Transfiguration 2.23.20

A reading from Exodus.

The Lord said to Moses, Come up to me on the mountain and wait there, and I will give you the tablets of stone with a law and the commandment, which I have written for their instruction.

So Moses set out with his assistant Joshua, and Moses went up into the mountain of God.

To the elders he had said, Wait here for us until we come to you again, for Aaron and her are with you.

Whoever has a dispute may go to them.

Then Moses went up on the mountain, and the cloud covered the mountain.

The glory of the Lord settled on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it for six days.

On the seventh day he called to Moses out of the cloud.

Now the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the people of Israel.

Moses entered the cloud and went up on the mountain.

Moses was on the mountain for forty days and forty nights.

But we had been eyewitnesses of his majesty.

For he received honor and glory from God the Father, when that voice was conveyed to him by the majestic glory, saying, This is my Son, my beloved, with whom I am well pleased.

We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven while we were with him on the holy mountain.

So we have the prophetic message more fully confirmed.

You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in the dark place until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.

First of all, you must understand this that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation, because no prophecy ever came by human will, but men and women, moved by the Holy Spirit, spoke from God.

The word of the Lord.

Six days after Peter had acknowledged Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the living God, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John, and led them up a high mountain by themselves.

And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white.

Suddenly there appeared to them Moses and Elijah talking with Jesus.

And then Peter said to Jesus, Lord, it is good for us to be here.

If you wished, I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.

While he was speaking, suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice said, This is my son, the beloved.

With him I am well pleased.

Listen to him.

When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear.

But Jesus came and touched them, saying, Get up and do not be afraid.

And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone.

As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus ordered them, Tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.

So this is sort of a preview of Easter, which is why it always falls on this Sunday.

And this is a really clean vision.

It's a great analogy that here's Jesus talking to Moses, who represents the Torah, and Elijah who represents the prophets.

So Jesus is supposed to be the culmination of the law and the prophets.

But I want to suggest to you that actually the story is not just a vision to get us through Lent, but a real invitation to what Lent might actually be about.

Again, we got to hear the scripture that Moses is going to go up for 40 days, like we're getting ready to go for 40 days.

And what does Moses do for 40 days?

He talks with God and hopefully he ends up listening.

In the story today, though, listening is not what happens.

I don't know if you've noticed, but Peter is interested in building tabernacles for Moses, Elijah, and Jesus.

He sees all of them in this sort of resplendent light, and he says, let's build a booth for them.

A booth.

In our translation today, it's a dwelling.

I don't know if you're familiar with the Jewish Feast of Sukkot.

This is called the Feast of Tabernacles.

If you're Jewish, you do this every year.

It's one of the high holy festivals.

You go out and you essentially build an awning in your yard, and you're supposed to sleep underneath it each night to reenact the story of wandering in the wilderness when people had no home.

Peter says, let's have the feast of Sukkot early.

Let's have it here, and let's build the booth over you all.

And then there's this voice from heaven that says, This is my son whom I love, listened to him.

And I want to suggest to you that one of the things we often miss is that when Jesus shows up with Moses and Elijah, he doesn't show up.

It's really easy to miss this.

They're talking to each other.

Jesus is talking with Moses and Elijah, and none of the gospelers tell us what they were saying.

But I want to suggest to you that God says, listen to him precisely because the disciples were not listening.

And perhaps one of our takeaways today is that it can be all too easy to be blinded by the light.

And I wonder if sometimes they saw the glory of Jesus and decided what they would do with that instead of following it.

And the difference, then, I suppose, is between looking and seeing, and the difference is between hearing words and actually listening to them.

We can only imagine what they were saying.

And I want to do that.

So if I do this wrong, that's fine, but let's imagine together.

Elijah was a prophet.

He spoke against King Ahab.

If you know your Bible, King Ahab killed Naboth so he could steal his vineyard.

He wanted to grow bell peppers on land that had been growing Bordeaux grapes.

And as you know, the older the grapevine, the better the wine.

A bell pepper you can buy at Lowe's and you can grow in two months.

But because he was the king, he murdered this man to grow bell peppers, and Elijah came and confronted him in power.

Elijah is the one who called for this showdown between the prophets of Baal and following God.

This was on Mount Carmel.

They offered offerings.

And of course, the Baal prophets got no response.

God shot down lightning from heaven and burned up the offering.

And do you know what Elijah did after that?

He took a knife and he slit the throat of more than 450 prophets of Baal with his own hand.

So I wonder if Jesus had a conversation with him about that.

I do.

I wonder if they had a conversation.

Not really effective conversion, you know?

When you kill somebody, they have no room for repentance or restoration.

And I wonder if Jesus didn't say something like, hey, Elijah, thanks for calling the king out over the bell peppers.

I don't know about killing people because they didn't have the right piety.

It would be really easy to be blinded by the light and say Elijah did the right thing because it was powerful.

But friends, we all know it's wrong.

And this might have been the conversation.

Jesus was talking to Moses, you know, Moses was the most powerful prophet.

He was the humblest man on the earth.

This is what the scriptures say.

He spoke with God face to face for 40 days.

He was so close with God, the scriptures say he came down.

And depending whether you're reading Latin or Greek, in Latin he grew horns.

I don't know if you know this.

In Greek, his face was shining like a flashlight.

What did Moses?

Where did he go wrong?

You know, he hit that rock instead of talking to it.

That seems like pretty small potatoes, doesn't it?

But Moses had a few other ideas.

You know, like if somebody gathers manna on the Sabbath, you stone them to death.

Seems a little harsh, doesn't it?

If a child says rebellious words against their parents, do you know what you do to them?

