"See-Through Spirituality"
First Congregational Church – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
Transfiguration Sunday – February 6, 2005
Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.
[texts: Exodus 24:12-18/2 Peter 1:16-21/Matthew 17:1-9]

I am blessed with two wonderful stepsons who, though they share none of my genetic matter, do share my sense of humor. Anyway, we've had fun whenever we're together exploring the things that make us laugh. Imagine my delight when I discovered that the boys shared my love of Mel Brooks' and Carl Reiner's "2000 Year Old Man." We laughed and laughed after Reiner's interviewer asked Brooks' 2000 year old Jewish fellow what was the greatest thing ever to happen to humanity and he responded, "Saran Wrap!" "Saran Wrap, you can wrap a sandwich in it…or an olive….or three olives….and you can see through it!"

I don't know why this came to me as I thought about the Lord's Transfiguration, except that the Scriptures spoke to me of transparency and transparency has become a watchword and a goal for me, both in ministry and in spiritual life. In the experience of Mount Tabor we are given a see-through spirituality, a sense of belonging and purpose that pierced the clouds of loneliness, doubt, and fear that have kept humanity from knowing the God who loves us.

If the readings from Exodus and Matthew sounded similar to you, it's because the similarity is deliberate. Very early on in the Christian experience the strong likeness between Moses and Jesus was celebrated. Matthew emphasizes this likeness in his gospel in a most pronounced way. As Biblical scholar Dale Allison has pointed out, in the first seven chapters of Matthew the Moses typology, i.e. that Moses is a 'type' or pattern of Jesus, goes step-by-step with the great events of Moses' life in Exodus. Following the account of the birth there is a slaughter of innocent children, then the return of the hero, a passage through water, temptation, and then a mountain of lawgiving experience.

What Matthew wants to do is to show us how Jesus is the continuation and the completion of the relationship with God initiated by Moses. Jesus doesn't come to overthrow the Law given through Moses, but to bring it to true fulfillment in the law of love and the act of grace. The early Church's great teachers picked up on these parallels and emphasized that to understand Jesus we need to first understand Moses. When Marcion and others tried to say that the God of the Old Testament was a false, or demi-god, and that the Hebrew Scriptures should be ignored, the Church said 'NO!' The English spiritual writer Kenneth Leech sums this up very nicely in his book, Experiencing God: Theology as Spirituality.  He writes:

. . . later Christian thought came to interpret the redeeming work of Christ in terms of the Exodus story. "In the Exodus, in the death and resurrection of Christ, it is the same redeeming action which is accomplished at different levels of history." The Christian liturgy celebrates the work of Christ by using the symbol of the Exodus, and the Christian Scriptures use the Exodus as the framework of their teaching. It was "the manifest intention of the authors of the New Testament to present the mystery of Christ at the time as prolonging and as surpassing the great events of Israel's history at the time of Moses."

. . . As in the deliverance from Egypt, so in the Paschal mystery, God's people are set free from slavery. But now, in the words of Hippolytus of Rome, there is a "cosmic and universal Pasch [Easter]."  [p. 33]

What should be clear is that God is opening to us in a new way and in Jesus we're invited to a new level of intimacy. Now the cloud that guided Israel out of Egypt and shrouded Sinai hovers over Tabor and out of its brightness comes the voice of God. The voice speaks a word of comfort and assurance to Jesus: "This is my Son, the Beloved, with him I am well pleased."

Just prior to going up Tabor, Jesus had revealed to the disciples that "the Son of Man must suffer and die."  Jesus tells them this and they recoil in horror. Peter tries to convince Jesus otherwise and he is rebuked for his lack of vision. Why? Because he couldn't see that in the act of becoming one with us in flesh – even in suffering and death – God identifies with us completely. Through Christ we are brought into the possibility of oneness, true union with God. And, wondrous gift, in the process we are restored to true humanity as well. The act of transfiguration is, then, the hope and destiny of all humanity. Each of us is called to a see-through spirituality that allows the glory of God to shine through us and to be seen by the entire world.

