Clouds and Glory

 Luke 9:28-36

Every year when this particular Sunday comes around, I thank God when I have a colleague like Ginny Soll who is not afraid to offer our Children’s Moment.  For if I think Transfiguration of the Lord is a difficult theological sermon to preach to adults, it is even more complex to unravel for our children.  But then, I often wonder if our children are not in a better position to hear this strange mountaintop story.  After all, children usually do not expect a scientific, sensible explanation.  They usually live quite well with mystery.

 For that is what we have today, isn’t it.  We have a text full of mystery.  So let me go ahead and offer a disclaimer.  If you have come to worship hoping I will tell you how this transfiguration occurred, how Jesus’ face changed and his clothes turned a dazzling white, and how Elijah and Moses appeared with him, crossing all boundaries of death and time, well then, you are going to be sorely disappointed. 

 That is not how I think Scripture works.  I do not believe the Bible was meant to be a science or a history textbook, explaining how God does things in the world.  On the contrary, I believe the Bible is a theological narrative telling us WHY God does what God does.  So we cannot approach this particular story for today, hoping to explain it and make sense out of it.  Rather, we are invited into its mystery, hoping that through this story, something will be revealed for us about God, like it was for Peter, James, and John on the mountain. 

 And as we approach this story asking the “why” questions, instead of the “how” questions, we discover a thickness and a depth that go far beyond the written words.  We could spend all day mining the theological richness of this passage.  Luke tries to communicate so much to us about Jesus, his relationship to the one he called Father, discipleship, dazzling glory, frightening darkness, death, life, the cross, and the transfiguration—and all in the span of nine verses.  It is enough to make your head spin, which may also be part of Luke’s point. 

 So let us briefly recap what happens:  Jesus takes three of his disciples up on the mountain to pray.  Not just any mountain, mind you.  THE mountain.  Clearly, Luke wants us to remember Moses’ encounters with God on the mountain.  The mountain is where one goes to meet and communicate with the Creator of all.  So Jesus takes the disciples up on THE mountain, even though the disciples are all very sleepy.  But luckily for them, unlike in the Garden of Gethsemane on the evening of Jesus’ arrest, this time the disciples stay awake. 

 And since they managed to keep their eyes open, they see what happens to Jesus as he prays.  In his intense time of prayer, Jesus is changed, or transfigured.  He shines with an inner light so powerful that it changes his face and his clothing.  He shines with an inner power the disciples had not seen before. 

 And as if that were not enough, this transformed, or transfigured Jesus speaks with Moses and Elijah about his own “departure,” as our translation puts it.  Actually, the Greek for this word ‘departure’ is “exodus”, a way out.  Jesus is talking with the giants of Israel’s story about the exodus, the way out, that he is about to accomplish in his arrest, trial and crucifixion.

 Are you beginning to see some of the theology, the God-talk, hidden in this text? 

In this one moment of shining light, the full disclosure of Jesus as Savior is revealed to disciples. 

In this one moment of shining light, we see a foreshadowing of the walk to the cross.    

In this one moment of shining light, we see how God’s action in Christ takes its place in God’s salvation history-- a history that includes the deliverance of the Hebrew slaves from captivity under the leadership of Moses. Through that exodus of Moses, God gave the people a way out of slavery and made them into God’s people.  And now, through this exodus of Jesus, through his life, death and resurrection, God is giving broken humanity a way out again, but this time, a way out that includes God’s very self as the key, the Way[i]. 

 Luke knew what he was doing when he wrote down this story.  Every single verse holds another clue, another piece of the puzzle, another taste of the mystery of God. 

 But there is still more for us to discover.  Did you notice the movement in this story from glory to darkness?  It is a move that is easy to miss.  Frankly I had never noticed it before until a teacher pointed it out for me.  And I think my blindness to that move is probably purposeful ignorance.  For I, like Peter, prefer to linger in the moment of shining glory and to celebrate it.  You see it even on the paraments and on my liturgical garb.  On Transfiguration Sunday, we use the colors of white and gold--- colors that point to splendor and glory, resurrection and newness.  And I think this is because we, like Peter, want to linger in the glory, basking in the light of this mountaintop moment, this encounter with God in all God’s shining power.

 As a matter of fact, Peter announced his intention to try and linger in that glory by setting up tents.  The Mystery moved him to offer a liturgical act that emerged in the first Exodus.  During the Exodus from Egypt, Moses and the people set up the tent of meeting and everyone who sought the Lord would go out to that tent.  It was a portable Holy of Holies[ii]. 

