Bill Countryman Good Shepherd Berkeley

LAST SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY, February 19, 2023

Year C: Exodus 24:12-18; Psalm 2; 2 Peter 1:16-21; Matthew 17:1-9

TWO PROBLEMS WITH EPIPHANIES

Every year on the last Sunday before Lent, we celebrate a great epiphany—the transfiguration of Jesus. Today, we actually have two epiphanies in our morning readings. One is the Transfiguration of Jesus, when his disciples saw him in his majesty—not just the teacher they revered, but someone (or even something) far greater. 

And, of course, the disciples had no real idea what to make of all that beauty and splendor. How could they? What they were seeing was real, more real than anything else. But how were they to relate it to the everyday world they were living in? And how were they to respond? 

And that’s one of the problems with epiphanies. Such experiences are not necessarily rare. They often come to people as an unexpected sense of the unity of all life—a moment when nature, for example, becomes transparent to us and utterly beautiful in a completely unexpected way. But we seldom seem to know what to do with such an experience. We remember it with gratitude. Perhaps we become a little more attuned to the ecological challenge of our times. But mostly we just treasure the memory of a wonderful moment. 

The disciples didn’t know what to make of Jesus’ transfiguration, either. The best thing they could come up with was Peter’s proposal to build three shelters one for Jesus, one for Moses, one for Elijah. Shelters?! Obviously, these three were in no need of protection from the sun! No, Peter actually wanted to build shrines, to mark the spot where this had happened so that they could return and remember. God, as you heard, didn’t think much of the idea.

Our other epiphany story this morning was about Moses’s scary experience at Mount Sinai. Climbing up the mountain, he went right into the cloud and fire; and there he actually spoke with God. (I don’t think he could have done it at all, if he hadn’t already been through the slightly less threatening epiphany of God at the Burning Bush.) And when he came back down from the mountain, his face glowed,which frightened people; and he had to cover it up when he went out in pubic. The people, in fact, reacted to the whole experience with terror. It was precisely during Moses’s forty days and forty nights on the mountain that they pushed Aaron into making the Golden Calf. They’d had more than enough of this epiphany business, and they demanded a less alarming, more approachable way of worshipping their God.

All the people could see was overwhelming power coming down onto the mountain. They couldn’t yet see that that power was coming out of love, bearing gifts for them. And this points out for us another problem about epiphanies. The first problem is that we don’t really know what to do with them. The second is that we’re apt to mistake the medium of the epiphany for the message—and run the other way. Even the most beautiful of epiphanies can wind up feeling a bit creepy. “What was that? And why did it happen to me?” An epiphany is a break in your normal existence. Sometimes, we want to hang onto the memory. Sometimes, we just want to run away from it. The disciples, I think, were torn between the two—prostrate with fear, but feeling the need to do something . . . anything.

Jesus glowed like the sun; he conversed with Moses and Elijah, the two great religious leaders of ancient Israel. And a cloud of glory overshadowed them (“overshadowed them”—isn’t that a strange expression for something that was the exact opposite of a shadow!). And a voice from heaven says, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well-pleased; listen to him!” 

Peter was just starting to unfold his proposal for a shrine when the heavenly voice interrupted him. God wasn’t cruel to Peter. There was no “Shut up and sit down, Peter!” But God was emphatic: “Listen to him.” Why that? Hadn’t they been listening to him all along? Yes. But had they grasped what God particularly wanted them to hear? The voice gives them a hint here by calling Jesus, “My son, the beloved.” It points us toward the central point in Jesus’ teaching:  love. Love God with your whole self. Love your neighbor as yourself. Even love your enemies. And all this because God loves us first. If they turn the epiphany on the mountain into a mere commemoration it may actually just become a distraction to them. What Jesus was calling them to wasn’t majesty or glory; it was love. “Stop gawking.” says the voice from heaven. “Don’t worry about shrines. Listen to him!”

Not that shrines are wrong. We human beings are creatures of time and space. We need reminders. We need shrines that pull us back into the epiphany. We at Good Shepherd, know how we benefit from this church’s beauty and its history of prayer and service. The voice from heaven isn’t saying that these are bad things. It just says, “Don’t get distracted. Don’t lose the main thread. The central thing—the true epiphany—is love.” 

There is nothing more powerful than love, the power by which God created the universe, the power by which God covenanted Godself to the chosen people, the power by which God came to live among us as one of us, the power by which we, too, are being transformed and enriched. The cloud, the fire, the blinding light, the cloud of glory overshadowing us—these are the signs. But the substance of the message is love.