EXODUS 24:12-18

PSALM 99

PHILIPPIANS 3:7-14

MATTHEW 17:1-9

Sermon – 2/10/02

Today in our world and even in this country there is expressed a fervent hunger for the spiritual, for the real, for the personal, for the authentic, for the intense experience – and sometimes the same person is seeking all of them. If any of these apply to you, stay tuned, for today’s Scriptures are about all of them: the intense, authentic, personal, real, spiritual experiences of three biblical “Hall of Famers” (Moses, Peter and Paul) with God.

People may go looking for these kinds of experiences in all sorts of places, often with results which are mixed or worse. Some Internet relationships turn out to be anything but authentic, chemically induced “highs” are anything but spiritual, and some church experiences (let’s face it) are neither personal, nor intense, nor “real” in a positive way.

The experience of God, however, is definitely real, intense, authentic, personal and spiritual. Meeting God is not like unexpectedly bumping into your cousin when you’re at Disneyworld. It is perhaps more like going swimming in the ocean and unexpectedly finding yourself in the grip of by far the strongest undertow you’ve ever experienced while being inside the most beautiful wave you’ve ever seen filled with dazzling light and color and never wanting the moment to end and not knowing if you’ll live through it and then being safely and gently deposited on the beach and being both relieved and disappointed that it is over. The authentic experience of God makes us truly aware that God really is “a power greater than oneself” who is indescribably awesome, almost tangible, and tenderly personal at the same time.

People go searching for this kind of experience (whether they know it or not) but, as St. Augustine of Hippo in North Africa said 1,600 years ago, “Every person has a God-shaped hole in them which only God can fill.” If your goal in life is to experience only the fake, the boring, the bogus, the impersonal and the materialistic,

tune out now; otherwise, follow me into the lives of Moses, Peter and Paul.

By the time we get to Exodus Chapter 24, Moses has twice lost secure, settled lifestyles. He was born one of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt, but was taken in as an infant by Pharaoh’s daughter even when Pharaoh was slaughtering male Hebrew infants. Moses grew up in a privileged position in the Egyptian royal household – which he threw away as a young man when, identifying with his fellow Hebrew by birth, he struck down an Egyptian who was abusing a Hebrew slave. Guilty of manslaughter, Moses escaped to the remote Sinai Peninsula, where he married a local woman, got taken into the tribe and became established as a shepherd, a husband and a father.

That was that – until one day he turned aside while shepherding to see a bush that was burning but was not consumed, and God Almighty spoke to him and commissioned him to go, “get in the face” of the most powerful dictator on earth and tell that Pharaoh to let the people of Israel go. Moses endured trials and tribulations, the glorious deliverance of the people by God from slavery into freedom – and from chaos into the rule of law when Moses received the 10 Commandments from God on Mt. Sinai.

Moses endured great hardships, repeated dissension among the people and burdens of leadership which weighted heavily on him. Instead of the quiet, predictable low stress life he had chosen, he had 40 years of leadership in conditions we in 2002 would call “being on high alert” all the time. He complained to God about the burdens; and God helped him.

But never, never did he say “God, I wish I’d never met You.” Never, never did he say, “I wish I was back herding sheep and had never looked twice at that burning bush.” Coming to know God more than made up for all manner of hardships and stresses for him; no wonder it says in today’s passage that Moses stayed on the mountaintop for “forty days”. He had a hunger for the holy, which could only be satisfied by a relationship with The Holy One.

Peter had a life which was as predictable and difficult as he wanted: being a fisherman in the Sea of Galilee. It’s a hard life and a dangerous life, but people will often choose the challenges and risks they know over ones they don’t.

But one day this guy Jesus came along and Peter dropped everything and followed him. Peter heard Jesus summarize and expand upon all the teachers who had ever gone before him, he was there when Jesus drew thousands of people to hear him preach, he witnessed Jesus heal people of the scariest and most intractable illnesses, he was at his side when he raised the dead. On the day described in this morning’s Gospel, Peter hiked up a mountain with Jesus, wanted to preserve a momentary vision that could not be preserved, and then heard the Voice of God and hit the ground, cowering in fear. Peter experienced the glory, the awe and the fear, caught in that all-powerful “undertow” and that beautiful wave.

