Text:  Matthew 17:1-9; 2 Peter 1:16-21                                                       W The Transfiguration of Our Lord

“A Light Shining in a Dark Place”

            In the name of him who has revealed his glory to us, dear friends in Christ:  In today’s Gospel lesson we join Peter, James, and John as they follow Jesus up the steep side of a high mountain.  They are, in a sense, climbing out of the dark, shadowy plain of their normal existence into a clear and brighter spiritual light, for when they reach the top they are given, if only for a brief moment, a sneak peek of the awesome glory God contained in the person of Jesus their Lord.  Standing before them, his appearance is marvelously changed. For want of better words to describe it, he peels back the human wrapper to allow them a glimpse of the divinity heretofore concealed within him.  The disciples are stunned and amazed.  And with the now glorified Jesus they see Moses and Elijah, two great Old Testament heroes of faith, speaking with him about unfolding mysteries that are soon-to-take-place.  In his confused excitement and what seems to be his desire to extend this majestic moment, Peter interrupts to propose that the disciples build temporary quarters for these three holy VIPs.  In his own account of this event, St. Luke offers the editorial comment that Peter, the poor guy, was just so dumbfounded that he didn’t understand what he was saying – just one of those people who feel uncomfortable with reverent silence and who seem to think that every space needs to be filled with conversation however inane, I guess.  But as if to head him off, it’s while he’s still stammering that a yet more overwhelming manifestation of God’s glory appears in a cloud that envelops them all. The disciples fall to the ground in trembling terror as they hear the thunderous voice proclaim, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.  Listen to him!”  And then, as quick as it all started, it’s over.  Jesus puts his hands on the quaking disciples, quiets their fears, and directs them to follow him back down the mountain – and he warns them not to talk about their wondrous mountaintop experience until after he is raised from the dead.

Taken altogether, it is a remarkable occurrence – a special grace granted to these three disciples that they should be allowed such glorious confirmation of their Master’s divine nature and of his all-fulfilling role in both God’s self-disclosure to lost mankind and his plan of salvation for us. And because it is so remarkable, it naturally follows that there is a lot in this story that we could discuss, say about the deity of Christ, or why it is that Moses and Elijah are the ones who appear, and so on.  But one of the advantages of following a lectionary series and returning to the transfiguration event each year is that it allows a preacher to not have to try to expound every detail.  And with that in mind, what I’d like to do this morning is take the whole thing together and use it to address what seems to be an ever-present but now perhaps growing trend within the Christian church, and that is the desire to experience something more than we have been given – some kind of highly charged, moving, spiritual experience like the disciples had here that we feel will confirm or strengthen our faith. 

            What I mean is this:  with all people, we’re drawn to the idea of “mountaintop” spiritual experiences.  We’d like to have one, or maybe more than one.  We think it might provide needed proof to settle those uneasy doubts we face from time to time.  We think that having a powerful experience would really notch up our level of commitment. We think we would be better servants of Christ if we had one.  And this hunger for the supernatural and spectacular causes Christians to go searching for experiences, looking for some light in the otherwise dark, drab existence that are our lives, so that we can feel the spiritual high we’re craving. Unfortunately, what often happens is that when supposedly seeking the true light of Christ in this experiential way, people get sidetracked and drawn to artificial lights like moths and June bugs are attracted to a street lamp on a spring evening.  Worse still, some of those artificial lights people are drawn to turn out to be the spiritual equivalent of a bug zapper.

            There is, for example, the whole signs and wonders movement within the church.  The people who get wrapped up in it are looking for miracles cures, the gift of what they call “speaking in tongues”, or a direct word of prophecy or vision from God.  In more aberrant forms it descends into excesses like “holy laughter” in which at the prompting of a comedian-like preacher the whole congregation spends thirty minutes or more laughing uncontrollably; or there’s what they call being “slain in the spirit” when the charismatic preacher thumps people’s heads with the Bible, sending them collapsing into a trance of some kind (I suppose if you thumped’m hard enough anyone could do it).  Along these same lines, I think maybe I’ve mentioned that church in Canada where the congregation started making the noises of barnyard animals.  The people were clucking like chickens, squealing like pigs, and braying like asses for Jesus – and all the while sincerely believing that they were having a meaningful spiritual experience by doing so. In other Christian faith traditions the same kind of thing shows up in alleged miracles like crying statues, apparitions of the Virgin Mary, or maybe just her form appearing in a water stain on a leaky church ceiling.  I remember not too long ago there was a bakery back east somewhere that found that one of the sticky buns they made looked just Mother Teresa.  “A miracle!” they proclaimed.  They even made a little shrine for it so that pilgrims could come see – and have their own spiritual experience.  

