Scripture Matthew 17:1-9
Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John his brother and brought them up a high mountain, by themselves. And he was transfigured in front of them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light. Then, look! Moses and Elijah appeared to them, talking with him. Peter responded saying to Jesus, “Teacher, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will pitch three tents here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” He was still speaking when, look! A cloud full of light overshadowed them! And then . . . ! A voice from the cloud said, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!” When the disciples heard this, they fell upon the ground and were very much afraid. Then Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Get up and do not be afraid.” They looked up and they saw no one except Jesus himself alone. As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus instructed them saying, “Tell no one about the vision until the Son of Woman from the dead has been raised.”
Translation: The Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney, A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church, Year A
Sermon “Shining Like the Sun”
My friend Kimberly and I have breakfast together every weekend, on Friday or Saturday, at Nezuntoz in Binghamton. We catch up on our week, we talk about our lives, we talk about our sermons… sometimes we sometimes get into intense theological discussions. This weekend, for whatever reason, we got talking about Covid—in particular, about that initial lockdown, the beginning of it all. How strange it was, how surreal to look back on it. And as we were talking, I began to realize that I had been entertaining a kind of nostalgia about it, about early lockdown. And this is bizarre to me, because that moment was truly frightening, for the whole world. It was a moment of great uncertainty. There were no vaccines. There were no treatments. None of us knew what the future held. All we knew was that the government was telling us to stay at home, at the risk of our lives. And here I was, telling a story about, I don't know, how cozy it was? How strange nostalgia is. How unexpected, sometimes, the things we think of fondly.
This morning we have a story from scripture that brings us into a liminal space, a moment when the veil between the world we see around us and another world is pierced. Jesus takes three disciples up a mountain to pray. But before we get to that, I think it's important for us to talk about what happened six days earlier.
Six days earlier, Jesus was talking to his disciples, asking them what the crowds were saying about him, and also, what they, his closest followers, believed about him. Peter responded with a powerful declaration. He said, I believe that you are the Messiah, the son of the living God. Jesus blessed Peter for his words. He affirmed his wisdom and recognized him as a leader and bedrock of the church he was building. And Jesus told all the disciples to keep quiet about that. But then the conversation took a turn. Jesus told Peter and the disciples something unthinkable. Something horrifying. He told them that he would go to Jerusalem, where he would suffer at the hands of the authorities, and be killed, and then, on the third day he would be raised from the dead. Whereupon Peter responded by saying NO. Absolutely NOT. This must NEVER happen to you. Jesus, who had only moments before called Peter a bedrock of the church, said get behind me, Satan. You cannot interfere with the plans of God. Jesus ended this conversation saying that anyone who wanted to follow him would need to deny themselves and pick up their own cross and then follow where he leads.
That's what happened 6 days earlier.
So Jesus takes his inner circle—Peter, John, and James—up a mountain, presumably, to pray. Jesus prays a lot. He is always caring for people: healing them, feeding them, encouraging them, sharing the wisdom of God with them. And he clearly sees prayer as an essential grounding, a restoration, and a preparation. These four men climb the mountain, and at some point, this incredible transfiguration occurs. Jesus is changed. He is glowing. His clothes are dazzling white. His face is shining like the sun. Imagine the shock of this, and then the thrill of this. And then two men appear, Moses and Elijah, these towering figures from the Old Testament, from Jesus’s faith heritage. Moses and Elijah, embodiments of the law and the prophets, stand alongside Jesus in all his glory.
In Bible study we talked about, well, how did they know it was Moses and Elijah? My guess is they had signifiers, items or clothing that revealed who they were with clarity.
My guess is that Moses was holding the two tablets of the law, which he brought down to the people from Mount Sinai. Elijah is a little more difficult; what might he have had to reveal his identity? Scripture tells us that Elijah has a hairy appearance—he’s apparently wearing a cloak made from the pelt of some hairy animal, such as a camel, with a leather belt around his waist… he looks like a wild man. Another signifier could be a raven, as ravens feature prominently in Elijah’s story. Whatever their signifiers, the figures are instantly recognizable to the three disciples.
Standing before the disciples are these three figures: Jesus, shining with the brightness of God’s glory, and Moses and Elijah with him.
There's another place in scripture when someone’s face shines with the glory of God. In the Exodus story, God has been leading the people through the wilderness as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. When they arrive at Mount Sinai, Moses travels up the mountain to meet with God, one on one, face to face. When Moses comes back down the mountain from his encounter with God, his face is shining with an unsettling, even terrifying light, because he has beheld the face of God. It is so frightening for the people to look at, Moses ends up veiling his face each time he comes down from the mountain, so that the people won't have to see this sight of him radiating God’s glory.
And now, something like this is happening—God is happening on this mountain with Jesus, and Moses, and Elijah, and Peter, and John, and James. And then Peter says, Lord do you want me to make three tents? three booths? 3 tabernacles? These are all translations of the word that that Peter uses. Peter wants to slow time down. Peter wants to capture this moment and hold onto it forever. I believe that moment of seeing Jesus glowing with God's shining light and these towering figures from their Biblical heritage, awakens in Peter a kind of nostalgia. Peter becomes nostalgic for a time he never experienced but knew about very well, a foundational time in the story f God’s covenant people: that time when God and Moses are leading the people through the wilderness and God goes ahead of them as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, that time when God’s shining face makes Moses’ face shine, too. I imagine Peter thinking, we have been transported back to that time! We are on Mount Sinai! Let us stay here, let us enjoy this, let us hold on to it. Peter gets nostalgic.
