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The Feast of the Transfiguration-Timothy-8.5.06

Exodus 34:29-35; Ps. 99; 2 Peter 1:16-21; Mark 9:2-9

 

How many of you have had a mountaintop experience?  Great feeling!  I know my ordination was one for me…I never wanted it to end!  Another one for me actually was on top of a mountain. At age 42, I went off to the Cascade Mountains in the State of Washington on a three and a half week Outward Bound Course. I spent those weeks climbing up and down mountains, crossing glaciers, swimming in icy mountain streams, and sleeping under the stars.  Except for swimming and sleeping, I carried up to 60 lbs on my back the whole time!! 

There were many wonderful moments, but one in particular stands out. We were climbing up a huge mountain, 12 thousand feet at its peak. It was a glorious day in early August when we started out; but as we got higher, it got more and more cloudy, until we realized that we had entered into a huge cloudbank. It was like pea soup!  A deep fog. We could not see each other. We could barely make out the trail. I was scared!! But I had no choice but to keep following the trail that switched back and forth.

We hiked along for what seemed like hours. I really began to wonder why I was spending $$ to do this crazy thing. And then it happened!  One minute I was in the dense fog of the cloud and the next, I had stepped out into dazzling sunlight. The ground was covered with snow, making the sunlight so bright that I could hardly see. I had reached the summit! The view was spectacular as you can imagine, but the best part was that, once my eyes adjusted a little bit, I noticed a few feet away, peeking through the snow, was a beautiful little purple crocus!!  For me it was a holy moment.  The holy had broken into the ordinary. I could have stayed on that mountaintop forever.

Today in the church calendar we celebrate the Feast of the Transfiguration. Our lectionary gives us two mountain top experiences. It is important to remember that, in the Bible, mountains are often associated with closeness to God and readiness to receive his words.  Remember that God appeared to both Moses and Elijah on a mountaintop. 

In today’s reading, Moses has just spent 40 days and 40 nights on Mt Sinai (also known as Mt. Horeb), considered to be one of the most sacred locations in Israel’s history. It is on this mountain that Moses encountered the Lord in the burning bush. It was here that the Lord made his covenant with Israel. And it was here that the Lord gave Moses the Ten Commandments. It is on this sacred mountain that the holy breaks into the ordinary

Some fifteen centuries later, Elijah hid from the armies of Queen Jezebel in a cave at the top of the same mountain. When he hears the sound of SHEER SILENCE…other translations say, A STILL, SMALL VOICE or A GENTLE WHISPER…God was not in the earthquake, wind and fire but in the sound of sheer silence. The holy breaks into the ordinary and it is on this same mountain that Elijah hears God’s instruction to him. 

In today’s readings, we heard about the other mountaintop experience in the gospel. This story is told in all three synoptic gospels. Imagine, for a moment, those disciples, Peter, James, and John, hiking up the mountain with Jesus, this cool rabbi with whom they have been traveling and “hanging out”. He has taught them so much and they love being near him; it is always an adventure. They know they are going up to the top of this mountain in order to get away from the crowds that follow Jesus wherever he goes. They are going up to find some quiet, so that they can pray.

By the time they get there, the disciples are very tired. All they want to do is sleep. However, just as they are trying to pray, out of the corner of their eyes, they see Jesus praying, and, all of a sudden, his face changes and “his clothes become as bright as a flash of lightening” (Mark says in his Gospel that they became “dazzling white.”)  Matthew says that Jesus’ “face shone like the sun and his clothes were as white as lightening”) and standing beside him, talking to him are Elijah and Moses.  The commentaries say that their presence ratifies to the disciples that Jesus is the Messiah, the Chosen One of Israel, the Fulfillment of the Law (Moses) and the Prophets (Elijah). And they are discussing Jesus’ departure, which he was about to accomplish in Jerusalem.  The disciples simply do not get it; but they know they have had an encounter with the holy. The HOLY HAS BROKEN INTO THE ORDINARY and they want to stay right there. They even offer to build shelters so they can all stay on the mountaintop.  Just like us, they want the experience to go on and on.

The Gospels tell us that even as Peter was trying to find a way to stay up on that mountain, a bright cloud suddenly enveloped(NIV)/overshadowed(NRSV)them. OVERSHADOWED… the same word used by the angel to Mary at the Annunciation…The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the Most High will overshadow you… and at Pentecost when the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples and rested on (overshadowed) each one as a tongue of fire.

