Exodus 24:12-18
2 Peter 1:16-21
Matthew 17:1-9

And in the second letter of Peter, we just heard the Apostle’s testimony to what it was he saw and heard during that experience. This leads him to speak about prophecy – and he’s speaking about two kinds of prophecy here: First, he is talking about the prophetic message from the Old Covenant – personified in Moses and Elijah – that is confirmed in the person of Jesus Christ. But then he seems to be saying to his audience that now that Christ has arisen and ascended into heaven, the challenge to his followers is to continue that prophetic voice into a new day.

What Peter, James and John experienced on the mountain during Jesus’ transfiguration was an epiphany – yet another revelation to the world of who Jesus was. During these past weeks in the season after Epiphany we have been considering the many and varied ways that God has been revealed to us in the person of Jesus Christ. And today Peter challenges us to wrestle with the message that the disciples received and shared. He calls us to ask, “In how many and varied ways has that message been interpreted and translated through the ages and through different parts of the world? And how do we receive this message and share it today?”

Moses and Elijah are links to the Hebrew Bible. From the prophet Malachi we know that Jewish tradition taught that Elijah was to be the predecessor of the Messiah (Malachi 4:5-6). Their appearance here – in a scene where Jesus is being explicitly manifested to the apostles as the Son of God – affirms the essential unity between the revelation of God as made in the Old Covenant, and the revelation of God in the person of Jesus in the New Covenant.

There are other parallels within the Gospel itself. Note that the words of God on the mountain are similar to the words of God at Jesus’ baptism (Matthew 3:17). Both of these events are really epiphanies in their own right, every bit as much as the visit to the infant Jesus by the wise men in Chapter 2 of Matthew’s Gospel. Additionally, God’s words on the mountain serve to confirm the words of Peter’s confession in the previous chapter. In fact, in both Peter’s confession narrative and the transfiguration narrative we see the three themes of Jesus’ ministry: Sonship with God the Father; the necessity of his suffering and death at the hands of humans, and the ultimate glory of his resurrection.

Indeed, it may be said that in the transfiguration, we have the climax of all of the epiphanies in the New Testament. With his face and clothing transformed to a brightness which cannot be of this earth, the glory of Jesus is shown to the disciples not only as it will be revealed at the end of time, but as the Messiah exists now, in the present historical moment, even before his death and resurrection. Jesus was, and is, present both in the NOW and in the Omega, our ultimate goal to which we journey in faith.

I think it is a measure of the divine plan that Jesus came at a time when there were no cameras, no videos and no television, and I think it is no oversight that neither the story of Moses’ encounter with Yahweh on the mountaintop nor the Transfiguration story describes either God or the transformed Jesus in human terms. In reflecting upon that, I was reminded once again of a wonderful truth: Although we are made in the image of God, God is NOT made in the image of us! Now, that seems incredibly obvious and may seem a somewhat dim observation – but only take a look around the world today. There is no scarcity of people – social icons, religious and political leaders as well as their avid followers – who are all-too-ready to tell us how God wants us to be just like them. We tend to forget that we are but the imperfect and finite examples of those traits which only God holds perfectly and to infinite measure.

And I think this brings us to what St. Peter is talking about in his letter this morning – the importance of, and the source of, that prophetic message which Jesus gives us and calls us to constantly remember and share with the rest of the world. This morning we are reminded that although the human Jesus was a particular person who came into history at a particular time and place, the truth and meaning of The Jesus Story is always, by necessity, a matter of interpretation through the lens of finite, imperfect human eyes, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Even the most faithful of disciples can only receive and understand Jesus through the lens of his or her own experiences, cultural traditions and time and place in history. As Peter himself reminds us in his letter, the prophetic voice of Jesus comes to each of us not by our own will, but by the power of the Holy Spirit, speaking to and through us in our own particular circumstances.

So we have the prophetic message more fully confirmed. You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.

Isn’t that a beautiful image: The prophetic message of Jesus Christ shining like a lamp in the dark night, waiting for the day to dawn and for the morning star to rise in our hearts – carrying that light – and that message – of Jesus with it?

