Sermon for March 2, 2025
Transfiguration of Our Lord
Luke 9:28-43a; Exodus 34:29-35
Rev. Karl-John N. Stone
I would guess that many of you have had a “spiritual experience” at some point in your life—a time when you felt the presence or power of God in a mysterious or special way. Maybe it was during prayer, being out in nature, during a conversation, worshiping in church, working on a service project, or simply helping someone or being helped by someone. Maybe it was in a dream, or during an unusual thing that happened. These examples really just scratch the surface. The point is—it’s normal, from time to time, to have some kind of “spiritual experience”. But you can’t really predict when, or how, or how often. That is up to God alone. You may even go long stretches without having any kind a “spiritual experience” at all.
Another thing that often goes along with it is, it’s often difficult to talk about it. How do you adequately talk about something that is by nature mysterious, and defies easy description? As the religion scholar Huston Smith observed: “Problems have solutions, but mysteries don’t, because the more we understand a mystery, the more we realize how much more there is to it that we had realized at the start.” [Cloud of Unknowing, trans. William Johnson, p.2]
And even trying to talk about a mystery, or a spiritual experience, we’re only pointing in the direction of the thing, and cannot fully capture the thing itself. These mysteries of God that happen to us often come “wrapped in a cloud” so to speak—and like a cloud, you can perhaps see it or feel it’s effect, yet you cannot reach out your hand to grasp it or control it.
Now think about the Bible for a moment, and how frequently clouds are involved when it comes to experiences of God. We heard about one of these in our first reading today, from Exodus 34. Moses is coming down from Mount Sinai. But before coming down the mountain, he spent 40 days up there, where “the Lord descended to him in the cloud and stood with him” (Exodus 34:5). During this time of great holiness and mystery, God gave Moses the Ten Commandments.
This mysterious experience changed Moses, but he didn’t realize it at first. As he came down the mountain, “Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God.” It was a change in appearance that stayed with him permanently and affected him so profoundly that, from that time on, Moses had to wear a veil over his face most of the time because people were so afraid of him, and of what he looked like, and of his brush with God’s holiness. The gift came with a cost. The gift: he was allowed to come so close to God’s presence that it was like a cloud completely surrounded him. The cost: from that time on, people were afraid of him because his face shone.
The gift of God’s glory imposed a weakness or limitation upon Moses—I mean, how many of you would like to go through life with people being afraid of what you looked like? You might feel that as quite a weakness, quite a limitation. But—God turned Moses’ weakness and limitation into a gift, because whenever Moses removed the veil people would listen to him speaking God’s Word. And because they listened, Moses was able to fulfill his calling to lead the Israelites as they completed their Exodus from slavery in Egypt, through the wilderness, and finally into the freedom of the Promised Land.
We see another cloud appearing in Luke’s gospel today—the story of Christ’s transfiguration. Jesus had just climbed a mountain with his closest disciples, Peter, James, and John. Up there on the mountain they prayed—they were connecting spiritually with God. And then very mysteriously, in a way similar to Moses, the “appearance of Jesus’ face changed and his clothes became dazzling white.” Suddenly appearing with him were “two men, Moses and Elijah”. This was fitting, since both of them had once talked with God on Mount Sinai—Moses received the Ten Commandments in that mysterious cloud, and Elijah (who, when was on the run, trying to save his own life, hiding in a cave on the mountain) very mysteriously heard God in the sound of sheer silence.
Jesus was clearly part of this tradition—spiritual leaders whom God talked with on a mountain—but even as he spoke with leaders from the past, they were not speaking of the past, but the future. They were speaking of Jesus’ “departure”—the word in Greek is actually “Exodus”! So, “they were speaking of Jesus’ Exodus which he was about the accomplish in Jerusalem.” As Moses once led the first Exodus from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land, now Jesus was preparing for a “New Exodus”, leading all of us who put our trust in God out of slavery to the ways of sin and death, out of our condition of brokenness and estrangement from God, and into the freedom of forgiveness and restoration; to the joy of salvation and new life—and ultimately to the great and mysterious promise, that through Christ’s resurrection, he would open the way to God’s new creation, when the whole world will be redeemed!
But just as Moses’ brush with God’s glory came with a cost, the same was true for Jesus. The cost to him was walking the way of the cross—and along that way, the sin of the world, and the suffering of creation, and the pain of death were laid upon him. He put himself in complete solidarity with the brokenness of the world by offering his holy and precious life on the cross—and he did that to redeem us, and offer new life, and a new way of life and salvation.
Before he could begin the way of the cross, he was blessed and empowered by the gifts of God’s glory on the mountaintop. But his glory is met by the disciples’ own lack of understanding about what is truly going on. They are like us! They found it hard to adequately talk about their mysterious spiritual experience. Peter offers to “make three dwellings” because he doesn’t know what else to do or say. And God seems determined to keep them in their state of unknowing. A cloud overshadows them, and they are terrified as they enter the cloud. I wonder if seeing Moses made them remember their bible stories, and made them afraid that their faces would shine from now on, and people would be afraid to look at them? Well, they were not burdened with that gift—however, their mysterious spiritual experience in the cloud did make them learn the limits of their understanding, and later, to feel the weakness of their failures to truly listen to Jesus as God had commanded from the cloud.
They are not ignorant; they’re simply human. They are not Almighty and Glorious; they are weak and limited in ability. And that is good news—if they will embrace it! For by embracing the reality of their own weaknesses and limitations, they are opening their lives to the mystery of God’s power being at work within them through Christ. And that’s exactly what happens the next day, when they come down from the mountain. A man needs his son to be healed. He pleads with Jesus, saying “I begged your disciples to heal him, but they could not.” The disciples’ weakness and limitations were being made plain for all to see—and yet, Christ was still at work, to heal the boy. “And all were astounded at the glory of God.”
Like the disciples, when we embrace our own weaknesses and limitations, and hand them over to Jesus, then the mysterious presence of God’s glory is at work. Like the disciples’ mountaintop experience, God gives us special spiritual experiences from time to time. But these gifts come with a cost: God wants to open our hearts to the pain and brokenness of the world, and realize how far things are from God’s glory, and how deeply we are in need of Christ to be our redeemer. Yet even our own weaknesses and limitation can be good news, when we allow Christ to work through them and through us to bring healing and salvation to the world. Amen.