 We are not told how long that bright cloud on the mountain overshadowed, enveloped the disciples. It could have been a long time, because time flies when you are having fun! It could have been forty days and forty nights for all we know; but we do know that while they were in that cloud, they heard the voice of God say, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with him I am well pleased: Listen to him!”  (Remember Mary at the wedding at Cana: “Do whatever he tells you.”) Listen to him!  Matthew’s gospel tells us that the disciples were so afraid that they fell to the ground.  But in their fear, Jesus came to them and touched them, saying “Get up. Do not be afraid.”  They looked up and saw only Jesus.  They saw only Jesus!

Luke’s gospel says the disciples were “weighed down with sleep” (NRSV).  The NIV says they were sleepy. But when they were able to shake off their sleepiness, they were able to see Jesus’ glory. It makes me wonder how many times I have been weighed down or sleepy and missed recognizing the holy when it was right before me. My spiritual eyes and ears are so often are weighed down by my own perceived needs, or my own perceived hurts, that I fail to see and hear what God is doing or saying. But the holy and the ordinary are woven together into the fabric of our lives…in encounters with other people, in moments in nature. Jesus is in our midst right now. We brush up against him everyday, and we do not even notice, because we are so busy, so obsessed with our everyday lives, which are increasingly saturated with, and infected by, our prevailing culture.

Theologian Eugene Peterson in his latest book on spiritual theology, Christ Plays in a Thousand Places, says:

         This is so characteristic of biblical spirituality: the ordinary and the miraculous are a single continuum.  Anything and everthing that we believe about God finds grounding in what we do in the course of any and every ordinary day.  We are not permitted to segregate our salvation away from the details of getting around and making a living. “Pass the broccoli” and “Hear the Word of God” carry equal weight in conversations among the saved. The sacraments are served in kitchen and chancel alike. (p. 174)

During Lent I always give up sugar which is VERY hard for me as I am so addicted to it; but I give it up because it reminds me of how easily distracted I can be with the ordinary, with fear, worry, hurt, grief.  Lent is a time for me to look and see the holy in the ordinary, to open my spiritual eyes and see Jesus alone everywhere and in everything. To listen with spiritual ears and hear Jesus say to me, “Get up; do not be afraid.”  But we need to acquire the habit of seeing and hearing with our spiritual eyes and ears all year long…every day..right now and when we are brushing our teeth!

Eugene Peterson says that: 

It has to do with training in perception, acquiring a taste for what is being revealed in Jesus.  We are not good at this. Our senses have been dulled by sin. The world, for all its vaunted celebration of sensuality, is relentlessly anesthetic, obliterating feeling by ugliness and noise, draining the beauty out of people and things so that they are functionally efficient, scornful of the esthetic except as it can be contained in a museum or a flower garden.  Our senses require healing and rehabilitation so that they are adequate for receiving and responding to visitations and appearances of the Spirit, God’s Holy Spirit. (p. 197) 

Can we work at getting the habit of being in the cloud with the disciples? Do we dare experience the tender transfiguration (Greek: metamorphose) of the love of Christ? Do we dare to experience the profound overshadowing of God in our own lives, to have a shadow cast upon us, to be enveloped in a haze of brilliancy, to be blinded to all else but the love of God in Christ Jesus everywhere, all the time?  

Ever since we fell out of relationship with God, our creator, in the Garden of Eden, God has sought to reveal himself to our fallen and rebellious world.  In fact, the whole of the gospel, the Good News, is the telling of God’s revelation…Jesus!  God, in the ultimate revealing of himself, has broken through the barriers of time and space and come to live among us. Jesus could have stayed on that mountain with the disciples, but once again, he empties himself as he turns his face toward Jerusalem and his impending death. This is why God came in the flesh…to die, taking with him all that separates us from God (SIN), SO THAT we could be back in relationship with our Creator…In order that we could be transfigured, changed, in and by the love of Christ Jesus…every day, in every situation.

It is the time for us, as Peter says in his epistle, “to be attentive as to a lamp shining in a dark place until the day dawns and the morning star rises in our hearts.”

So today as we come to the table, let us see that, first of all, the bread and wine are transfigured to become for us the Body and Blood of Christ. And as you kneel at the altar,  “your tongue will taste bread and wine, but your soul will taste Jesus” (St. Catherine of Sienna). The holy breaking into the ordinary. Once again you will be transfigured by the brilliant light of God’s love. And as you come down from the Mount of Transfiguration that is the Eucharist, let God’s love shine through you in all that you do in order to fill the world with God’s dazzling light, allowing the ordinary to become Holy.

In Jesus name, AMEN

Marnie Keator+