Transfiguration                                                  2/6/05

                                                            “Stop!  Look!  Listen!”

I have a little quiz for you today.  With it we can see how well you were truly listening to the lessons that were read and how informed you are about Scripture.  The good news is that you won’t have to answer out loud or even show how your answer compared to the answers given by others through a show of hands.  How well you were listening can just be between you and God...but, remember, God knows everything.  Ok...

Question 1.  Did you notice that God revealed Himself to both Moses and the disciples on a mountain? 

Question 2.  Did you notice that an encounter with God results in the face shining in some remarkable way in both stories?

Question 3.  Did you notice that the voice from the cloud says the same words at the Transfiguration as at Jesus baptism?  Bonus question:  Did you notice that that lesson telling of the baptism of Jesus where God’s glory is revealed and the lesson telling about the Transfiguration where God’s glory is revealed form bookends for the Epiphany season?

Question 4.  Did you notice that both the baptism story and the Transfiguration story either involve or are followed by temptations?

Question 5.  Did you notice that in each lesson it was necessary to stop, look and listen in order for God to be revealed?

“Stop, look and listen” is a phrase I remember from my childhood.  It was used to teach people about driving safety when crossing a railroad track.  If you didn’t stop, look and listen a train might slam into you with devastating results.

God doesn’t deal with His people like a freight train.  If we don’t stop, look and listen for his presence, He will likely just let us go on about our way.  The result can be just as devastating though, even if we don’t notice that we missed an encounter with God.  Since we wouldn’t want to miss such an encounter let’s consider what each means in our lessons and in our lives.

Have you ever considered what a temptation it must have been to Jesus to go non-stop in His ministry?  Jesus only had three years to accomplish all the good He could on earth.  He had only three years to teach His disciples. He surely must have felt sometimes like He was having to fit three decades of teaching into those three years.  He may have really been wondering about this as He and disciples climbed the Mount of Transfiguration.  Within just days of this event, Peter had first declared that Jesus was Son of God and then showed His total misunderstanding of Jesus’ mission when He tried to deny Jesus’ prediction of His need to die.  And here is Peter once again trying to have it his way by wanting to stay up on the mountain, enjoying the glory.

How tempting it must have been to keep working non-stop to get the disciples to understand and to help just one more sufferer.  But Jesus knew better.  He knew the importance of taking time to stop and let God speak. 

This is just as hard a lesson for us to learn today – maybe even harder.  We are so constantly on the go.  Nearly from infancy we are taught that we must be doing something all the time.  We must have constant stimulation.  Can you, especially you who are older, remember the pure pleasure of just sitting by the creek with a fishing pole or lying in the grass looking for faces in the clouds?  We, even children, feel guilty if we take time to stop our hurried activities in that way today.  And as a result, we may miss opportunities to encounter the holy.

This week we enter the season of Lent, a time to reflect on what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.  The glory of the Easter resurrection will be a much greater joy for us if we have truly allowed ourselves to experience what led up to it. 

Therefore, I would challenge all of us to make planned stops each day... plan to take time to be still and know God.  Engage in a bit of “self”-denial and deny that voice in our heads that says something terrible will happen if we don’t keep going and doing every minute of the day.  Let us discipline ourselves by setting a time (at least, fifteen minutes) to just stop and be still.  See if you don’t find God speaking to you. 

Combine that stopping with fifteen minutes or so of looking for God in your day and for listening to Him through the words of Scripture.

When the disciples stopped and looked they saw Jesus, their teacher, transfigured.  Now, if they hadn’t been looking, especially if they hadn’t stopped and looked, they might not have seen the glow of His face or the extraordinary whiteness of His clothes.  And certainly, when like Peter they got too focused on their own agendas they missed much of what they were meant to see.

When we insist on going and going we tend to keep our eyes down to avoid tripping over objects in our path.  We can be so focused on getting where we are going that we fail to see who we are going with.  If the disciples hadn’t been looking – if they had kept their focus on their own agendas – they might have missed seeing God in the flesh.

