First, we will be having an Ash Wednesday service on Wednesday, Feb 17th at 4 pm – weather permitting. And yes, we’ve figured out how to give you Ashes safely. Remember to wear a mask.
Our second announcement is this:
During Lent, and beginning Sunday, February 21, I will be posting online a study of the Gospel of John. Each day, there will be a link to a YouTube video about a different chapter of this most important Gospel, the Book of the Bible that points the clearest to whom Jesus was and what He did that tells us that He was the true Son of God. I hope you’ll join me in these and forward them to your friends. You’ll be able to find the links on the Cedar Grove Facebook page and through the prayer emails.
Why do we listen to scripture and sermons and sing hymns in church? The reason is very simple: Becoming a Christian is a journey, not a single event. Declaring that we will follow Jesus is just the first step on the journey, a recognition that Jesus is worthy of being followed. The weekly service and weekly Bible studies are the ways that we allow God to transform us from who we have been into someone who will be stronger, more likeable, more caring, and more capable, someone who will be able to change the world around us into a world that is more like God wants. God could change the world with a snap of His fingers – but for some reason God appears to believe that gradually changing people is the most important part of changing the world for the better. And so each week, we pray for God to transform us into a new creation.
Some Old Testament History
As part of that, I’d like to start this morning with a bit of a review of the history of ancient Israel. A while after Noah and the flood, a man named Abram was born. He grew up and God spoke to Abram, asking him to leave his home in what is modern day Iraq and walk to the land we know as Israel. Abram did this. God told Abram that he would be the father of a great nation, with more descendants than the number of stars Abram could see in the sky. God also changed Abram’s name to Abraham.Abraham’s grandson, who was originally named Jacob but who was renamed Israel by God, eventually took his twelve sons, his household and servants and went to Egypt to escape a famine in the Holy Land. His family stayed there 400 years and multiplied into twelve tribes, one for each son. This is found in the Book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible.
Eventually, the 600,000 members of his family left Egypt, led by Moses in the Book of Exodus. The Israelites escaped across the Red Sea and stayed in the desert forty years. Moses finally dies, but his body cannot be found. The twelves tribes are eventually being led by Joshua, Moses’ hand-picked successor, into the area of modern Israel, Jordan, and the West Bank, where the twelve tribes of Israel conquered the land. They settled down, ruled by short term leaders known as judges – people such as Deborah, Gideon, and Samson lived during this time.
A couple hundred years later a king – Saul, was chosen to lead the Israelites, as told in the First Book of Samuel. Saul led for several decades, but was later replaced by David – the grown man who had killed the giant Goliath as a teenager. David’s kingdom grew to extend well into modern-day Syria by the time of his natural death. David’s son Solomon, recognized for wisdom, became king.
After Solomon’s death, there was a civil war. The northern ten tribes became known as the Kingdom of Israel; the southern tribes of Judea and Benjamin became known as Judea, centered in Jerusalem. After some time, the king of Israel was Ahab and his wife was the daughter of the high priest of Ba-al from Lebanon, who brought many priests of the Ba-al cult into Israel. And one day a man named Elijah walked into Ahab’s palace and declared that there would be no rain until Elijah said so because the king and his family were leading the country to worship a false god. And for 3 ½ years, there was no rain.
Finally, Elijah challenged Ahab and the priests of Ba-al to a duel on top of Mount Carmel. Each side would build an altar and put a bull on it for sacrifice. Each side would pray to their god to light the fire of the altar. 700 priests of Ba-al were on one side, and Elijah was on the other side. Tens of thousands of ordinary people were watching. The priests of Ba-al prayed and danced and cut themselves and shrieked for hours – to no effect. Elijah prayed to God and fire fell from heaven, igniting the altar. Elijah took advantage of the situation to have the priests of Ba-al killed by the crowd, which upset Ahab and Jezebel. Elijah had to run into the wilderness.
Our Old Testament reading today picks up after Elijah has returned and taken on Elisha as his apprentice prophet. The two of them take a journey, crossing the Jordan River to the east, where Elijah is taken up into heaven, leaving Elisha to continue as replacement prophet.
Almost a thousand years later, Jesus and his twelve disciples have been walking around northern Israel. They travel to the north of the Sea of Galilee, the large freshwater lake in northern Israel, following the Jordan River north. Eventually, they come to Caesarea Philippi, a town at the foot of Mount Hermon, which forms a large part of what we call today the “Golan Heights”, a 9200 foot high mountain cluster.
