus, in which Moses's face glows with light after his encounters with God on Mount Sinai, provides one small glimpse. Moses doesn't realize what's going on until he comes down from the mountain and to the people of Israel to find that they're all shrinking back from him in fear and puzzlement. Moses ends up having to work out a system whereby he wraps his face in a veil when among the people, taking it off when going back to the mountain. The people cannot understand that shining, and to be fair, who could blame them?

The telling of the Transfiguration of Jesus found in Luke's gospel might also point to something about that much light. We are told that while Jesus was praying, "the appearance of his face changed and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightning." That probably wasn't a sight people who routinely walked on long, dusty roads were accustomed to seeing. Then Moses and Elijah enter the scene, and we already know Moses knows something about one's face changing appearance; the two of them appear "in glorious splendor" and are talking to Jesus about the events to come.

This is all strange enough; throw in that the disciples were barely awake for all of this, and one can almost be sympathetic to Peter's bungling suggestion about building festival-booth tabernacles for the three shining figures. At this, light is overcome by a cloud, a voice speaks from the cloud, and then - poof! - all of that scene is gone, with only Jesus standing there before the disciples.

Amidst all of that shining and all that dazzling and all that light, Peter, and presumably the other disciples with him, didn't see things right. In all that light, his eyes betrayed him. To be fair, he would have been raised with Moses and Elijah as "heroes of the faith," so to speak, but in that moment of illumination he saw things wrong.

It is particularly telling what the voice from the cloud (we may presume bringing instruction from God at the minimum) finally says to the disciples: "This is my Son, whom I have hosen; listen to him." Not "behold" or "see" or any of those clearly visual words, but "listen to him." The disciples have this amazing privilege that we modern Christians cannot possibly imagine, walking with Jesus in person, and their job is to listen to him, not to get blinded by the light.

A quote from Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, a bishop in the Eastern Orthodox Church based in England, offers some insight, just maybe, into what's going on here:

It is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of a mystery. God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder.

 

We could also turn to the Apostle Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 13, which we read just a few weeks ago: "For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part ... for now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully ... " (9, 12). 

This is a challenge for we who are steeped in the post-Enlightenment ethos of learning by observation. We see the thing, we observe it, we learn from doing so. That generally works fine in a lab or perhaps in fieldwork. But our eye cannot see through all the light inaccessible, to borrow the phrase from the hymn. 

Even our typical cultural concept of "mystery" betrays us here. If you were to see or hear the word "mystery" outside of a church setting, there's a decent chance the word might be referring to a novel, by Agatha Christie or some other such, or to endless numbers of movies or TV shows sold as "mysteries," with the implicit social contract that the "mystery" will be neatly solved and packaged within the hour or two hours of viewing time, and with the implicit reward that if you observe carefully and follow the clues you'll be "right" about "whodunit." 

That's not how the mystery of faith works. We can listen to Christ, as that voice in the cloud tells the disciples, but we're not listening for clues; we are listening for the mystery itself, the very thing that our eyes cannot comprehend.

What the disciples saw on that mountain that day was, at least in part, a mystery. This teacher with whom they had been journeying around Judea or Galilee was far more than "just a teacher," far more than "just a rabbi." To contradict the old Doobie Brothers song, Jesus is way, way more than "just alright." And this side of eternity, we're not going to grasp it all. No preacher can preach enough sermons, no teacher can teach enough lessons to wrap the faith up neatly and package it up neatly and to tie it off in a neat bow. Any "Christianity" that promises you all the answers to life's problems is lying to you, and there is plenty of "Christianity" being forced upon the public square right now that purports to do exactly that. 

We suffer a plague of people who know. Our public discourse is glutted with supposed "faith leaders" who have got God pegged. They can tell you exactly which parts of scripture are sacred and inviolable, and which can be safely ignored or tossed aside. They can tell you exactly whom you're allowed to hate and whom you must follow without hesitation. These are the ones who back "patriots" who do unpatriotic things, and who back dictators who launch utterly unjust and despicable wars for petty spite. 

Friends, no. That's not how it is, and to the degree that the Transfiguration reminds us that we don't have God all neatly packaged, this is the best possible news. We know only in part; we may know more over time, but this side of eternity we know only in part; but then, only then, we will see face to face. In the meantime, our only recourse really is to follow the instruction of the divine voice from the cloud, and "listen to him!" 

