Christ Lutheran Church: Welcome

Awe! - March 18, 2007

Awe!

The Transfiguration

March 18, 2007

Rev. Dave R. Garwick

Again our story continues of the life and times of Jesus.  We began way back in the first week of December with all the prophecies of the Advent season of a Messiah who would come.  And that, of course, came to pass on Christmas with the birth of the Christ Child.  Then we recalled how He was dedicated in the temple eight days later and then visited two years or so later by the Wise Men from present day Iran.  Then after His escape to Egypt to survive King Herod's massacre, He returned to northern Israel to grow up in Nazareth.  We recalled how He got separated from His family during a Passover visit to Jerusalem when He was twelve.  And then the next thing was His baptism where He was commissioned for His ministry when He was thirty.  In His home congregation He then announces who He really is and then begins a very brief three year ministry of teaching and miracles and healing.  Today we are at that part of the story where He turns His face to His appointed execution in Jerusalem.

We are now on a mountaintop where His apostles want Him to stay put.  Last Wednesday night at the Lenten service, we considered what went into Jesus' choice to leave that moutaintop and head right into the jaws of death.  But before we get too far along, I want to follow Peter's lead and linger just a few more minutes up there.  Like our opening hymn said, "O Master, it is good to be high on the mountain here with Thee; O master, it is good to be entranced, enwrapt, alone with Thee..."  Let's not move along too quickly from this dazzling moment.

In fact, I think I'm going to defend Peter a little bit here.  When Peter saw Jesus glowing in the presence of Moses and Elijah, he said, "Master, it is good for us to be here!  Let us make three shelters, one for You, one for Moses, and one for Elijah."  Because he said that, just about everything that is said these days about Peter is that he wanted to avoid the responsibility of going back down to the valleys of life and wanted to just bask in the glow of this holy Spring vacation retreat.

Well, that's possible and if so, then that would have been both understandable and wrong.  Jesus took them all not only back down to earth, but on to the path of sacrifice, suffering and death.

But I think Peter may have been talking about something else, something that escapes most of us most of the time:  AWE.  Plain and simple jaw dropping awe.  The word itself actually DOES what it means:  when you SAY it, your jaw just hangs open:  AWE.  These days our jaws are more likely to drop open in yawns.  I wish people would stop talking about "going to church," and would instead talk about "going to worship."  Worship is to be AWE.

Up on that mountain, Jesus glowed when He met with two prophets who had both been gone for about a thousand years:  Elijah and Moses.  These were the two people who had faced God on mountains.  When Moses came back down the mountain with the two tablets of the Ten Commandments, HIS face flowed and it terrified the people.  When their missions were complete, it was God himself who buried Moses in a place unknown to man.  And Elijah never died because God took him up in a whirlwind with a chariot of fire.  THESE were the two whom the Father sent to meet with Jesus on a mountaintop who was turned into a dazzling light when the voice of God came out of the clod and said, "THIS is My chosen Son - listen to what He says!"

Now the Gospel of Mark picks it up at this point and says, "Peter said to Jesus, "Rabbi, it is good for us to be here.  Let us put up three shelters - one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah."  (He did not know what to say, they were so frightened.)"  (Mk 9:5-6)  Point being, Peter didn't talk about setting up tents because he wanted to stay up there forever.  He said it because his brain was simply too scrambled to know what to say at all.  It says he was afraid.  And the Gospel of Matthew says the same thing.

Last week when I was busy training the 5th graders for First Communion, Becky led the discussion of C.S. Lewis' book The Screwtape Letters in Adult Education.  (If you're not attending Adult Education, you don't know what you're missing!).  There was a brief discussion about what it means to say that God is awesome.  The point was made that anything that is truly awesome is also frightening in its power, its size.  A ten foot grizzly is awesome.  The Rock Mountains are awesome.  The rolling ocean is awesome.  GOD who made them all is awesome.  For crying out loud, He is the One who at any heart beat now is going to cast each one of us into the torments of Hell or elevate us into the endless joys of Heaven.  THAT is awesome.

To meet God face to face is called a "theophany" and that is the Christian Concept for today.  In the Bible, such theophanies are typically on mountaintops.  Like what Moses experienced, like what Elijah experienced, like what Peter, James and John experienced there on the Mount of Transfiguration.  When Moses faced God he glowed.  Elijah had to pull his cloak over his face.  Jesus dazzled.  Peter, James and John fell terror stricken face first to the ground.

And what do WE do?  We "go to church" and gaze out the window, and wonder how long we'll have to sit through the sermon, and how much time we'll have for coffee.  We do not have to go to the top of a mountain for a theophany.  God has come down to us.  Jesus is God WITH us.  Where two or three are gathered in Jesus' name, He is IN OUR MIDST.  When you reach out your hand to receive the body and the blood, Jesus truly IS present.

If you stop and think about what's going on here - not in terms of things you HAVE to do, but  Who it is who is here, and let yourself be overcome by the theophany, the face to face presence of God himself in this very room, then jaw-dropping awe will transfigure you from a church-goer into a WORSHIPER.

Amen.  May it be so.