Today is Transfiguration Sunday. While going down a few rabbit holes in this strange story, this sermon focuses on the promise that Jesus comes down the mountain with his disciples, choosing to enter into the messiness of our broken world and chaotic lives. Our Scripture readings today are Exodus 24:12-18 and Matthew 17:1-9.
Here’s the sermon podcast audio and the livestream from Christ the King.
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How many of you watched the Super Bowl last week? Anyone watch the Puppy Bowl instead? Ok, if you watched the Super Bowl, did you watch for the game, or for the ads?
Christin and I were getting back from the Quake weekend youth event in the Dells, so I only watched about half the game, but that still included plenty of commercials. There’s something odd about commercials for Jesus during the Super Bowl, but I think the He Gets Us ads are very well done. Controversial, but well done. The Ram electric truck ad was the funniest.
There weren’t many others that stuck out to me, but there was one with sort of a horror movie theme with bunch of rabbits dragging people into holes. I had to look up what it was for, so I’m not sure how effective it was, but it was a great literal image of rabbit holes.
(If you’re trying to remember, it was a streaming service called Tubi. Here’s the ad.)
Anyway, there are a lot of rabbit holes we could go down today with this story of Jesus’ transfiguration.
We could focus on the significance of mountains in the Bible. I think the people who selected the lectionary readings went down that rabbit hole.
In the first reading from Exodus, we heard about God calling Moses to go up a holy mountain to receive the 10 Commandments. On that mountain, Moses encountered God’s glory. For the last few weeks, our Gospel readings have come from Jesus’ sermon on the mount. Later, Jesus will pray on the mount of olives, and eventually ascent into heaven from there. There are lots of stories about encountering God on mountains and hills.
Or, another direction we could go is to focus on the character of Peter in this story. Peter’s one of my favorite Bible characters, and this story’s one of the reasons why I love him. Jesus takes Peter, James, and John with him up a high mountain, and as they’re up there, Moses and Elijah appear. These are great figures from Israel’s history, some of the greatest people to have ever lived. Peter grew up hearing about them, and suddenly, here they are chatting with Jesus.
Peter gets overwhelmed, and when Peter gets overwhelmed, he talks. You might say he’s a verbal processor.
He starts babbling, “Lord, this is great! I’m so glad we’re here! This is amazing! I don’t want this experience to ever end. I know, let’s set up some tents, let’s stay here, we can just live on this mountain, hold onto this amazing moment!”
The rabbit hole we could go down here is that this isn’t the only time Peter does something like this. He doesn’t worry about practical things like how they’re going to survive up on the mountain, or whether Moses and Elijah even need shelters. He just goes for it like he always does.
He’s the first of the disciples who’s willing to identify Jesus as Messiah. He’s the one who draws his sword to defend Jesus. He’s the one who steps out of the boat. Peter’s enthusiastic, he’s impulsive, and he’s the rock Jesus chooses to build his church upon. We could do a whole character study just on Peter.
But what I want to focus on this morning is the end of the story, the very last verse.
Not the very end, where Jesus tells them not to tell anyone. One more rabbit hole, because sometimes I think we take that phrase in verse 9 very seriously. Jesus ordered them, “Tell no one” and we stop there. We can be very good at keeping Jesus’ story a secret. Perhaps that’s part of why it seems so strange to have Super Bowl ads trying to tell his story.
But what Jesus actually says is “Tell no one about the vision…until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.” For now, hold on to the story. It’s not time to go and tell yet. He’s saying it won’t make sense until you know what’s really going on, until the rest of the story unfolds.
Until Jesus is raised from the dead, until Easter, this vision, this experience doesn’t matter. There are a lot of spiritual experiences people have (and even more that people claim to have).
There are lot of people who have claimed to be speaking for God, or even claimed themselves to be God. At Jesus’ baptism, the disciples heard God’s voice from heaven confirm his identity—and they hear the same confirmation again here on the mountain—but for the world, their testimony still won’t be enough.
Jesus says, “Don’t even bother spreading the news about who I really am until the proof is in.” The resurrection is the proof. Jesus is the only one who claimed to be God, claimed to have power over death, claimed the authority to offer everlasting life, and then came back from the dead. The resurrection proves the truth of who Jesus is.