The disciples got just a glimpse of that 'face to face,' and they weren't ready for it. The mystery wasn't theirs to solve, it was theirs to wonder. So it is for us. We know only in part now. The time will come, but that time is not now. For now, we can know the One who is God's only Son, God's chosen, and listen to him. 

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #156, Sing of God Made Manifest; #---, Upon a holy mountain; #12, Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise

Sermon: With Glory

First Presbyterian Church

February 11, 2024, Transfiguration B

Mark 9:2-9

 

With Glory

 

It’s one of those days, liturgically speaking.

One of those days that isn’t quite a major event in the liturgical calendar.  It’s certainly not on the level of Christmas or Good Friday or Easter, not even quite on the level of, say, Pentecost or Epiphany. It’s there, and it must mean something, but explaining or understanding just what it means isn’t easy at all.  

The Transfiguration of the Lord – there’s an unwieldy name for you – marks in the liturgical calendar the final Sunday before Lent starts. Its subject is that peculiar incident we’ve heard from Mark’s Gospel, in which Jesus takes a few of his disciples up a mountain and something happens that is rather difficult to describe.  

“Transfiguration” itself is an unusual word at best. Dictionary.com defines being “transfigured” as “to change in outward form or appearance; transform,” with a secondary definition of “to change as to glorify or exalt,” a definition which is largely based on its usage to describe this event.  

In fact we really don’t use this word very often outside of this story. We’re more likely to use a word like “transformation,” “transmogrification,” or maybe “metamorphosis,” which is actually close to the word used in the Greek text. Of course, popular culture can affect how we understand any of these words. The toys and movies about those robots that change into other kinds of machines can easily pop into people's minds when they hear or see the word “transformer,” and the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes used the word “transmogrifier” for Calvin’s fanciful machine for changing himself into someone else (that word became so uniquely associated with that comic strip that to this day, readers still think “transmogrify” was a made-up word, though it is quite real).

All of these words carry some implication that a person or thing changes appearance, but not necessarily changing in substance or person. The Transformer robot can still be called Optimus Prime even when it looks like a truck. Calvin is still Calvin even if he’s “transmogrified” into a tiger or frog or whatever his imagination comes up with.

What happens in today’s gospel is not exactly like that.  

Mark’s early readers would have realized that something was up the moment that Mark mentioned that Jesus and the three disciples were going up a mountain. Anyone who know their Hebrew Scriptures would have remembered that interesting things happen on mountains.  

One of the first such examples would have been Moses and his trips up Mount Sinai to receive the law from the Lord.  In Exodus 34, when Moses came down from the mountain after receiving the re-dictated Ten Commandments, his face was glowing, after God his Moses in a cleft in the rock and allowed divine glory to pass by Moses.  

Another, similar mountain encounter with the glory of God is recorded in 2 Kings, when the fugitive prophet Elijah encounters the glory of God not in fire or earthquake or whirlwind, but in the “sheer silence” that followed. Mountains are often – not always, but often – places where holy and mysterious things happen, and not just in the Hebrew/Jewish tradition. Mark’s readers would have likely taken the hint, and expected something unusual to happen. And in Mark’s usual no-nonsense, no-frills, no-time-wasted fashion, that expectation is rewarded.

Our author quickly tells readers that Jesus began to … change. To be transfigured, as translators have usually chosen to translate μεταμορφὠθη (metamorphothe), the Greek word found here. As Mark then describes the event, Jesus changes, but the change that Mark describes seems to be mostly about light; “his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them” (v. 3). This would also remind Mark’s listeners about those previous mountaintop experiences, with Moses’s face ending up glowing and Elijah glimpsing the dazzling glory of God.

And then, as if any more clues were needed, we get those very figures themselves appearing in this scene. Elijah and Moses appeared next to Jesus, talking with him – now there’s a conversation you wish somebody had been able to record!  

By this time Mark’s readers must have felt as if they were being hit over the head with the obvious; this man Jesus is of God. Mark told us way back at the beginning of the gospel that this was the “son of God” (1:1), and the scene before the three disciples seems to us (who after all have the benefit of Mark’s narration and storytelling to clue us in) to be a magnificent and irrefutable demonstration of the glory of God manifested in Jesus. This would seem to be as much proof as anybody could need, right? This man is from God, right?  The son of God?

