All Scriptures quoted are from The New Revised Standard Version unless otherwise quoted.

A young father in our congregation recently told me of how his children just couldn’t keep the secret about his Christmas present just past. Even though he actually went and bought the basketball goal his children would give him on Christmas day, hauled it home and stored it in the garage, mom had warned the children to keep dad’s Christmas present a secret. At least five times each, they told their dad, whatever he did, not to look in the garage because he might see the basketball goal they were supposed to keep a secret from him. It’s hard to keep good news a secret.

So, how in the world were the disciples supposed to honor Jesus’ request about keeping what they saw on top of the mountain a secret? Peter and James had been given tickets to the nicest suite in town for watching the show as Jesus was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him. Even if they weren’t constantly in motion trying to one-up the other disciples, Peter and James would have had good reason to tell others what they’d seen. Imagine, if you can, what they saw! I can’t. But, as they were coming down the mountain, Jesus ordered them, ‘Tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.’

Some might wonder whether or not they were able to actually keep Jesus’ command or, if somewhere along the line, they just told the person they trusted the most and told them not to tell anyone else, you know, kind of like we do with good news or gossip, either one. For that matter, why would Jesus tell them to keep it a secret? Isn’t this a remarkable witness to who he claimed to be? Couldn’t he use the good press? What’s up with that? Why secrets about spiritual visions?

We could speculate all day long but the truth is that we just don’t know and we don’t even get to ask. All we do know is that, by the time Peter writes his first letter, Jesus had died, been raised from the dead by the power of God and been gone a long time. With the perspective that only that kind of time could allow, Peter now turns everyone’s attention back to it. There is a right time to receive a gift and there is a right time to understand its meaning. Jesus must have known that, had the disciples run down the hill telling their story that day, they would not have had the depth of understanding only time and maturity would bring.

It was OK by now to spill the beans and send two millennia worth of Christians into intellectual tailspins trying to figure out the transfiguration. This is what Peter says. We had been eyewitnesses of his majesty . . .. We heard this voice come from heaven, while we were with him on the holy mountain. So we have the prophetic message more fully confirmed. Be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your own hearts.>

Aren’t those beautiful, magnificent words? All Peter claims is that, decades before, he was a witness to the majesty of God in Christ. He claimed his experience, while not answering all questions, had certainly confirmed for him what the prophets had already said about Jesus. He also said that it gave him the equivalent of a lamp by which to take the next steps and went on to say that we, too, should walk in that light until the light fully awakens us from within. All of which seems to be some indication of what our final transformation in Christ will mean, a capacity to see eternity from within a fully enlightened conscience and soul, able to actually see from the inside out instead of the other way around.

All Peter is saying, all Peter can say, is that, for now, all we know of God, all of it, all of our gathered knowledge put together in one place, is like one lamp leading us through, say, Carlsbad Caverns. If you’ve ever walked there then you know that it’s so difficult to see at all or to see it all, even when they turn on all the lights; your eyes can never quite adjust. We just don’t have the eyes we need to see that kind of vastness. So, follow the lamp. Walk in the light God has given. Take the next step toward the call of God you believe to be your’s, then the next. Don’t worry about being able to understand or take steps in places where, for now, you’ve been given no light. Enjoy the mystery of God’s magnificence as you make the journey. Live in it now without having to understand it all.

Which is why we give, right, on days like today? We pledge our financial support to this very human institution not because we fully understand how human money makes a difference in eternal causes but because, lost in the majesty of God's holy mystery, what else can we do but give, our lives, our money, our love? We give to mystery, not certainty.

Nancy and I, along with several other Cliff Temple folks, attended the New Baptist Covenant meeting in Atlanta this past week. It was the first interracial gathering of Baptists of that kind since 1845, when southern Baptists, who did believe in slavery, split off from Baptists in the north, who did not. It was not just Episcopalians, Lutherans and Catholics who later fought the Civil War!

It was a remarkable meeting this week. We heard some remarkable speakers, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, John Grisham and Dr. William Shaw. Shaw is a prominent, elderly black preacher whose message was so profound it had me in tears three minutes in and I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t stop crying.

James’ letter to the early church was referenced more than once during the meeting. He was up on the mountain with Peter when Jesus was transfigured. He’s the one who wrote such irritating words as, faith without works is dead (James 2:26, NIV). I can’t help but wonder if something James saw on that mountaintop found its way into those words decades later. What do you think?

