Calvary Episcopal Church
Memphis, Tennessee
February 14, 1999
Last Sunday after the Epiphany

From Fear To Light
The Rev. William A. Kolb

First Reading: Exodus 24:12 -18
Gospel: Matthew 17:1-9

Transfiguration is the theme of our day at worship. It is the content of our gospel reading, and it is one of the pieces of gospel on which I love to preach, because there is so much in it.

I can remember earlier sermons I've preached on this. One of them had to do with Peter, who typically wanted to stay on the mountain forever and continued to enjoy the peace and the glow of all that went on up there. He had no clue about the fact that they were going through all that to ready them to go down the mountain.

Another sermon, or maybe the same one, that can come out of this reading has to do with the fact that we are very fortunate if we enjoy a vacation but near the end look forward to going home, or back to work, or back to routine. That is a balanced life, and the fact is if we vacation all the time, it ceases to be a vacation.

This reminds me of the time Sunny and I had the good luck to be chaplain on a cruise ship for 22 days. Ask me about it, I'll tell you about it. It was great. But it suddenly occurred to me, the man who was the regular chaplain wasn't there because he was on vacation.

You need to go back and forth. We need to go back and forth in our life to draw something from here that strengthens over there. Draw something from there that strengthens over here.

In the sermon I preached on this a couple or three years ago, part of what I had to say had to do with my sudden realization that the atomic bomb had been dropped on August 6th-- day of the transfiguration on our calendar. It seemed to me the 5th or the 7th might have been better, because the bright light of transfiguration is a good light and the bright light of the atomic bomb, no matter your politics, is a sad thing. It seemed to me that another day would have been better.

Anyway, I'm not going to preach on any of those things today, but you see how rich this telling of the transfiguration is. There is so much that we can learn from it or perspectives we can get from it.

What is the story? Very briefly, Jesus goes up to what we think is Mt. Hermon. He goes there to pray and takes three of His major apostles with Him. They get sleepy, a big cloud comes over the mountain, and Jesus is transfigured by bright, blinding light. His robe is so white it makes regular white look like brown or something. I mean it is brilliant.

He is seen there in that bright light with Elijah and Moses. It is not because they are luminaries in the Old Testament world that they are there-- that is true, but they represent the whole history of Israel. They seem to be giving Him their blessing for Him to go forward down the mountain in this great eternal drama.

Elijah represents all of the prophets in the history of Israel. Elijah represents God speaking through man to us about daily life, about issues, about controversies. Prophets were seized by what was called the Ruach Yahweh-the spirit or the breath of God--and would go into the town square and say things that sometimes got them killed. But they were seized by the spirit of God and had to say what they said about injustice, about the way widows or orphans were being treated, about the way the king was misusing his power. It was Elijah, the greatest of the prophets, to whom the voice of God spoke to us with unique directness.

And it was Moses, who brought the tablets down from Mt. Sinai, [to whom the voice of God spoke to us] of the law--the law we refer to when we're talking about the Ten Commandments or the first five books of the Old Testament. He was supremely and uniquely the one who brought God's law to the human race.

So you have the prophets, and you have the law, and you have another theme in this transfiguration account : You have clouds. You heard about the cloud that descended over the mountain during this. We heard earlier in the Old Testament reading that Moses on Mt. Sinai was surrounded by a cloud, and it was a luminous cloud. It had supernatural bright light of the presence of God. We read in commentaries that this cloud stood for Shechinaah and contend Shechinaah, but what counts about it is that it refers to the glowing glory of the Lord.

Now I was lucky enough in seminary to spend a lot of time studying the word "glory." "Glory" to me could never be just a word. It is not like glorious. The glory of the Lord is a bright, blinding light that, if we were in the direct presence of God, we wouldn't be able to stand because it would be so bright. The cloud in Exodus when Moses is on Mt. Sinai, says the writer of Exodus, was like a devouring fire on top of the mountain, similar to another cloud we heard about in the Psalm--the pillar of cloud that led Moses and the people of Israel out of slavery into the Promise Land. They followed a cloud across the desert. Again, the luminous cloud at the dedication of Solomon's temple…"and it came to pass when the priests would come out of the holy place, that the cloud filled the house of the Lord."

All through the Old Testament, there is this picture of the cloud in which was the mysterious glory-the blinding light of the fullness of the presence of God. And here we see it again in the transfiguration. The blinding light of the brightness of the presence of God being immediately and directly present with Elijah, Moses and Jesus.

As a matter of fact, a couple of facts are interesting about the brightness of God's presence. You see on the communion rail a green vestment which is called a chasuble. That chasuble is descended from a vestment worn by the high priest of Israel in ancient Israel who would wear it anytime they went near the altar in the holy of holies- -the place of worship. Because of the blinding light of the glory of God, you needed to protect yourself. In fact, when Moses would come down from or come back from having spoken with the Lord, not just the time of the Ten Commandments but other times, his face shone, says the Bible. His face glowed for a while, and it was so unsettling to the people that they asked him to take his time coming back into town 'til he cooled off some. So it is through the whole 5,000 years of the history of God that we hear about the cloud, that we hear about the glow and the blinding light.

Now back for a moment to the law and the prophets. Jesus names the law and the prophets as the center of our combined faith-Judaism and Christianity. He says, and this is very familiar to all of us, "Love God and love your neighbor, on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." What would it be like without the heritage that we get from the law and the teachings of the prophets? It is hard enough to find truth in everyday life. We can find plenty of facts, but truth, real God truth, is hard to find and hard to know that we have it. In 5,000 years of faith history, as best we can believe, the law and the teachings of the prophets are the teachings of God to us for everyday life.