You know how there always seems to be one person, no matter the situation, who always seems to say the wrong thing at the wrong time? No matter how beautiful, how glorious, how transcendent the moment, they manage to chime in with something that’s just wrongheaded or ugly or maybe just … off? In the gospels, Peter is a good bet to be that guy. In all of the gospels he manages to be that rare combination of (1) always willing to speak, and (2) not necessarily the sharpest knife in the drawer. In this case, these two traits combined to cause Peter to blurt out a suggestion that, for all his good intentions, ruined the moment. It was as if a resplendently beautiful bride took a pratfall halfway down the aisle.

To be fair, Peter’s suggestion about building three “dwellings” (also translatable as “tents” or “booths”) wasn’t totally out-of-nowhere. One of the possible interpretations of Jewish tradition at that time was that the “Feast of Booths,” a regularly-observed event, would be the time when God would intervene in Israel’s fortunes and usher in a new age. Peter seems to have jumped to the conclusion that the appearance of Elijah and Moses with their teacher was just this sign that God’s new age was arriving. Peter, though, was forgetting about the very things this teacher Jesus had been telling them, unpleasant things about suffering and death. Perhaps he wanted to forget them, or hoped that this intervention would make them unnecessary. Whatever it was, Peter’s blurted-out suggestion, probably babbled in a moment of bafflement and uncertainty, was just … off. 

To make that clear, a cloud descended over the mountain, and when it lifted Elijah and Moses were gone and Jesus stood alone before the disciples, with a stern warning from above to “Listen to him!”

It was a moment of revelation, in a way. The Transformers and Transmogrifiers that came up earlier were about concealment. Even the very packaging on that Transformers toy described them as “Robots In Disguise.”  This, on the other hand, wasn’t a disguise. Just the opposite; for those few transcendent, dazzling moments, the disciples caught just a glimpse of Jesus as he really is, in all the divine glory that is his.  

It had to be hard for the disciples not to wonder as they headed down the mountain, particularly when Jesus started going on about their not telling anybody about what they saw, why they couldn’t see this all the time, or at least more often.

Why is it that we can’t see this glory always? Why do we have to live in the dark and grey of the world, down in the valley instead of living in that glory up on the mountain? To put it directly, too many people have not seen that light, or have cowered in fear from it, or run from it; and this is exactly why we are called out to bear witness to the light of God that we have seen, the revelation we have known in Jesus, the indwelling of God that we know through the Holy Spirit. If others do not see the light, it is our job to bear witness to it. This is why we don’t get to stay on the mountain. There are too many in the valley or on the plain, in the city or out in the countryside, from whom the light is veiled, and our calling is to bear witness, to let that light that is within us shine through us.  

It’s not our light, of course. It is the light of God’s glory, the light that illumined Jesus on the mountain, dazzling and intense and brilliant. It is that glory, that transcendence that points us towards hope, knowing that the Jesus transfigured on the mountain goes before us, intercedes for us, suffers and rejoices with us in our sufferings and rejoicings.  

For this we rejoice. The Transfiguration, strange as it may be, is a moment of hope, maybe one last reminder before the penitence and reflection of Lent that we are not abandoned, we are not forsaken, we are not alone. To borrow from John’s gospel, the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it.

For light, for transfiguration, for glory revealed, Thanks be to God.  Amen.

 

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal); #13, The Mighty God with Power Speaks; #11, Source and Sovereign, Rock and Cloud; #156, Sing of God Made Manifest

 

Sermon: Epiphanies and Cloudy Mountains

Grace Presbyterian Church

February 26, 2017, Transfiguration A

Exodus 24:12-18: Matthew 17:1-9

Epiphanies and Cloudy Mountains

Back on Wednesday I had to do a bit of driving around. It was not too much, but it was made better by the fact that Wednesday was a mostly cloudy day, on which the sometimes-oppressive Florida sun was not able to make the car time quite as miserable as it might be otherwise. No squinting, no fumbling for sunglasses. Easy.

I know this is a little bit heretical to say in this state, but sometimes cloudiness can be a good thing.

In the Old Testament a cloud can in fact be a very good thing: it can, on occasion, be a manifestation of the presence of God.

