Transfiguration Sunday - Jesus in Context

Scripture: Mark 9:2-9

Mark 9:2–9 NIV

2 After six days Jesus took Peter, James and John with him and led them up a high mountain, where they were all alone. There he was transfigured before them. 3 His clothes became dazzling white, whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them. 4 And there appeared before them Elijah and Moses, who were talking with Jesus. 5 Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here. Let us put up three shelters—one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.” 6 (He did not know what to say, they were so frightened.) 7 Then a cloud appeared and covered them, and a voice came from the cloud: “This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!” 8 Suddenly, when they looked around, they no longer saw anyone with them except Jesus. 9 As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus gave them orders not to tell anyone what they had seen until the Son of Man had risen from the dead.

2/11/2024

Order of Service:

Announcements

Opening Worship

Mission Moment

Prayer Requests

Prayer Song

Pastoral Prayer

Kid’s Time

Offering (Doxology and Offering Prayer)

Scripture Reading

Sermon

Closing Song

Benediction

Special Notes:

Week 2: Mission Moment

Opening Prayer:

Heavenly Father, thank you for sending your Son Jesus to us to lead us back to You. We have heard Your Holy Spirit call us to come and worship You today. May our praise bring You honor and glory. Open our ears to Your Word today to guide us and fill us with Your Spirit so we can follow You faithfully. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Children’s Moment:

Jesus in Context

Over the past five weeks, we have read and learned about the five covenants of the Old Testament – the relationships God had with His people. Perhaps you noticed that each new covenant was similar to the ones before. Adam and Eve were tasked with tending creation for and with God. Noah was shown that God judges us and shows us mercy as we care for His creation. Abraham was given a blessing that He was to receive and share with others, and Moses showed the entire nation of Israel how to live into that blessing and share it with the world. Finally, David’s covenant with God showed us that God does not just want us to do things for Him; he wants us to live with Him, almost circling back to Adam and Eve in the Garden.

While those people were all different, and their situations changed drastically, God did not change, and His desire to adopt us as His children through this Holy Covenant did not change either. One of the reasons God had five different Covenants with His people was that they kept breaking those relationships. When people consistently break promises they make to us, we often distance ourselves from them or break that relationship entirely. God disciplined His people and then offered them mercy by giving them a new covenant relationship with Him again – or perhaps reinstating the original covenant in a new way.

We struggle to maintain our covenant relationship with God. He is perfect, and we are not. Like any lopsided relationship, He bears the burden of our faults and imperfections. We know we cannot give God everything He deserves, even on our best days, and that puts us in a very tenuous balancing act as we live our lives daily. It sometimes feels like a balancing act because we don’t always know exactly what to do in each situation and don’t always have the strength to do it.

But the truth is, we cannot figure out the balance of life on our own. We end up with broken covenants between each other, and especially with God, and we cannot repair them. We make our mistakes, act out in impulsive behavior, or choose to trust the wrong people or things, and then we are stuck with the consequences of the broken relationships that follow. God, the one who could lead and guide us back into the right relationships, is the one we end up hurting the most. Like everyone before us, we seem doomed to fail and break our covenant relationship with God.

However, our scripture today shows us that Jesus is God's answer to all our broken covenants with God.

Fulfilled

This moment of transfiguration was an experience that helped three disciples understand that Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament covenants. While they probably did not yet understand how Jesus fulfilled those covenants for them, they suspected that He was much closer to God than anyone they had ever met. If anyone could live that life in perfect balance, giving to God what He was owed and living in a right relationship with Him, it was Jesus. He checked all the boxes, and He was their teacher, the one who showed them how to live for God.

I’m not sure we can fully appreciate the spiritual and emotional weight that Peter, James, and John encountered on the mountain with Jesus that day. They were nearing the end of their time with Jesus. He had dropped some short remarks about his coming death, but there had been so many healing miracles -- so much life coming from Jesus that I think they may have ignored or misunderstood those warnings. They were so close to Jerusalem. They were sure the time was near when Jesus would gather all the true Israelites and lead them to freedom and victory.

No one had been able to lead, teach, heal, and empower the people of God the way Jesus did for centuries if not a thousand years. He performed miracles like the greatest prophets and spoke with the kind of authority they imagined only Moses had when he brought the covenant down from Mt. Sinai. They could not compare Jesus to any leader before because He seemed to embody the greatest strengths of all their leaders.

As Jesus gathered His three most trusted disciples together, they were suddenly blinded by a white light from his clothes. As their eyes slowly adjusted, they saw two other figures, whom they recognized as Moses and the prophet Elijah, speaking with Jesus. This would have been one of the greatest moments in their life.

This moment went far beyond meeting someone famous. If George Washington and Abraham Lincoln came to life to choose our nation’s next leader while we watched, that experience wouldn’t hold a candle to what Peter, James, and John felt on the mountain that day. It is hard to grasp the enormity of seeing Moses and Elijah with their hero, teacher, and friend that day. But God, in His infinite wisdom, offers us an example.

