You are God's Flute

Prayer of the Day

Holy God, mighty and immortal, you are beyond our knowing, yet we see your glory in the face of Jesus Christ. Transform us into the likeness of your Son, who renewed our humanity so that we may share in his divinity, Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

Exodus 34:29-35

Moses came down from Mount Sinai. As he came down from the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant in his hand, Moses did not know that the skin of his face was shining, and they were afraid to come near him. But Moses called to them; and Aaron and all the leaders of the congregation turned to him, and Moses spoke with them. Afterward all the Israelites came near, and he gave them in commandment all that the LORD had spoken with him on Mount Sinai. When Moses had finished speaking with them, he put a veil on his face; but when he came out, and he told the Israelites what he had been commanded, the Israelites would see the face of Moses, that the skin of his face was shining; and Moses would put the veil on his face again, until he went in to speak with him.

Psalm 99

The LORD is king; let the people tremble. The LORD is enthroned upon the cherubim; let the earth shake. The LORD, great in Zion, is high above all peoples. Let them confess God’s name, which is great and awesome; God is the Holy One. O mighty king, lover of justice, you have established equity; you have executed justice and righteousness in Jacob. Proclaim the greatness of the LORD and fall down before God’s footstool; God is the Holy One. Moses and Aaron among your priests, and Samuel among those who call upon your name, O LORD, they called upon you, and you answered them, you spoke to them out of the pillar of cloud; they kept your testimonies and the decree that you gave them. O LORD our God, you answered them indeed; you were a God who forgave them, yet punished them for their evil deeds. Proclaim the greatness of the LORD and worship upon God’s holy hill; for the LORD our God is the Holy One.

2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2

Since, then, we have such a hope, we act with boldness, not like Moses, who put a veil over his face to keep the people of Israel from gazing at the end of the glory that was being set aside. But their minds were hardened. Indeed, to this very day, when they hear the reading of the old covenant, that same veil is there, since only in Christ is it set aside. Indeed, to this very day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their minds; but when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.

Luke 9:28-43a

Now about eight days after these sayings Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes because dazzling white. Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him. Just as they were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah” - not knowing what he said. While he was saying this, a cloud came and overshadowed them; and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen. 

On the next day, when they had come down from the mountain, a great crowd met him. Just then a man from the crowd shouted, “Teacher, I beg you to look at my son; he is my only child. Suddenly a spirit seizes him, and all at once he shrieks. It convulses him until he foams at the mouth; it mauls him and will scarcely leave him. I begged your disciples to cast it out, but they could not.” Jesus answered, “You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you and bear with you? Bring you son here.” While he was coming, the demon dashed him to the ground in convulsions. But Jesus rebuked the unclean spirit, healed the boy, and gave him back to his father. And all were astounded at the greatness of God.

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As of today, we are at the end of the Epiphany season. Epiphany is the time after Christmas where we spend Sunday after Sunday diving into who this newborn king really is, what will become of this baby in the manger, why the twelve year old in the temple bewildered the Rabbis, where his ministry might take us, how his kingdom will come, when we might expect him to show up. Our prayer of the day points us to the culmination of the Epiphany season, the fruits of our labors to understand all there is to know about this Jesus of Nazareth:

“Holy God, mighty and immortal, you are beyond our knowing…”

…

Huh.

Do you ever feel like God is a complete mystery, though? I mean, the Bible is full of weird and strange and violent and contradictory stories, people have used these stories for ages to argue for and against women’s rights and slavery and all kinds of social justice legislation… it seems we can make God agree with just about any argument that we want to win. Either that, or God is just too far away, too important, too involved in natural disasters to be concerned with what’s going on in our boring little lives, our simple day to day experience, our anxieties and personal fears.

This morning’s Gospel reading sure sounds like the God we are taught to fear, heavenly and bright and all powerful on the mountaintop in the terrifying cloud. This is the God I want to come and fight my battles, stand on my side, win my wars. Unless, of course, God is calling me to join in somebody else’s fight, then maybe I’m no so eager to have an all-powerful Lord. Like the white preachers who lost their jobs because they marched for civil rights and preached a Gospel of integration, or the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer who put his life on the line to work against Hitler’s regime and remain faithful to the Gospel even while the rest of his church fell in line with the Nazi message without much of a fuss. Paul’s letter this morning states that “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom,” but we who have military history know that freedom is not free. And we who have lived through the civil rights era know that none of us is free until all of us are free. So, if God sets us free, God sets all of us free, and binds up our freedom all together.