It happens in today’s reading from Exodus, Moses is making ready to go up the mountain called Sinai to receive instruction from God. Even from the moment the Israelites had first come to that mountain after their deliverance from Egypt (back in 19:9), God had made his presence to Moses there known by the appearance of a thick and dense cloud, from which God’s voice might be heard by the people. Even before that, during the Exodus from Egypt, a pillar of cloud had been the manifestation of God’s protection of the people as they traveled by day, with a pillar of fire taking its place by night.

There are other accounts in Hebrew Scripture of cloud as manifestation of God, but my personal favorite is a little-known account from the little-read book of 2 Chronicles. In this account in chapter 5 the great Temple was being dedicated under King Solomon. At the climax of the dedication the Temple was filled with a cloud, “so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud; for the glory of the Lord filled the house of God.” I mean, let’s face it, that’s pretty cool. (There is a parallel account in 1 Kings 8, but I prefer the Chronicles version because in that story, the cloud fills up the Temple only after the trumpeters have played and the choir has sung. I am a musician of sorts, after all.)

So when we get to the account from Matthew’s gospel today, along with the account of going up a mountain, and the actual glowing transfiguration of Jesus, the bright, welling cloud as a manifestation of the glory of God would not have been unfamiliar to those to whom Matthew was writing. It is a scene in a gospel, but like so much of Matthew’s gospel it contains a host of echoes and resonances with Hebrew Scripture.

Still, though, there is something interesting about a cloud as a manifestation of the presence and glory of God. Clouds, after all, aren’t exactly known for their revealing properties. Clouds aren’t translucent; they obscure. The whole reason that the cloudiness made that drive the other day so bearable is that it obscured the sometimes-oppressive February summer sun (that’s a phrase that only applies in Florida).

And in the account from Exodus, that’s exactly what happens. The voice of God could be heard by the people, but God could not be seen, and when Moses went up the mountain to receive the commandments of God he also disappeared. Not that the people minded; already they were quite content to keep their distance; as early as Exodus 20 they were afraid that if God spoke to them directly – face to face, so to speak – they would die. In their minds, the cloud was protection.

(As for that lovely story from 2 Chronicles 5, the glory of the Lord filling the Temple with a cloud was indeed enough to bring the dedication of the Temple to a halt; “the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud” as verse 14 describes. Not sure if it means the priests were physically unable to stand or simply couldn’t stand it.)

In Matthew, the cloud seems a little different. This event is taking place six days after Simon had made the great breakthrough confession of faith recorded in 16:16: “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God.” Jesus had followed up this confession by giving him a new name – Peter – and by launching into an extended piece of instruction on his forthcoming death. The newly-christened Peter had taken Jesus aside to rebuke Jesus for such talk, only to get the rebuke back ten times over – “Get behind me, Satan!”

Despite that rebuke, Jesus took Peter up the mountain, along with James and John, where this Transfiguration took place. As it happens, as Jesus himself is transfigured and glowing and shining and dazzling, and then as Moses and Elijah – the law and the prophets, so to speak – appear with him, Peter steps into a role many of us might recognize, maybe, from times of great excitement or stress or fear in our own lives: the person whose mouth immediately starts running despite the fact that his brain is supplying absolutely nothing useful for his mouth to say.

And then, when Peter is fumbling around about building booths for Moses and Elijah and Jesus as if this were the ancient Hebrew festival known as the Feast of Booths? That’s when the cloud appears.

The cloud “overshadowed” them. And, as it was back in the days of Exodus, a voice (the voice of God?) spoke from the cloud, to the effect that the disciples fell to their knees in fear (not unlike their Hebrew ancestors at the prospect of the voice of God). What the voice said sounds familiar – “this is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased” is an exact echo of what the voice from Heaven – from the clouds, so to speak – says at Jesus’s baptism, back in chapter 3. But there is added a command: “Listen to him!” (And don’t miss that exclamation point.) Only at the touch of Jesus (“Get up and do not be afraid”) do they look up to see the cloud gone, Moses and Elijah gone, and Jesus – “Jesus himself alone” in Matthews’ emphatic construction – is there. The cloud, the glory of God, has removed the distractions of Moses and Elijah, the safe and comfortable heroes of the faith Peter and James and John knew, and left them with “Jesus himself alone,” whom they have just seen as they had never seen or heard or understood him before.

