tabernacles

Maybe it was a wedding. Or a first kiss. The birth of a child. Or a grand promotion. Maybe you saw the Grand Canyon from the window seat on a plane.  Or maybe you climbed an actual mountain. We’ve all had mountaintop experiences, those moments, usually brief, where the line between the sacred and the profane dissolves and we find ourselves on holy ground. It takes work to get there, climbing and bushwhacking and breathing heavy. But when we get to the top, whether it’s a graduation or a house purchase, a life changing vacation or paying off the student loans, when we get to the top, something sacred is there, and we need to mark the moment. 

We mark our moments with rings, with signatures, with fancy clothes, special dinners. We mark our moments with monuments and toasts, songs and hopefully, some human connection. We want to hold on to the moment for as long as possible, treasure it, keep it safe, make it memorable, never let it go. Peter wants to do the same. He and James and John experience Jesus in a new way, dazzling white, shining like the sun, speaking with the prophets who have defined and framed their faith for centuries. We all want to house the holy, find a way to keep it still, keep it memorable, keep it safe. “So let’s build some houses,” Peter says. “One for Moses, one for Elijah, one for you.” 

Now Peter is one for two so far. He’s scored some points for naming Jesus as the Messiah in chapter 16, but almost in the same breath, as Jesus predicts his own death, Peter is rebuked. He’s told, in the harshest of terms, “Get behind me Satan!” But Peter, bless him, has the audacity to try again. He wants to build some tabernacles, some houses, a place where the holy can be kept, high upon a mountain, where the sacred and the profane have collapsed in on each other, where they’ve experienced the presence of God. 

Now this is totally within his tradition. Mountains were sacred places, and to build a monument high upon one was the natural thing to do in this situation. And it’s the highest of honors, to equate Jesus with Elijah and Moses, to say they’re all deserving of monuments high upon this mountain. Jesus, the same in stature as the prophet Elijah and the emancipator Moses, was the highest honor Peter knew to give him. It’s the “natural” response, if there can be any, to this dazzling, awe-inspiring, God revelation. Let’s build a thing, a house, a place for people to travel to, a place for people to come to, to experience God. 

So it’s natural for us, too, to want to mark these sacred occasions in our lives with symbols, buildings, monuments and photographs. We want to hold on to them, keep them safe, treasure them so that we can go back to them and experience some part of it all over again. That’s why we celebrate birthdays and anniversaries and holidays. That’s why we mark our experiences with rings and presents and certificates and diplomas. 

So, Peter says, “Let’s build a building. Let’s erect a monument. A tabernacle. A house. A place where God can be experienced again and again, a place to mark this amazing experience that we’ve had.” 

The Hindus are really good at this. When they have sacred experiences, they mark it, right where it happened, and this invites others to the same sacred place, where they experience God, where they mark the place, and that encourages more people to come to that same place to experience that same experience. These, then, become sacred, holy spaces. Places where the presence of God has been experienced and touched and known, even just a little bit.  All throughout India there are sacred trees, sacred mountains, sacred buildings, sacred columns and walls and sidewalks and shrines and temples. These are places where the divine has been experienced, where something sacred has happened, epiphanies and theophanies and transfigurations where the ordinary has turned extraordinary. 

But this time is a little different. This time, in our reading for today, God reveals God’s self in three different ways. There are three different theophanies, three visions, in this one transfiguration. 

The first is the obvious one: Jesus transforming before their eyes, blindingly white, shining like the sun. This has the disciples gobsmacked, astonished, but still standing on their feet, awed, but still functioning. This revelation shows Jesus’s majesty, his glory and his awe-fullness, and Peter is able to be amazed by this, he’s able to name it, he wants to build a house around it, to mark it and remember it. 

It’s a once in a life-time revelation, an eye opening, extraordinary vision where the sacred comes down to us and reveals us some of its glory. So of course Peter wants to mark it, wants to note the time and the place, wants to build some kind of monument to it - it’s a monumental experience.

But the next has them all lying prostrate on the ground. It’s the voice of God coming through the clouds. God reveals God’s self through a booming voice and the naming of Jesus as God’s son. This revelation reveals God’s power, God’s transcendence, God’s immanence made present. It’s enough to knock them to the ground. They pass out. They can’t handle it. “This is my Son, the beloved. Listen to him!” 

God doesn’t often speak from clouds, but when God does, it’s to point to Jesus. This is God’s response to Peter wanting to build three tabernacles for Elijah, Moses and Jesus. It’s to point to Jesus, to highlight him, to lift him above every other name. This is my son, the beloved. Listen to him!  And so we’re given instructions, we’re told what we’re to do, how to function as Christ’s followers. We’re to listen to him. 