Okay, that feels like I made a big jump there. So let me back up a minute.

Jesus goes up the mountainside with his three friends, Peter, James, and John. Suddenly he’s brighter than light, blindingly so, and those sleepy friends of his are now wide awake and stunned to the point of not being able to talk about this experience until long after the resurrection. They have just seen Jesus talking with Moses and Elijah, the law and the prophets embodied, the heart of their faith in the flesh, and then comes the cloud, the terrifying cloud that in all of their stories signifies the glory of God descending. This is the God so holy that no one could look on God’s face and live. This is the God who led them out of slavery and through the wilderness by a series of massive plagues on Egypt and parting the Red Sea and providing a pillar of cloud and fire to guide them. The God who struck down mighty armies. The God who by David killed the giant Goliath. The God by whose word the earth opened and swallowed up those in the camp who had made a golden calf while Moses was up on the mountain. This is absolutely terrifying. We can talk more later about how Peter’s mouth gets away from him when he’s anxious, because he just shouldn’t have said anything. So we have this experience, the three friends of Jesus on the mountain with the terrifying light and cloud and then the voice! The voice of God telling them to listen to Jesus, the chosen one, after which they… just… can’t… I mean, what can you say about that sort of experience? Who would believe it? How crazy would it sound? How would you even describe it?

So it’s this big moment of power and awe, the God they have been hoping for, the epic mountaintop experience… .and then it’s over. Just like that. Turn off the lights, it’s time to go back down the mountain, time to get on with the work.

Which brings us to the next part of our prayer of the day:  “…yet we see your glory in the face of Jesus Christ….”

When we wonder about God, when we try to grasp who God is, and what God wants, and how God loves, we look to Jesus. Specifically, we turn to the cross of Jesus, that ‘departure’ he was talking with Moses and Elijah about on the mountain. As Lutheran Christians, this is where our understanding, our wrestling, our focus, always returns. Not for a place to get good advice, but when God seems too much to handle, or life, for that matter, bears down on us, we have this story, this moment, where we are reminded that it is Jesus who really reveals what God is all about.

And what happens next here is part of this same story. We could stop after the vision on the mountain and call it a great day for Transfiguration and leave it at that. But we don’t. We could only really stay there for a day, anyhow, because we are about to embark on the 40 day journey of Lent. But the story today continues on down the mountain, with Peter and James and John silent about the sudden flash of glory they have just seen, and we come to a story of tremendous humanity. A desperate father and his suffering son, begging for help, for understanding, for anything that might alleviate the son’s suffering, might save his life from the torture of these seizures. Can you feel the depth of despair in the father’s voice when he cries out in pain at his son’s pain, in powerlessness when he finds the disciples are no help at all, even though they have cast other demons out only recently? We have come down the high mountain and landed in the depths of pain as the demon throws the boy to the ground in convulsions. The son, so powerless over even his own body, the father, powerless over his own grief, we have reached from one extreme to another, high to low, exultation to heartbreak.

And it is here, in the dirt, that God’s glory is made known.

God is not far away from us, brothers and sisters. God is in the dirt with us. Marching to Selma with us. Standing for the value of Jewish lives with us. And Muslim lives. And Black lives. And every life that has ever been thrown away like so much dirt. 

God Incarnate, Emmanuel, with us, means that 

God is Black, 

God has AIDS, 

God is epileptic, autistic, old, crazy, 

and willfully, willingly, God is broken. Broken wide open with love for us, broken wide open by everything in us that is not love, so that we, all of our broken, crazy, autistic, old, epileptic, dying selves, we in all of our dirtiness reveal the glory of God. In the broken and poured out life of Jesus, we who are broken are filled by love to overflowing, leaking love through all of the cracks and crevices and weak spots.

This is what I mean when I reiterate Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, that the Spirit of the Lord brings freedom. Our culture tells us to fear weakness, to cover up our broken places, to be ashamed of our vulnerability, our need to be known and loved. Not just our culture, history is full of wars and disasters brought about by people taking advantage of each other before they could lose what little ground they have gained, never realizing all the ground belongs to the God of us all. Freedom isn’t only glory on the mountain of light, it is also love in the valley of shadows. The Spirit blows through the cracks, and wouldn’t you know, that’s how a flute makes music.

So we come to that final portion of this morning’s prayer of the day: “Transform us into the likeness of your Son, who renewed our humanity so that we may share in his divinity, Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.”

Amen.