Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri

Morning Worship · February 22, 2009

Last Sunday After Epiphany

Prayer of the Day

God of Love and God of Power, bestow upon us a double portion of your Spirit. Help us to hear your word and perceive the marvels you are performing. Grant that we may see beyond the problems of our world and behold Christ in all of his glory. Touch us and lift us into the light and peace of your presence. We ask it in Christ’s name.  Amen.

Scripture

Mark 9:2-9

Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.

As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell on one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.

Message

Transfiguration

Larry Gallamore

I’m always amazed at the intelligence of today’s teenagers. They are so incredibly intelligent. I was visiting with a group of teenagers a few months ago, and I asked if anyone knew the Transfiguration story in the Bible. A teenage girl said, “That’s the story about Jesus and his disciples doing some mountain climbing. They got to the top, and they were so excited. Jesus started to shine. I think that’s where the idea for the song “Shine, Jesus, Shine” came from. Preacher, I have a question for you.  Why is it that preachers always say the disciples had to come down from the mountain to serve others? Couldn’t they have stayed up there a little longer? Don’t you think people need that kind of ‘high’? People are trying to get high on drugs all the time.”

These words sank deeply into my mind. After further discussion, I left that day thinking, “Wow! What I just heard was very profound. People need that kind of high. They are trying to get high on drugs all the time.” That young teenager was right. We put way too much emphasis on the disciples coming down from the mountain to serve. It’s true we are here to serve, but how are we going to serve when we’ve never spent any time on the mountain with God?

When you’ve been to the mountaintop, you can do anything. You may remember the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speaking in Memphis in 1968, when a lot of people were talking about threats on his life, said:

We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop, and I don’t mind. Like anybody, I want to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will, and he allowed me to go up to the mountaintop; and I looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

Life is different when you’ve been to the mountaintop. It’s different when you’ve seen the Lord. When you’ve seen God, you can no longer ignore the prophet’s ecstasy. You’ll no longer disregard the dreamer’s vision, and when you hear someone say, “I heard God speak,” you’ll not take it lightly for you know some have heard God and others have entertained angels. You know God is not limited in any way. It makes no sense to limit our faith, to limit our vision, or to limit our experiences with God.

How limited we are; how little our thoughts. We rise early in the morning, plod off to the day’s work, plod home at night sore and tired, we eat and sleep, we work, we live, we die. It has been said of humankind, “A man or woman works hard to get money to buy food to gain strength to work hard to get more money to buy more food.” Some people think this is all life is. This is not all that life is. When you’ve been to the mountaintop, you know it is so much more. You know what it is like to be excited about life. You know what it’s like to be close to the Eternal Spirit of God. You know what it’s like to rejoice, and you know what life really is. You will never settle for less than the real thing.

There is a wonderful story that’s been in circulation for some years now of a little boy who lived far back out in the country. He had reached the age of 12 and had never, in all his life, seen a circus. You can imagine his excitement when a poster went up at school that, on the next Saturday, a traveling circus was coming to a nearby town. He ran home with the good news, and then came the question, “Dad, Mom, can I go?”

The family was poor, but the father sensed how important this was to the boy, so he said, “If you do your chores ahead of time, I’ll see to it that you have the money to go.”

Come Saturday morning, the chores were done, and the boy stood ready by the breakfast table in his best clothes. His father reached down into his coveralls and pulled out a dollar bill – the most money the boy had ever had at one time – and gave it to him. After the usual cautions about being careful, the boy was sent on his way.

The boy was so excited that his feet barely touched the ground all the way to town. When he got there, he noticed people were lining the streets. He worked his way through the crowd until he could see what was going on. There in the distance approached the spectacle of a circus parade. It was the grandest thing the boy had ever seen. There were exotic animals in cages, bands, acrobats, and all that goes to make up a great circus.

After everything had passed by where he was standing, a circus clown with floppy shoes, baggy pants, and a brightly-painted face came by bringing up the rear. As the clown passed by where he was standing, the boy reached into his pocket and got out that precious dollar bill. Handing the money to the clown, the boy then turned around and went home.

Don’t make that same mistake in your spiritual life. Don’t settle for less when God offers you so much more.

I’m excited because I have the privilege of witnessing the Church of Jesus Christ enter a new era, another Great Awakening where stories like the Transfiguration mean more than they have ever meant before. Stories like the parting of the Red Sea and Elijah taken up to the heavens (2 Kings 2:1) have come into their own. We no longer shrug our shoulders and dismiss these wonderful stories as idle tales.