You stone them to death.

Now, thanks be to God, we didn't do that because none of us would be here in the room.

Let's just be honest, right?

I wonder if Jesus didn't say in Moses, hey, like, I get where you're coming from.

But maybe we could think about this a little bit deeper.

I don't know if you've read part of the law of Moses.

You're not allowed to wear fabric made out of two, you can't wear clothes made out of two kinds of fabric.

The word for doing that is the word abomination in Hebrew.

It's abominable, like the snowman, to wear a cotton polyblint.

Bad news, everybody.

You're abominable.

I wonder if Jesus didn't talk that out.

It's against the law of Moses to plant two kind of crops in the same field.

And, you know, this is that time of year when nobody wants to hear that eating crawfish is abominable.

But it is.

And I wonder if Jesus didn't talk that out.

We don't know the conversation.

And the reason we don't know is because the disciples weren't listening.

Now this is gonna sound a little bit wild, but forgive me if it does.

I was up late last night, but um I think actually this is a really strong invitation at the beginning of Lent for us to consider the difference between hearing the scriptures and listening to them.

Okay.

And for us to consider whether or not sometimes we're blinded by our faith, or our faith invites us to really listen.

And one of the reasons I want to put before you this made-up conversation that may not have happened at all, is to think about Lent is a time in which we're invited not just to hear and obey, but Lent is a time in which we're invited to have real dialogue, to listen, and have conversation, not just with one another, but with scripture.

So one of the neat things about Bible, I don't know if you know the word Bible.

We call it the Bible.

Bible doesn't mean the book, it means the books.

Plural.

And what's really fascinating about the Bible, in my opinion, is that you can find some variants of opinion if you read it carefully.

Like in the books of Ezra and the Emma, people who aren't Jewish are bad.

And they should be put out of your city because they could corrupt your faith.

But in books like Ruth, the foreign people have actually really good faith.

In books like Joshua, it's Rahab the prostitute that has better faith than most of Israel.

So which one's right?

I think that the truth is that truth is not super simple.

Sometimes they're both right.

Sometimes we can't handle corrupting influences.

So think about that with your children.

You didn't want your children exposed to adult realities when they were four.

They weren't ready for it.

But hopefully by the time they're 40, they're able to handle the world on its own terms.

They can both be right.

The question is, how do we listen and how do we respond?

And I want to suggest to you one of the beautiful things about having so many books in the Bible is that we're invited to join the conversation.

Not just to be silent, but to join the conversation.

Our psalm today.

This is a song from the hymn book of ancient Israel, and it includes phrases like God mocks people.

I don't believe in that God.

I don't.

Maybe that makes me a heretic.

But I think that describes me.

I don't think that describes God.

And I think this is part of Lent, is for us to think through.

Are we mapping ourselves onto God or are we listening carefully and allowing God to map God's self on ourselves?

And I didn't want to sound like a broken record, but this is a really important year in the democracy of the United States.

I mean, we're a republic, you know, but this is a really good question.

Are we blinded by light or do we listen to one another?

I said it last week, I'll probably say it all election season long.

One of my biggest fears in the United States that we live in now is that we've already decided who we're going to listen to and who we're not before they speak.

I I didn't remember feeling like this when I was a child.

When I was a child, I felt like there was room to weigh the merits of somebody's argument instead of just flattening them with a label.

And maybe that's just nostalgia.

Maybe it maybe it wasn't that way.

But increasingly I hear so-and-so belongs to this political party or this church or is a fundamentalist or a holy roller.

So whatever they say is fake news.

Fake news.

And I wonder if this story isn't very well timed this year to invite us to open our ears to one another.

And of course, you know, we can only open our ears if we're willing to actually open our hearts.

Now, Aristotle said it's the mark of an educated person that they can entertain the propositions of another person without converting to them.

It's the mark of an educated person that they can entertain the propositions of someone else without converting to them.

And really what that means is that we make enough space for somebody else that they might convince us if the merits of their argument are worthy.

And I think that's the kind of repentance we could use as a nation.

But I also think that's the kind of repentance we could use in our individual lives of faith.

Because the truth is, I don't think there's any room in Scripture for us to label people as stupid.

But I will tell you that is the predominant way in which we handle not only politics but faith.

Hearing and listening are at least my theme for Lent.

And I'll tell you, there's a couple of people in this parish who stand out to me as amazing people.

I won't name them.

Maybe I will.

If you know Rob Puckett, he's one of my personal heroes, because I've never said I've never heard Rob Puckett make a joke at somebody else's expense.

I've never heard him make a joke at somebody's expense.

There is something incredibly illuminating about that way of life.

I have never heard her Meyer make a joke at somebody else's expense.

This is my Lenten journey, is to adopt their sense of humor.

This is my Linton journey to think about when I see somebody else's faith practice that isn't my own to say, I'm glad it works for them.

It may not be where God is calling you this land, but I do want to invite you to hear the story anew.

This isn't just about seeing the glory of God.

It's about making room to hear the voice of God, to have an actual conversation, a dialogue with each other, and instead of just cutting each other off based on how we look or how we're labeled.

Maybe God is calling you to a different Lenten discipline this year.

What I hope though this story offers you is that it's not just about seeing, it's about hearing.

This story, Jesus is transfigured.

He looks different.

At the end of Easter, it's totally different.

He's transformed.

Transfiguration means it looks different.

Transformation means the ingredients have changed.

And the goal for Lent is not that we're transfigured.

The goal for Ash Wednesday is not that we look different because we've got X an X on our head.

The goal for Ash Wednesday and Lent is that our ingredients change.

And boy, the world could use higher quality ingredients this year.