In ancient times, particularly at the time of Elijah and Ahab, people were known for climbing to high places and building small shelters as small temples for various gods and goddesses. Remains of these small shelters can still be found on Mount Hermon.
After waiting six days at the foot of the mountain, just as God had Moses wait six days before coming up to Sinai, Jesus led Simon Peter, John, and James up onto Mt Hermon. They travel up the mountain, passing the small shelters dedicated to the gods and goddesses of old. It is a long, hard climb, but then again, isn’t everything that is worth great value?
After all, we know that it takes four hard, grueling years of campaigning to become elected President after years of working in other jobs.
We now know that Tom Brady gets up every morning at 5:30 AM, works out for 3 hours on his own, eats very carefully, spends the afternoon working out with the team, studies plays and the opponents for 3-4 hours, spends time with his family and goes to bed at 8:30 pm. That’s what it takes to become the greatest quarterback of all time.
It took years of working late into the night for Bill Gates to develop MS-DOS, the predecessor of Windows. That’s what it took to grow Microsoft into the greatest software company of all time.
It took extreme organization for Suzannah Wesley to raise 23 children and spend time with each one every day. It took tremendous planning for her to teach her youngest sons Greek and Hebrew before they were six years old, her youngest sons who were John and Charles Wesley, who would go on to found the Methodist movement.
It took Thomas Edison almost 10,000 failed attempts before he developed the first commercial lightbulb, trying all sorts of combinations of materials in an attempt to get the right combination that would last more than a couple of hours before burning out. That’s what it took to become known as the greatest inventor.
It is hard work climbing the mountain to see God.
Peter, James, and John followed Jesus up the mountain. And the oxygen at the top is much less than the oxygen at the surface, especially when you consider that the fishermen were used to working almost 800 feet BELOW sea level on the surface of the Sea of Galilee. It must have been a terribly exhausting climb as they reached 9000 ft above sea level, ten times the climb of Seneca Rocks, 8 times the height of the Empire State building, 20 times the height of the Washington Monument. Have you ever walked up the steps of the Washington Monument?
And they passed all those little shelters to the fake gods and goddesses of the past, walking past them as they climbed to the top where they were all alone with Jesus. Imagine that you are there…
The wind blows cold. You can see far to the south the 6 x 13 mile lake that is Galilee. The sun is bright, there aren’t any birds at this level, the winter’s snow is still on the ground, it reflects the sun so brightly, it is cold, our robes are dingy yellow compared to the snow, but…look at Jesus! He changed right before our eyes!
His robe is now dazzling white, whiter than the snow, whiter than the clouds, whiter than anyone could possibly bleach them, they seem to glow. And there are two other men, old men with long white beards, standing with Him, talking to Him, they are Elijah and Moses, the two men whose bodies were not left to be buried, the two men who spoke for God, the two men who were deemed the greatest prophets of the Old Testament. They were talking to Jesus, the rabbi, the teacher whom we had followed across half of Israel and whom we had followed up the mountain.
Imagine! We had walked with the man, we had talked with Him, we had eaten food with Him every day. We had met His mother, we had seen his brothers, we had shared bread with Him – and here He was, talking with Elijah and Moses, the two most important holy men our country had ever known!
And then Peter spoke up. Some people get quite when they are nervous; others babble. Peter was a babbler. “Rabbi”, he said, “It is good for us to be here. Let us put up three shelters – one for you, on for Moses, and one for Elijah.” Peter wanted to honor them with three little shelters like the pagans had honored their gods. He thought he was paying them a compliment as he babbled on.
A cloud moved across the top of the mountain and it also glowed. A tremendous Voice came from the cloud: “This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!” And we hit the ground, for God had just spoken to us and even Peter shut up!
When we looked up, only Jesus remained with us…
And as we walked down the mountain, Jesus told us not to tell anyone what we had seen until He rose from the dead. And we kept the matter to ourselves, trying to figure out what “rising from the dead” meant. It would be months before we found out it meant exactly what it sounds like.
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The effect upon the three disciples was deep. After all, imagine that you suddenly found your high school English Literature teacher was actually Earnest Hemingway’s son, or your high school physics teacher was Albert Einstein’s daughter. Imagine your swim coach’s mother was an Olympic champion or your driving instructor won Daytona last year. Imagine your friend invites you over to join him and his uncle for dinner, and his uncle turns out to be Dr Charles Stanley. Would you listen closer to any of them as they taught you?
