St. Matthew's Sermons

Sermon for the Feast of the Transfiguration | 2023
By Fr. Hayden A. Butler

I came of age in a tradition of conservative Christianity that laid special emphasis on the power of Christ’s sacrifice, the necessity of converting the heart, the lifelong benefits of studying the Scriptures, and the natural spiritual work of proclaiming the Gospel. What I learned in the company of those who were at that time called evangelicals formed in me enduring spiritual habits that found their home when I came back to the Anglican roots of my Wesleyan childhood faith. As Anglicans were the first and best evangelicals, so in seeking the excellence of that way of practicing the faith I was led, as it were, from tent revivals in the fields to the quiet prayerfulness of churches like St. Matthew’s.

Like any tradition, evangelicals also had their peculiarities. Among the cultural quirks of life as an evangelical, in particular, was the annual observance of ‘the mountaintop experience.’ At least once a year, usually at a retreat or camp, evangelicals spend three days carefully reiterating the core Scriptural pillars of Creation, Fall, Law, Prophecy, Gospel, and Faith in Christ. This culminates on the final evening of the retreat, at which time a heightened emotional environment was curated, during which the retreat leader hammered home the fact that Jesus’ atoning sacrifice on the Cross was indeed for you and ushered the gathering to receive it again, usually with tears of contrition and gratitude. This was the mountaintop experience of my youth. The whole year led up to it; it was when the faith felt most real, though at times it had the effect of making the rest of time feel ordinary by comparison. One gentle critique of this practice was that it set up an opposition in the life of a Christian: only on the mountain was life real and the rest of the time was spent trying to cling to it at the expense of attentiveness to the demands of love in the moment. The mountaintop experience is rightly critiqued in this way, but it cannot be dispensed with easily or entirely.

In fact, the mountaintop experience is a frequent Biblical motif. The Lord seems to enjoy meeting with people at pivotal times in this way. Consider Moses in the Exodus, who encounters God on Mt. Sinai in the burning bush to receive his calling, and who later would return to that same mountain to receive the Law for Israel and see more than any before Him the glory of the Lord revealed. Consider as well, though, how it was on a mountain that Moses was allowed to view the Promised Land knowing he would not himself enter it, how it was on a mountaintop that Moses was led by the Lord to die in the wilderness. Next, consider Elijah, the greatest of the prophets until John the Baptist. Elijah’s faith in the Lord was gloriously rewarded on Mt. Carmel when he confronted and conquered the prophets of Baal. Yet it was also on Mt. Horeb that Elijah hid in a cave from those who sought his life, in near despair and waiting on the cliff’s edge for the stillness of God. The mountain can be the place where deep and intimate communion with God is known, and also where a profound test and challenge to that faith can be experienced. It is where we can be shown clearly our own real limits but also where God reveals Himself to be sufficient in that weakness.

Jesus Himself knew this dual quality of the mountaintop experience. It was on a mountaintop that He received His third temptation in the wilderness, presented with all the kingdoms of the world. And it was there that He received the consolation of the angels when He had passed the test to commence His ministry. It was on a mountain that Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount as lawgiver, on a mountain that He miraculously fed the multitudes. It was on the mountain on which sat Jerusalem and its Temple that Jesus accomplished on the Cross the suffering foretold for the Son of Man, the same mountain on which Abraham had been called to sacrifice Isaac, and on which it was said the Garden of Eden once stood. And it was on the mountain that our Lord led His disciples and was lifted into heaven, the last mountaintop of the Scriptures….until of course, the vision of the new heavens and earth where all the faithful are to be gathered on the one remaining mountain, the new Jerusalem.

The Transfiguration of Christ on the mountain shapes our understanding of all mountaintop experiences in at least three ways. First, it reveals that all genuine mountaintop experiences are connected, none of them are a matter of private revelation, but a communal revelation unfolded over centuries to many. Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Peter, James, and John all behold the same God who reveals Himself more and more but without negating or disagreeing with any prior revelation. The Covenant, the Law, the Prophets, the Gospel, and the Faith all look to Christ from before and after. What is revealed on Mt. Tabor is the end of history revealed in the midst of history, the glorious Christ proclaimed by the Father in the Spirit. Spiritual experiences are not the reward for eccentric spiritual individualism; revelations are given to some as a gift for the benefit of all. That Peter, James, and John are brought together suggests that the revelation is to be held in common by disciples of the apostolic faith. They received a vision of what will be revealed to all the faithful. And that they join Moses and Elijah suggests to us that any revelation we might think we are having is never going to be fundamentally different from what is revealed by the witness of the Scriptures of the Law, Prophets, Gospels, Epistles and Apocalypse. The Word and the Spirit are always on the same team.

Second, the Transfiguration reveals that the mountaintop experience is connected to the whole of life around it. It is not, as we sometimes see it, a replacement for the ordinary Christian life, but rather the orientation and reorientation of that ordinary life. For the apostles, the Transfiguration reveals Christ in His glory and affirms His words to them at the foot of the mountain: that He must go up to Jerusalem to suffer, a message they immediately resisted. It is the case in the Christian life that diligence to the daily taking up of our crosses to follow Jesus can seem less preferable to some intense and special task that only we are granted. It is easy for us to be tempted by a desire to be spectacular. But the Transfiguration cements through an extraordinary experience what Jesus had said in plain words along the way. His words and His signs always go together. This reorients our perspective on the Christian life to see more clearly that the astonishing sign follows the word of the Lord, and suggests to us that if we hope to be present for the mountain we can do no better than to attend to the Lord as He leads us and speaks His word to us in the valley.

Third, the Transfiguration reveals that the God to whom we are called to the mountain to meet is also the One who leads us there and the One who comes down with us. The mountaintop experience is not, as we can sometimes think, the only place where God really is. We must be wary of a Christian tendency to privilege a revivalist tendency that disparages the ordinary presence of God in the normal course of life in order to point us to the special place over yonder where God actually is…which we will find usually requires some price of admission or subscription fee. Rather, to be found in prayer with the brethren, to receive the same sacraments that have always been received through the generations, to look for, converse with, and listen to the Lord in the mundane details of life and the flow of love’s demands, this is where God truly is. If we are occasionally refreshed by a sudden gift of knowing He is with us, and that He is the Lord, then it is for our consolation and a reminder that He is with us always. Enthusiasm and felt consolation come and go, but He is constant. We learn through the contrasting experiences of life that our Lord is as present to us on the mountain as He is to us in all of life–even if it is there that we are given the sight to see Him most clearly for a time.

Ultimately, the end of the Christian life is to arrive where Peter, James, and John arrived on Mt. Tabor: beyond Scripture and Sacrament, at the end there is Jesus Himself–whom we shall see face to face in the New Creation. Nothing will hide His face from our sight there. To those who have in the course of time sought Him in His Church, in His Word, at His altar, and in the hearts and minds of His faithful people, like it was for Peter, it will be the last sight we ever wish to see. We will want to make our home there because all of life will become about Him and only the things we find in Him on that last great mountain of New Jerusalem and New Eden, where at last we will be brought to rest. Until then, we will continue to offer in the valley of life the words of the Psalmist: “I lift up my eyes to the mountains. From where does my help come? My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth.”