Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

Sermons 

about the people in your life

that you see on a fairly regular basis:

friends, family members, colleagues,

people you volunteer with,

next-door neighbors, caregivers,

the folks you hang out with on weekends.

And ask yourself this question:

How do those people know

that you know God?

What I’m asking is more than just

do they know that you go to church,

or where you go to church, or whatever.

It runs deeper than that.

After all – sad but true –

there are plenty of folks who are churchgoers,

maybe even some of us,

who know a good bit about God,

but can’t really say truthfully that we know God.

And I don’t just mean,

do you talk about God …

even atheists can talk about God.

When you think of the people you see regularly,

whether you know them fairly well

or just in passing:

What is there about you

that could at least give them a clue

that you and God are on speaking terms?

With Moses, it was pretty obvious.

He comes down the mountain,

carrying the stone tablets of the covenant,

having just conversed with God …

and his face is shining.

He was glowing; he was incandescent,

even though he didn’t know it at first.

But, do the people say,

wow, look at Moses,

he must have talked with God;

let’s go hear what he has to say?

They do not.

They hang back, and they’re afraid to come near him.

It’s kind of like, earlier on in the book of Exodus,

where the people get nervous about

God talking to them.

So they appoint Moses, and they say to him,

We’re too scared.

You go up on the mountain and talk to God,

then come back down and tell us what God said,

but please please please

don’t make us go listen ourselves.

So Moses becomes the go-between, the spokesperson,

and he is transfigured

by being in God’s presence.

And even this leaves the people weirded-out.

They become afraid of him!

So, poor Moses,

except when he’s up on the mountain with God,

or actually relaying God’s message to the people …

He has to cover his shining face

so the people won’t hide from him as well!

Now, granted that most of us

probably don’t want to go around

with brightly-glowing faces …

think of the traffic accidents we might cause

by people rubbernecking …

Nevertheless, we do need to ask ourselves:

In what ways is it made clear to the people around me

that I know, and am known by, God?

When we come to the New Testament story

of Jesus’ transfiguration,

again we get a changed face and dazzling light,

and a fair amount of fear from those who witness it.

But in this case, the outward appearance of light

remains only long enough to make the point.

The three disciples see,

Peter speaks without thinking, surprise, surprise …

God speaks out of the cloud

and scares Peter, James, and John real good …

But then Jesus and they go back down the mountain,

none of them glowing,

and they appear to be back to business as usual.

Jesus heals people, he teaches them,

he settles an argument among the disciples,

and begins to turn toward Jerusalem

and the end of his life.

And yet,

even though his face wasn’t shining all the time,

people knew, didn’t they?

Before the transfiguration and after, they knew,

Jesus was connected to God

in a special kind of way.

People recognized that a powerful relationship was there,

and they were drawn to it.

Well, some were.

Others were repelled by it,

and made life difficult for him.

But nearly everyone recognized

there was something there.

Where do they see it in us?

Somehow, even though it’s likely that we won’t

glow as brightly as Moses …

Somehow, we need to be sure

that our lives reflect God’s light.

Because that’s really the key:

It’s not that we shine

with some inner light of our own …

Rather, we reflect the light of God

which is really shining onto everyone.

It’s as if God is the sun and we are the moon.

To someone else, it may appear that

we glow with a light of our own.

But we know that what we do

is reflect the glory of God.

Yet we also know, don’t we,

that even the ability to do that comes from God.

To come into the presence of God

is to be changed.

We may know this from our own experience,

we may have seen it happen to someone else,

we may know it more from intuition than experience.

Some of us may have avoided getting too close to God

because we fear being changed.

The thought of being transfigured ourselves

is on the one hand

incredibly exciting to think about,

and on the other hand

overwhelming and scary.

To be willing to be transformed into something new

also means being willing

to let some of the old within us die.

Think again of the sun and the moon:

What is it that gets in the way

of the moon reflecting the sun’s light?

At different times in the month,

why can we only see light from part of the moon, and not all of it?

It’s the shadow of earth.

Likewise, it’s earthly things

that usually block God’s light coming to us.

And it’s only as we die to these things

that the shadow diminishes,

and we can receive more light,

and in turn, reflect it back.

Now don’t lose that sun and moon analogy,

because it’s instructive in many ways …

But another way to think about it is

to think of the more accurate kind of reflection

you get from a mirror.

We talk about ourselves as humans

being made in the image and likeness of God,

and so part of our task as Christian humans

is to be as accurate a likeness as possible.

Imagine looking at yourself in a mirror that’s dusty,

so that the image is obscured.

Or in a real old mirror that needs to be resilvered,

and the image is blurry or unfocused.

Or a broken mirror,

where the image is fragmented and incomplete.

Or even a funhouse mirror,

where the image is ludicrously distorted.

None of us is a perfect mirror for God’s image.

Only Christ was, and is, that.

But we call all be transformed

into better mirrors than we are now.

We can all reflect God’s glory and God’s love

so that others around us may see.

How we’re going to do that

is a question we each have to answer for ourselves.

Pick your metaphor:

Are you a mirror that just needs to be picked up and dusted off,

or have you been broken in some way,

and need to be fixed before you can reflect God?

Are you an old mirror that needs some renewal before you can reflect,

or are you a funhouse mirror who could do the job just fine

if you’d straighten just out a little bit?

What do you reflect, and what do you distort …

and are you ready to change that,

so that God’s love will shine from you more brightly?

Or if you’d rather think of yourself as a moon than a mirror …

How much of God’s light do you reflect,

and how much is in shadow?

What are the earthly things

that block God’s light from getting to you in the first place,

and then block it from shining out toward others?

Which of them will we remove, or at least shrink,

so that the light of God will be reflected

from us, to others?

The thought that we ourselves might be transfigured

is at the same time both terribly exciting

and more than a little bit frightening.

What if our shining frightens other people,

as it did for poor Moses?

What if it bestows on us gifts for ministry

that we didn’t have before,

and that make demands on us?

… like, those disciples who somehow ought to be able

to heal a child with convulsions?

What if allowing God to transfigure us

leads us on our own journey

of commitment and sacrifice?

Luke tells us flat-out that Peter, James, and John

were terrified by what they saw and heard up there on the mountain,

and that, after the whole event had occurred,

"in those days [they] told no one any of the things they had seen."

So we need not beat up on ourselves

for feeling thrown off balance by an encounter with God …

or even, the possibility of an encounter with God.

We simply need to confess that we are scared out of our wits

at the thought that God might transform us, change us,

ask things of us we don’t think we’re able to give …

and then ask God to do it anyway.

One of two things will happen:

Either God won’t ask us to do those specific things

that we find so threatening and so scary …

or, God will take away our fear.

Either way, we win …

and so does God’s kingdom.

What are you reflecting?

What are we, together, reflecting?

What are we – together and alone –

what are we willing to change, to set aside, to give up,

in order to show God to the world more clearly?

What amazing things may happen around us

when we walk into the world with our faces shining?

Amen.

© 2007 Julie Adkins (e-mail: DrJAdkins@trinitypresdallas.org)