When Heaven and Earth Meet
Sunday of the Transfiguration, March 6, 2011 (Matthew 17:1-9 with Exodus 24 and II Peter 1 in the background)
Can earth and heaven ever meet? Can God, the Creator of the universe, the One who dreams you and every other person on the earth into being, the One whose work shapes the ice age, the hills, the mountains and valleys, lakes rivers and oceans, the One who created the DNA code before we humans ever even thought about it, appear to us, speak directly to us, reveal some of God's very essence, God's glory to us?
What do you think? How might you know?
Have you ever had God speak directly to you, reveal something of Himself/Herself to you? Or, does God only do this somehow only to and for others? Or, did God only speak and act long ago and far away?
The word for these experiences, for God revealing something of God's self to human beings are mystical experiences. The essence of mystical experiences defy explanation or even full descriptors. Can any of you fully describe in a way that I might comprehend – what it was like to fall in love as you did? Or what is it like see your own child being born? Or, what is it like to come to experience God? Such realities are beyond our word smithing. We can try to describe them to someone else so that they may also know – but there is still something missing.
This doesn't change the truth of such realities. Let me assure you, people have had and do continue to have mystical experiences. They occur more frequently than we might imagine. I know this, because a number of people over the last 30 years have honoured me by telling me of their own mystical experience or experiences. Such these experiences happen in a variety of ways and places. Some have had experiences of God as they have nearly died. Others have had them while they were at church singing an old hymn out of, can you believe this, the green hymnal? Other people have told me of loved ones to whom either God, Jesus or an angel has appeared and spoken to them in a vision. That message has later been corroborated in their lives or in the lives of others.
We claim that God and Jesus are alive – that the Spirit is moving. But do we believe that? What would we do if God chose to speak directly to us or give us a vision in some kind of way? Would we disregard that? Would we think or feel that we were losing our mind? Would we dare to tell anyone else? Might we prostrate ourselves in fear and awe?
We need to be careful on 2 fronts. Our minds are important. God is the One who gives us our minds. We are to use them to their fullest potential. Don't be afraid of truth. Only fear half truths. Having said that, there are also limitations to our minds. At times our minds, our eyes, our ears can fool us. Many people realize this. Some of them are religious charlatans. They play on the truth of the possibility of mystical experience by seeking to take financial advantage of others, having them pay for some kind of contrived "mystical" experience. This may indeed involve spirits, but it is not the Spirit of God, the One whom Christians call the Holy Spirit.
Now this doesn't mean that we should throw out or simply pooh pooh any and all mystical experience. But we need to discern such experience. Listen to the experience, think about it, pray about it – either yours or that of someone else. Does such a mystical experience reveal in any way what Christians have come to call the "fruits of the Spirit"? These are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, service. Or instead as a result of such claimed mystical experience is there a growth of divisiveness, arrogance, hatred or selfishness? We need to be careful around mystical experience.
But we also need to be open to mystical experience. God is God!
Today we gather under this wonderful text – the Transfiguration of Jesus in Matthew's Gospel. In the preceding chapter Jesus has told his disciples that he must suffer and die. Now he leads 3 of those disciples up onto a mountain apart. Once there Jesus is "transfigured". His face shines like the sun and his clothes become dazzlingly white. Moses and Elijah are suddenly there with him. Moses had lived over a thousand years before Jesus walked this earth while Elijah carried out his prophetic work hundreds of years before Jesus had been born. Moses is the representative of the law for the Jewish people. Elijah represents the prophets. In other words, the sum of all God's work with and for the people of Israel are now there with Jesus up on that mountain. Peter, James and John are privy to all of this. Wow!
Peter isn't sure what to do – but he's got to do something. Perhaps he should try to hold onto the experience or recall the experience of his ancestors in the wilderness. So, Peter proposes to Jesus that he, Peter, could get busy and build some tents – one for Jesus, one for Moses and one for Elijah. But then Peter is interrupted. A bright cloud overshadows them. From this cloud they hear a voice, the very voice of God: "This is my Son, the beloved. With him I am well pleased. LISTEN TO HIM!"
Now the disciples fall to the ground overcome by fear.
Have you ever been overcome by fear or awe or reverence in the presence of God? Have you ever been moved to literally fall down because you have experienced God's presence?
Or, have we so rationalized, in some sense "anthropomorphized" God, made God out to be like us as a human being, that we think or feel that God is merely familiar company, not one to worship or revere? What a friend we have in Jesus?!
Sometimes, the disciples knew better. On that mountain God is speaking to them. The Holy One, the Creator of the universe, the One who freed their ancestors from slavery to the most powerful nation of that time is speaking to them. What else could they do, but fall down on their faces in reverent fear?
Do we know God – not just about God, but actually know God? God loves us! God's love flows from God's holiness, from God's deep abiding concern for new and just life, life that is merciful and gracious for all. This concern leads God to battle against evil – evil that includes hatred, greed, the illusion of self-sufficiency and idolatry of power. God also battles against powers that we cannot see which conspire to enslave us to hatred, fear, selfishness, apathy, rationalization and blindness to so much reality.
Dear people, we need to know, in the Biblical sense of knowing, that God is God! God reveals God's self to us in Jesus. God is at work on this earth, in this time and even in this place as God's Spirit moves. God works through the Holy Spirit around us and within us, around and within others and all creation. God still speaks both directly and indirectly.
See what happens to those 3 disciples up on the mountain. Their noses and foreheads are pressed into the mountain's dirt and rock. They are beginning to hear God speak to them, but they are overcome with fear.
At times we too are afraid. We can be overcome with fear because of many things, things which do have power. But such things do not have the same power that God does!
See that Jesus does not leave the disciples up on the mountain overcome by their fear. He comes to them. He touches them. He bids them get up and come back down the mountain to the rest of life. They are to follow Him. By the grace of God they do. By the grace of God they become an integral part of God's good and gracious will, to bring love and mercy to others – to have us know and experience that death and evil as powerful as they are – and they are – have limits.
Wherever we are today – in mind, body and spirit, Jesus comes to touch us. You see earth and heaven can meet by God's grace in Jesus.
Be open to that – to this touch of Jesus which bids us both to listen and to get up: to love as we are being loved, to forgive as we are being forgiven – to trust not in ourselves but in this God who can do amazing things, no matter what. You see this vision of Jesus, this gift of faith, is that which can transform us into living as whom God wills us, graces us to be, the children of God!
Who says earth and heaven can't meet? Amen.