What a great story, this story of Transfiguration. We see the brightness of the Spirit of Jesus and the fact that he is visited by two men, Moses and Elijah, long-since dead. What a powerful witness to the fact that the Spirit lives on forever. Spiritually, we have gone way beyond what most of us heretofore wanted to acknowledge. In years past, we were just not into this kind of religious stuff, and we couldn’t wait to get those disciples off that mountain. We neglected and ignored their religious high, their peak experience, and their chance to be closer to the Spirit of God. We rushed them down the mountain to serve. We were just not into the ways of the Spirit.

When you are into the ways of the Spirit, you recognize you need constant contact with God. You need God’s touch. You need God’s Presence. And you need God’s power. Without it, you’ll never be prepared to face the future.

I was meeting with a group of pastors who met weekly. We were having a great time laughing and telling jokes (clean ones, of course), and one of the pastors asked, “Do any of us really know how much we need this time? We have some really tough issues to face. We help people through divorces, help them with their children, and we try to help when they’ve lost their jobs and their loved ones. We need this time to re-create ourselves and to reassure each other that God is still in control.

Peter, James, and John needed that Transfiguration experience. They had been with Jesus. They had hoped; they had prayed, and now the day finally arrived when they could say, “I know. I know who Jesus is. ‘I know in whom I have believed and I’m persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him’.”

This experience so changed their lives that they wanted to stay on the mountaintop forever. They didn’t realize that the change that had occurred in them was a spiritual change.

Let’s examine what they experienced. Do you know that we can experience what they experienced with our spirits? It’s hard to tell things like this in public, because the public is so unbelieving.

Now, what really happened? Let’s examine the story a piece at a time. Jesus took the disciples up on a mountain. He was transfigured before them. What exactly does that mean? Are you ready for this? This is what some today might refer to as astral travel. The body travels to another plane to make a stronger connection with the Eternal Spirit of God. Stay with me on this one. Some religions call this Soul Travel. The ancient Old Testament writers believed that there was a Silver Cord that connected the physical body to the Spirit. When the Cord is broken, the Spirit is freed from the body (Ecclesiastes 12:6). It is an “out-of-body” experience. I know that’s more than you wanted to know. My imagination tends to reach a higher level of consciousness when I get into these magnificent biblical stories.

Notice Jesus’ clothes become dazzling white such as no one on earth could bleach them. The Spirit became a very bright color like a bright light when the Divinity of Jesus comes through. Jesus is immersed in the Spirit of God at this point. When he began his ministry, he was baptized in the Jordan River, immersed in water, cleansed although he needed no cleansing to start his ministry. Now he is immersed in the Spirit on the mountaintop as the culminating event in his public ministry before the Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension.

What does this story teach us?

1.      Holy moments are very real. They come to strengthen us to live our earthly lives.

2.      These events happen more often to those who refuse to limit God and put themselves in the way of such experiences. In other words, to have a mountaintop experience, you have to be willing to climb the mountain in your mind.

3.      It’s OK to desire such experiences, realizing God has already provided them for everyone. Our part is to receive them

You may recall Elisha followed his mentor Elijah all across the country asking God for a double portion of Elijah’s Spirit. He received it because he believed it was possible. The most powerful benefit of such an experience is the reassurance of the Power and the Presence of God in our everyday lives.

In you practice the Presence of God in your everyday life, you’ll soon discover that more and more good comes into your life. You will also become a source of inspiration and help to all who meet you.

Practicing the Presence of God helps you to overcome this faulty religious belief that God is separate from your daily life. We all know people who live as if religion is something separate and apart from their daily lives.

These folks believe it is something only to be found at church on Sunday, to be put on along with one’s Sunday clothes. There are some who feel that the fruits of religion can only be found in the next world. These people have not yet encountered Jesus. There is nothing vague or otherworldly about Jesus’ teaching. To Jesus, religion was everybody’s daily life. He went about preaching to the multitudes, teaching practical stuff and demonstrating in his own life how practical religion could be. His healing bears eloquent testimony to the practice of religion.

Don’t ignore those mysterious experiences that happen in your life. Don’t let go of an experience just because you don’t understand it. Delight in the experiences that are from God, and use them as a source of strength for your time of service in the valleys below.

So be it. Amen.

Benediction

Spirit of the Living God, every day we have the chance to be made new, to be washed in your holy light, to be transformed from our humanity into the sacred and holy. Transform us! Amen.