"Holy Transformation." A Sermon on Transfiguration Sunday.

"Holy Transfiguration"

Exodus 34;29-35; Luke 9:28-43

         Many of the great events in the Bible took place up on a mountain.  Moses received the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai.  Elijah called down fire from heaven on Mount Carmel.  Peter made his confession of faith on a mountain.  Jesus often preached on the mount.  That's a pattern we can see in the scriptures.

            In both the Old Testament and Gospel lessons we heard today, we see a pattern.  Generally, when Moses heard God's Word for him and the people of Israel, it was when he was off by himself...  away from too much busy-ness and noise.  At times, Moses brought the Israelites out of the camp...  away from the distractions of their everyday work and routine-- to hear God speak to them directly.  

            When we study the Bible, we see this pattern of withdrawing-- going apart for awhile to be with God-- and then returning.

            Sometimes it takes longer than we think it might.   When Moses came down from Mount Sinai the first time after a time apart with God, he found the Israelites worshiping the golden calf.   Since they'd broken the covenant, Moses broke the stone tablets containing the Ten Commandments.

            Then Moses made a second trip up the holy mountain.  He stayed there forty days and forty nights, fasting.  He wrote out the second set of tablets containing the Ten Commandments.   He prayed, "Show me your glory,” and God passed before him.  The LORD proclaimed the holy NAME to him and revealed more of the divine nature than had ever been revealed to the people before, saying,

            "The Lord... the Lord,

              a God merciful and gracious,

              slow to anger,

              and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,

              keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation,

              forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin,

              yet by no means clearing the guilty....

            It was after this revelation that Moses came down among the people with his face shining so brilliantly that the people were afraid to come near him.  His appearance had been changed by his time apart with God.   There'd been a holy transformation.

            We know from reading the gospels that after his baptism, Jesus was led by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness.  He spent forty days alone in the wilderness, fasting and being tested, before he began his ministry. 

            Jesus had been praying alone, with only his closest disciples near him, when he began teaching them that he would have to undergo great suffering...   be rejected by the religious authorities...  be killed...  and the third day be raised.  Then he told them that anyone who wanted to be his disciples would have to deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow him.

            It's eight days later when Jesus takes his inner circle of disciples and goes up on a high mountain to pray.   While he was praying they saw his face change, and his clothes become dazzling white.   Then Peter and James and John saw Moses and Elijah, talking to Jesus.

            A cloud comes-- a sign of God's presence, as it had been in the Exodus.  From the cloud, a voice speaks:   "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,” echoing the voice heard when Jesus was baptized. 

            At his baptism, there's a moment when the veil of the present is stripped away to reveal who Jesus is     and who he will be.   Now, the disciples are told not only who Jesus is-- but they also hear that they are to "listen to him."

            This strange mountaintop experience of worship happens on the way to the cross.  The end of the drama is over the horizon-- a tragedy that will end in death for Jesus...  and the scattering and disillusionment of his disciples.  On the way, there’s this mountaintop experience that looks toward the cross...  and yet transfigures the cross in a burst of revealing light and glory.

            On the Sunday of Transfiguration, just before Lent, the church makes its weary way toward the cross on Good Friday.  The story we heard talks about withdrawing and returning-- a dynamic we see throughout the gospels.  I believe this pattern of withdrawal and return is at the HEART of Christian worship...  and at the heart of our Christian life.

            In the midst of the pressures of life...  in the hectic busyness that most of us experience as ordinary time-- it’s hard to find the time and space to develop a spiritual life.  It takes commitment and discipline to look and listen for God. 

            This Wednesday is Ash Wednesday-- the beginning of Lent...  the forty days leading up to Easter.  If we want to grow in our faith...   if we want to be ready to experience the new life of the Resurrection, then we need to "take time to be holy." 

            Today's scripture lessons remind us how important it is to take time apart to be with God...  and listen for what God wants to say to us. 

            On the way to the cross, we need to withdraw and listen. We need to watch for the shining light of epiphany-- as God reveals his glory to us and transforms us gradually into God's likeness. 

            That's the reason for a Lenten discipline.   If we want to be followers of Christ-- we need to be true disciples.  We have to give Christ time to teach us...  and transform us into his likeness.

             

            I think some of you can testify that worship makes a difference in your lives.  I'm convinced that worship, study and prayer make all the difference.

            We withdraw up on the mountain, so that we can return to the valley.  We return to a world that hasn't changed.   But we've changed-- however gradually.  We have seen the Lord.  We've heard a voice. 

