All our readings today have mountains in them – mountains and manifestations, one could say. Now, mountains can be daunting places. Time was when I would bound up a mountain like a gazelle. You could possibly find that difficult to imagine, but I swear it is true. Now, my knees won’t let me come down once I have got up!

But I wasn’t always as you see me now. I often say that we oldies have the last laugh on the young who think they are immortal, and will never be old. We know that they will! Without wishing in any way to make them feel downhearted, we oldies know the reality, for we were once like them!

But enough of that. Today’s readings are all interconnected, and the connections are obvious. Moses encountering God in a cloud on Sinai, and Peter writing at first hand of his similar experience, all point to the gospel, to what happened on a mountain somewhere in Palestine some 2000 years ago.

It is one of those quirks of modern liturgy and the lectionary that we remember today what is traditionally celebrated in the month of August. In case that statement seems somewhat dense to you, let me try to explain.

In the church calendar, the Feast of the Transfiguration is on August 6th, but in the context of the New Testament, we are in the right place – the Sunday before Lent, at the end of Epiphany. .This is because according to the gospel framework of Matthew, it properly belongs here before the journey of Jesus to suffering and death in Jerusalem. But let me unpack that just a little.

Lent, as we are all aware, is the preparation time for Holy Week and Easter – the Passion, the death and resurrection of Jesus. In the gospels, particularly in Mark, which is the earliest, and the one used as a source by Matthew and Luke, there is a distinct framework – a time-line, if you like, which builds up from before the birth of Jesus, through his ministry, right through to his passion, death, and resurrection. Just before the Passion story begins, and Jesus sets his face to go to Jerusalem, as Luke puts it, this event is recalled, and so it is an appropriate theme for the Sunday before Lent. It is, if you like, a ‘bridge’ Sunday between Epiphany and Lent.

But just as Epiphany began with the revealing of Christ to the Gentiles in the form of the Wise Men, so now it ends with another epiphany – the revealing to the disciples of Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of God Peter alone had grasped this a little earlier at Caesarea Philippi when he said, in answer to the question of Jesus ‘who do you say I am?’, replied: ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God’. But the other disciples had been too dense to catch on. This epiphany, or manifestation of God, is a voice – the voice which was heard at the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan, and it seems as if it happens in order to convince the other disciples of the truth of Peter’s insight. Sometimes they needed beating over the head a little in order for the truth about Jesus to be conveyed to them.

No wonder we find it difficult to get the message across in these days! The disciples were there, and they didn’t get it. Mark especially shows them as being somewhat dim as to who Jesus was and what he was about. It has been my experience over more than forty years in the ministry of the church that many ministers, let alone Christian congregations, still don’t get it, and what is preached about and taught does little to help people live or tell the gospel. Present company excepted, of course!

What happened here was a mystical experience. We cannot rationalise it, and we are not meant to. But it was written by Matthew to convey a truth to those who first read it, and to those of us who read now it in 2008. I want to suggest that it is something like this.

Jesus takes a small group, just three, up a high mountain in order to reveal something to them. What Jesus wants them to know is that at some point in the future, the Son of man (which is a phrase loaded with meaning, and not to be confused wit ‘Son of God’) the Son of Man will come in glory to rule at the end of the age. He has said this plainly in the verses which precede the Transfiguration story. So it is, that phrases which occur in our gospel are also loaded with meaning – phrases such as ‘his face shone like the sun’, and ‘his clothes became dazzling white’. The appearance of Moses and Elijah is significant too. The Jews believed that they did not die, but were taken up into heaven alive, and that they would return to earth before the Messiah.

It is all rather complicated and technical, and I can see your eyes are beginning to glaze over, and perhaps you are losing the will to live! But the voice from the bright cloud is the crucial part of the story. It is saying to the disciples that this Jesus is indeed ‘the Son of Man’, the fulfilment of the Old Testament expectations, the one to whom we should pay attention, because he is the one who will judge at the end of the age.

Now, living in these days, when people find it difficult to reconcile the rational and the spiritual, we do have a problem with all this. Many of us would find it difficult to conceive of how the end of the age will manifest itself. In the New Testament, it is, literally, quite apocalyptic, and one cannot help feeling that it is all designed to encourage people into living their lives in a particular kind of way. This begs the question as to whether we need religion to engender morality, but let us leave that to one side for now.

What this Transfiguration story says to us today, I would suggest, is that it is not just about Jesus. It is also about us. Can we see ourselves in it?

You see, in our lives there is the tension between special spiritual experiences (we used to describe them as ‘mountain top experiences’) and the humdrum of the daily round and the common task. This is one reason why people like to dwell on the past –‘ how it used to be in so-and-so’s time’, or ‘how wonderful Billy Graham was’, or whatever you care to mention. There is an old hymn on the Transfiguration which Methodists sing, which catches the mood quite well. Peter wants to linger and take in the experience, but it is denied him. And the hymns says: ‘No, saith the Lord, the hour is past, we go; Our home, our life, our duties lie below, While here we kneel upon the mount of prayer, The plough lies waiting in the furrow there.’ We encounter the Christ as we serve him in the world. In our daily lives, we can and, indeed, do encounter Christ in experiences that transform us. In a later chapter in Matthew’s gospel (25) he records Jesus telling us that in the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the prisoner, we do indeed, and surprisingly, encounter him.

Yes, we rightly glory in the great occasions, like the ‘Big Sing’, for example. But let us not be blind to Christ in the every day experience. As another old Methodist hymn, a hymn in praise of work puts it: ‘raise the stone and you will find me/cleave the wood, and I am there’.

In the world we experience today, we swing at lightning speed from one to the other. We are on the mountain top one minute, and in the valley of the shadow the next. I think of that country very dear to my heart – Kenya – where the success of recent years was virtually wiped out overnight in the aftermath of the elections. It has been tragic. Of course, the signs were there, and some of us expected some turbulence. Part of it is ‘chickens coming home to roost’ from way back in colonial times. And in such a situation, it is not easy, perhaps, to see Christ, for he seems obscured by the cloud.

But he is there, just as he is here. He is just as much in the mountains of East Africa as on the mount of Transfiguration. He weeps over Kenya, just as he wept over Jerusalem. He suffers still with his people. As Christians there struggle to keep faith and bear witness to peace, integrity and justice, as they seek to bring transformation to that nation, as they struggle with tribalism and ethnicity and corruption, they need our prayers, our solidarity, our support.

Christ is, indeed, with them and us in the everyday routine of our lives. Like the disciples on the mountain top, we need to open our eyes, to look around us, and see Jesus, for he is never far from us.

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