This is at once both a tremendously scary and a tremendously liberating reality. What’s scary about it? Well, for many of us, the challenge that we must always be on the lookout for Jesus – that we might actually find Jesus in new places and in new ways that we don’t expect – sounds an awful lot like relativism – that there is no absolute truth. It sounds like we can’t simply rely on pointing to a sentence in the Bible and then closing the Book, figuring we know all there is to know. It sounds like from that proposition, it is only a hop, skip and a jump to saying, “Do whatever you want. If it feels good, do it.”

But that, of course, is NOT what St. Peter is talking about. Look at the rest of his statement: First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, because no prophecy ever came by human will, but men and women moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.

And here – before we get to the exciting part – let’s remind ourselves what prophecy is – or first, what it is NOT. Prophecy is NOT fortune-telling! Prophecy is NOT using a Ouija board or tarot cards or staring into a crystal ball and predicting the future. Look at any of the prophets in the Hebrew Bible: They were mortals, finite, imperfect human beings. They didn’t just land on earth and start prophesying! They were real people, with real jobs, real families, living in a specific place at a specific time in human history. They didn’t go to Prophet School or have a Master’s Degree in Prophecy. They were people who, faithful to and inspired by the spirit of God, looked at the world around them and observed all of the ways it was falling short of what God envisioned when he created it. Their prophecy lay in their ability to warn the religious, social and political leaders of the time of what they were doing wrong, and to warn them that if they didn’t change their ways, bad things were going to happen.

Now, we can look at the beginning of Peter’s statement above – that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation – and decide that means we are not to interpret Scripture, but to take each and every word at face value. But that’s not what Peter is saying – look at the rest of his statement: because no prophecy ever came by human will, but men and women moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God. It is not interpretation that Peter is cautioning against, but interpretation based on our own ideas and not based on the promptings of the Holy Spirit.

And this is the kind of prophecy to which St. Peter calls us. No, our prophecies aren’t going to enter the Canon of Sacred Scripture and be added as a book in the next translation of the Bible – I guess that would be the Really New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. But our prophecy – and this is the exciting part – is the living out of our faith each day and, in the decisions we make, in the relationships we enter – and those we avoid – in the efforts we make to live into our baptismal covenant, we keep that prophetic message of Jesus alive and ever new, ever fresh for every generation, for every culture, for every race and nation. And from today’s readings, we can draw guidance to help us discern if what we are doing is the prophetic work of God:

• The transfiguration points to Jesus as the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets, the full revelation of God in human form.
• In Jesus’ death on the cross and in his resurrection, we understand Jesus – and therefore God – to be a God of suffering and of love, but at the same time a God who is victorious over the forces of evil and over death itself.
• From the letter of Peter, we understand that Christ is calling each of us into our own personal transformation, our own conversion to true discipleship by searching for and finding Jesus in places we might not otherwise go and in people whom we might not otherwise seek out, including those living on the margins of society – those for whom many of the promises of the Good News seem so far away.
• As we ourselves experience God in these unfamiliar places, we come to understand that there is a broad spectrum of ways in which people of different cultures and different times can experience, understand, and celebrate the prophetic message of Jesus and know him, and love him, and serve him as their savior and Lord.

Let me be clear that I am not suggesting that the Word of God changes from one generation to another. But for Christians, the Word of God is more than the words contained in the latest or the most popular edition of The Bible. The Gospel of John reminds us that for Christians, Jesus is the Word – the Word made flesh – and his life, his teachings, his example stand as the Living Word, the Word of Life. What I am suggesting is that while the Word of God does not change, the way that we receive and understand the Word of God has an awful lot to do with our own experiences, our own cultural traditions, our own understandings of what the world is like and how the world works. That is where our challenge comes to us: To remain faithful to God’s promptings and to relate them to, and interpret them for, the real world around us.

As this season after Epiphany draws to a close, and as we enter into the penitential season of Lent, may we reflect on the many and various ways in which Jesus is continuously revealed to us both throughout the ages and in our own time. May we open our hearts and our lives to His call to be his disciples, to be His prophetic voice in a world that sorely needs to hear it. And I pray that each day we have those epiphanies, that divine experience of rediscovering Jesus in every place, and in every person we meet. Amen.

© Copyright 2008 by the Reverend Donald L. Hamer