For us to come close to understanding what they felt in that moment would be like those same disciples, Peter, James, and John, who helped write the New Testament gospels and letters, coming back to tell us what we needed to do to be more faithful followers of Jesus. These were the men who not only wrote some of the scriptures but also lived them. The gospel stories were about their lives as they learned directly from Jesus. They not only knew His teaching by heart, they knew what Jesus looked and smelled like... they could tell you whether He snored in His sleep on the boat as they sailed into the storm. These were the men who first wrote John 3:16 and heard Jesus say it for the first time. Meeting them today might bring us close to the overwhelming excitement they felt in the presence of Moses and Elijah, the two men who helped write and live their scriptures.

Naturally, they wanted to do something to honor Jesus and these men who were legends in their minds, second only to God. The three of them were the voices that carried God’s Word to the people for more than a thousand years. Nevermind the light show, if Moses and Elijah are willing to come to this place, let’s build a structure around it and mark this as Holy Ground. (Does this sound like what David wanted to do with God in building Him a Temple?) They wanted to sear this moment in their memories forever and share it with the world. But this was only the beginning of their experience. Jesus did not want them left to be witnesses from the outside. He wanted them to participate in this Holy moment.

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Silence and Secrets

So, God did His part and spoke to the three disciples. Five hundred years of silence ended that day. It had ended thirty years earlier with Mary and Joseph and the parents of John the Baptist. But for Peter, James, and John, who had never heard God speak to them and had been raised believing that God no longer spoke to His people, the silence from heaven ended. In two short sentences, God told them everything they needed to know for the rest of their lives. He told them how to live a life that was obedient to Him and helped them stay in the right relationship with each other. He told them how to live in a world where they were an oppressed and persecuted people. God told them in two sentences more wisdom than they could have learned studying the scriptures with the most excellent teachers, even with Moses and Elijah themselves. What did God say to them?

“This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!”

The thoughts of building memorial shelters were gone. The idea of comparing Jesus with the great leaders of the faith had vanished. For Peter, at least, there was a new realization that Jesus was more than just a man. He was the Son of God. We often wonder how Peter knew when Jesus asked that Jesus was the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of God. There’s no need to wonder. Peter knew because God told him so.

“This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!”

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And then everything vanished before their eyes. With their heads spinning, thinking it would be years before they fully understood what they had experienced just then, Jesus gave them the first instruction -- their next step -- after the voice of God told them to listen to Him. What did Jesus say? He told them to keep that experience a secret until He had risen from the dead.

Wait! What?!

The shepherds come to the manger to see a baby born. It’s all “Go Tell it on the Mountain, over the hills and everywhere...” but God brings back Moses and Elijah from the dead and then speaks to these three fishermen, and suddenly, they were supposed to keep it all a secret until later.

There is a unique trick the tempter uses on us when we have heard from God. It is the desire to pass on something we have not lived or fully understood. It is the temptation that cripples the power of sharing God’s Word and teaching with others. It is the Achille’s heel of preachers throughout history, the weak spot in the armor of teachers, and the place where relationships fall apart between parents and their children. At its most basic level, it is the hypocrisy of telling others to do as I say but not as I do. But it grows to a greater level of inconsistency when we tell others to do as we say, regardless of whether we understand what we are saying, let alone live it out as an example. When we jump in too early to share what God speaks to us, we risk miscommunicating God’s Word to others.

Sometimes, we do this out of mistaken zeal and excitement about our experiences, wanting to share those feelings with others. Other times, we feel the heat and conviction of God’s Spirit working and changing us, and, like the game of hot potato, we cannot pass it off fast enough. Often, the things we preach and teach the loudest and most often are the things we struggle to deal with ourselves.

There is another reason we refuse to keep what God shares with us to ourselves. We know that there are some things He shares with us individually, not to be shared with the rest of the world. We know they may not be ready to hear it yet. But sometimes, we don’t trust that God has everyone else’s best interest in mind. We feel He might not get around to speaking to them or perhaps cannot reach them. So, we take matters into our own hands to reach the world for Him on our terms rather than His.

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Listen to Jesus

Our part of our relationship with God is listening and obeying. God’s part is giving instructions and providing for the needs of everyone. If we seek Him, we will find Him. If we obey Him, He will provide for us and everyone else.

When we act before God has spoken, we are not being faithful or obedient. We are just guessing.

Jesus wants to mend and reforge our covenant relationship with God, but we must listen and obey Him for that to happen. Jesus cannot listen to and obey God for us. He can forgive us and welcome us into new birth and new life, but we have to be the ones to follow Him each step of the way into that life. It is not our role to figure out what to do to live a life for God and fulfill our covenant relationship with Him. Jesus teaches us by example, and the Holy Spirit guides us each step of the way. Our job is to listen and obey.

Are you listening?

What is Jesus saying to you today?

Closing Prayer

Gracious God,

Thank You for Sending Jesus into the world to be a living example of Your love, grace, and desire to give us abundant and eternal life with You. Thank You for sending Him to be an example for us of how to receive and live that life with You.

We know we have failed to be the people, the families, the community, and the church You call us to be and that the world needs us to be. We need Your help to follow Jesus on the path to redemption and new life. This week, as we begin our season of Lent together, help us to hear Your voice clearly. Help us shut out the noise around us. As we fast from the things that distract us, help us hunger for Your Word, our daily bread. As we take up our crosses to follow You into new ways of living and serving, give us Your Holy Spirit to strengthen us for the journey. Help us to draw so near to You that those who come near us cannot help but see and feel Your presence alive in us.

Lord, come and live in us today. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

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