But then something new happens. A cloud full of light—a pillar of cloud?—comes over the entire scene, and the voice of God can be heard: “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!” And Peter and John and James fell to the ground, and hid their faces in abject terror. And the next thing they knew, they were feeling the touch of Jesus—on their backs, on their shoulders—his gentle touch, and his gentle voice, saying, “You can get up now. No need to be afraid.” And they finally look up… and Moses and Elijah have vanished. And Jesus is just Jesus again. Regular face, regular clothes, same kind voice. And they go down the hill, and Jesus says don't tell anybody about this. Not until after I’ve been raised from the dead.
What do moments like this mean?
John Calvin tells us there are two ways of knowing God: the revelation of nature, and the revelation of scripture. Throughout all recorded history, people of all different cultures and religious expressions have experienced the numinous, the liminal. These are experiences which can’t necessarily be explained, but which seem to pierce that veil between the world around us, which we take for granted, and another world, which we don’t expect to see—not in this life, anyway. People experience these things while at prayer or meditation; they experience them when overwhelmed by the beauty or glory of nature—the roaring vastness of the sea, or the rising of the sun, or the view from a mountaintop, or the view through a telescope, or the view through a microscope. God can get to us, you see. God can reveal just enough of Godself that we experience God whispering to us, “I am here” and we know it viscerally.
I think that’s the experience Jesus and the disciples are having in this moment. They have been at prayer. They have climbed a mountain. And perhaps, even more importantly, they have had revelations of Jesus—recent revelations—which landed on them intellectually, perhaps emotionally. But until this moment, none that had awakened their awareness of the Spirit of God present to them. None that had been full of glory. Now they are awake.
Do things like this still happen today? The answer is yes. They do. They don’t happen all the time, but they happen. People’s lives are changed by experiences of awe. And experiences of awe tend to make people more open to other experiences of awe. And awe is, in many ways, at the heart of faith.
Where do we go with it? What do we do with it? It’s interesting that this experience doesn’t seem to change the behavior of Peter, or John, or James as the gospel story proceeds to Jerusalem. After all, Peter, even after having had this experience, will deny Jesus three times on the night when he is arrested. I attribute this, in part, to that moment of nostalgia Peter experienced. When seeing the glory of God revealed in and through Jesus and Moses and Elijah, his instinct was to look back, to turn back, and to express that desire to stay still, to not move, not blink, not change a thing. But that is not the purpose of revelation, of a numinous moment. The purpose of such a powerful revelation is to move forward, not back. It is to take action, not stop and stay. In this instance, it is to understand the power of Jesus, not only as a religious leader, their rabbi, but as a man who is suffused with God, shining with God’s light, and who has enlisted them to his work of compassion—of teaching, healing, and feeding. When we experience the powerful presence of God, it is not to encourage us to stay exactly where we are, but to prod us to move forward into the life that the reality of God calls us to live.
The spiritual we will sing in a few moments offers us such an invitation. I shared this story last year, but it bears repeating. It’s a story about Araminta Ross, Minty to her family, but who, in her adulthood, took the name Harriet Tubman.
On the night of November 12, 1833, Minty slipped out of the house she was living in and stole through the woods to her mother’s home. As an enslaved child, she did not live with her mother, but with the family who had her doing outdoor work, chopping down trees, hauling lumber—the kind of heavy labor usually done by men and boys. But Minty had found that she could slip away and visit her mother at night.
While she visited with her mother, one of her brothers stood guard outside, to alert her if they caught a glimpse or heard the sound of anyone who might be out looking for her. But suddenly her brother called out loudly, that Minty should come outside right away. Her biographer writes,
“Minty slipped out of the rude dwelling, and found that the darkness was no longer solid. A spray of lights pierced the night and rained down to earth. With her brother beside her, Minty saw the stars, all shooting every which way, a moment she would remember forever after. Scores of other enslaved people across the south saw the celestial pageant, too, remembering the event as ‘the night the stars fell’ or ‘showered down,’ and disappeared like sparkles. Minty, her brother, and people of all races and statuses across the country were witnessing an astounding astrological phenomenon, now known as the 1833 Leonid meteor storm. In the wee hours of the night and early morning, on November 12th and 13th, nearly 100,000 blazing stars plunged toward the earth, like a blaze of firecrackers… Throughout the country, many of those who witnessed the star-shower saw an invisible hand at work. Churchgoers in the south, north, and west attributed the event to the hand of God… Experience of the event was preserved in the African American oral tradition, through the stories of formerly enslaved people, and perhaps, through the spiritual, My Lord, what a Morning.”[i]
As a child, Harriet Tubman experienced a revelation of the glory, majesty, and power of God at work. Throughout her hard life, and the lifesaving work she did as a grown woman, this woman known as Moses was confident of the glory, majesty, and power of God to lead her and those she helped to save to a new life of freedom. After all, she had seen, as a child, what God was capable of. If the stars could fall out of the sky, without a single person being hurt or killed—which was how many people experienced that meteor storm—then surely God could aid and protect and encourage her to go forward, to do the holy work of helping children of God to find freedom.
As we sing together, I invite you to dream of that night, of what it felt like to see the stars falling. I invite you to dream of that moment on the mountain, when the light of God in Jesus’s face was shining like the sun. I invite you to know, or perhaps remember from your own life, what it is to behold God’s glory, majesty, and power. And I invite you to look forward, to the life God invites you to lead.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
[i] Tiya Miles; ed. Henry Louis Gates, Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People (New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2024.