How often do we miss seeing God and His glory because we are not looking, because we are too busy with our own agendas?

The story is told of a minister who had an encounter with the holy while on a business trip.  He was on a plane and planned to not get behind on his church work by using a laptop computer during the long flight.  As chance (or the Holy Spirit) would have it, his seat mate was a very unsophisticated woman who obviously had never flown before.  She had the window seat and spent the flight commenting on all she could see out the window and her delight in it.  And not only what she could see in that way, but also the funny little things experienced worldly-wise travelers take for granted, like the positions of the seat and the little mayonnaise packet that came with her lunch.

Other travelers napped or talked of business and trips of the past.  The preacher desperately tried to keep focused on his work, but the woman’s constant excited observations drove him to distraction. She made him most uncomfortable for some reason by punctuating her comments with references to the glory of God’s creation and how He was blessing her.   Finally, he gave in and listened to her story of taking this, her first flight – in fact, her very first trip outside her small W.V. coal town – to visit her daughter who had just had her first child.

The woman was quite a story teller and before he knew, it the stewardess was instructing everyone to fasten their seatbelts for landing.  It was then that the minister realized that only this woman of all those on the plane around her had truly enjoyed the trip.  The man and woman in front of them had been mentally in Japan and France and Mexico.  The man on his left had slept through the trip.  And he, man of God that he was, had spent too much of the trip buried in annoyance that he couldn’t be about his work.  Only this woman had been fully aware of her experience and able to see God in it.

Each day, we have opportunities to fully experience life and God in it.  Do we see the irksome roadwork that slows us down on the way to work or the beauty that God painted for us with frost on the trees?  Do we tune people out with music and news on the radio or tune into what people are saying beneath the words about their daily troubles?  Do we focus on our busy agendas or keep open to God’s message being spoken all around us.

I challenge us all to make the effort during these days of Lent to look for God in our lives each day.  There are many ways to see Him in other people, in the world and in our experiences, but we must look – better yet, stop, look and listen.

Back on the Mount of Transfiguration, notice what happens to Peter.  Even in the midst of the experience Peter can’t stop his need to do.  Instead of trying to hear what is being said by Moses and Elijah and be fully present to the experience, Peter just has to start talking about building shelters.  And then it happens!...  God interrupts Peter.  He virtually says to him, “Shut up and listen to Jesus.” 

This listening is an ongoing act.  It must be part of a disciple’s constant experience and the disciple must be open to hearing both what he wants to hear and  less welcome news.  For the disciples it will mean hearing that their beloved teacher will suffer and die.  But, it is only by listening to this news that they can hear the Good News that He will rise again.  It has been said that God gave ten commands in the Old Testament, but only one in the New Testament:  Listen to Him.

Listening is the central quality of discipleship.  As modern day disciples we too hear the command to listen to Jesus.  We do this by reading Scripture, but also by letting that Scripture speak in our hearts.  Jesus continues to give guidance to His disciples and to speak words of comfort, hope and guidance if we will just hear God say to us, “Shut up and listen to Jesus.”

And ultimately, we will hear Jesus say that it is time to leave the mountaintop and descend into the world – a world that is still in need of His healing touch.  Jesus leads His disciples back down the mountain and commissions them to speak His word and work miracles in His name. 

For all that we may like to see them as saints they are just regular people like us.  They will waiver between faith and doubt.  They will have moments of great enthusiasm for their work and times when they fall asleep in the midst of prayer.  They will perform acts of courage and they will all run away when Jesus most needs them.  They are people just like us. 

And we are disciples just like them.  Let us now descend into the valley of Lent and into the world that is still in need of Jesus’ healing touch, a touch that must now come through us. We are called to make where we are and our world a better place.  We are called to make this a better church doing ministry and mission under the guidance of God.   We are called to stop in our hurry to look at the needs of those around us and hear the cry of pain from those far away.  Let us stop, look and listen to Jesus both on the mountaintop and in the valley of life.  Amen.