Sermon of 18 February 2007, Transfiguration Sunday
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Readings: Exodus 34:29-35, Psalm 99, 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2, Luke 9:28-36


What veils us from God?

We hear this morning in our readings two amazing mountaintop experiences, and two very human reactions to the divine. Moses, himself both fascinated and yet afraid at his first encounter of the divine in the burning bush, is now more comfortable with his ongoing encounters with God, but we see in the Israelites the same human experience of apprehension and fear that the disciples experienced on the mountaintop with Jesus in today’s gospel reading. While Moses’ encounters had already trained him to take his mountaintop experiences back to the valleys of normal human community where they can best serve God’s purpose, his followers experienced the brilliance of an encounter with God through Moses’ own shining face.

Similarly, Peter, James, and John experienced, first hand, the brilliance of Jesus as he, in the presence of God, spoke with Moses and Elijah in what could only be described as the ultimate mountaintop experience described in the gospels. Peter, always the first to speak up with his honest, human, and frequently inappropriate response, speaks our own hearts’ desire to stay in the moment, to remain on the mountaintop and set up shop.

As much as we might prefer the exhilaration and spiritual ecstasy of our close personal encounters with God, the truth is that the rest of the world goes on as though nothing had happened. It is our responsibility to bring those experiences back to the valley of our every day life and thereby allow it to shape and change us in profound ways that can be experienced by more than just ourselves.

The example in Exodus, however, gives us a very telling example of the response of the masses in the valley. Having not realized that his face was shining brilliantly from his encounter with God, Moses brings the good news back from his mountaintop to find the people terrified of his very presence – unable to comprehend the experience he’s just had and afraid to even approach him.

His choice to veil his face as a means to ease the anxieties and fears of the people is an important lesson to us. Having not been in the presence of the holy themselves, they only had Moses’ descriptions of his encounter to inform them, but similarly, they were not able to withstand the full results of that encounter, having no frame of personal reference. Moses gives them God’s commandments and tells them of the encounter, but veils his face, which could only show the awesome and profound effects of the human coming into direct experience of the divine. If a picture is worth a thousand words all at once, the thousand words offered by the image of Moses’ face were each too deep, too fundamental, too mysterious to be comprehended.

Luke’s telling of the Transfiguration of Christ is similar in many ways to Moses’ experience on Mt. Sinai, except that this encounter was witnessed first hand by Jesus’ three closest disciples.

Yet even in the presence, themselves, of the holy, the disciples are still at a lack for words to respond to their experience. All they know is that it was profound beyond words, that it was indescribably awesome, and that their deepest heartfelt desire was to stay there in that divine, ecstatic moment. The disciples themselves were then taken inside the veil when the cloud enshrouded them. Terrified, they received their own personal divine encounter, hearing God’s words in affirmation of Christ.

Coming back out of the veil, they told no one of their experience “in those days.”

The physical veil of Moses, and the veil of silence by the disciples draw us into the mystery of an experience that apparently cannot be aptly described in words, but it also seems to point to an almost unwillingness within each of us as humans to fully embrace and explore the depths of a soul shaking encounter with the divine.

For me in my life, I look back on two specific encounters that I would certainly describe as mountaintop experiences. One was purely on a spiritual level, the other was holistically experiential.

I’m sure many of you can guess that the first of these experiences was my late teenage spiritual retreat experience at Happening in the diocese of California. As the defining mountaintop experience of my life up to that point, this was an event that quite simply changed me forever. I came home from that weekend with a deep and abiding sense of God’s love for me, Garnabus, an eighteen year-old teenager who struggled with self-worth and self-confidence, and sought desperately for approval from all the wrong places… I no longer needed to prove my worth, to question and second guess myself and my abilities, to win the approval of everyone around me. I was free to be myself, secure in knowing that I was all I would ever need to be – that I was all that I could ever be. Whatever I would become beyond what I already was would be for me and for God.

