I want each one of us to think of someone we’ve known for
a long time. Maybe they’re in our family, maybe they’re good friends,
maybe they’re people we work with. But whoever they are, we’ve known them
for a long time. We’ve spent a lot of time with them.
When we do that, when we spend a lot of time with someone and we
do that over a long period of time, we start to feel like we know pretty much
everything there is to know about that person. We know what they like and
what they don’t like. We know how they feel about things and how they’re
going to react in certain situations. Sometimes, we even know what
they’re thinking, and we know what they’re going to say before they even say it.
Got a person like that in mind? Okay, now imagine if that
person said something totally unexpected. Imagine if they did something
that seemed totally out of character. How would we react? We’d be
shocked, right? We would not know what to say. We would not know
what to do. Here’s this person we thought we knew so well, and they do
something so completely out of left field that we feel like we don’t really
know them at all.
That’s pretty much how Peter, James, and John felt in our Bible
reading tonight. Remember, they’d been traveling with Jesus for a while
at this point. We don’t really know how long, but it was long enough that
they were considered Jesus’ disciples at this point. They’d heard Jesus
speak. They’d heard him tell parables. They’d seen him do miracles.
They thought they had a pretty good idea who Jesus was. In fact,
we’re told that just eight days earlier, Jesus had asked them who they thought
he was, and Peter had answered, “God’s Messiah”.
And then, Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up onto a mountain.
They start praying. And Jesus transforms. We’re told the
appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became as bright as a flash of
lightning. Think how bright that is. That’s a blinding light.
Peter, James, and John would not even have been able to look directly at
Jesus.
Think of how unsettling that would be. Our sermon series for Lent is “Jesus in HD”,
looking at both the fully human and the fully divine Jesus. The disciples knew the human Jesus, and they
thought they knew the divine Jesus, but now they really saw the divine Jesus in
all his glory. This guy they thought they knew so well, and now suddenly
he’s completely different.
The three of them were stunned. Peter starts babbling.
We’re not told that James or John said anything. Probably they were
in shock. All of them were in shock. Here was this guy they’d been
traveling with, this guy they’d been following, this guy they’d been
encouraging others to follow, too. They thought they knew him so well,
and now, suddenly, they felt like they did not know Jesus at all.
Have you ever felt like that? I think most of us do, at some
point in our lives. We’re going along, living from one day to the next.
Things are going okay--not great, maybe, but not terrible. We go to
church fairly regularly. We pray sometimes. Life seems to be going
on more or less as it should.
We’re in kind of a routine. We figure we know what’s going
to happen tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. We
think we know God, and we think we know what God has planned for our lives.
And then, something happens, and it all transforms. It can
happen in all kinds of ways. It can happen in good ways: falling in
love, having a baby, getting a new job opportunity. It can happen in bad
ways: losing a job, having a health problem, having a relationship fall
apart.
Either way, it’s really unsettling. Even when the
transformation happens in a good way, it’s still really unsettling. We
thought we knew God, and we thought we knew what God had planned for us, and
now, suddenly, everything is completely different. We thought we knew God
so well, and now, suddenly, we feel like we don’t know God at all.
Sometimes, when something like this happens, we don’t know what to
make of it. Peter, James, and John did not know what to make of it.
They kept it to themselves, not telling anyone else. We’re not told
why. Maybe they did not understand it. Maybe they thought no one
would believe them. Maybe they did not quite believe it themselves. Maybe
they were not sure what believing it even meant. Now that they’d seen
Jesus in his glory, were they supposed to do something? If so, what were
they supposed to do?
And sometimes, when we feel God wanting to transform our lives, we
keep it to ourselves, too. We don’t tell anyone else. Maybe we
don’t quite understand what God is trying to do. Maybe we think no one
will believe it. Maybe we don’t quite believe it ourselves. Maybe
we don’t know what we’re supposed to do if we do believe it.
Peter, James, and John came down from the mountain with Jesus.
We’re not told what they did. Except for one thing. They kept
following Jesus. Even though they did not really understand, even though
they were not quite sure what had actually happened, they kept following Jesus.
They went where Jesus wanted them to go. They did what Jesus wanted
them to do. And they never forgot what they had seen. And at some
point, at least one of them told it to Luke, so he could record it in the gospel
he wrote some thirty years later.
And that’s what we’re supposed to do, too. Keep following
Jesus. Even if we don’t really understand, even if we’re not quite sure
what’s happening, we need to keep following Jesus. We need to go where
Jesus wants us to go. We need to do what Jesus wants us to do. And
we need to never forget the transformation that’s taken place in our lives.
Transformation is what the period of Lent is all about. When
Jesus was transformed on the mountain, he revealed to Peter, James, and John,
who he really was. When God transforms our lives, God reveals to us who
we really are, too.
You see, it does not require a whole lot of faith for us to just
keep living our lives the same way we’ve been living them. It does not
require a lot of faith to have tomorrow be pretty much like today. But a
change of life requires faith.
And that’s true whether the change is a good change or a bad
change. It takes faith to leave a comfortable job and take a new one.
It takes faith to let someone know you’ve fallen in love. It
certainly takes faith to have a baby.
And when the change is a bad change, when we do lose a job, or
have a health problem, or have a relationship fall apart, that takes faith,
too. It takes faith to believe that God is still there. It takes faith
to believe that God is with us in the bad times just as much as in the good
times. It takes faith to keep trusting God when all the things we counted
on, all the people we trusted, all the things we thought were fixed in our
lives, are suddenly not there for us any more. It takes faith to keep
believing that God is still in control when it feels like we’ve lost all
control ourselves.
When God transforms our lives, we find out whether the faith we
claim to have is real. When God transforms our lives, we find out whether
our faith is strong enough to deal with that transformation, no matter what it
is.
Because transformation is really what the whole period of Lent is
all about. If we go through the period of Lent and nothing about us
changes, if we get to the end of the period of Lent and are still the exact
same people we were when the period of Lent started, then the whole point of
Lent has been lost on us. Easter is not a glorious recognition of Jesus
dying for our sins. It’s just a nice springtime holiday, a time to look
for eggs and eat chocolate bunnies.
Don’t get me wrong--I have nothing against Easter eggs or
chocolate bunnies. But if that’s all we’re getting out of Easter, then
the whole period of Lent has been wasted. Nothing about us has changed.
We have not truly repented of our sins. We’re no closer to God,
we’re no closer to each other, we’re no closer to being the people God wants us
to be, than we were before.
Jesus did not come to give us a nice springtime holiday. The
fully human yet fully divine Jesus lived and died so that our sins could be
forgiven. But our sins can only be forgiven if we repent, if we ask God
for forgiveness and resolve to change our lives.
God wants to transform our lives. Let’s open ourselves up to
that transformation. We may not understand it. We may not know what
we’re supposed to do. But let’s keep following Jesus anyway. Let’s
go where Jesus wants us to go and do what Jesus wants us to do. If we
truly do our best to do that, our lives will be transformed in ways we will
never expect. And we’ll come to know God in a way we never have before.
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