We know the rest of the story. Easter has happened. The Son of Man has been raised from the dead. Now is the time to tell people about our experience, about Jesus. But again, that’s another rabbit hole, not what I want to focus on.
I want to focus on a few words at the beginning of that verse. Read the highlighted part with me. “As they were coming down the mountain…”
Jesus comes down the mountain with his disciples. That’s what I want to talk about. Peter, James, and John go up the mountain and they have an incredible encounter with God. Their eyes are opened. They experience the same kind of thing Moses did, where Moses had climbed up the mountain of God and the Lord spoke to him, the glory of the Lord surrounded him like a cloud.
When Moses comes down off the mountain (which won’t be for another 8 chapters—God has a lot of instructions for him, not just the 10 commandments, but all the plans for building the tabernacle and setting up the priesthood) when Moses finally comes down, he discovers that everything is falling apart. The Israelite people who he’s supposed to be leading to the promised land have gotten tired of waiting for him and have instead built a golden calf to worship.
Things were great up on the mountain, but coming down into the world is a shock. He gets so upset that he actually shatters the two tablets with the 10 commandments that God has written down for him.
But even though the people disobey, even though Moses is ready to throw in the towel, God doesn’t give up on him or the people, and in chapter 34, God actually makes a replacement set of 10 commandments tablets, calling Moses back up the mountain to retrieve them.
After that trip, his face is glowing. He is transfigured, transformed by his encounter with God.
Sometimes we get that kind of mountaintop faith experience. I hope Quake last weekend was one for some of the people who went. But eventually, we have to come back down the mountain, back to everyday life.
Transfiguration tells us Jesus is with us in everyday life too, in the mundane, on the plains. Jesus is present in the mountaintop experiences, in the moments when everything just feels right and sacred and you can sense God’s presence surrounding you like a cloud, maybe even hearing a voice from God, and Jesus is also present with us in the valleys, in the lowest points of our lives, when everything is falling apart.
Jesus coming down the mountain with the disciples is this little tiny detail in the story, but it points to the whole reason Jesus came in the first place. God became incarnate—Jesus stepped down out of heaven—to come to be with us, to enter into our world and into our lives. Jesus is God with us, Emmanuel.
There’s a strain of theology that tries to say that Christians should believe everything happens for a reason. There’s a bit of it in the song we just sang, right?
And it’s a fine line, because do we believe God is powerful, and God is good, and God is acting in the world. But the promise in this Transfiguration story is not that everything happens for a reason, that there’s meaning and purpose in everything. The promise, the hope in this story is that Jesus goes down the mountain with us.
If you keep reading the story in the Gospels, this moment of transfiguration on the mountain doesn’t really change much. As soon as Jesus gets down from the mountain, he finds a crowd of people in need waiting for him. He enters the crowd and there’s a father there begging Jesus to heal his demon-possessed son who’s suffering from seizures.
Jesus enters into the broken parts of life too. We can trust our God to be with us. As we just sang, even if it feels like there’s an ocean separating us from Jesus, he continues to hold onto us, refusing to let go.
That song says, “We believe there is purpose, there is meaning in everything.” Yes, there is purpose and meaning to life, because God can redeem any situation. The story is still unfolding, as we’ll sing shortly. God is at work for good in the midst of all situations.
But everything does not happen for a reason. Don’t tell me over 41,000 people dying from an earthquake is part of God’s plan. Don’t tell me that God just decided to strike my family members with cancers and dementia so I could learn some lesson or appreciate life more or something. God’s not the one doing that. Sometimes bad things just happen, and there is no answer, no reason why other than that we live in a broken world—a broken world God loves enough to enter and redeem.
I don’t have all the answers for why bad things happen, and neither does anyone else. In fact, I’d argue theodicy questions of predestination versus free will and suffering are the ultimate theological rabbit hole.
So let it be enough to trust that God comes down the mountain into our world, that God is with us, always.
Let it be enough to gratefully accept those rare moments of revelation and transfiguration, and to be grateful for the work Jesus does on the plains, in the everyday.
To be grateful to be here, trusting that in the midst of the darkness, the light of God’s love continues to shine.
And may the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen