Exodus 24:12-18; Psalm 2; 2 Peter 1:16-21; Matthew 17:1-9

In today’s reading from the Hebrew Tradition, according to Exodus 22:12, we read that when God made an appointment with Moses for Moses to climb the mountain, the point was for Moses to receive from God the tablets of stone, with the law and the commandment, which I have written for their instruction. Straight away I am interested by the use of a singular noun there: the commandment signifies only one commandment, rather than multiple (e.g. ten) commandments written alongside the law on the tablets. I wonder what’s going on there, we aren’t told. Moses took his assistant Joshua with him, and he left delegates in charge of the camp: “do not disturb us with your squabbles”, says Moses, “we are going to meet with God. If you have to squabble, tell Aaron and Ur, but leave us to answer God’s invitation.” Moses goes toward the mountain and for six days nothing happens: the cloud has descended, but Moses is still without (not within) the glory of The LORD. God was present, but God was silent.

Have you ever been in the presence of a silent God? Invited close by God’s invitation, drawn by the longing of your heart, and then…silence. Not even crickets, just (     ). I have; and I did not like it.

In Exodus 24:16c Moses finally gets invited inside the cloud, and then the cloud itself is transformed into a devouring fire. The Shekinah, the visible glory of God, first looked like a cloud and then looked like a fire: after Moses is summonsed and as he begins to climb the appearance of the glory of The LORD changes, and it is in this new reality where Moses stays for forty days. We are not told in today’s readings about the effect upon Moses of this experience; but we are told he was invited; and that he entered; and that he was present with God for a significant period of time.

Have you ever been in the presence of a speaking God? Invited close by God’s invitation, drawn by the longing of your heart, and then everything around you changes: there is the sense of fire and of your being devoured by the fulness of God? I can put my hand up to that too, and I also did not like it much even though I did not experience God as intensely, nor for as long, as did Moses.

To borrow the language of Paul, and to reflect briefly on my own experience, there is new creation going on here. For Moses there was six days of God’s activity, and then a seventh day: it all reads a bit Genesis 1-ish, and it should. We know from later readings, if not from todays, that when Moses returns from the mountain-top he has been transformed. Yes, he has the tablets of stone, but he also has a shining face, or long antlers (depending upon how well you read Hebrew it could go either way). The commandment that Moses has is instructions for building the tabernacle, a new method, and a new place for God to be gathered among the people and worshipped in their midst, in other words a new thing. Moses is changed (he is actually radiant), and worship is changed (the relationship between God and the Chosen People is eternally redefined): six days and then a seventh indeed.

What we often call transfiguration in the reading from Matthew 17, (and we find a similar story in Mark and Luke), can also be called theophany. It’s a bit like Epiphany, if you remember that word, and theophany is best translated as “an appearance or a manifestation of God”. That’s what happened to Moses when God appeared to him, although we can suggest that he was also transfigured by his experience even if it was less of a manifestation than what Peter, James and John, and Elijah and Moses himself saw in Jesus. In Psalm 2 I see theophany, and maybe epiphany, brewing. The Psalmist asks in Psalm 2:1, why do the nations conspire and I want to ask the same question. Later (Psalm 2:4) we read He who sits in the heavens laughs, the LORD has them in derision; I mean, do they actually want to get smited? We know that God comes down from Heaven, and we know that God is interested in the condition of the world and the activities of all people, but why invite wrath? It reminds me of the stereotypical small boy who plays up and does naughty just to get attention. In Exodus 22 God gives hand-written plans to Moses for a tabernacle, a real tent for God to occupy on earth, and in John 1:14 we read that the Word became flesh and lived among us, where “lived among” is literally “tabernacled”: God The Word came to earth and pitched his tent in our camp and lived in that tent. Going back to Psalm 2:7 we read I will tell of the decree of the LORD: He said to me, “You are my son, today I have begotten you”, words we heard echoing like thunder in Matthew 17:9. Happy are all who take refuge in him reads Psalm 2:12, the refuge necessary because of the destruction wrought in Psalm 2:9-11. Short message, God is coming to the actual earth, and those who have set themselves against God in conspiracy and other plots, and who have thrown off the restraints of wisdom and obedience will get a good talking to, at the conclusion of which they will leave the conversation terrified and broken.

Well, okay, yes it does say that in Psalm 2, but that’s all a bit random, isn’t it? What’s that got to do with Moses in Exodus, and with Peter, James, and John in the three gospels? Well, it’s because that that is who they met with: The LORD we see in Psalm 2, with the agenda we see God expressing in word and action is the one whose fire swallows the mountain with Moses on it. It is also, as Psalm 2 reminds us, the LORD we see in Matthew 17. In Israelite royal tradition Psalm 2 might have been used as a coronation song, with the new king ceremonially adopted as a son of God and a man now anointed with glory and position through whom God will rule the kingdom. So, the new king needs to be a good king, not one of those kings of the earth who set themselves…against the LORD. Instead, he must be the LORD’s anointed as Psalm 2:2 reads. God has chosen a man to act locally; to be all that God is, and to love all that God loves. A man to uphold all that God upholds, and to punish and supress all that God hates. That man was Moses, and that man was various kings of Judah, and that man was Peter, James, and John, and that man is you. And even if you happen to be a woman, that man is you.

When God took me into the silence more than twenty years ago (it was 2003) and then into that time of intense fellowship and speaking and refining, I was transformed. I did not get a shiny face, nor antlers, and I have never had to grow out my hair nor wear a veil in public to protect the less holy. But the transfiguration that took place on my mountain, which was actually a small town north of London, was not of Christ but of me. Not that I became Christ or became like Christ in anything other than appropriate and Christian Christlikeness, (I’m not claiming special privilege here), but it was me who was transformed. I am not a sinful king and the only wrath and fire I saw were of the refining and the protective kind, where God The Father was incensed at what had been done to me by the world, God’s precious son. But there was a change; just as for Moses there was a change, and for Peter and James and John, and those kings of Judah in the moment. In God’s refining and discipling work there is also equipping and commissioning; Moses returned from the mountain with instructions, plans, and jobs, and so did, do and shall all whom God calls up to the mountain for an extended chat in the glory.

You all know that I am not one for the headings in our Bibles, sometimes I find them prescriptive, and they were not written by the men who wrote the words we now hold to be scripture. But in this case, I will make an exception for the New Revised Standard Version and its heading Eyewitnesses of Christ’s Glory as they point us to 2 Peter 1:16-19. The verses themselves read For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we had been eyewitnesses of his majesty. For he received honour and glory from God the Father when that voice was conveyed to him by the Majestic Glory, saying, “This is my Son, my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven, while we were with him on the holy mountain. So, we have the prophetic message more fully confirmed. You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.

In other words, “I was there, I heard it, and what I saw and heard changed me in the hearing and seeing.” I am not quite as bold as that in my testimony, I was not there “at the Transfiguration” and I did not see Jesus in the flesh or even in the spirit, my experience was of a clear voice in my head and of “my heart strangely warmed” as John Wesley also wrote. So, I know it was God, but I am in no way calling myself the equal of the Apostle Peter. But the point isn’t in my experience, or even in the details of the experience of my experience, but in yours. I am not Peter; I’m not James nor am I John; neither am I Moses, nor Elijah, nor any former king of Judah. I am Damien, and I have met the LORD; and not through cleverly devised myths, which as a sociolinguist I can define and describe in academic detail, but I have been [an] eyewitness of his majesty in what The Father did for me, did in me, said to me, and has said through me. I am converted, not just by accepting the news of the cross into my heart (although I have definitely done that, I can give you date and time); no I am converted because I am irrevocably changed by the experience of being refined by God and turned around by God, of being pointed in a new direction in a new country with a new outlook and a new hope, for a new purpose pointing toward the glory of the One who has always been and always is, and yet who is new every morning in what is created in me.

My life is not always the best lived testimony. I can get very anxious and confused, and when I am anxious, I can get all flight-and-fight. I make mistakes all the time, I do not speak as clearly as I would like and I often don’t speak as clearly as I think; I think better than I speak, and sometimes I have said what I wasn’t thinking or I haven’t said what I was, or at least it wasn’t made clear to you when you were listening to a sermon or speaking with your pastor. There is darkness in my light-showing, and sometimes the light of Christ which burns hot and bright within me is obscured by the soot and the smoke of what is still being refined away. This is why the best I want from you, for me as your pastor and your preacher, is that you do not follow me but that you follow the one that I proclaim. Do not look at my pointing finger, but at the One to whom my finger points.

I hope you hear that I want you to know the Christ I know. I want you to be transformed by him, transfigured if that works for you, converted, and altogether-changed and a new-creation. This year the point of the story of the Transfiguration of Jesus is not that he displayed his fullest glory on the earth for just a moment; nor that Moses and Elijah as representation of “The Law and The Prophets” and as fore-runners of the messiah themselves joined him in that moment; nor that Peter and James and John looked on at that moment; nor that Peter opened his mouth and closed his mind in that moment. No, the point is that everyone who meets God in the glory comes away transfigured.

Have you met God in the glory? Heed Christ’s invitation now and join him up the mountain: so that you can later descent the mountain changed-anew and build him a home among your neighbours.

The is the work of the LORD, thanks be to God. Amen.