            Without such precious times of renewal... withdrawal... and vision, we wouldn't be able to endure life in the valley.   We wouldn't be able to walk the road that leads to the cross. 

            If we expect immediate and total spiritual perfection-- we're expecting too much.  Our transformation is happening gradually, like the transformation of the first disciples.  The Peter who was so enthusiastic about the mountaintop experience is the same Peter who denies Jesus in the face of the cross.  Human failure to comprehend, let alone live up to, divine revelation is a hard fact of life. 

            God calls us to accept it as fact, but to be strengthened by the assurance that God never gives up on us.  The Lord never abandons us to failure.   

            God gives us the hope we need to follow Jesus boldly, and gives us the Spirit of the Lord to lead us further into the truth...  further into the freedom that Christ offers us.

            The Apostle Paul said that we "see the glory of God as though reflected in a mirror dimly"...   and that we're being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another."  

            God isn't finished with any of us yet.  At our worst moments-- both individually and as a church-- we act as if God is finished with us.  We act as if creation had been finished a long, long time ago.  But nothing could be further from the truth. 

            The Holy Spirit still moves over the face of the waters.  God still breathes life into piles of dust.  Jesus still shouts us from our tombs. 

            God still sheds new light on our understanding...  and lights our faces with the radiance of His glorious self-giving love.  God continues to shine upon us... to transform us, almost imperceptibly, one degree at a time.   

            And that, my friends, is good news!

            Thanks be to God!

            Amen!

Rev. Fran Hayes, Pastor

Littlefield Presbyterian Church

Dearborn, Michigan

March 3, 2019

           

                      

          

"Commandments of Freedom." A Sermon from Littlefield Presbyterian Church on the Third Sunday in Lent.

"Commandments of Freedom"

Exodus 20:1-17; John 2:13-20

In 2001, Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore had a Ten Commandments monument installed in the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial Building, without the knowledge of the other justices. This resulted in a legal battle over establishment of a particular religion in a government building and eventually to his being removed from office over his refusal to comply to the federal court injunction. Eventually, the monument was placed in a storage room, and later it was taken on a flatbed trailer on tour by a group called “America for Jesus.”. There was controversy between a those who thought that was a good idea and those who saw it as worshiping a graven image, a form of idolatry.

            What I hadn’t thought a lot about at the time is how much this monument weighed:   5,280 pounds. That’s just over 500 pounds per commandment.[1]

            As Tom Long suggests, in the popular religious consciousness, the Ten Commandments have come to represent, for some, weights and heavy obligations.  Most people in our society would have a hard time naming all ten commandments, but they may still think that the Ten Commandments are about finger-wagging “thou shalt not’s.” For some others, the commandments are heavy yokes placed on the necks of a rebellious society. As Tom suggests, a two-and-a-half-ton rock sitting on the bed of a truck is a perfect symbol of this.[2]

            The gods of ancient Babylon were heavy idols that had to be carted around. The prophet Isaiah was referring to them when he said, “These things you carry are loaded as burdens on weary animals.”

           

            Those who see the Ten Commandments as a series of burdensome rules overlook something essential.  The Ten Commandments begin not by an order to obey a set of rules, but by an announcement of freedom.  “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.”[3]

            This was God’s direct address to the people of Israel: “God spoke all these words.”  “Words” -- not commandments.  So, it is really more accurate to speak of them as “the Decalogue” -- the ten words.

            “Because the Lord is your God,” the Decalogue affirms, “you are free not to need any other gods.  You are free:  free to rest on the seventh day…free from the tyranny of lifeless idols… free from stealing and covetousness as ways to establish yourself.  

            The Decalogue begins with the good news of what the liberating God has done and then describes the life of freedom that God desires for people.

           

            “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” Although this introductory sentence of freedom and redemption is often left out of printed versions of the Ten Commandments, in Judaism it is recognized as the first word. 

            “You shall have no other gods before me” is the second word.[4] Idolatry is the focus in this second word. Idolatry commonly refers to worshipping graven images, such as the golden calf.[5]  Idolatry, the worship of “other gods” could include any person place, or thing that we hold to be more important than God. These other gods could also be money, property, fame, power-- anything in which we place our ultimate loyalty and trust or worship. So, this second word is a call to love and trust in God above all things. This is the grounding for all other commandments or “words.”