            Closely related to this kind of spiritual thrill seeking is what’s being promoted in some circles in the name of having a “meaningful worship experience”.  It happens that the right combination of emotional sentiment, excitement, music, and beat will create an atmosphere in which people can receive a certain sense of euphoria.  This sensation of euphoria is then equated with “feeling the presence of God”.  If someone comes away from such a worship service with the same sort of rush you can get from a well-done pep rally or from watching your team win a closely contested championship game then he’s likely to say, “I could really feel the Spirit moving among us today.”  Of course, the next service has to be even more upbeat and exciting to recreate that feeling of God’s presence – and if you don’t feel him … well, I don’t know … maybe he isn’t there?

Another form of looking for a spiritual experience upon which to hang faith is the health and wealth gospel that attracts so many.  In it, people are led to believe that the condition of their health and the success they have in business are direct reflections of their spiritual well-being.  If you are sick or poor – if you experience bad things – well, then you don’t have enough faith; because, they’re told, God always rewards his best and faithful people in this life with superabundant blessings.  This is a frightful teaching that can really turn out to be one of those spiritual bug zappers for those who are deceived by it.  We know from Scripture that God’s faithful people do sometimes suffer from tragedies, or experience poverty and poor health. Joseph in the Old Testament, along with Job, or even Jesus in the New, are good examples that prove it.

Then there is constant circulation of certain apocryphal stories:  the church’s equivalent of urban legends. There are many that I keep hearing over and over again, each time with a little bit different detail; like the one about a hitch-hiker who, when picked up by a Good Samaritan, rides for a while and then suddenly turns to the driver and says, “Jesus is coming again soon” and then mysteriously disappears.  And because the story keeps getting recycled and retold, it begins to sound like there are reports of this happening all over the county.  But people latch on to these stories and they pass them on precisely because they imagine that these experiences – even though they happened to someone else – are faith-building and meaningful.

And finally, with the pursuit of experiences I want to include the desire (and maybe “over-willingness”) we Christians sometimes have to analyze events that take place, and to interpret them in such a way that we imagine that we see the hand of God in operation and thereby suppose that we know what he’s up to.  To give you a concrete example of what I mean, just a little more than a month ago, the day after Christmas, the worst and most deadly natural disaster in modern times occurred.  Without warning, tidal waves born of earthquakes deep in the ocean surged forward from otherwise calm seas sweeping away everything and everyone in their path.  It’s believed that over a quarter of a million people died; but the actual number will never be known.  I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures and reports.  And as usually happens in the face of such cataclysmic disasters, when confronted by destruction and forces that remind us how puny we really are, people start wondering about the big questions:  “Where was God in all this?”  “How could he have allowed such a thing to take place?”  “Couldn’t he have prevented it?”  “And if he could have, why didn’t he?”

But in attempting to answer these questions, we see the problem with trying to find God or understand him in what can be seen and experienced.  It’s sort of like trying to know who Thomas Edison was by studying a light bulb.  It involves a lot of guesswork; and the answers you end up with usually come more from what you already think than anything you gather from the evidence. For example, as I’ve already implied, some use the whole tsunami tragedy as an excuse to deny that there even is a God. Kind of like evolutionists who look at the wonders of creation and conclude that some things just happen. Amazing, isn’t it?  Then I heard some Muslim clerics who were claiming that it was an act of their god Allah against infidel Christians.  They explained that since it was Christmas time, there were a lot of Christians vacationing on the tropical beaches of the islands that were hit the hardest.  Allah used the opportunity to smite them.  Some pretty specious reasoning, don’t you think?  I mean, Indonesia is the nation with the most Muslims in the world – and it was the one hit the hardest – accounting for more than half of the total number of people killed.  Now, it’s true that several hundred tourists were lost, and maybe some of them were Christians … for argument’s sake, let’s say they all were.  So we’re to understand that Allah destroys his own people at the rate of something like five hundred to one just to get a few Christians.  And this is supposed to inspire confidence in him among the Muslim faithful?    Wouldn’t it make more sense to strike some place that was predominantly non-Muslim?