Peter later vowed to stay with Jesus to the very end and then denied him three times, to his overwhelming shame. Peter was after Jesus’ resurrection, forgiven, then commissioned to preach and lead boldly – and he did both, in front of the same soldiers and police who had tortured and executed his Lord. He was a new man – and from that time on he never either denied Jesus nor wished he never known him.

Ultimately, in fact Peter too was crucified – head down according to tradition, since he told the Roman soldiers he was not worthy to die as Christ had died. So the needlepoint on the wall between floors which has “the Keys of the Kingdom of heaven” crisscrossed on an upside-down cross is Peter’s emblem.

Moses and Peter both started out trying to do things with only their own wisdom and their own strength, which ended with Moses fleeing after killing the Egyptian and with Peter denying Christ. Later, guided by God’s wisdom, empowered by God’s strength and transformed by the direct experience of God, they gave up their old lives and never looked back. Their experience of the Holy One made all the suffering and loss worthwhile.

Paul, never shy about speaking about himself, most explicitly addresses this point. Paul had been a “rising star” in the Jewish community: a diligent and fanatical Pharisee who was a disciple of the great Rabbi Gameliel. All his status, both that inherited and that achieved as a Jew, he forfeited when he became convinced that Jesus was indeed the long awaited Messiah of the Jews but in an awesomely unexpected way, as the Son of God. Paul became a pariah to those he had known, and the center of often-violent controversy wherever he went.

When he wrote his Letter to the Philippians, Paul had already suffered much persecution due to his devotion to Christ – and if you could hop into a time machine and tell him he would be ultimately executed by the Romans due to his faith, it probably would not have surprised him.

He writes, “Whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss, because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him...I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.”

Let us “fast forward” historically to another figure, just two generations past Paul: Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, a major Middle Eastern city, who died at the hands of the Romans in the year 117 for the crime of failing to honor the emperor as Lord. To Christians, only Jesus is Lord, and to regard any mortal as Lord was (and is) blasphemy.

The punishment the Romans decreed was not death by lethal injection or firing squad – nothing that quick. Ignatius, like many other Christians, was thrown into the arena in Rome in the midst of ravenous wild beasts, who tore him apart.

He knew what was coming. While being taken to Rome for this purpose, chained at the time to ten Roman soldiers, he wrote this letter to the churches he passed, asking that they not try to rescue him. I quote:

“I shall willingly die for God, unless you hinder me...

“Let fire and the cross; let the crowds of wild beasts; let tearings, breakings and dislocations of bones; let cutting of members; let shatterings of the whole body; and let all the dreadful tortures of the devil come upon me; only let me get to Jesus Christ.

“All the pleasures of the world, and all the Kingdoms of this earth, shall profit me nothing. It is better for me to die on behalf of Jesus Christ, than to reign over all the ends of the earth.” ‘For what shall a man be profited, if he gain the whole world, but lose his own soul?’ Him I seek, who died for us; Him I desire, who rose again for our sake.”

Intense enough for you? Real? Authentic? Personal? Spiritual? Perhaps in a way you’ve rarely heard before, these men all wanted something more than anything else they could ever imagine – and wanted to share that holy want with others, indeed to stimulate that holy want in others, so that it would eclipse all bogus or dangerous wants they might be prone to.

They wanted God. Almost as much as God wanted them. Almost as much as God wants us.

God wants to save us from all that is phony, false and dangerous, including within ourselves, and to bring us to God’s self as part of a transformed community of humanity. God wants that so much he was willing to die so as to take away all the barriers of sin that separate people from God.

Do you have a hunger for the real, the authentic, the intense, the spiritual, the personal relationship which God wants to have with you?

Are you ready to “put your toe in the water”, to meet God one tenth of the way? Then you are ready to move from the “mountaintop” of today’s Scripture readings and plunge into the challenging, healing, transforming waters of Lent.

See you on Wednesday.

(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church