A child is furiously drawing a picture...crayons flying over the page when the parent comes into the room. "What are you drawing?"
"I am drawing a picture of God."
Always looking for the teaching moment, the parent says, "You know, no one has ever seen God."
The child replies, "They will have when I'm done with this...."
Epiphanies, or encounters with God, are the stuff of much of the scripture. In our common everyday life, we may yearn for God but it is perhaps in those moments of deepest yearning that we discover how far away God can seem. The God-encounter that is the subject of today's Gospel lesson on this the last Sunday in the season of Epiphany, is certainly dramatic and in that regard also mysterious and otherworldly. Recalling this transfiguration story is going to help us this morning, I hope, as we try to understand the nature of God-encounters, which are at one and the same time human encounters as well. They are hard to talk about, and in fact become tainted by the oversimplification of language...for they must remain in part mystery. The power of God-encounters is in the transformation they work in the life of those who are the witnesses.
The wonderful vision of the call of the prophet Isaiah creates a God-encounter packed with pretty dramatic images:
“I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up. Around him flew six winged angels – and they were singing, “Holy, Holy, Holy, is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.” Isaiah 6:3
The net affect on Isaiah was a confirmation of his mission – “Whom shall I send?” said the Lord. And Isaiah responded, “Here I am Lord, send me.”
If he had any doubts about being a prophet, they were nullified by this dramatic epiphany, for he leaves the temple and begins to preach to the people with an unpopular message about the need for the nation to repent and for the restoration of justice in the land. His life is changed by this encounter with God.
Shrouded literally in smoke – six winged angels flying about – Isaiah at first thinks his life is at an end – “Woe is me for I have seen the Lord.” Instead, it turns out, that his true life vocation is only just beginning. Something happens that is beyond our understanding in these moments of clarity. Something mysterious happens when fear turns to assurance and passivity turns to action – it happens in these epiphanies.
Reformer John Calvin spoke of the "hiddenness of God" whereby we encounter God in a hidden, obscure fashion, awaiting that full, radiant revelation which is Christ. Martin Luther also spoke of the "hidden God." God is most hidden, for Luther, precisely when we encounter God most vividly and directly in Christ. We do not, cannot ever fully comprehend the God who is encountered in the crucified Christ. Thus, the nearer God in Christ comes to us, the stranger God seems.
One of the reasons that our series called “Living the Questions” which is the Lenten Study beginning this coming week, is so appropriate for this season, is that the ultimate revelation of God’s love for us as expressed in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, is also the most confounding. Although it is at the center of our faith, it is the most shrouded in mystery – it is what Paul called the great scandal. Our questions are the key to unlocking the mystery – they take us ever closer to an understanding of the fullness of God.
The events of the Transfiguration, the episode which is described in all three of the synoptic Gospels when Jesus takes three of the disciples, Peter, James, and John, up to the top of a mountain. There, apart from the rest of the retinue which is part of his traveling company, they experience the vision of Jesus transfigured or physically transformed in much the same way as Moses was reported to have been when he descended from Mount Sinai after receiving the tablets of the law from God. His face shone with such brilliance that one could not look at him. Then, for some inexplicable reason, the disciples seem to nod off and go to sleep – just as Jesus is having a chat with Moses and Elijah about what is going to happen in Jerusalem.
Out of his stupor, Peter jumps up and suggests building booths or structures to house them; boxes in which to preserve this scene for all time. Let’s lock up this experience in some kind of shrine – let’s nail it down! That is when the voice of God comes in a cloud that had descended upon the mountain top: "This is my son, listen to him."
Nobody has seen God, but Jesus three disciples came close to it in their witness of the transfiguration. Nobody knows how the story, which we read as our scripture lesson this morning from Luke, got passed down to the Gospel writers, but we do know that it is told from the point of view of the disciples who were the witnesses and that although they were told to keep it quiet, they remembered and they shared it. What happened on the mountain was one of those moments of clarity for the disciples, in what was often for them a confusing and sometimes incomprehensible shared ministry with Jesus. Before their eyes, they see Jesus the teacher, preacher, healer...transfigured into one like the son of God...who after the moment declares, "Let us go back down...where life is."
In Luke's plan, as he weaves his story of the life of Jesus, this mountaintop experience comes just after the disciples have had a rather testy interchange with Jesus. Jesus has imparted to them the fact that he will have to suffer...that he will have to make his way to Jerusalem and be tried and crucified. Having so recently found a hero, the disciples are aghast at this revelation...in fact Peter tried to squash it. "Surely not, my Lord...this will never happen." To which Jesus responds with a rebuke..."Get behind me, Satan."