            Then there was an interesting case in Sri Lanka, which is a largely Buddhist country; and most of those who aren’t Buddhist are Hindu. But there are a handful of Christians. And it happens that in one especially hard hit place there was a Catholic church called St. Peter’s.  The congregation consists of some seven hundred families.  Their church building sits right on the beach.  Now it’s in total ruins.  And you should know that the tidal waves struck on Sunday morning.  But it happens that on this particular Sunday, the parish priest decided to do something different.  Since it was the feast of St. Joseph, he started the service a little early and led his congregation in procession to a certain shrine to St. Joseph about a mile or so inland, and they held an outdoor worship service there.  There were about 1500 people in attendance. And it was just as the service was wrapping up when the tidal waves hit – but the whole congregation (those who went to church that morning, anyway) were safe.  Gives you something to think about next time you consider sleeping in on a Sunday morning, doesn’t it?  Ah, but there’s more:  it turns out that the service ran especially long because the priest wanted to bless each person individually.  So the service took about forty-five minutes longer than usual.  If they had finished at the normal time, they would have been back in their homes – and have been in the path of the waves.  No doubt most of them would have died.  Think about that next time you think my sermon is running too long.  Who knows what dangers you’re being protected from by my verbosity?

Anyway, seeing that this happened, lots of the Buddhist and Hindu survivors are starting to come to the church – which is a good thing, of course – but their rationale for doing so is that the episode proved that their own gods were no good.  They didn’t help.  But the God of these Christians obviously did a better job of it.  But there’s real danger in such a view.  What happens the next time they experience a tragedy?  Do they switch back?  What if it had been a Mosque that was rescued and the Christians had all died?  What would that prove?  When the Trade Towers fell, lots of Christians did die and only a few Muslims did – what spiritual truths should we derive from that?

You see, this is why it’s always a mistake to try to do our theology and build our faith by so-called spiritual mountaintop experiences.  They are unreliable, non-lasting, and subject to too much emotional distortion and interpretation.  No, faith and theology can only be built on the solid bedrock of truth.  Jesus Christ is that truth.  He is the divine Son of God who came to save us from our sins regardless of what we see or experience.  This was true also for the disciples.  The Jesus they followed up the mountain was from the time of his conception the true God in flesh.  His glorious transfiguration that they were privileged to see did not make it so. Nor did it cause the disciples to believe it, for they had already at this point confessed that they believed him to be the Christ, the Son of the Living God.  Seeing his glory was only a blessed confirmation of what they already believed.

And a couple more points should be made.  First, they weren’t seeking the experience.  It was an unexpected gift given by God’s grace.  Secondly, it was not for everyone.  Jesus had nine other disciples who also believed him to be the Christ; but they were not chosen to have this vision of glory.  Thirdly, it didn’t last.  As much as they might have wanted to stay on the mountain and prolong it, Jesus, with his glory concealed again as it was before, led them back down to where the mission of the church was to be done:  in the dark, dreary, mundane world from which they had come that morning. Finally, it didn’t make the three disciples who had the experience any more faithful or spiritual.  Though they had seen it, when under pressure, Peter still denied that he knew Jesus; and James and John still selfishly asked for the seats on Jesus’ right and left sides in the coming kingdom.

So what spiritual insight should we draw from this episode in the life of Jesus? We didn’t get to go up on the mountain and see a preview of his glory – and we’ve seen that even having the experience did not prove particularly helpful to those who did.  So what’s the point?  The answer, I believe, was given by the voice from the cloud:  “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!” The point is that Jesus is the divine Son of God and our Savior from sin even when we don’t see and experience wonderful and glorious things.  And he is completely accessible to us at all times – not to view in visions of glory, but rather to hear.  The voice of God said, “Listen to him!”  We can do that any time.  His Words that we have recorded for us in all of the Holy Scriptures are the Words that cleave the darkness and make his light shine in our hearts.  His Word is the light in the darkness no matter how terrifying or dreary outward circumstances in our lives become.  Not to miracles, or to uplifting feelings of enthusiasm, or to apocryphal stories, or to successes in business; but rather to the Word of Christ we are to be drawn to receive his forgiveness, his wisdom, his guidance, and his Holy Spirit who allows us to experience Jesus our Lord. He gives himself to us in his life-giving Word.  That’s where he’s left the light on for us – the light we can follow through the darkness until he appears again in glory.  Let’s listen to him; for by listening, we do behold his glory.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!