The focus of this week’s meeting of some 16,000-20,000 from some thirty different Baptist groups was how we could all get together and start bringing the light God has given us to bear on such issues as world poverty, concern for our environment, world hunger and so on. We were asked to consider how what we say we believe, what we claim as our faith, can transform how we actually behave in dealing with those issues.

We heard Bill Clinton on Friday night. Some of my friends gave me a hard time for attending a so-called spiritual gathering at which Bill Clinton, of all people, was invited to deliver a keynote address. Something occurred to me, however, as I was listening to him. It was the first time in my life I’d ever seen him personally, even if it was at a distance of at least 300 yards. Every other time, I’d seen him through a camera lens someone else was focusing for me. I have to tell you that, regardless of what you may think of him, when there is nothing but air between your face and another human being’s, it’s harder to make fun of them, ridicule them and judge them. When you see another human being like that, their face looks so much – like your own! It’s virtually impossible to see them as just an issue and not as a person for whom Christ also died.

Clinton told the story of having breakfast with the then President of the Southern Baptist Convention just after he was first elected President of the United States. After jostling over several different theological and political issues, the President of the SBC looked at Clinton and said, “I’d like to ask you a question and all I want is a straight yes or no answer, not one of those slick political answers.” He then asked Clinton, “Do you believe the Bible is the inerrant word of God, without error, from cover to cover, yes or no.”

Clinton thought for a moment and then said in response, “I believe the Bible is completely true but I don’t believe that there has ever been or ever will be a person alive who understands it completely.” Clinton’s answer didn’t satisfy the questioner, as you can imagine. But, Clinton went to say that he believes one of the most important verses in the Bible is 1 Corinthians 13:12. Nearly all of us can quote 1 Corinthians 13:13 from memory. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love (1 Corinthians 13:13, NIV). The question that poses itself is why Paul would have placed such emphasis on love, as being greater than even faith or hope? Why would he do that?

Clinton wondered out loud, and has left me wondering ever since, if it is not because of what Paul had written in verse 12 just prior to those great words we know so well in verse 13? Now we see but a poor reflection, as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known (1 Corinthians 13:12, NIV). After quoting those words to his adversary, Clinton raised this question. Is it possible that Paul claimed love as the primary spiritual gift, above faith and hope, partly because he had just written that, even if we have the greatest faith, the most refined system of beliefs about God, in the world, if we don’t have love for each other, it makes our faith void?

Show me your faith by your works, his colleague on the mountaintop, James, later wrote. Anyone who listens to the word and does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like (James 1:23, NIV).

Clinton dug deeper. He asserted that verse 13 emphasizes love over faith because, as he said in verse 12, even when our sight is as good as it can be, it is still like staring into a mirror that gives only a poor reflection of reality. In other words, Clinton said, love is primary because verse 12 allows for the fact that, right now, we might all be wrong. In the meantime, until we have the dawning of a new day, the day of Christ’s full light from within, a more fully awakened conscience, heart and mind, until that day dawns, all we have is the lamp of love by which to take the next step.

There are some in this congregation who have said they won’t come see or listen to Brian McLaren because of something they read about him on the Internet. They have chosen to let others focus the lens for them. Without having read one of his books, heard him speak in public or ever having even met the man, they have written him off as a heretic. They have expressed genuine concern that his teachings might threaten their faith when, in fact, the greatest threat to our system of beliefs, to our faith, is not what someone else believes but our own unwillingness to love each other, even those with whom we vehemently disagree.

There were two men, both farmers, in the very first church I served as pastor. One day I looked up and neither of them was in church or ever darkened its doors again while I was there. Only later did I learn that one of them felt cheated over a hay deal and was so angry at the other one that he swore he’d never set foot in the same church with him again. The other man reciprocated in kind. The man’s behavior had so violated his understanding of Christian integrity, his system of beliefs about how others should behave, he wouldn’t even talk to him or listen to him, or, worse, take communion with him. A communion meal initiated by the very act of betrayal itself, by the one who was most cheated.

In my memory, those men were quite old, probably in their early 50’s. By now, both of them men are certainly dead. The hay has long since become manure that fertilized another farmer’s field and grown more hay that other cows have eaten and passed on to countless generations of cattle. By now, the cows none the wiser, I hope those two men have seen a new light they were unable to discover in the church. In that light, I hope they have seen each other as brothers in the same family started by an older brother who used their betrayal of him as the reason for the first meal the family ever had together. I wonder what those two farmers saw when the lamp of light’s little earthly time flickered out and the light of heaven dawned in their hearts. I wonder what they saw when they saw each other the way Jesus had always seen them, and loved them anyway.

I wonder.