A Faithful God, Empowering Us to Love

March 2, 2025 - The Last Sunday after Epiphany

My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.

Good morning, Epiphany. It has been a busy week around here, especially with some of our snowbirds starting to return home from warmer climates. We had our “Game Night and Soup Swap” on Friday night, which many of you attended; we filled our freezer with soup for those who need care, and we played games that gave us all an excuse to be together in relationship, something we all need more of, if we’re honest. Earlier that day, George Sipes took me ice fishing out near Pullman, which I’m sure you’ll hear more about in a sermon at some point, apparently men are legally required to talk about their fishing trips to anyone who will listen? Between us, we caught 20 or so Bluegill in the cold wind on Friday, not bad. We’ve also been preparing for Ash Wednesday and Lent, this being the final Sunday of the season of Epiphany. But the moment from the week that I want to highlight this morning came from our book club last Wednesday night.

A small group of us met in the Parish Hall on Wednesday to discuss the Reverend Samuel Wells’ book, The Heart of It All, which he subtitled “The Bible’s Big Picture.” In fewer than 100 pages, Wells tries to summarize the entirety of Christian scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, and he does a decent job of it, placing the law and the prophets of the Old Testament in the context of the story that continues through Jesus and the church, and then placing all of it within the framing of God’s relationship with us. There’s a paragraph in his commentary at the end that I want to read for us to begin the sermon this morning; it’s a paragraph that encapsulates this whole story captured in the 60+ books that we call the Bible, and it’s important before we dive in today. It goes like this: 

“God created the world, called a people, delivered that people from slavery, made a covenant with them, gave them land, king and temple, watched them stray and go into exile, and brought them home. God then came among them in Jesus, and Jesus portrayed the kingdom of God through word and action; but he was put to death, only for God to raise him, and take him to heaven, after which God sent the Holy Spirit to empower a church that opened God's life out to all the peoples of the earth, which it continues to do as it anticipates the last day, on which God will unveil the everlasting kingdom.”

That’s it. That’s the Bible, that’s the story. Sermon complete, time to go to brunch.

No. Now, there’s an easy sermon if you look at the readings today about mountaintop experiences with Jesus, and I've actually been to Mt. Sinai, so that personal story was available... but I wanted to go a little bit deeper, and maybe a bit broader, so please try to stick with me this morning.

I wanted to start with that quote from Sam Wells today because for many of us, the Old Testament feels “old,” easily dismissible, not worthy of any real attention because now we have Jesus. Preachers rarely preach on the Old Testament. We come to church to be reminded of Jesus and love, not of the archaic laws of an outdated patriarchal culture, laws that subjugate women, laws that make eating cheeseburgers a sin worthy of death, laws that require railings on the roofs of our homes or a specific number of tassels on our clothing. We especially don’t want to read about a God who sent one people group out to massacre other people groups, or as Jim Wright pointed out to us on Wednesday night, a God who says he will abandon his people to cannibalism of their own children. It's true, the Old Testament can get pretty... dicey.

But the benefit of a book like Wells’ book, the benefit of a good seminary education, the benefit of good churchy scholarship in general, is that we can stop viewing the Bible as a fundamentalist rule book or as a history or science textbook and instead view it as a story that helps to explain the world we find ourselves living in. For us Christians, we view it as the story. It’s the story first written down by a people suffering in exile, the story of the faithful, loving, creator God, one who makes covenants and promises to humankind, one who sends the law and the prophets to help them see the way forward, the way to a better life with each other and with their God. And by the end, it becomes even more than that.

In that context, in the context of a centuries-long story of a committed relationship between God and humanity, we have today’s lectionary texts, all of which revolve around Luke’s telling of the transfiguration of Jesus. C.S. Lewis called the transfiguration “the second greatest event in the New Testament,” second only to the resurrection. Fleming Rutledge writes that with the exception of the resurrection, “there is no greater manifestation of Jesus’s unique divine glory than this one.” Jesus on the mountain with Peter and James and John and Moses and Elijah, the transfiguration is the fitting end of the season of Epiphany in part because of Rutledge’s point: in this moment of awe and wonder, of clouds and of dazzling light, we can see the glory of God in the person of Jesus Christ. We see the ultimate epiphany, the manifestation of the divine, there on the mountaintop. We and the disciples see Jesus for who he truly is, not only another man, but the Holy Son of the Most High God.

Now, if you read these eight verses in Luke 9 and have an ounce of imagination to visualize it for yourself, you have to be left in a bit of awe. Place yourself in John’s shoes or sandals, for example (something I often find myself trying to do with anyone in the Bible named John). John is accounting this after the fact, now: “See... my friends, Peter and James, and I, well, we followed our teacher Jesus up a mountain to pray for a bit, to get some peace and quiet. We had just fed five thousand people, with five loaves and two fish (somehow), then Jesus told us he was going to be killed and be raised from the dead... and now we’re up on a mountain praying... and then instead of the peace and quiet we expected, the appearance of Jesus’s face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. Then, Moses and Elijah appeared and started talking to him about his death and resurrection, and then a cloud came down to the mountain and God spoke directly to us and said something that reminded us all of Jesus’s baptism a few years back. God said, “This is my Son, my Chosen, listen to him!” And then it was all over, back to peace and quiet, back down the mountain. Pretty wild day.”

