Day 77 - Listening and Looking for Faith

A sermon delivered on Feb. 10, 2013 at First Presbyterian Church, Soddy-Daisy, TN. 

Exodus 34:29-35; 2 Cor 3:12-4:2; Luke 9: 28-43

During the Easter season which begins in three days on Ash Wednesday I am going to explore the question “What is faith?” somewhat in the manner we explored the question posed by advent, “Why did Jesus come to earth?

The first question about faith is why is it often so hard to believe something we are told is true?  How often do we receive a message but fail to understand it or ignore it?  You may hear, “If you don’t watch out how you are using that chain saw you are going to hurt yourself!” only to keep working until you nick your leg.

Hearing and seeing may lead us to knowledge, but not necessarily to understanding what is heard and seen. In Moses and the prophets’ time, The Lord would often allow people to hear a message or warning but not open their minds to it until they had sunk deep into the misery of a sinful predicament.  In our Exodus passage the message to the Hebrews was possession of the law without understanding is deadly.

Here in the desert after leaving Egypt Moses would go up on the mountain to to talk with God and bring His commands to the Hebrews.  Being in the presence of the glory of the Lord changed the face of Moses. It shone brightly. When he delivered the message of the covenant to the Hebrews, they listened to him, captivated as much by his shining face as the Lord’s words. That shining of the Lord’s glory was the Holy Spirit. It conveyed the meaning to Moses and the Hebrews until Moses put his face behind the veil. Paul in 2 Corinthians 3:12 – 18 (4:2), says the Hebrews only understood while Moses’ face glowed with the glory of God. When Moses put on the veil to keep the Hebrews for staring at him they no longer understood the law. They heard it but did not have faith in the truth of the what they heard.

Paul was surely also thinking about Isaiah 6:9-13 when the Lord spoke through Isaiah to the Hebrews before the Babylonian captivity: “⁹And he said, “Go and say to this people: ‘Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand.’ ¹⁰Make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes, so that they may not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and comprehend with their minds, and turn and be healed” … ¹²until the Lord sends everyone far away and the land is empty. ¹³Even if a tenth part remain in it, it will be burned again, like an oak whose stump remains standing when it is felled.” The holy seed is its stump.’ This Isaiah passage reveals the heritage of the old covenant of the Law was God’s continued punishment and wrath towards his beloved, but errant people who could not keep it.

Imagine how it would be to hear and see but have God bar understanding so you had to fail. Let there be no doubt that the Lord said he was a jealous God. Did Jesus come to change all this on behalf of the Lord as part of an unfolding plan to blind our understanding of grace until He revealed his true glory in Christ?

Luke’s account of the transfiguration has several messages. (1)At the end of this encounter with Jesus, both Moses and Elijah fade into the background. This tells us Jesus is supplanting the Law.  (2) The Lord’s voice and command comes from the cloud cementing Christ’s authority and identity, “This is my Son, my Chosen, listen to him!” (3) Finally we see that none of the three disciples will understand what they saw and heard until after the post-Easter resurrection.

I want to focus on this human reaction to the message because it shows how we easily fail to understand the circumstances. In v33 “³³Just as they were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah” —not knowing what he said.” Peter wanted to celebrate the presence of Moses and Elijah with Jesus but did not see the deeper significance. 

Can you imagine these three disciples were having an out-of-this-world experience with the Glory of God shining from the face of Jesus (special word è Presence of God) and two long deceased prophets who I might add they recognized, and a cloud emanating a loud voice but not realizing this was the culmination of all that Jesus had preached with them in his ministry? They were given the full truth about Jesus yet they leave dumb of everything but the experience of the event.  They only saw and heard, but did not understand because they had no faith yet. (V36: ³⁶When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.) Faith comes later. 

This reminds me of my experience at Ga. Tech. I was hired to manage a research lab. Now Research in the university is a pay-as-you-go proposition. This was a research laboratory that worked in metallurgy and materials such as ceramics, polymers and special materials that increased efficiency of making gasoline from crude oil but had struggled economically for years. Historically in science and engineering, metallurgy and materials have always held an honored place in all engineering disciplines. It is the science that gave us high strength steels for bridges, exotic alloys used to make turbines engines in aircraft and generators of electricity such as in TVA, and the lightweight exotic alloys used to make aircraft, artificial joints and teeth, weapons of war, you name it. Any university worth its weight has a good materials program. This had been a very good research laboratory.