Of course I couldn’t have put that into words at the time. I wandered in a half ecstatic haze for about two weeks, veiling my full experience as too deep and too personal to share fully with anyone other than my friends from the retreat who had been there and experienced the same thing I had. But as I mentioned a couple of months ago, I felt as though my face must have been shining from the reactions I got from people I encountered in the weeks following. The difficulty was that the rest of the world didn’t even pause to appreciate the soul-shaking experience I’d had. The rest of the world down below that mountaintop didn’t care that I would never be the same again, or that I had no words to describe the primal depths of the encounter. But for me, the world had stopped – for that weekend and for the next couple of weeks as I adjusted to being back in the valley of normal life, I set up my dwelling on that mountaintop and didn’t want to come down.

The other experience I want to share with you came out of a personal crisis stemming from doing what I knew in my heart to be the right thing to do even though it would mean embracing another profoundly life-changing reality, and would hurt someone close to me.

My best friend for many years was a woman named Equis. We had known each other for about twelve years, had attempted to date each other – rather disastrously – for two and a half of those years, had been college roommates, and had continued to be roommates for the last two years we knew each other after college. When I told her about meeting and falling in love with Fuego, she surprised me with reactions of anger and resentment rather than the congratulations and joy I had expected from my best friend, and told me that she could not be my friend anymore if I decided to date Fuego (which I quickly came to realize meant anyone when she confessed that she had secretly hoped we would get married some day). This came at the end of the weekend between two summer camps I was working, so the next morning I drove back up to camp, thinking about what she had said and praying for an easier way out than choosing between my then best friend and someone I really thought I might have a future with. I knew what was right in my heart, but up to that point in my life it was the most difficult decision I had ever had to make. A wise and good friend of mine, The Rev. Mommy Chaplain, was the chaplain for camp. When I told her of my dilemma, she used the example of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane – praying for an easier way out than breaking the hearts of his twelve best friends by doing what he knew was right to do. I phoned Equis to let her know that I had to do what was right in my heart, and that as much as her decision not to be my friend anymore saddened me, I had to do what I knew was right. She had moved out and headed back to San Diego before I got home from camp that week. Where this becomes a mountaintop experience is through Fuego. This was the first time in my life I had to face an unappeasable situation, and having done what was right instead of what was easy, I suddenly found myself more alive in the coming weeks than I had been in about seven years. I was in love with the woman of my dreams (I literally realized that she had been the recurring mysterious woman in my dreams for the previous several years), I had friends again, one of my best friends from high school (who had been instrumental in getting me to Happening) moved in as my new roommate, I felt spiritually and emotionally energized and free. This time, I brought the mountaintop experience with me instead of staying on the mountain top. My world didn’t stand still as the rest of the world continued spinning around me, rather I felt like I was living life in fast-forward for the next several months. Looking back on my life previous to that summer, it looked like an endless holding pattern of emotional and spiritual stagnancy. It’s amazing what strength and courage comes with taking off the veil.

What both of these experiences have in common is the profound change that they made in my life. In the capacity of these encounters to permanently change something deep and fundamental about myself, my relationship with others, and my experience and understanding of God, there is something at once captivating and yet terrifying. Some aspects have taken years to fully understand and describe, much as I’m sure the disciples’ encounter at the Transfiguration took them some time to fully embrace and understand.

This perhaps is one of the single biggest reasons for the veil we put up between ourselves and God. It is simply a terrifying thought that we could be fundamentally and permanently changed by removing it. We hear countless examples in the Bible of people whose lives were completely uprooted, swirled around, and replanted as something other than what they were before. The blind made to see, the deaf made to hear, the lame made to walk, the leper made clean. And today – a teacher going up a mountain and bursting into brilliant white light as he converses with long-dead prophets and has his divinity confirmed by God’s own voice…

It’s no small wonder that we want to remain in those moments when we finally drop the veil and experience something so awesome and powerful that we can’t imagine our lives any other way than that which they’ve become through the experience. But until we’re willing to drop the veil and start climbing, the mountaintop will always be just a beautiful mystery on the horizon.

Lord, grant us the courage to start climbing, the grace to experience your unfathomable and life changing love for us, and the wisdom to come back down the mountain.

Amen.