Glory in the Valley
Transfiguration of Our Lord Sunday – February 19, 2012
Glory! Or as my friend and colleague, Pr. Barnett, from down the road likes to put it when his West Virginian is showing, “G-lo-rey!” That's what we get here in this morning's gospel, on this Transfiguration Sunday. We trudge up the hill with Peter and James and John (or at least, I trudge, that's how I go up mountains) for some time apart with Jesus, and we get this mysterious, glorious scene. Jesus is transfigured. Somehow, everything is different. His divine glory is revealed to these three. It's as if they get to see Clark Kent change into Superman before their very eyes. Up on the mountain, they suddenly see Jesus as they've never seen him before. They catch a glimpse of a Jesus they weren't quite expecting. And along with Jesus, two other super-hero figures of the Old Testament appear, Elijah and Moses, talking with Jesus.
Amazing stuff. But one of the things we, living in 21st century America, less acquainted with our Bibles and certainly with ancient Jewish thinking, fail to see in this whole episode, something that Peter and James and John would NOT have missed, is that Elijah and Moses were signs and symbols of the Day of the Lord coming near. The belief was that God would send them to let humanity know that the Reign of God was at hand. And poor Peter, who we usually give a hard time in this story because of his desire to stay, to hold on to this mountaintop experience and capture it forever, well, there may be more than meets the eye there too. Because the expectation at the time was that God was going to usher in the new age during the Festival of Booths, – and so Peter is offering to build them booths for them so they won't have to do it themselves as this great Festival of celebration is about to begin. And it's understandable, knowing all this, being up on the mountain with Jesus, surrounded by all of his sparkling GLORY, that this is when they would think that God is about to come and begin to rule, finally, that now is the time when God will bring about peace and well-being for all of creation.
We operate the same way. Once in a while, we get a glimpse of God, Jesus, the Spirit in their divine glory – in a especially powerful and moving worship service where the readings and the songs and the sermon all seemed to speak to your heart and drew you into a place where you knew that you were in the presence of the Living God; or on a literal mountaintop, when you finally came to the summit after all the hard work of getting up there, not seeing the destination til you got there, and then when you arrive, you see the surrounding land laid out all around you and it takes your breath away and you marvel at what God has made; or on the beach at sunrise, listening to the waves pound and it looks like the water goes on forever and you are at peace; or at the birth of a child, seeing new life draw first breath, and you embrace that tiny creature for the first time, knowing that you are embracing a miracle of God. I even had one of those moments driving in the car once, on I-80 in Pennsylvania, and suddenly, I felt Christ in the car with me, and I can't really explain it, except that I felt him physically there, like if I turned my head and looked in the passenger seat, I would see him there – and I couldn't tell you what transpired, just that those few moments stick with me.
In any of these or a million and one other ways you may have found yourself pulled into the presence of the Living God, experiencing God's glory, and these are the moments when it feels like God is finally about to break through into our world from beyond our dimension, to come in powerful, unmistakable new ways that will transform us and the world around us, and at last things will be as we know that they should be. Those moments are when we feel we know who God is and what God is all about.
But what we don't understand, and what Peter (and James and John too, we can assume) don't understand is that the glory of Jesus and the fullness of God's reign is not able to be seen just in Jesus on the mountaintop, glowing, dazzlingly white. That's a part of it, but if that's all we see, we are left in the lurch when we come down off those mountains, as we always have to. When we are stumbling through the valley times of our lives, it can be good to remember the mountain, but that's not all there is to the story. God's reign comes on that mountain, yes, but what we see in this story, and really in the whole story of Jesus' life, is that Jesus comes down. He leaves the glory of heaven to be born as a baby himself. He leaves the glory of that mountain to return to the valley, where he finds people arguing over how to deal with a boy possessed by a spirit. He comes down into darkness and dinginess and dirt – and it's there that we see Jesus initiating the fullness of God's reign. Not simply in mountaintop experiences, but wherever we meet him along the way – in our darkness, as much as in our light; in our sorrows as much as in our joy; when we are weighed down with heavy hearts as much as when our spirits are rejoicing. We find him not just in the high and lofty, but in the unbelievably simple and common everyday stuff of life. In the tap water that washes over us at baptism, joined to words of promise that we, too, are God's beloved children. In the olive oil that is traced on our foreheads in that same baptism, reminding us that we are sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross of Christ forever. In bread broken and wine poured, transfigured by Christ's life and death to become for us new life and forgiveness and grace and mercy, contained in ordinary food and drink that we can taste and touch and see and smell.
These simple things, as much as our mountaintop moments, are what gives us strength for the journey ahead, as we wait, in the meantime for God's reign to be fully revealed, for Christ to come again in the glory that he so richly deserves, yet laid aside for us. And while we wait, we listen to this one, God's beloved Son, learning to follow and obey, to line our footsteps up with his – through communion and worship and study and prayer and relationship with one another, all of these – sacred and common at the same time, transfigured for us by the One who himself is on this day transfigured, shown forth, revealed, the One who goes up the mountain into glory, and just as certainly turns and heads back down, headed unavoidably to Jerusalem, to death, to the cross, lifted up where his true glory is revealed in the self-sacrificing love that is willing to die so that we may live. May his light be reflected in our lives.
Amen.
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