Before the fall of the Berlin Wall in the 1980’s there was always plenty of contracts and grants from the DoD, DoE and NSF to support their research. Then Congress reduced the Defense budget and less and less government money was available for other research programs. At first enough the profit being made in the giant research program of Ga. Tech kept this old prestigious materials research group afloat. But that dole caused many scientists in my laboratory to take the money for granted as recognition of their elite position as materials scientists.

The money was gone and the research group needed to revitalize and to relearn how to survive on their own contracts in this new world, or else. I developed a new strategy for a research program on new problems. We held a series of individual and group meetings explaining this “new” reality, and defined how their older research could fit into this new plan to find contracts to continue their employment. I very carefully explained that the consequences of not doing this, the money was gone and their jobs would disappear.

No matter how much counseling  about this Armageddon facing them, they seemed to think I was just Chicken Little crying the sky is falling. Even as I began to cut their jobs to ¾ time, or ½ time or began having to let some folks go, they kept to their old research that had grown increasingly irrelevant while they looked for the dole as if time was unchanged.

It was as if they were standing on a railroad track looking down the track in one direction while a train was bearing down on them from the other direction. No matter how loudly I shouted the warning of their situation, a situation that should have been as painfully obvious to them as the loud horn of the locomotive and the roar of its engines, but their whole past experience made it impossible for them to turn and see the train, to hear and understand that their demise was imminent unless they took action and stepped off the tracks. It was too late, that laboratory is no more. They could see and they could hear but had no faith to follow a new way.

The Transfiguration is such a powerful telling of the beginning of faith. For the disciples, the voice from the clouds and the departure of Moses and Elijah signaled the departure of the old covenant and imminent coming of the new covenant of God with his people through Jesus. Yet even with the presence of the Holy Spirit (the glory of God) shining in Jesus’ face, they did not understand or perhaps even recognize it or the meaning of the words from the cloud. (Remember Peter subsequently denied Jesus.) To understand grace requires the faith found in the empty tomb on resurrection day.

For us today, the power of this story is the light of Jesus’ face, his dazzling white clothes and the voice in the cloud. They signify the presence of the Holy Spirit that conveys the true image of Christ in prophetic words, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” We no longer rely on the covenant of Law of the prophets to understand, we understand through the presence of the Holy Spirit that Jesus left with us. The Holy Spirit is the beginning of our faith.

Where and how do we find the Holy Spirit? The presence of Elijah in this passage may recall the answer.  In the first verse Jesus went up on the mountain to pray. Prayer preceded every event of importance in the life of Jesus. 

Elijah discovered it in the desert as he fled the forces of Jezebel, the wife of King Ahab after he had killed all her prophets of Baal.  1 kgs19:4-15 tells us in his flight he stopped for the night exhausted and without hope hiding in a cave. He prayed to the Lord to take his life. These are the words of the Lord: ‘But the word of the Lord told him  “Go out and stand on the mountain before the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake;  12 and after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.  13 When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” ‘ and then the voice told Elijah to go about the Lord’s business and stop worrying about Jezebel’s troops.

If we desire the understanding given by the Holy Spirit we must listen for the sound of silence, and that is found only in prayer.

Last Wednesday we talked about the nature of creation and the universe from a Biblical and scientific perspective.  Science reveals that the age of universe and the world far exceeds a literal calculation of Bible.

 Skeptics use that scientific data to reject what is seen, heard and understood by faith that we are God’s beloved creation and the Scriptures reveal the history of and promise between God and his creation. Such skeptics read the Bible and see the great conflict with the observed world and reject it in favor of the secular or objective view.

But on the other hand some of our brothers and sisters who are uncertain and perhaps harbor doubt or only hope but not faith, would deny their experience of the real world revealed by the objective observations of science in favor of the comfort of the literal word of Scripture. In a sense both of these extremes deny the world as it is, a world formed by God, not humanity. In each case people have seen, heard and read without understanding, because they have not attuned self to Holy Spirit.

          With the Holy Spirit we read scripture and understand God and Christ’s purpose for us by faith alone.  Pray and listen for understanding. AMEN