You might notice that at the beginning of each service lately I have referred to that day as the second or fourth or fifth or seventh Sunday of Epiphany. Epiphany, of course, marks the occasion of the visit of the Magi to welcome and bring gifts to the child Jesus, an event that theologically can be taken to refer to a revealing of Jesus not just to the people of Israel but to all the world. Not everyone is big on the idea of a “season” of Epiphany, but reviewing the scriptures we’ve heard does seem to suggest a theme of Jesus being revealed:

--Jesus is revealed at his baptism by John, who reluctantly baptizes him so “that all might be fulfilled”;

--Jesus is revealed as he begins his public ministry with acts of healing, so that so many came to him from all across the region to be healed;

--Jesus is revealed in the Sermon on the Mount, in the Beatitudes, in the teaching about being salt and light, in his declaration that he comes “not to abolish but to fulfill” the law and yet overturns everything we thought we knew about keeping the law, challenging us instead to fulfill the law.

And now in the Transfiguration Jesus is revealed again, in a glory his disciples had not comprehend and we do not comprehend. We see Jesus transfigured; we see Jesus glorified; we see Jesus in his eternal-ness.

As the eminent twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth describes in his The Faith of the Church:

Eternal does not mean "that which has no end" but "that which belongs to the world to come". Eternity is not defined by its unlimited characteristic but by its relation to the world to come, to the glorious kingdom of God.

“That which belongs to the world to come."

At a challenging time for the disciples, when Jesus insisted on his own death and severely rebuked those who could not accept it, these disciples are given a glimpse, however fleeting, of Jesus the Eternal, Jesus of The World to Come. At a nearly impossible time for us, we receive this glimpse of Jesus the Eternal, Jesus of The World to Come. Death does not, cannot, have the last word, no matter how dark our despair might seem, how much madness might seem to hold sway in the entire world, no matter how bleak the night. The clouds pull back and conceal what is not eternal, revealing the One who is eternal. And that, strange and puzzling as the story might be, is why the Transfiguration is a day of great hope.

This is God’s Son, the Beloved, in whom God is well pleased.

Listen to him!

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal):

#634            To God Be the Glory

#11              Source and Sovereign, Rock and Cloud

#189            O Wondrous Sight, O Vision Fair

#156            Sing of God Made Manifest

Sermon: Three Journeys to a Holy Mountain

Grace Presbyterian Church

February 7, 2016, Transfiguration C

Exodus 34:29-45; Luke 9:28-43a;

2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2

Three Journeys to a Holy Mountain

Mountains often figure into the stories of religious traditions – not just the Judeo-Christian tradition, but others as well. Not surprisingly, mountains often figure as the location for an encounter between the human and the divine, or possibly as a retreat for a person seeking contact with the divine. Such is the commonality of this connection that it shows up fairly often in popular culture – say, any number of comic strips in which people are climbing a high mountain to seek the council of the guru perched atop it. Even in the current blockbuster movie rampaging though theater box offices, Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens, the final scene of the movie takes place on a mountaintop, as a young woman seeks the long-absent last of the Jedi Knights. To bring the mountain references full circle, that scene itself was filmed on a mountaintop on an island off the coast of Ireland that had, until the 12^th century or so, been home to a Christian monastery, a place where monks had sought to live closer to God, and more closely with God.

Moses went up a mountain.

The Hebrew people came to a mountain, Sinai, out in a wilderness. Moses went up that mountain to receive law from God. Receiving the law, first from the finger of God; then the awful rebellion of the Hebrew people; Moses pleading to God not to destroy the people God had just delivered from Egypt. Moses up the mountain again, this time to carve God’s commandments onto new stone tablets.

Exodus tells a strange story at this point. Moses comes down from the mountain, back to the people, after having been forty days with God receiving the commandments. Evidently Moses didn’t notice (though the people did) that after so much time in the presence of God, his face was glowing. Not in the way we speak of a pregnant woman or a new mother “glowing”; Moses’s face was literally shining.

Maybe surprisingly, or maybe not, the people were afraid of Moses. It’s not as if the Hebrew people hadn’t already seen plenty of strange things – the plagues on Egypt, the parting of the sea, the fire and pillar going before them – but this one was too much; too strange, or too close to home, somehow too much for the Hebrew people to bear, and they were afraid of Moses. Eventually Moses had to put on a veil, to keep the people from being fearful or freaked out by his shining face – though he would remove the veil when he went back up the mountain, to the presence of the Lord.