For John, for Peter and James, there could be no doubt left after this overwhelming experience. Jesus was more than a teacher and more than a prophet: he was the Messiah, the very Son of God. And this God, this God who had been in covenantal relationship with them since the days of their forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, this God who had saved Noah from the flood and been with Adam and Eve in the garden, this God spoke from a cloud and commanded them to listen to their teacher, to listen to Jesus.

In the 18^th chapter of Deuteronomy, one of those law-filled Old Testament books we often like to skip over, the people of Israel are promised that God will raise up for them a prophet unlike any other, specifically called God’s chosen, and they are then given the three-word command: “Listen to him!” In today’s story, in Luke, the words of God from the cloud that echoed Jesus’s baptism from earlier in Epiphany? Well, they echo this centuries-old promise too, “This is my Son, my Chosen. Listen to him!”

Moses and Elijah are there too, two pillars of the Jewish faith, representing the law and the prophets, the two primary ways that God had led the people of Israel throughout their history. Moses and Elijah spoke with Jesus in the same way they had spoken with God in the Old Testament scriptures. Moses, as we read earlier today, spoke with God on Mt. Sinai, receiving the law on the tablets of stone, and his face shone with the glory of God. Elijah spoke with God on Mt. Horeb and was given commands in the Old Testament to name new prophets and kings, before he was eventually brought up to heaven in a whirlwind. These are monumental figures in their story of God’s relationship with humanity, and there they are, side by side with Jesus, visible to the three disciples.

So, what does all of this mean for us, today? In our tradition, perhaps particularly in the twenty-first century, in American contexts, especially in a branch of the tradition that considers itself pretty educated and enlightened, where science and reason are very much valued and where human rights and public policy are top of mind... we as Christians, at least on our best days, we really like Jesus’s teachings. We really like the Sermon on the Mount. We really like the command to love our neighbor, and like we talked about last week, we might not completely like it, but we willingly wrestle with the command to love our enemies. Jesus’s love is our focus, the paradigm-shifting, earth-shattering love that turns everything upside down. It’s a good focus, one we could all focus more on.

But, even Jesus’s love, even the Sermon on the Mount, they lose their full power, they lose their full significance without today’s story, without the epiphanies of this season. Without the complete message of the Transfiguration, of Jesus completing the story that began with Moses and Elijah... without that, the Beatitudes we love... they’re just really nice teachings. Without the divinity of God, the glory of God shining radiantly in the divine person of Jesus, without the promises of the Old Testament fulfilled in the continued story of the Gospel, without the long-awaited command from the cloud to listen to God’s holy Son, well... without all of that... it’s all on us. It’s all on us to do our best to work out Jesus’s teachings, to work out how to love as he loved. It's on us to do the impossible, to love those who hurt us, to bless those who curse us, to pray for those who persecute us. It's all on us. And that’s all such a tall task in a world like ours.

But with the divinity of Christ as recognized by the disciples in the Transfiguration, with the understanding of the full story of God-with-us from the garden through slavery and the exodus, through the law and the prophets and through the exile, and ultimately through the story and person of the incarnate son of God in Jesus, and then the story that continues with the Spirit with us today... well, in view of all that, now we have God, the Creator God, at our back, fulfilling promises for generations and then with us through the Spirit still today. We have God now empowering the church, as Sam Wells wrote, to open God’s life and love out to all the people of the earth. We don’t have to do this alone. We don’t have to do our best alone. We have God with us, empowering us to live into the life of love Jesus Christ laid out for us. In the context of the full story, God is faithful, God is just, God is love, and that love is shown for us in God’s son Jesus Christ.

Paul writes in our 2nd Corinthians passage this morning that we ourselves are being transformed, transfigured, into the same image, the image of the glory of God. We do that together, veils removed, seeing each other live into love, empowered by the Spirit. I had someone after last week’s sermon ask me how exactly we were to love our enemies, that maybe my sermon should’ve had some more real-world examples of that. Maybe, sure, and maybe that’s true today too, or maybe that’s for us each to work out.

What I will instead give you today is reassurance that the commands to love our neighbors and love our enemies, that the Beatitudes, that the Sermon on the Mount, that the parables, that the self-sacrificing love that took Jesus all the way to a brutal death on the cross... all of that comes not from a really good teacher, but through Jesus and directly from the divine, triune, Creator God, who tells us to listen to Jesus, who has promised for generations and generations to never leave us nor forsake us... and I can reassure you, thanks to Paul’s reminder, that each of us are being transformed and transfigured into God’s image simply by our commitment to be in loving relationship with each other here.

We are tasked today simply with radiating the glory and love of God through our own lives, and if we do that together, with God’s help, then we can trust that the entire world will be changed.

Amen.