Transfiguration Sunday

Richard Davenport February 23, 2023 - The Transfiguration of Our Lord Exodus 24:8-18 Exodus 24 is sandwiched in the middle of a bunch of other important stuff God gives to the Israelites. It all starts back in chapter 20 with the giving of the Ten Commandments. Then follows another couple of chapters of laws and ordinances, most applying to the civil realm to govern their life as citizens of the kingdom of Israel. There are also some religious ordinances that govern their lives as God's people. The next seven chapters all deal with the workings of the tabernacle, how the altar will be constructed, how the priests will be dressed and how they'll be consecrated, and that sort of thing. So it's in between all of this that we find this little scene in Exodus 24. God has given Moses the Ten Commandments and a number of other laws to share with the people. Then he follows up by reminding them what he is promising to do. At the end of Exodus 23, God reaffirms the goal. This is what he told the Israelites at the very beginning, before they had even left Egypt. God tells them all about how the Passover is going to work and why it is so important. They will soon be leaving Egypt and escaping their slavery there. But to goal isn't really to get out from Egypt. The goal is to go to the Promised Land, and God explains this to them as they prepare to leave. They are going somewhere and God's promise to them isn't complete until they arrive. God makes that clear again in Exodus 23. This is the goal, the Promised Land. It is a land that is currently inhabited by all sorts of pagan people, but God will deal with that problem. He doesn't need them to assist in that process. Instead, his only requirements are that they reserve their worship for him alone and that they not cave in and let the people continue to stay in the land. The pagan people will hold on to their pagan ways and drag everyone else down with them. So there in Exodus 23, God lays out the covenant, ""Behold, I send an angel before you to guard you on the way and to bring you to the place that I have prepared. Pay careful attention to him and obey his voice; do not rebel against him, for he will not pardon your transgression, for my name is in him. But if you carefully obey his voice and do all that I say, then I will be an enemy to your enemies and an adversary to your adversaries." God has already claimed them. He has already brought them out of Egypt at this point. They are already his people. The question now is what will their relationship look like? God has many blessings to give them, but they can only receive them if they stay with him. If they go off to worship other gods, then they are looking for those same blessings in the wrong places. Moses recounts to them everything God had said. He's laying out the terms of the covenant. God will drive out their enemies. God will curb the diseases that afflicted people in the ancient world. God will ensure their harvests were plentiful. God will prevent miscarriages and lengthen the lives of the inhabitants. Moses reads all of this to the Israelites and they respond, "All the words that the LORD has spoken we will do." It's then that we get to the part we have for today, where Moses offers up sacrifices to God and then takes the blood of the sacrifices and sprinkles it on the people. God is making clear who is a part of the covenant. God sets the terms of the covenant. The people agree, and God invites the representatives of the nation up the mountain to share in a meal. The connection to Communion comes through here loud and clear. We come up and share a meal with God. At the Last Supper, Jesus even refers to the cup as "the blood of the new covenant," or "new testament" if depending on where you hear it, the word is used either way. In both cases, a legally binding arrangement. He's telling us that everything that goes on here back in Exodus 24 should be kept in mind as we share the sacrament together. Jesus shares his blood with those he has claimed as his people. The covenant God makes with the people here in Exodus is renewed, amplified, for it is not the old covenant, but a new covenant. The old is meant to prepare for the new. The basic parameters are still the same though. God claims his people and they worship him alone. Anyone who runs off to worship other gods has broken the covenant. Each claiming the other exclusively. At that point it starts to sound a lot like marriage. Unsurprisingly, marriage is a theme God uses more than a few times as he describes his relationship to his people, the church. They are his and he is theirs. It's also why he describes them as adulterous people when they promise to worship him alone but then go off to worship other gods. This is why the Israelites get into such trouble later. They made a commitment and they abandoned it. They sought security, happiness, pleasure, and everything else everywhere but God. They no longer wanted to be exclusive. The fact that they had made that commitment no longer mattered. The parallels to adultery are pretty evident and God uses that example as well, even referring to them as an adulterous people. Breaking the commitment is bad enough, but the people then assumed their relationship with God would continue unchanged. They could go off and do whatever they wanted and God would still be bound by his commitment to shower all this good stuff on them. Having their cake and eating it too. We continue to fall into the same patterns. We've committed ourselves to God as well and he has committed himself to us. We may not be going out worshiping gods of other religions, but we do look to all sorts of other things in the hopes they'll do for us what God has promised to do. We look to the government to provide for us and protect us from all harm. We look to modern medicine to solve all of our ailments. We follow the new positive thinking of the day or the newly discovered wisdom of ancient times with the expectation that this will sort out the spiritual malaise we find ourselves in. When we find ourselves in trouble of any sort, the first person we should talk to is the one who promised to care for us and be with us at all times. Yet, he is often the last person we talk to. Still, when we go hunting for all of the things we want in all of the wrong places, and when those things fail us, we get mad at God anyway. He was supposed to do his job, even when we didn't do ours. He was supposed to keep all of this from happening. He was supposed to protect and provide for us. He was supposed to bring joy and peace. We blame him even though we're the ones who did the leaving. There's a reason God warns against adultery. Running around creating shallow relationships with lots of other people loses sight of the fact that the kind of peace, joy, and contentment can only be found in the kind of relationship that requires a great deal of time and effort, a relationship created by sacrificing what is yours and giving it to another, and having them do the same in return. As the Israelites did, many times we don't take our commitments very seriously and we operate as if we should be able to do whatever we want without any consequences. Then we get mad at God for not living up to his end of the bargain. But, contrary to our own interpretation of how things ought to operate and what we should be able to expect, God isn't the one bringing the heartache, the grief, the frustration, and anxiety that we find as we chase after all of these other solutions to our physical and spiritual problems. They are the natural result of abandoning the one who made the promise, the commitment to do all of those things for us, to love us sacrificially. When St. Paul talks about marriage in Ephesians, he says the relationship between a husband and wife reflects the love Christ has for the church. That gives new meaning to Christ's words at the Last Supper. Where before God claimed his people by the blood of the covenant, Christ does so again by the blood of the new covenant. As we see the error of our ways, as we find all of our own efforts just leading to more grief, we also acknowledge that we're the ones who have failed in our commitments and deserve everything we have brought on ourselves. Then we hear again the voice of Jesus, the one who loves us so much he is willing to commit himself to us. We hear the voice of Jesus who says that his blood is for the forgiveness of sins. We who have sinned, we who have left him to go our own way should be treated with shame and scorn. We should be thrown out for our atrocious treatment of God, but he loves us and nothing we do will change that. He is always willing to take us back, even if that means forgiving all of our past offenses. He is willing to do so if it means we can move forward. The blood of the new covenant, given to us again every time we approach the altar. Every time, Christ puts aside whatever has come before and repeats again the commitment he made, the vow he took, to be our God and we, the collective people of God, lift our hearts to him, repeating our commitment to be his people and worship him alone. Despite everything we've done, he is willing to take us back, to be our God once again. This happy scene in Exodus 24 will very soon be marked by anger and sadness. The Israelites waste no time in rushing off to literally worship another god, made with their own hands. But even this doesn't change who he is and what he has committed to do. The life of the nation of Israel is a constant cycle of adultery and return. They chase after all sorts of other gods, other ways of living. Their lives suffer on account of it. God calls them back and, when they return, they are forgiven and start again. This hasn't changed. We, as God's people, continue the same cycle. But God's love and forgiveness haven't changed either. He is always waiting for us here. He is ready to take us back. He expresses his love for us again, his people, his church. We celebrate the wedding feast again every Sunday. Transfiguration Sunday has quite a lot going on. In this case, we reflect on how God comes to earth to bring us back to him. Jesus reveals who he is to the disciples on the mountain. He is the same God. He is the same one who claimed his people so long ago and who always will.