The Transfiguration of our Lord, February 14, 2010, “Series C”
Grace be unto you and peace, from God our Father and from our Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Let us pray: Dear Heavenly Father, on the mount of Transfiguration, you enable your Son’s beloved disciples to gain a glimpse of his glory. Come to us in our worship, transfigure our doubts into faith, our questions into your answers, our fears into your reassuring peace. Give us grace to silence all competing voices and to listen only to your will for our lives. Above all, give us the courage to witness to other of your redemption, which is in Christ Jesus our lord. Amen.
William H. Willimon in his commentary on our lessons for this morning, begins with the following statement. “Sometimes, as the rabbis noted, Scripture interprets Scripture. One passage of Scripture is utilized in the illumination of another.” End quote. [Pulpit Resource, Logos Productions, 1998]
This, I believe, is very evident as we look at our three lessons for this morning. In our lesson from Exodus, we have the story of Moses coming down from Mount Sinai, after receiving from God the tablets of the covenant for the second time. We are told that the skin of his face was shining because he had been talking with God and had beheld God’s glory. As a result, the people were afraid to come near to Moses, so he put a veil over his face when he talked to the people.
Clearly, this imagery of God’s glory shinning brightly, is evident in the depiction of our Lord’s transfiguration before Peter, James and John. We are told that the appearance of Jesus’ face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. Clearly, the implication in this text is not that Jesus face changed as a result of being in the presence of the glory of God, nor of being in the presence of Moses and Elijah, whom we are told appeared to Jesus in glory. For it was not just Jesus’ face that reflected the glory of God, his whole appearance, including his clothes exuded God’s glory, indicating Jesus’ oneness with God. Jesus could not hide his glory with a piece of cloth.
Finally, in our lesson from Paul’s Second Letter to the churches in Corinth, Paul picks up on the detail of Moses hiding the glory of God with a veil. He does this to describe his understanding as to why some Jews come to faith in the good news of the redeeming grace of God in Christ’s life, death and resurrection, and why some do not. Listen to Paul’s words: “Indeed, to this very day, when they [the disbelieving Jews] hear the reading of the old covenant, that same veil is still their, since only in Christ is it set aside. Indeed, to this very day, whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their minds; but when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed.”
It is as if Paul, remembering the image of the veil over Moses’ face, twists that image a bit to suit his purpose in confronting the discouragement that is brought about by declining membership in the congregations of the Corinthian churches. As Willimon states, “It is as if Paul is saying, “The gods of this world have veiled the faces of unbelievers. When they hear the words of the Gospel, it is as if a veil has been placed over their minds. They are unable to see the full glory of God in Jesus the Christ.” End quote.
At our council meeting this past Thursday evening, we reluctantly reached a decision to cancel our midweek Lenten supper and classes. This decision came about as a result of two factors. First, we received word that St. Mark’s United Church of Christ, who participated in our Lenten study last year, decided not to participate with us this year, citing that many members did not like traveling at night on winter roads. Instead, St. Marks will join their sister congregation in Transfer for a study on Saturday mornings.
Secondly, there was a consensus that outside of council, there were few members of our congregation who have attended these studies over the past few years. With the work involved in preparing the classes and meals, as well as the cost of heating the facilities, it was decided to not have the studies this year. As I lamented that night, I feel like a pastor living in a different era, as Lent was always seen as such an important time of faith development, that so many members of the congregation would participate in midweek activities that they were held at noon and in the evening. But that commitment to faith development does not seem to be present in the church today.
Marva Dawn, a theologian of our church who was a keynote presenter at one of our Synod Convocations, points out in her book, Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down, A Theology of Worship for the Turn-of-the-Century Culture, that the number of Christians in our culture is declining. She writes: “David Barrett reported statistics for Oxford University Press that in a twelve-month period, 2,765,100 worship attenders in Europe and North America cease to be practicing Christians – an average loss of 7,600 every day. This means that every week more than 53,000 people leave churches and never come back. The percentage of active Christians in the world has fallen from 29.0 percent in 1900, to 23.3 percent of today’s population. Unfortunately, losses in the Western world even outweigh Christian growth in the Two-Thirds World.” End quote.
For those of you who are here this morning, have you ever wondered, as did Willimon, “why it is that not everyone in town is here in church this morning? Why is it that Jesus moves us and our lives, yet other look upon him and feel nothing?” After all, if our crucified and risen Christ is the Son of God, who has redeemed us from sin and death, why is it that every pew isn’t filled to offer our praise and thanksgiving for his gift of grace?
As Thomas Long points out in his book, The Living Pulpit, and I quote, “Faith, the tradition has claimed, is not a noble human virtue, a praiseworthy act of self-transcendence. Faith, rather, is a gift from God. It is something that would never have done, achieved, or thought up on our own. It comes as a surprise, a disruption of the normal ways of being human… Faith is not a human discovery, but a divine disclosure, something imparted to us by God…
‘The sea of faith,’ wrote Matthew Arnold in his poem, ‘Dover Beach,’ was one…at the full…but now I only hear its melancholy, long withdrawing roar…’ Perhaps this is so. Perhaps we do live in a time when the ranks of the faithful have dwindled alarmingly. If faith is a gift from God, however, it is not the place of people of faith to chastise the world for its lack of faith, as if the world could be scolded into coming to its senses. It is, rather, the task of people of faith to be faithful, to live as those who belong to the God we have met in Jesus Christ.
Strange as it may seem, whether the world in our day has more faith – or less – than some other age is, in a sense, irrelevant. What counts is the character of God, whose love will not ever let the world go, whose promises are surely to be trusted.
‘Nearer and nearer draws the time, the time that shall surely be, when the earth shall be filled with the glory of God, as the waters cover the sea.’ The gift of faith is to trust this, to trust the God who promises this, even when all we see is the receding of the tide, and the only sound we hear is the grating of the waves drawing back.” End quote.
On this day that we celebrate the Transfiguration of our Lord, what we are really celebrating is not what Peter James and John were privileged to witness on that mountain 2000 years ago. What we are really celebrating today is the fact that, here in this nave, we have gathered to worship God and give him thanks, because God has lifted the veil that has covered our eyes and minds, to see the glory of God in Jesus the Christ. What we are celebrating today is the fact that God has granted us, through the power of his Holy Spirit, the gift of faith, to trust in the witness of Gospel, that in Jesus, God’s grace and glory are revealed to us.
So let us live out lives of faith, and allow the grace of God to direct our lives through the power of the Holy Spirit. And if you feel so inclined to want to deepen your faith through study, please join me on Wednesday mornings for a study of the lessons for the following Sunday.
Amen.
