(Matthew 17:1-9, from the readings for Transfiguratioin Sunday)
Preachers sometimes poke fun at Peter for the way he lost his head on that mountaintop after witnessing the blazing glory of a transfigured Jesus conferring with Moses and Elijah.
“Lord, it is good for us to be here!” Peter blurts out. “If you wish, I will put up three shelters – one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah!”
Matthew’s straightforward account offers a relatively kind portrayal of Peter’s disorientation. Luke adds a comment that Peter “did not know what he was saying” (9:33), and Mark opines that Peter “did not know what to say, they were so frightened” (9:6).
Given these digs in the text, you can’t really blame preachers for piling on. The ribbing often transitions into a critique of Peter’s apparent preference for awesome spiritual mountaintop experiences rather than the slog of everyday discipleship and kingdom work waiting to be done back down the mountain, back down in the real world. Such sermons urge us to enjoy the spiritual highs when they come our way but caution us against getting addicted to them. We’ll have all the glory we want after we die. Until then, it’s time to roll up our sleeves and get busy.
But I think I understand at least something of Peter’s reaction, here. And I don’t think he’s all that far off the mark.
On my bedroom dresser is a not-especially-extraordinary giant Atlantic cockle shell. Despite the word “giant” in its name, it is only about as big as the palm of my hand. When I hold it, I can curl my fingertips and thumb around its edges. It is mostly beige colored, with touches of darker brown. In a shell shop, it would sit on the discount rack toward the back of the store. It is nothing spectacular. But it is, in a way, one of Peter’s glory shelters.
It came into my possession during one morning of a beach vacation several summers ago. I had gone by myself for a sunrise walk on the cool, smooth, hard-packed stretch of wet sand just above the reach of the waves.
Despite the scenery, my mood was dark.
For reasons I don’t have time to go into, I had been feeling God was far away, and maybe even nonexistent. I had headed for the beach that morning thinking that maybe he and I would reconnect in some way. But I had been walking for a while, and I had felt precisely nothing. Despairing and a little angry as I turned to head back to the condo, I prayed – demanded, really – that God give me some kind of sign to show me that he really was there. Was … anywhere.
The shell on my dresser is one of a dozen giant Atlantic cockle shells that began washing up on the sand right in front of me a short time later. They appeared one by one along a perhaps 50-yard stretch of beach that I had passed no more than 20 minutes earlier on the outbound portion of my walk. Each was practically unscathed, which was rare. The ocean left nothing comparable to them on the beach at any other time during the week-long trip, just tiny shells, or chips and chunks of larger ones. But nobody had dumped the shells there; the only footprints on the wet sand were my own.
Perhaps there is some rational explanation for how the shells came to me on that morning, but I can’t imagine what it would be. I think that finding one unscathed shell in the surf under those circumstances would have been a stroke of luck. But finding a dozen struck me as a miracle.
I gathered them sheepishly. As I picked up each one, rinsed it in the water and inspected it, I sensed God telling me to look closely at its graceful curves, rippled surface and smooth inside and try to explain how such a thing could come to be, let alone the living creature it had protected, without at least a touch of divinity. Hadn’t the same divinity been practically shouting – or maybe singing – to me all morning as the waves had crashed and the wind had blown and the darkness had faded and the sun had risen? Hadn’t I experienced it all with a mind and body that, themselves, were improbable, and even inexplicable, without a Creator? I had been impressed by the seemingly miraculous appearance of a dozen sea shells. Hadn’t every preceding moment been just as miraculous? Wouldn’t every succeeding moment?
I think that is a key lesson of the Transfiguration. I think God lifted the veil muting the glory of one moment to show Peter, James and John – and us – that every moment is bursting at the seams with glory, be it on the mountain, down in the valley, or anywhere in between. If we saw that glory in full at all times, it would consume us. We would go as out of our minds as Peter had, and there would be no coming back. But the glory is there at all times nonetheless. God does not “show up in a big way,” as we sometimes excitedly claim he did after a particular mountaintop experience with him. And we do not conjure up his presence in church on a given Sunday morning if the music is just right and the sermon perfectly on target and the congregation’s hearts sufficiently open. The question is never whether he will come to us. The question is always whether we will discern that, as Paul tells the Athenians in Acts 17, “He is not far from any one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being.”
Did you catch that? God does not commute to work, or travel back home at the end of the day. He does not run to our rescue from some other place that he was when our trouble began. He cannot arrive too late, or fail to show up at all. We live and move and exist “in him.” I am surrounded by him as I write this. You are surrounded by him as you read this. He isn’t “here” in the sense of being here with us. He is the very place we call “here,” no matter where we are.
Thank goodness I don’t have to live on that beach to be in the presence of the glory I encountered there. It would be hot in the summer and cold in the winter and wet more often than not. But the shell on my dresser is, in one sense, a shelter that I have built, one I can visit now and then to remember the lesson I learned that morning:
Glory is everywhere. All the time.