Elijah went up a mountain, too.

Even though the story isn’t included in today’s lectionary reading, Elijah had his own mountain encounter with God. 1 Kings 19 tells the story of Elijah’s flight from Queen Jezebel, who had threatened his life after his victory over the prophets of Baal. Despite seeing four hundred and fifty prophets of a false idol destroyed, and God miraculously devouring with fire an utterly drenched altar, Elijah reacted out of fear of the human monarch rather than trust in the God of power he served. And he ran.

He ran all the way to Horeb, the mount of God, which in Moses’s time had been called Sinai.  There God hid Elijah in the cleft of the rock, where Elijah witnessed God not in the wind, earthquake, or fire, but in the “sound of sheer silence.”

But even in the very presence of God, Elijah reacted with resignation, with fear, and with hopelessness, repeating the same mantra he had repeated all through this journey: “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.“ As a result God sent him down from the mountain with a commission to set apart a new king for Aram, a new king for Israel, and a new prophet … to replace himself. Not every mountaintop turns into triumph.

Now Jesus goes up a mountain.

This wasn’t uncommon. More than a few times Jesus would, throughout the four gospels, go off to a mountain to pray. The passage actually says “the mountain,” a definite article as grammarians would say, though it clearly wasn’t Sinai or Horeb. But it was the mountain, one they knew.

This was a little different, though, because Jesus took a few of his disciples with him. And it got even more different when a couple more people showed up, and something started happening to Jesus. His face changed. His appearance became dazzling bright. Shades of Moses’s shining face.

To their credit, the disciples didn’t react in fear, at least not immediately. Peter started babbling nonsense, about building three booths, but Peter babbling nonsense is just Peter being Peter, really. But then a cloud started descending on all of them, the three disciples as well as the three transfigured figures, and then some fear begins to set in. And frankly, for a good Hebrew, that kind of theophany (a fancy seminary word for “manifestation of God”) should be met with a little fear. The real trouble didn’t start in this case until Jesus and the disciples came down the mountain, when the rest of the disciples had been unable to heal a sick child. Coming down from the mountaintop isn’t easy, and things don’t always work the way you think they should after you’ve been on the mountaintop.

Three journeys to holy mountains – always they were as holy as any place God created, but here made holy by the manifestation of God, to Moses, to Elijah, to the disciples in Jesus. Here the Transfiguration becomes a bookend to Epiphany, when God was made manifest in the child Jesus to those magi who came from far away. God is made manifest in Jesus, God is made manifest in the body of Christ as Paul has been teaching us these last few weeks.

But there’s one more mountain left, actually.

Besides looking back, the mount of transfiguration also looks forward. Luke refers to this in verses 31-32, when Moses and Elijah were speaking to Jesus about his departure, “which he was soon to accomplish in Jerusalem.” There Jesus would be led up one more mountain, upon which would be performed perhaps the most unholy act in human history.

And yet Golgotha, too, is a mount of transfiguration. Only there, on that mountain,, we are the ones being transfigured.

Paul helps us here, in 2 Corinthians. Look at 3:18: “And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.”

At Epiphany, the magi see God in the child Jesus. At Transfiguration, the disciples see God in their teacher. But on Golgotha, at the other end of this approaching season of Lent, Jesus ascends a mountain so that we might be transformed, we might be changed “from glory to glory,” so that we might be transfigured into the Body of Christ, showing God’s love and justice to a skeptical and suspicious world.

One journey completed, we now take up another. A cross awaits at the end of that journey. Don’t let the old gospel songs fool you: it is a hideous, cruel, demonic cross. What happens there is the brutality of fallen and depraved humanity at its basest and lowest.

And yet…

Because of that one more mountain we are transfigured, are transformed. We are drawn in to God. Because God would not settle for our lostness, our separation, our fallenness, Golgotha, Good Friday, becomes a place of transformation for us.

Today we see Jesus transfigured, but then it’s our turn.

For transformation, Thanks be to God. Amen.

Hymns (PH ’90): “O Splendor of God’s Glory Bright” (474); “Jesus On the Mountain Peak” (74); “O Wondrous Sight, O Vision Fair” (75); “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” (with tune BEECHER)

Ahem. (agnusday.org, again)