            The Ten Words we heard in today’s lesson were not new for Israel, but they were a good listing for their time and situation, when the newly liberated people of Israel were wandering around in the wilderness, learning how to be free people.   The Ten Words were adapted at different times and places. That’s why when we compare the Ten Commandments in Exodus and the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy, we see some differences that reflect some changes, such as a changing role for women in the culture.

            “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” The Ten Words had been given to the people to celebrate and maintain their emancipation from Egypt and the Pharaoh.

            In the Pharaoh, the ruler of ancient Egypt, was a brutal concentration of power and wealth.  Walter Brueggemann has often pointed out how every time a “Pharaoh” turns up in history, it turns out that this empire is propelled by a sense of not having enough, a system designed to accumulate more and more--more money, more power, more land, more food, more cheap labor for the ruler.[6].  

            When Pharaohs--or tyrannical emperors or kings or dictators-- rise up in history, they act in violence against vulnerable, disadvantaged people. The Exodus from Egypt and the celebration of Passover is a powerful demonstration of how God broke in to liberate the people from their oppression, and to give them a life of freedom. 

            But it becomes clear that we don’t always know what to do with freedom.  There were times in the wilderness when the people of Israel when they grumbled and wished they could go back to slavery in Egypt.

            So, Brueggemann says the Ten Commandments “are nothing less than strategies for staying emancipated in the new life that the God of Sinai governs.” These strategies are urgent, he says, because Pharaoh, in a variety of forms, always wants to coerce us back into Pharaoh’s domain of exploitation.

            This new strategy for living as free people is to honor God to the exclusion of every other idol…to honor God’s name and God’s purpose for our lives.  I love and am challenged by the way Brueggemann points to the scripture’s truth, as he says this strategy for freedom means to “refuse every other ultimate loyalty, every idolatry in our lives among all the ‘isms’ including racism, sexism, and nationalism. It means not to worship stuff, not stuff that is rare, precious, attractive, beautiful or empowering. It means not to recruit God’s name for our pet projects of religion, morality, economics or politics, because the only God is no party to our proximate causes.”

            The season of Lent calls us to a reality check.  Moses, through the Ten Commandments, or Ten Words, at Sinai, declared new possibilities for a life of freedom, outside the oppression, anxiety, fearfulness, and scarcity under Pharaoh-- a new life that honors God’s holiness, that loves the neighbor in concrete ways, and that honors the Sabbath and makes time to be holy.

            Lent invites us to look honestly at the ways in which we have failed at living freely. We’ve heard Pharaoh say, “Be very afraid,” and lived anxious lives. We’ve believed what those in power tell us about scarcity, so we’re afraid we won’t have enough and accept that the poor can’t have what they need for lives of dignity. We hurry to try to keep even, and are over-extended and exhausted.

            The season of Lent is a time for us to ponder the gospel life to which Jesus calls us: an alternative life that is unafraid…a life of abundance Jesus showed us when he multiplied loaves and fishes to feed the multitudes. Jesus calls us to a life of healing and forgiveness and generosity to neighbors.

             The season of Lent reminds re-presents the outrage Jesus demonstrated at what he saw in the Temple and how he challenged the status quo. It reminds us how determined the empire and the keepers of the status quo were to maintain their power and privilege and control, to the point of executing Jesus on the cross where his followers and other would see him being tortured.

            “You destroy this temple… in three days I will raise it up.” Even the disciples couldn’t understand Jesus’ words until after the resurrection.  The story of Jesus doesn’t end at the cross.  Only after the resurrection can we reflect on what the cross of Jesus means for a life of faith.

            In these last weeks of Lent, we are invited to ponder what the apostle Paul wrote: “The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”[7]  

            The powers of this world will tell us that it is foolish to think we have enough to feed a crowd… and that it is a sign of weakness to practice mercy, justice, and faithfulness. But we can trust that God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

            Thanks be to God!

            Amen!

            .

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[1] Thomas G. Long, “Dancing the Decalogue,” in “Living by the Word,” in The Christian Century.

[2] Tom Long, in “Dancing with the Decalogue.”

[3] Exodus 20:2

[4] Rolf Jacobson, Commentary on Exodus 19:1-6 and Exodus 20:1-17. http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=2113

[5] Bull worship was common in some cultures in the ancient world, including Egypt. The golden calf is first mentioned in Exodus 32:4

[6] Walter Brueggemann, “Strategies for Staying Emancipated.”  http://day1.org/8145-walter_brueggemann_strategies_for_staying_emancipated

[7] 1 Corinthians 1:18-25