That day on the mountain, the disciples got confirmation that Jesus was indeed God’s Son. They were told that God loved Jesus, that Jesus was God’s beloved Son, and they were ordered to LISTEN TO HIM. And if they were told to listen to him, then we should also listen to him. (We should note that a similar declaration was not given about Elijah and Moses, for Jesus is by far the most important, as the Son of God.)
The disciples were shaken. They had recognized that Jesus was speaking on behalf of God, a prophet, perhaps almost as important as Moses or Elijah. He was a deep teacher, better than any they had run into, even better than John the Baptizer. Peter had even declared a few days earlier that Jesus was the Anointed One, the Messiah. But the events on the mountain made it clear that Jesus was far more important than Moses or Elijah. And so witnessing the transfiguration of Jesus resulted in the transformation of the disciples.
No longer could they simply act like students listening and following around to a particularly good preacher – they now knew they were following God’s Son, and they had heard God’s Voice tell them to listen to Him. It made a difference to them; It should make a difference to us.
No longer could they simply decide from time to time to take a vacation from the travels; no longer could they decide to skip a teaching time; no longer could they hang back in the crowd and just talk with each other while Jesus was talking… For, you see, they had recognized that Jesus’ words were truly from God Himself, and that meant their eternal souls were dependent upon every word that Jesus said.
And finally, it meant that when Jesus was resurrected and then returned to Heaven, these disciples would continue to spread Jesus’ teachings throughout the world. James became a leader of the church in Jerusalem until he was beheaded by King Herod. Peter traveled around the Holy Land and then to Babylon in Iraq with Mark, and then to Rome until he was crucified upside down by the Emperor Nero because, Peter said, he was not worthy to be crucified in the same way Jesus was. And John traveled to Ephesus in western Turkey, a Greek town at that time, where he wrote his Gospel and then was exiled to the island of Patmos off the Turkish coast, where he saw the visions that he wrote down as the Revelation of St John, the final book in the Bible that tells of the return of Jesus in the future. Each of these men became fully convinced that Jesus was indeed the Son of God and that day on the mountain was a huge part of that convincing.
Forget what you may have heard about Christian belief being focused upon a set of do’s and don’ts. No, traditional Christianity has held for almost 2000 years that Jesus was sent to earth by God as the walking, talking, breathing, eating representative of God, as God’s Son, the Prince of the Universe to explain where we had gone wrong in making following the moral law to the letter more important than doing good, than loving God and each other.
Jesus came to speak on behalf of God – and was the highest form of ambassador from God – the Son of the King of the Universe, the One who was present at the Creation, through whom everything that was made was made. The words and deeds of Jesus Christ are the most important story ever recorded – and you can find those words and deeds in the first four books of the New Testament – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And if you are new to Christianity, you will be shocked by what you find there.
You will not find a tremendous list of do’s and don’ts. Instead, you will find a man who kept pointing people back to God – and telling people to show love for each other. You will find a man who was focused upon helping the outcasts of society – and the common people. He hung out with prostitutes, with tax collectors, with Roman soldiers, with lepers. You will find a man who healed many – and who helped beggars move back into regular society. And you will find a man who cared deeply for wealthy people who were hooked by their worldly wealth and were unable to walk away from their wealth so they could live again and find spiritual wealth.
If you are listening now to me, I’d like you to consider taking some of this time we’ve been given – this time COVID has given us – and use this time to begin reading your Bible. If you don’t have one, google the online Bible at biblegateway.com. Read the gospels of Mark and of John, which will do you the most good. They were written by Mark, who spent much time with Peter – and by John. Peter and Mark, two men who saw Jesus transfigured upon that mountaintop and heard the Voice of God telling them that God loved Jesus, who was His Son, and for us to listen to Him.
Check us out at cedargroveunitedmethodist.org online and on Facebook, and in person. We’ll be ready to help you understand the depth and breadth and height of God’s love for you. We’ll be ready to help you learn to be transformed as you learn about the transfiguration of Jesus.
Prayer
Let us pray:God of the Universe, lead us to speak on Your behalf. Lead us to accomplish Your mission in this world. Give us people to speak to, the words to say, and fill us with Your Holy Spirit so we may speak with gentleness and grace, leading people to Your Son, Jesus, sharing His guidance, praying to Him, looking expectantly to eternal life, worshiping our God, and being assured of the Truth. This we pray in the name of Jesus. Amen.
Benediction
Heavenly Father, bless us and guide us each one, that one day you may say about us, “These are my daughters and sons, whom I love, in them I am well pleased. “Go and serve the Lord! Amen !
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