 So perhaps Peter wanted to make a place where he could go to meet the Holy, where his face might have the chance to shine with divine encounter and linger in that glory.  You cannot blame him.  Who among us would not want that—a space for glorious encounter?  But as soon as Peter gave voice to that longing, a thick, dark cloud came and overshadowed the entire group. 

 It was a cloud that obscured everything, a sudden blinding fog that eliminated their vision.  In a way, it was the exact opposite of what had just happened in the moment of transfiguration.  In the cloud, instead of seeing Jesus clearly, standing alongside Moses and Elijah, there is unseeing and unknowing.  In the cloud, instead of the bright inner light of glory, there is frightful darkness.  In the cloud, instead of Peter announcing his excitement of faith, the disciples say nothing, for they are too afraid to speak. 

 And yet, [and I think this is the clue to the entire story] it does not stay silent in that cloud.  Someone else speaks into the darkness.  That darkness is penetrated by a holy voice—God’s voice.  The darkness is shattered by the same voice heard earlier at Jesus’ baptism.  “This is my Son, my Chosen, listen to him!”  

 What fascinates me is God did not choose to speak at the moment of Jesus’ transfiguration, his transformation-- the moment when Jesus was covered by anticipatory glory.  On the contrary, God chose to speak words of claiming and blessing precisely as Jesus and the disciples were covered by the terrifying cloud of anticipatory darkness. 

 As one theologian writes, “It is tempting for us to ignore the darkness and death, which if anything are more central to this story [of transfiguration] than light and glory…We think it is more likely to find God in the glory than in the darkness or death.  Of course we prefer glory, instant and easy, not the cross…  We even think we can split glory from death, as if we can have the joy of Jesus without the cross of Christ.[iii]”

 When I was a hospital chaplain, I worked on the General Medicine floor of a Level 1 trauma hospital in Houston.  I will admit to you that I did not like that work at all.  It was exhausting, going from crisis to crisis, death to death.  And I was not very good at it, either.  But I remember my first encounter with a patient.  I do not recall his name, but only his story and his face.  He was gaunt and scared.  He was living with full-blown AIDS and had been disowned by his family.  The social worker told me that he did not have any kind of support system.  And he was very, very sick with some kind of secondary infection. 

 I remember just walking the halls, up and down, passing his door but being too afraid to go in, not knowing what I was supposed to say about God’s presence in the midst of such suffering.  When I finally worked up the courage to go into his room, he was so weak he could not really speak.  I sat down and said something insubstantial.  I felt so inadequate that I just wanted to escape. 

 So I asked if he wanted to pray and I started praying the Lord’s Prayer.  And with his eyes looking into my eyes, he started mouthing the words with me.  And you could see an almost palpable sense of peace transform his face.  I knew that peace did not come from an encounter with me, his inept chaplain.  Rather, I knew that peace came from an unseen encounter with God.  That scared, dying man found himself overtaken by a cloud of fear and terror, a cloud of suffering and death.  And yet, precisely in the midst of it, God chose to speak through familiar words of his faith, offering him an intangible peace. 

 It was precisely in the suffering of that hospital room, where it seemed that the power of God was negated, that God was at work offering peace and comfort.  It was precisely in the terrifying darkness of the cloud that obscured the colors of glory, when God spoke and claimed Jesus as God’s own beloved Son, a part of God’s very self.  And as we will find on Good Friday, it is precisely in the terror of the cross, when God is most powerfully present. 

 For what we learn on the mountain this day, what I learned in that hospital room, what we will rediscover during Lent and Holy Week, is that the light of Christ’s glory is most luminous, most powerful, most dazzling, and most transforming, precisely in the darkest moment of darkness and death, when pure love puts on pure vulnerability to meet pure evil, and wins—once and for all.                                                                                                       

Luke sure knew what he was doing when he recounted this story, didn’t he. Luke’s thick story of mystery and presence reminds us of God’s power and ability to transform and change even our darkest and most terrifying moments, making them luminous and life-giving.  And it does all this with a depth of truth that we will never be able to fully explain nor exhaust.  All we can finally say after this encounter on this mountain is “glory.”  And the only place for us to be after this encounter on the mountain is in worship.  And ultimately, all we can ever finally do in response to this encounter on the mountain is to try and trust, day by day, that God’s voice of claiming, blessing, and power will shine forth both in the light and in the darkness, transforming it all.  Amen.