Transfiguration C (17-18 February 2007)

Luke 9:28-36

Pr. George L. Murphy

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Akron, Ohio

 

FOLLOW THE LEADER

 

            There are a lot of ways to say what the Bible is about, some better than others.  Here’s one good way:  The Bible is the story of a journey.  It’s a hopeful journey, one with a promise at the end.  That is what the book is about, and as people of the book we are on that journey.  It is our story.  The journey that we’re on has a name – it’s the Exodus.

 

            You’ve heard that word before.  It’s the name of the second book of the Bible, the book that today’s First Lesson is from.  That part of the story tells of God raising up Moses to lead the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt, through the sea to freedom.  It’s the beginning of their journey to the promised land.  The word “exodus” comes from the Greek and means literally “the road out.”  For Israel the Exodus was the road out of bondage to freedom.

           

            The story goes on from there with the long journey through the desert and finally the entry into the promised land.  But it still wasn’t over.  Sin, injustice, evil weren’t done away with completely, and the Old Testament tells about the long thousand year struggle of people like Hannah, David and Elijah to keep our ancestors on the right path as the journey continued.

 

            So we come to this story of the Transfiguration in Luke’s Gospel.  The light show, the appearance of the great Hebrew saints, the cloud of the divine presence and the voice from heaven are so dazzling that we might miss one little detail.  All the gospels that tell this story say that Moses and Elijah were talking with Jesus, but Luke is the only one who tells us what they were talking about – “his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.”  The word “departure” is literally – maybe you guessed it from what I said earlier – “exodus.”  What Jesus is going to do is to lead creation in a new and greater exodus, a new stage of the journey to freedom and the Kingdom of God.

 

            And the reason we read this today is that we’re at a critical point in our journey.  For the last several weeks of the Epiphany season we heard texts that tell us who Jesus is.  Now this coming Wednesday, Ash Wednesday, we begin the journey of Lent.  And before we start that journey we need to be very clear who will be leading us on that journey - who we are to follow no matter what comes.  The heavenly words from our text tell us that - “This is my Son, my Chosen.”  It is not Moses or Elijah but the Son of God himself who is going into the desert and who calls us to follow.

 

            Lent will be suffused with images of Israel’s desert journey.  Next Sunday Jesus is lead by the Spirit into the desert, into what the book calls “the howling waste of the wilderness,” to be tested as Israel was tested.  The desert is a hard place – there’s a reason why people like Arabs and Apaches are tough.  “Here is no water but only rock/ Rock and no water and the sandy road”.  [T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland”]  And here Jesus is tempted as Israel was in the wilderness – tempted to place demands on God, to test God, to find new gods.  Those are our temptations as well.

 

            I can guess what some of you are thinking about now, and the answer is “No!” I am not talking about playing “Let’s pretend it’s Bible times,” like some Vacation Church School game.  This is real.  You don’t need to wear sandals and live in a tent, but if you take your Christian commitment seriously you will recognize that you’ve entered into that desert experience.  You will see that you have to depend on God because in the desert there is nothing else to depend on.

 

            Just a few verses after the Transfiguration story Jesus “set his face to go to Jerusalem.”  That is the Lenten journey on which he leads us – to Jerusalem, to Calvary, to the Exodus in which Israel passes through the sea.  Except this time the sea doesn’t part, but overwhelms the one who goes ahead: 

 

            “The cords of death encompassed me;

                   the torrents of perdition assailed me;

              the cords of Sheol entangled me;

                   the snares of death confronted me.”

 

The grand journey seems to have come, quite literally, to a dead end.  But what is happening here is something greater than liberation from slavery in Egypt.  It is the defeat of the powers of evil and sin that lie at the root of oppression and injustice.  It is the defeat of death, and so our leader goes into death. 

 

            And when we come to Easter, we will sing about the resurrection of Christ in the language of Exodus.  We’ll remember that “This is the night, when first you saved our fathers:  you freed the people of Israel from their slav'ry, and led them dry-shod through the sea” and see ourselves as “Jacob’s sons and daughters” who have been “loosed from Pharaoh’s bitter yoke.”

 

            Again this is not “Let’s pretend.”  Whenever someone is baptized, the prayer over the water reminds us that “Through [the water] you led the children of Israel out of their bondage in Egypt into the land of promise, and Saint Paul tells us that “All of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death.”  Baptism was your enlistment for this journey.

 

              And the journey goes on.  We are not at the goal, though we have seen it in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  That is why it is, in spite of all, a hopeful journey.  But it is a journey, not a place to settle down.

 

            On Mount Tabor, as Moses and Elijah were leaving, Peter had an idea.  “Let us make three dwellings one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”  The word for “dwellings” there suggests that Peter may have had in mind the festival of booths, or  tabernacles, in which all Jewish males are supposed to live in temporary shelters for a week as a remembrance of the dwellings of Israel during their journey through the wilderness. 

 

            Peter saw the some of the significance of what he had just witnessed.  But he had to realize – and we have to – that this is not just a symbolic journey we’re on.  It’s real, because the exodus journey on which the risen Lord is leading us is real life in the real world.  As people who are empowered by the one we follow, we’re called to see part of our task as helping to move the world along. 

 

            We’ll be ending our service today, like many churches in this country, by singing a familiar hymn, “Amazing Grace.”  You’ve heard that many times but there’s a special reason for using it today.  2007 is the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the international slave trade with the leadership of the British politician William Wilberforce.  His mentor was John Newton, the former slave trader who wrote “Amazing Grace.”  “I was blind but now I see.”  It is the truth of the resurrection of Christ that changed John Newton and which has brought about change in the world.

 

            And will continue to bring it about.  There is still slavery in the world, still many forms of injustice and oppression.  Part of our task in our exodus journey is to be God’s instruments in calling people toward the goal of that journey, the resurrection of the world.