Stepping Into The Mystery (Transfiguration)

Exodus 24: 12-18 & Matthew 17: 1-9

Roger C. Lynn

February 11, 2018

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(click here for the video for the entire worship service - the sermon starts at about 24:00)

It was almost exactly twenty years ago. I was spending a week at Holden Village above Lake Chelan on a personal spiritual retreat. One afternoon while cross-country skiing I came to the edge of an open field, with the river beyond and the mountains forming a backdrop for the whole scene. The air was full of snow. And suddenly I was “in” the moment. I wasn’t looking at it from the outside. I was a part of it. Everything became more intensely and vividly real. Language has always eluded me when I’ve tried to describe this experience. The best I’ve been able to come up with is to say that God was present – fully and intimately present. 

How is such an experience explained and understood? What happened? Was it real? That depends partly, I suppose, on how you define “real.” If someone had been filming the scene five minutes before I arrived and continued filming during my experience, I suspect you would not see any difference, except perhaps on my face. Indeed, if someone else had been with me, it is entirely possible that they would not have noticed what I noticed. It was an intensely personal, and very subjective, experience. And it was very real. In fact, I believe what I caught a glimpse of, there in that mountain meadow, was the reality which is all around us all of the time. What occasionally changes is our level of awareness and perception.

Several thousand years ago, on the other side of the planet, far from the center of the world’s attention, in what was considered to be wilderness, a group of former slaves made their way towards freedom. Their leader, a man named Moses, went up on a mountain and had an encounter with God. The description which we find in Exodus, told and re-told, shaped and re-shaped down through the years before it was ever written down, still bears witness to the nature of such encounters. They are inherently beyond description. “What happened up there, Moses?” “Well, it’s hard to describe. It all seems a bit hazy, like there was a cloud covering everything. But at the same time it was incredibly brilliant, as if everything was on fire. And everything became so clear. Life looks so different to me now. I have a sense of where we are going and how we can get there together.”

It was July 1997. The place was Zephyr Church Camp on the shores of Liberty Lake just east of Spokane. I had been there for almost a week, serving as counselor at high school church camp. The combination of the closeness of the community which had formed that week, along with the joy of learning and singing and sharing life together, ultimately found me leaping and dancing and laughing across the field – fully alive and present and in-tune with the world around me and with God. It was all so real I could taste it. Why me? Why in that moment? I honestly don’t know for sure, except to say that I somehow was ready to see it. I’d let my guard down enough for God to slip past my defenses. A bit more reality leaked in that I usually allow.

Almost 2,000 years ago, on another mountain on the other side of the planet, four friends shared an experience which would help shape and define their lives, individually and collectively. The descriptions we find in all three of the synoptic Gospels include some of the same details found in the Exodus account of Moses’ encounter with God on the mountain. There is cloud and brilliant light and a sense of being overwhelmed. What “really” happened? Jesus had been saying all along that God’s reign was happening here, now, in the midst of them. There on the mountain they finally caught a glimpse of just how close that really was. 

In his novel, “The Final Beast,” Frederick Buechner describes an experience which I have always believed to be autobiographical. A young minister, in the midst of a spiritual crisis, finds himself out behind an old barn, feeling fairly lost and alone. Then, for no particular reason he could say, he notices two apple branches clack together in the breeze. And in that random moment, he hears not just two pieces of wood, but the rhythm of the eternal dance. “. . . whatever this is we move around through . . . Reality . . . the air we breath . . . this emptiness . . . If you could get hold of it by the corner somewhere, just slip your fingernail underneath and peel it back enough to find what’s there behind it, I think you’d be . . . I think the dance that must go on back there...way down deep at the heart of space, where being comes from . . . There’s dancing there . . . My kids have dreamed it. Emptiness is dancing there. The angels are dancing. And their feet scatter new worlds like dust . . . If we saw any more of that dance than we do, it would kill us for sure . . . The glory of it. Clack-clack is all [we] can bear.”

It was Fall in the year 1974. I was home for the weekend during my first year in college, sitting with a friend in my home church. At one point, for no particular reason that I’m aware of, she asked me if I was going to be a minister. It was a reasonable question, given the fact that quite a few youth from that congregation, including at least one from our group, had done just that. It was a question with which I was quite familiar, having grown up the son of minister myself. And so, without even really thinking about it, I gave her what had become my standard answer. “No.” I didn’t have anything in particular against the idea. I just knew that it wasn’t what I was going to do. At least I thought that’s what I knew. In the moments immediately following my very short answer, much of what I thought I knew shifted out from under me. “That’s not the right answer!” That’s what I heard in my head. That’s all I heard. It wasn’t Paul’s conversion experience on the Damascus road. I didn’t hear detailed plans about what I needed to do and where I needed to go and how the rest of my life would turn out. I heard just enough to redirect my path. Was it the voice of God? I can’t honestly say for sure. I think maybe that isn’t even the most helpful question. Did I experience God in that moment (to say nothing of the countless moments which have resulted from that moment)? Absolutely!

So why am I telling you all of this? So what if I had a few experiences which seemed slightly out of the ordinary? So what if some other folks, both recent and ancient, have also had experiences which didn’t fit into normal categories? Why does that matter? Why should you care? I believe it matters because such experiences represent opportunities to glimpse beyond the ordinary veil of our lives into the extraordinary reality of which we are all a part. The point is not that some people are special because they have these experiences. If that was all there was to it, then it really wouldn’t be very important. But such experiences are not limited to a chosen few. They are happening to all of us all the time. We just spend most of our time not noticing. But when we seek to be open, when we slow down enough to pay attention, when we create opportunities for the veil to lift, the result is that our perspective does shift and our awareness does increase. We start noticing. And our lives are enriched as a result. 

There is a concept which I believe originates in Celtic spirituality known as “thin places.” The idea is that there are some places where the veil between the worlds is thinner and thus our awareness of the sacred and the holy are heightened. I am convinced that the whole world is, in fact, a thin place, and we have but to pay attention and we will begin to notice. Such experiences need not be grand and spectacular, like Moses on the mountain, or Jesus transfigured, or even me at the edge of a field filled with snow. They can happen in the most ordinary of moments. I suspect they may even have happened to you, and you simply didn’t recognize them for what they were – tiny glimpses into the presence of God. Maybe it was a moment when a friend smiled at you and your breath caught in your throat. Maybe it was the beauty of a sunset and the whole world stopped for just an instant. Who can say for sure what such moments will look like? I simply invite you to be on the lookout, and to be prepared, should such an experience find it’s way into your life, to step into the mystery. I promise you that your life will never be the same again.