Now why was Jesus on that mountain that day? He went there to pray, but He was praying about something very specific and very special. Just before
the transfiguration, there is a scene in the gospel of Matthew when Jesus says, coming near end of his earthly ministry, "Who do people say that I am?" As you will recall, Peter says, "You are the Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed One." Well, Jesus wanted to make sure of that because He knew He was on His way to an ominous trip to Jerusalem, and He wanted to be very, very certain that He was doing what God wanted Him to do not what He thought God wanted Him to do and not what He wanted to do.

It is so easy for us to mistake our own will for that of God's. Prayer and
quiet can open us to truth-that is why Jesus was up on that mountain
praying and being quiet. Now He is up on a mountaintop, and that is yet another theme of the transfiguration that relates to a lot of other times in scripture. Both Moses of the law and Elijah of the prophets had their most eminent experiences of God on a mountaintop. We know that Moses was on Mt. Sinai when he received the table of the law, as we heard in our Old Testament reading. But it was also on a mountaintop, Mt. Horab, that Elijah found God, and you will recall this line, "Not in the wind, not in the earthquake, but in the still small voice." So we have mountaintop as a theme.

A few last questions: Why do we have transfiguration on this Sunday? You
know I tell you it is August 6th, right? So you think I've lost it and you
don't want to mention it is February, because, you know, you're kind to me.
In addition to observing the feast of transfiguration every August 6th, in
the Church, the lectionary lessons, we are told, "This is what you read this
day." The whole Episcopal Church and most denominations, by the
way, have the same readings every Sunday. The Sunday before Lent begins-the Sunday before Ash Wednesday, the Sunday called Last Epiphany, the last Sunday after the Feast of the Epiphany-we read the transfiguration every year. We read Matthew, Mark, Luke; we vary it, but it is always the transfiguration.

You know Epiphany is about light, bright light. The star that the Wise Men followed and life, if you live long enough (and it doesn't take very long), has some darkness-has some dark times. That is why the light of God is an extremely important theme-that God's presence in our lives can lead to some light or strengthening recollection of light, and the hope of future light when we're going through a valley. This day we read of the transition with all of its light but its foreshadowing of darkness-going down to Jerusalem is a transition between Epiphany and Lent and the Crucifixion.

As I said, it follows Peter's saying you are "The Christ, the Son of the Living God." And this reading and this day focuses very specifically on who is Jesus.

In journalism they have the five W's - who, what, where, why and when. That is what used to be written in a first paragraph in a newspaper. It isn't any more. Everything is a feature story now. But back in the good ol' days, you could know the whole story by reading the first paragraph.

With the five w's (you can tell I got my training a long time ago), the five w's of what follows the transfiguration after they go down the mountain--after they take the trip from the lovely glow to the city of life below--are as follows.

Five w's: When is it going to happen? Soon. What is going to happen? We are going to find out shortly in our Lenten journey. Where is it going to happen? Jerusalem. Why does this thing happen to Jesus when he gets down there? We are still learning about why. And this momentous event on the mountaintop, the transfiguration, is the who.

Who is Jesus? The blinding light of the Shechinaah-the Glory of God, the presence of the history of Israel, and God's words, "This is my Son, my beloved. Listen to Him."

After that, there can be no doubt about the source of Jesus' teachings when he goes down in Jerusalem, and there can be no doubt about whom they are torturing and killing. And in fact, what they are trying to kill. Was this, the transfiguration, like a blessing and anointing before a journey, before a battle? Perhaps. It established that Jesus would carry the fullness of the history and future of the Word of God into the final act of the eternal drama. That He would go down the mountain into the teeth of man's loss for power and the worldly fear of goodness and truth. What fear? Fear in the hearts of the Romans and those appointed by the Romans to be in power over the oppressed people of Israel. Fear of what? Fear of losing that power over the people and the fear of goodness and truth lead to the Crucifixion.

God says to us, "Do not fear." That is a common phrase in the Bible. I looked it up on the computer. And on the computer, I found out that God or Christ says, "Do not fear," or "Do not be afraid," or 'Fear not," or whatever about 600 times. And in our transfiguration reading today, Jesus says toPeter and John and James, after the transfiguration when they are just
waking up, "Do not fear."

Also, the Angel of God said to Mary when she learns what lies ahead for
her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God, and behold you
will conceive in your womb and bear a son and you shall call his name
Jesus."

Fear is a universal; fear is an emotion that all of us have felt at one
time or another, or we are totaling avoiding contact with ourselves. Fear lies
beneath so much of the anger and verbal and physical violence in our world.
Fear is very, very important. Being alive can bring joy, but it can also bring fear. It can bring fear because during our lives we must wrestle with or expend spiritual energy avoiding
issues of sin and repentance and suffering and death.

And we must also wrestle with the temptation to become cynical. Cynicism,
I think, is a growth industry in our culture today. I think it is safe to
invest stock in it for some time to come. I don't see any light at the end of the
tunnel. But the enthusiasm of youth is much nearer the truth than the
cynicism of middle age, and the scary thing is a lot of young people are
becoming cynical. But cynicism itself is a death in life, a death of hope
and death of light, and these are some of the issues addressed by our journey through Lent. As we deal with them, God, Creator, caresses us and says, "Do not fear. When you fall, I shall catch you."

Lent for Jesus is a journey from the mountaintop to the cross. The Lent of
our lives is a journey from the glow of youth to the Jerusalem of wisdom
and death. What we always need to remember-and will be reminded of during and at the end of this Lent-is that the journey does not end with death. Not for Jesus and so not for us.

Amen.

Copyright 1999 Calvary Episcopal Church

First Reading: Exodus 24:12 -18
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 the 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 Hur 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. (NRSV)

Gospel: Matthew 17:1-9
Six days later, 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 him. Then Peter said to Jesus, "Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah." While he was still 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." (NRSV)

[back to top]