Finally, though, the disciples receive God’s presence through Jesus’s own touch. He reaches out to them, he touches them, and then he reassures them, saying, “Get up. Do not be afraid.”  This is Jesus. God’s son. Listen to him.

Jesus says, “Get up, don’t be afraid.” These are the words we should listen to. He doesn’t give details on how to build the right size house or what it should be made of. He doesn’t lecture about what’s just happened. He doesn’t reprimand or scold. He doesn’t even explain it. Instead, he goes back down the mountain with them. Back down to the people, down into the valley, where the work is, where the hurt and the dirty and the poor are. He goes back down with the disciples to the people. Because this is the way that Jesus reveals himself to us on the regular. This is the way Jesus comes to us; this is our theophany. It’s the touch of Jesus, him reaching out to us, telling us to get up, to not be afraid, and then to go back down the mountain. 

God reveals God’s self on mountaintops, through clouds and bright whites and shining like the sun, sure. But God doesn’t want us to stay there. Because God also reveals God’s self through touch, through the humanity of Jesus, and through our own humanity.

Don’t be afraid to go where Jesus reveals himself. Sometimes it means climbing a mountain. Sometimes it will be wild and overwhelming. It might be impractical, too bright, hard to see anything else, or it might be somewhere close by, somewhere familiar, somewhere earthy and real, but when we go where Jesus reveals himself, we will hear God, we will be transformed, too. 

Jesus also reveals himself in the every day, through his touch and his assurance to “Get up. Do not be afraid.” Do not be afraid to go back down the mountain, to go to the people, to leave the “sacred” space and enter in to the profane. Because God is there, too. We are not meant to stay on the mountain. We’re meant to go back down. Things won’t make sense to us until after we go back down, until after we enter back in to the everyday. Things won’t make sense to us until after Jesus’s humanity is on full display through his death and resurrection. That’s why he tells them not to say anything just yet. 

And so, in this way, this God, this God who reveals God’s self in the touch of Jesus, cannot be preserved, cannot be kept safe. We cannot build this God a monument, we cannot encapsulate this God, this God will not fit in a box. This is the God who comes back down the mountain with us, who enters in to humanity with us, who tells us, not to build houses on mountains and attract people to come to them, but to go back down, to enter in to the humanity, to go to the people, to find the lost and the least and ourselves. 

The God who touches us, who tells us to “get up. Do not be afraid,” is a God who goes with us back down the mountain. Back down to where things aren’t the mountaintop of extraordinary experiences, but in the valleys of human experience. 

So often we think, “If we build it, they will come.” 

But Jesus says, “No. Get up. Don’t be afraid. Go back down the mountain to the real world where real, fleshy, messy humanity is.” And he touches them — a reminder that God’s glory is present not just in clouds and light and voices from the sky, but in the humanity of touch. 

God is present in our touch, in the breaking down of boundaries between us, in the connection with one another, in community, in our humanity. God occasionally shows God’s self with fireworks and lasers, with talking clouds and blinding sunlight. Although, I’ve never been so lucky. But most of the time, God shows God’s self in us and through us, through connecting with each other, through the building of bridges between those whom we think we don’t have much in common. God wants us to go up the mountain to experience God, sure, but also to come back down, to enter in to the world, because that is what the incarnation is all about. 

We can do all sorts of things to attract people to our church, but what God really wants, what God is calling us to do, is to get up, to not be afraid, to go back down the mountain where our visions and transfigurations will make sense to us, to go to the people, to serve them, to see the face of Christ in them. 

We need to mark the sacred moments. We need to label them and cherish them and reflect upon them. Those mountaintop experiences are sacred. The weddings, the graduations, the promotions and the vacations, these are all important monumental experiences. But let’s not forget the life that happens in the in between. Those are sacred moments too. Those are the times when Jesus touches us with a human hand amidst a broken and human world. 

In this way, we are all tabernacles. We are all houses for God. We can all touch and be touched. We can all go to the people, go down the mountain, into the valleys, and touch one another. God is in the mountaintop experiences, this we know for sure. But God does not let us stay there. God calls us to be the presence of Christ for each other, down in the valley where the people are, where the need is, where the messy and the hurt and the broken are. God calls us to be tabernacles, not to stay up high on a mountain, but to bring Jesus down into the city, the valley, the place where the people are. May we, like Peter, like James, like John, may we become tabernacles for Christ. Get up. Do not be afraid.

Thanks be to God.