Exodus 24: 15,16; Matthew 17: 5,6,7

Limited Visibility

So once again we talk about a high point of Jesus’ time on earth, the Transfiguration. It is also the experience that seems the farthest removed from earthly life.  Several disciples go up with Jesus to the top of the Mountain, traditionally considered to be Mount Tabor, overlooking the Megiddo valley and looking toward Mount Carmel.  This is a mystical experience for them as they have a vision of Elijah and Moses and of Jesus with His garment dazzlingly white and His face bright as the sun.  But the text says the disciples’ vision is obscured by a cloud above Jesus as He talks to Elijah and Moses. Pity the disciples, professional fishermen just a short time before and now witnesses to the high point of Jesus’ revelation as the beloved by God. They’re trying to make sense of it all.

The text in Matthew points back to Exodus where Moses goes up to the mountain, not in Northern Israel this time, but beyond its furthest border in the Sinai.  There on top of the mountain the text says he is in a cloud for six days, just waiting there until God calls him out.  I like the idea of the cloud image in both text. I like this reality of limited visibility. The lack of visibility of Moses on the mountain hundred of years and hundreds of miles away from Peter, James and John on the mountain to the north, both trying to figure out what’s beyond the cloud. It goes back to this Old Testament concept of God Who is so holy that God cannot be seen, so holy that God’s name cannot even be spelled out.

Friends, in the movie Twentieth Century Women the viewer is effortlessly transported to the nineteen seventies in Santa Barbara during the presidency of Jimmy Carter and we see a single mother born in 1924 whose behavior is excused by all the young people because “she was the Depression.” She is quite modern in her own way, but she prefers fifties music and she claims she can smoke because she started when it was fashionable and not unhealthy. She also does not like frank talk about intimacy.  She has the burden of raising a young teenage boy. She feels ill equipped and asks for the support of two young women who float in and out of her old bungalow.  The three of them try to raise this boy, but he doesn’t need much raising really and they wind up confusing him.  It is as if they are just making things up. Even though all the days in the movie are sunny, the characters have no clue what they are doing.  They are making it up as they go along. They have limited visibility.

Friends, like the mortals in text, we are the ones in the clouds or trying to see through the clouds.  We are dealing with limited visibility, trying to piece together what it is we are dealing with.  This is not just the case with God. God is the biggest mystery. We can’t quite get the full picture of God, we have to leave a lot to our imagination.  If the Bible is any indication, God appears to like it just fine that way.  God can never be captured and if think we can capture God fully, we are probably on the wrong track.  But this limited visibility is something we deal with all the time really.  And I am not talking about driving in the valley fog. I am talking about adolescence and marriage and parenthood, about our economic future and more recently the direction of our country.  We have limited visibility. We are trying to piece together our journey forward in each of those aspects of our lives with less than the information we need.  Life is a lot like putting together a piece of IKEA furniture without the instructions. With the manual it’s challenging already, without it we will have to try every screw, every bolt and every bar in different places. We make things up as we go along.  Let’s face it, friends, a lot of life is winging it.  Imagine Moses on the cold mountain in fog for days wondering what on earth he is waiting for. Imagine the disciples scrambling to be helpful and appropriate, awkwardly offering to build a booth for Elijah, Moses and Jesus each, not realizing they were dealing with a vision. Both scenes are among the most supernatural in the Bible, but when we look closely there is a real humanness we see.

Once on an October morning I tried to retrace the steps I took with a high school group I had helped lead into the Desolation Wilderness and I walked past Echo Lake, through the trees, higher up toward the next lake and I was in the clouds. It was in that brief period of my young life when I was an accomplished hiker.  This is far behind me now. Anyway, there was no one there.  Suddenly the clouds lifted, revealing the first dusting of snow of the season.  Limited visibility, that’s true, but then more than once the clouds do life and we get a view that makes all the fumbling worth it.

Friends, welcome to the cloud, and I do not mean the sphere where we store your data without a clue about how that’s done.  No, welcome to the reality of a world where clouds drift in and out of our lives, where we are always winging it no matter how prepared we are.  The clouds come more often than usual this season it seems. As we figure things out, may we trust God’s grace and may we be commit to being good, loving justice and being compassionate as the Bible teaches us. May God help us.