No one really knows what happened during the six days Jesus shared with the trio of disciples on the Mount of Transfiguration. Nobody even knows where the Mount of Transfiguration is. Something wondrous and miraculous happened to them, something so radiant and mystical that the afterglow never left Peter. Years later, Peter remembered this day, as one commentator points out, different from all other days, and wrote, still in a kind of holy hush: "We had been eyewitnesses of his majesty" (2 Peter 1:16). This is, like Moses' trip to the top of Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments from God, an original mountaintop experience. Even though you eventually have to come down, as Jesus directed his company to do, you come down changed.
A few years ago there was an interesting movie called Smoke. It was about a tobacco shop owner, played by Harvey Keitel, and the impact he had on the lives of his neighbors. Every morning, this shopkeeper stood out in front of his shop and took a picture of the intersection on which his shop stood. In one amazing scene, he has a conversation with a writer whose wife has died, and who has, in his sorrow, really lost his focus. The shop owner invites the writer to his home to look at his photographs. He pulls out several albums full of pictures. The writer begins to page through them, and he realizes that every picture is exactly the same scene - a particular corner in their city neighborhood. The shop owner says, yes, he goes out every morning at 8 a.m., every day of the year, and photographs that corner. The writer shakes his head, and begins to turn the pages perfunctorily.
"You're going too fast," his friend tells him. "Slow down and look at them." "But they're all the same." "Yes," he replies, "they're all the same, but they're all different. The sun is in a different place. The lighting is different. The people are different. They're all the same, but every one is different." So the writer slows down and inspects each picture. In one, he discovers the image of his late wife. In fact, he begins to see many things that he had never noticed before. It becomes a kind of metaphor to describe his reawakening to life.
“Even with us something like this happens once in a while,” says novelist Frederick Buechner, “The face of the man walking with his child in the park, of a woman baking bread, of sometimes even the most unlikely person listening to a concert or standing barefoot in the sand watching the waves roll in, or just having a beer at a Saturday baseball game in July. Every once and so often, something so touching, so incandescent, so alive transfigures the human face that it’s almost beyond bearing.”
God finds ways to wake us up. The disciples on the mountaintop, heavy with sleep, and yet suddenly there is the glory of God surrounding them. God does that to us. Perhaps that awakening actually happens in the midst of struggle…as we grapple with our faith and try to cut through the fog that is our questions, our complaints, our uncertainties. Peter and his buddies were certain that Jesus was not going to die, no matter how many times the teacher would suggest it. So – on the mountaintop, God came in – came close and opened a way for them to see God more fully.
God is Holy, Holy, Holy other – and yet in an instant, God can and will be right there with you – the mountaintop can be anywhere. The trips to the mountaintop are the transformational experiences that are the moments when, with the spirit's help, a new window is opened in your life. A child can be excused when they boast that they can draw a picture of God. As adults, with adult faith, we need to accept that God is not so predictable or easily contained. We recall Jesus' journey to the mount of transfiguration with his disciples on the last Sunday before Lent...before the journey to the cross knowing that as we struggle with the reality of crucifixion – and all the questions it raises, we find ourselves once again focusing on the person of Jesus Christ. We know him – and yet we do not know him. The disciples came down the mountain with the charge to Listen. As they listened to Jesus, as the spirit directed, they found themselves coming down the mountain and taking up the way of discipleship that would lead eventually to Calvary.
There is a current movie called Crazy Heart which comes to mind. The movie is about a bedraggled, drugged-up by alcohol, country music singer who is clearly at the end of his days. Stumbling from one small town in the southwest to another – playing the bars in the local bowling alley, he is out of money and friends. The movie is about his reawakening to life. One of the songs from the movie which keeps haunting me, begins:
“I used to be somebody, but now I’m somebody else…” Written during his days as a drunk, he grieves the person he wants to be. Finally sober, at the end of the movie, the same lyrics become a testimony to the change that has infused his life. I used to be somebody, but now I’m somebody else – a new man.
The work of the Gospel is transforming work...people are not changed by being convinced...or by learning new vocabulary. They are not changed by talk which reduces everything down to a simple, common denominator, nor by being caught up in ecstatic experiences with waving arms and loud amen’s. People are changed from the inside out.
As witnesses both Isaiah and the disciples needed to “listen,” to the voice from the throne in the first instance, to Jesus in the second, and grapple with what they heard and saw and then go down the mountain...and back into life. They did not need to build booths because "God was not going to be locked up in a booth..." God is not going to be found in a booth, not on the mountain, not even in the church. God is going to be found down there, out there, in the world...in us."
It is in the gifts we receive...and the gifts we share through the interactions of our lives with loved ones and strangers...enemies and neighbors...encounters of joy and encounters of pain and loss...which are the transforming, transfiguring moments of our lives. In those encounters – the mysterious, hidden God becomes visible in surprising unexpected ways.
Listen, my friends, because God is calling to each of us out of the fog. These are the moments of transfiguration...I would say that kind of meeting happens more often than we expect as we each go about taking up our place on the way in service to our Lord. Amen.