We remember the Lord’s Transfiguration on this last Sunday before Lent to remind ourselves of our hope and our destiny as we walk with Jesus on the way to the Passion, the Cross, and the Resurrection. The Transfiguration is a dramatic foreshadowing of the Resurrection and it was meant to show the disciples not only the connection with the covenant God made with Israel, but to demonstrate the continuation and fulfillment of that covenant in the actions that would unfold in the days and weeks ahead. 

All of us have heard of those whose faces have shone with God's glory. In our age of special effects and computer enhanced graphics it's very difficult for us to think of what happened on Tabor, or in the case of those with shining faces, and believe it actually happened. We want to put these happenings into the realm of mythology. Yet the author of the second letter of Peter reminds us that we "would be 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 our hearts." I think we need not so much worry about the phenomena or how to document the occurrence, but to look to the real point – that God wants to be a part of us, of our world, and of our everyday lives. God wants to restore us to the kind of personhood, the kind of glory for which we were made, and God makes this possible in Jesus Christ.

For all of our great advances in technology we still live in something of a dark age. The more we seem to know the more seems to be covered up. Look at the newspaper or listen to the news and there are stories of intentional cover-ups and deceptions in every area. Whether we look to the business world and the scandals that have rocked various corporations and brokerage firms, or politics (and here there are more examples than I care to go into), or even the world of sports there is a dark shadow. It is precisely to overcome the deception, the alienation, the fear that God has come among us and invites us to a new and wonderful transparency of heart, of mind, and of life. What happened on that mountain long ago continues to speak to us today and continues to call us to a see-through spirituality.

I was privileged to study with Belden Lane, a wonderful historical theologian who has specialized in the history of spirituality. Research for his book, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality, took him to both Sinai and Tabor. I was touched by his experience on the mount of Transfiguration and want to share it with you. Dr. Lane captures, I believe, the wonder of what God wants each of us to have, the experience of transparency that allows us not only to discover our connection to God, but also to rediscover our true selves as well. He went up Tabor and was trying to read the passage from Matthew we've read.

A harsh cold wind rustled the pages, making them hard to hold. Dark clouds were gathering. I knew that in taking this time alone I was probably also missing a ride back down the mountain with some of those who'd come for Mass.

But the words of the gospel went right through me as I stumbled over the passage. I heard them spoken by God not only to Jesus, but also, it seemed to me. "You are my son," the voice was saying, "the one I love. I'm pleased with you; I take pleasure in who you are. Listen (and attend carefully). . . to my glory within you" (Matt. 17:5). There were no lights flashing at the time, no extraordinary vision. God knows, I was half freezing to death. But I couldn't get away from the embarrassed, almost heretical feeling that in all my ordinariness – a foreigner with cold feet and anxiousness about the weather – I was somehow in that moment included in the transfiguring light once revealed in that place. A father was saying words I'd been longing to hear all my life.  [p. 132]

In his moment of transfiguration Belden was able to imagine a new life. Many things began to come together for him as he became transparent to the glory of God already in him and the wonder of the see-through spirituality began to take hold. You see, what Belden experienced on Tabor we can experience on Church Street, walking by the lake, driving home from work, or even sitting in our living room. The experience comes when we open ourselves to hear God speaking to us, saying, “You are my beloved daughter, my beloved son, I take delight in you.”

As much as I enjoy Mel Brooks, the greatest thing that ever happened to humanity isn't Saran Wrap. But the “2000 Year Old Man” was on to something, because the greatest thing is see-through. The greatest thing that has happened to us is that God has opened God's life to us and in doing so has restored us to the fullness of what it means to be human. Regardless of the darkness and the cover-ups all around us, the light shines inside us and seeks to light up our world. In the Transfiguration we get a glimpse of the glory and the destiny that is ours. Now it is time to go back down the mountain. It is time to go back into the ordinariness of our daily lives, but as we go remember something. Remember that we're to have a spirituality that is see-through, so the glory inside us gets out and brightens those around us. Remember the voice that speaks to each of us who takes the time to hear it, or to see the glory within, and tells us, "I am pleased with you, I take pleasure in who you are," and rejoice. Today as the bread and cup come to you, receive it as we are spiritually and physically joined to God and  to one another and hear those words again, “I delight in you” for, indeed, God does delight in us. Amen. Alleluia.