Sermons

Sunday Next before Lent
Sunday 26th February at 10am

Simon Cowling
Readings: 2 Corinthians 4. 3-6 & Mark 9. 2-9

Six days ago, near the town of Caesarea Philippi to the north of the Sea of Galilee, Jesus has asked his disciples: 'Who do you say I am?' Peter has made a bold assertion: 'You are the Messiah'. Jesus affirms this startling insight of Peter in a rather understated way - by telling his disciples not to speak about who he really is. He then goes on to talk for the first time about his coming suffering and death. Peter, though, will have none of it and rebukes Jesus. This time Peter gets no marks for insight. 'Get away from me, Satan', says Jesus. Peter has relapsed into his more customary state of getting hold of the wrong end of the stick.

So here we are six days later. Jesus, as he often does, withdraws to a remote place to pray - on this occasion he goes up what Mark describes as a 'high mountain'. With him are Peter, James and John who seem to have been his 'inner circle' of friends. As Jesus prays Mark tells us that 'a change came over Jesus and his clothes became shining white -whiter than anyone in the world could wash them.' Jesus is transfigured. He is still Jesus, but he is utterly changed. The disciples then have the extraordinary experience of seeing Elijah and Moses talking with the transfigured Jesus. In the face of this manifestation of God's glory the disciples seem to be thrown into rather a panic and Peter characteristically blurts out the first thing to come into his head, offering to build shelters for Jesus and for the two great Old Testament figures that are speaking with Jesus - Moses and Elijah. But, we are told, he and the others did not really know what to say. Finally a cloud out of which comes the very voice of God: This is my own dear Son - listen to him. Then Moses and Elijah are gone and the disciples, no doubt bewildered, journey with Jesus back down the mountain.

Here is a question. Why Moses and Elijah on the mountain? What is it about these two great figures of the Old Covenant, that they should be the ones present at this moment of transfiguration, at this time of manifestation of God's glory? Well firstly, there's an obvious connection with mountains. Remember that in the book Exodus, Moses had met God on Mount Sinai in thunder and lightning, trumpet-sound and smoke; remember that in the narrative of 1 Kings, Elijah had met also God on Mount Sinai, a fugitive on the run from enemies the prophets of Baal whom he had condemned to death because they refused to worship Israel's God.

But dig a little deeper and think about what those encounters on Sinai had been about for Moses and Elijah. Moses returned from Sinai with the Ten Commandments, a reminder to God's people of how they should live, a framework that held out a way of life based on justice and on a right relationship with God and with each other. Elijah returned from Sinai with a deeper understanding of the need for God's people to remain faithful to their covenant with him, with a renewed sense of affirmation of his calling as a prophet to speak out against covenant breakers who would sacrifice to idols. So here, on the Mount of Transfiguration, is the Son of God, the Father's dear Son, standing in the glory of God with Moses the lawgiver and Elijah the guardian of the covenant who together stand for justice and for faithful service to God in relationship with him.

So what is our response going to be to this challenging trio? How are we to listen to God's Son so that we may begin to reflect his glory? How are we to live lives based on justice and integrity? How are we going to be faithful in our relationship with God? These are difficult questions. One of the criticisms levelled at the Church generally, and at individual Christians, is that too much of our behaviour is selfish or immoral or hypocritical - or all three. To judge from the never-ending flow of salacious stories that the red top tabloids love so much about the illicit entanglements of vicars, organists or churchwardens, or from the behaviour of two supposedly Christian communities - Catholic and Protestant - in northern Ireland, the world seems full of Christians who just don't practise what they preach. And even if we know that this is not the whole, or even most, of the story, we do need to respond to what the wider world has to say about us. One response to those who make these criticisms is to say that the Church is really nothing more than what's been called a school for sinners, full of people who are just like anyone else, except that we have recognised our sinfulness and our need for God's grace. That's fine, but it can sometimes seem a little defensive; and in any case merely recognising our sinfulness and our need for grace, though important, does not get us beyond base camp. Another reaction is to welcome wholeheartedly the criticisms because the people who make them, often of no fixed faith themselves, nevertheless maintain a stubborn belief that those who do believe ought to have their lives and their behaviour transformed, transfigured by the glory that the disciples glimpsed on that mountain in Galilee. And they are right. Those of us who claim to follow Christ must accept that as baptised Christians we should seek God's glorious grace to transform our lives and our patterns of behaviour, so that in time something of God's glory will shine from our faces too. We must accept that transforming our lives ands our patterns of behaviour necessarily involves deepening our relationship with God through prayer and the study of scripture both individually and together. We must accept that transforming our lives and our patterns of behaviour necessarily involves a commitment to justice and peace - not as a substitute for a relationship with God in Christ but as an outworking of it. And we can begin by listening closely to the words of Jesus, as the disciples were told to on the mount of Transfiguration, so that gradually the theme, the story of our lives can be transformed, transfigured as we allow God to work with our raw material.

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay