Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

Sermons 

Try to imagine how you might have felt

if you had been up on that high mountain

with Peter and James and John,

watching all these strange goings-on around Jesus.

What would your reaction be?

Faint away from sheer terror, or excitement?

Would you be cynical …

run right home to make an appointment

with your eye doctor or psychiatrist or both?

Would you fall to your knees

in praise and worship?

Pinch yourself to see if you were dreaming?

Would you be like Peter,

and try to do something

to preserve that one decisive moment forever?

Today, I guess,

you could just whip out a camera,

or even your cell phone,

and snap a quick picture or even a video,

and there you’d have it …

lasting evidence of this amazing event.

Peter’s idea, I guess,

is just as typical a first-century reaction

as taking a picture might be for our century.

"Boy, am I glad I was here," says Peter.

"Hold on just a minute and

let us build each of you a booth."

A booth … that same word means "a shrine,"

or "a tabernacle," kind of a mini-temple.

Peter is awed by what he sees,

He wants to hang onto it.

He wants to enshrine Jesus, and Elijah, and Moses.

Keep them up on that mountaintop for always.

Preserve the moment,

so that he and others

can experience it again and again.

Like we might do by printing out a photo,

or uploading the video to You Tube,

or burning it to a DVD.

But God’s voice interrupts Peter,

as if to say, "Hold on a minute,

you don’t know what you’re saying.

Listen to my son here."

And for the first time,

the disciples know that Jesus is the Son of God.

Of course, they had already begun to catch on

that Jesus was the Messiah, or Christ …

the two words mean the same thing.

They knew the Old Testament,

and it seemed to them that there was much about Jesus’ life

that looked like a fulfillment of a lot of the prophecies…

But nowhere in the Old Testament

was it suggested that the Messiah

would be the Son of God …

at least, not any more than

any one of us here is a child of God.

But then, here comes this strange event

that we call the transfiguration.

Jesus goes up the mountain

with Peter, James, and John …

and quite suddenly, he seems to undergo a change.

His face shines like the sun,

and his garments become white as light …

And the disciples see it,

and they understand in a new way.

What’s going on here, really,

is not only a transfiguration of Christ

but also, and perhaps more important, a transfiguration of the disciples.

Because once they have seen him as he really is,

in all his glory,

nothing can ever be quite the same again.

And it’s natural for Peter

to want to preserve somehow

this mountaintop experience,

this spiritual high.

To freeze the moment,

and have everything be this wonderful from now on.

Haven’t you ever wanted to do that

with the high points of your life?

Whether it was a spiritual high,

like a conversion experience, maybe,

or your ordination as a church officer,

or a flash of insight during a Bible study.

Or whether it’s a very human thrill:

a wedding, the birth of a child,

graduation, getting that coveted driver’s license,

an award for your work.

When wonderful things like that happen,

it seems as if everything in the world

has fallen into place.

Life is just peachy.

God’s is his heaven;

all’s right with the world.

And we wish it could stay that way

forever and ever, amen.

But it doesn’t.

And it seems like, so often,

the harder we try, try, try

to preserve those wonderful moments,

the faster they slip away from us.

So, sorry, Peter …

no booths allowed on the mountaintop.

You, and the son of God,

must come back down the mountain, into the valley,

where real life happens most of the time.

Because Jesus is not only God;

he is also human.

And he has a human life to live

and a human mission to fulfill,

just as we do.

You know, in the earliest centuries of Christianity,

they spent a lot of time and energy

debating about whether Jesus was God, or human …

and they finally decided he was both.

And then, having settled that, they argued about

whether he was half-divine, half-human,

or some other proportion,

and at last they concluded he was

fully human and fully divine … 200% …

And sometimes, I think,

these arguments seem so silly to us,

like theological hairsplitting.

You may have heard of some of the

more outrageous debates of church history:

• How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
• If a bug gets into the holy water,

is the water made dirty,

or is the bug made holy?

Stuff that makes you either want to giggle,

or to throw up your hands in despair

at the trivialities the Church sometimes gets caught up in.

But the debates about what and what Jesus is

are not trivial; they are crucial.

Particularly now as we look ahead to Lent.

If Jesus was not divine, if he was not God, the Son of God…

then his suffering and death may have been tragic,

but they are no more tragic or meaningful than

the death of any martyr for the faith.

And yet, he also has to be human,

because if he is not,

then it is not we humans for whom he lived and died.

If Jesus is not human,

then he cannot be the model for our lives,

and his death cannot redeem us, sinful humans.

So it’s not trivial …

it does matter who Jesus is.

We don’t necessarily have to understand it all intellectually,

but I’m sure glad God has it all figured out!

Some days we do encounter Jesus, the Son of God …

we see his glory, we feel his power,

we know ourselves to be with him on the mountaintop,

and it’s wonderful.

But I think most days

we experience Jesus as the human one …

just as the disciples knew him most of the time.

We live our lives in the valley, not on the mountain,

and he is here.

He was tempted, as one of us;

Sometimes he became angry, as we do;

Sometimes he cried;

Sometimes he wanted to be with people,

and other times he wanted to be alone.

He suffered human pain and a human death,

for us.

And yet his glory was once again revealed

in the resurrection.

Jesus does matter;

who he was and who he is makes a difference.

Thanks be to God

for his life, and death … and life.

Amen.

© 2008 Julie Adkins (e-mail: DrJAdkins@trinitypresdallas.org)