As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus said, “Tell no one of the vision until the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.”
 
How could they not tell of what they had seen? They had witnessed something far beyond the events of normal, everyday life. They had seen something that couldn’t be explained, at least not then. They had seen Moses and Elijah, and Jesus changed, and in that moment were changed themselves, just a little. How could they not tell?
 
Yet this was good advice from Jesus. They needed time, time to digest what they had experienced. And they needed time, time for subsequent events to happen, time for this experience to be put in context, before it would begin to reveal its meaning.
 
It is a difficult story for us to get a handle on. It seems so outwith our normal experience. But there are elements which are grounded in what we know. We know about companionship, about communal experience. We know that something experienced together can be so much more powerful than something witnessed alone. And we know that high places can give us a different vantage point, a different perspective on the world from normal.
 
I’ve never experienced this myself, but I have long wanted to, to climb a mountain through cloud and emerge near the top into sunshine, and look around and see the peaks of other hills floating, as it were in a sea of snow-white cloud. Rather too often, I have experienced the opposite, leaving clear weather in the valley only to climb into fog which obscures all from sight.
 
It is this sense of clear air and distant views at height, separating off the mountain tops from the valleys and transforming a familiar landscape into something which looks quite different that I long to see. It is that change in perception, seeing something which in that moment is not fully imaginable from the ground that so intrigues me.
 
That's what the transfiguration of Jesus is about – a glimpse of something that the disciples could not have imagined from the vantage point of their everyday lives.
 
It was a moment out of time. They had been following Jesus for a while. Some of them, had they been asked, might not have been able to explain why. It seems so unlikely that they would follow just because he said, “Follow me,” or that a man should have left everything behind just because his brother was doing so. There was so little evidence, just a feeling, something, perhaps, like an inner light, drawing people to him. And the years of following had not been straightforward either. There was hardship. There was opposition. There was the difficult process of unlearning all the old expectations of who the Messiah would be and what he would do. There were the spectacular things and the surprising things, but there was no triumph; rather the dark brooding clouds of Jesus’ impending death were gathering. So the disciples, often, were quite uncertain, quite unsure.
 
But now, three of them were given a vision, a reassurance, but even this was confusing. Even this would take time to understand.
 
They saw Jesus as they had never seen him. A man they knew so well, now they saw him as unearthly, a confirmation perhaps of Peter’s brave confession – you are the Christ, the son of the living God. And next to him, they saw the two greatest figures of the Old Testament, the only Scripture they knew: Moses, to whom God had given the Law, and into whose care he had entrusted the children of Israel in their escape from Egypt and under whose guidance they had come to understand more fully the nature of their calling as God’s chosen people; and Elijah, the greatest of the prophets. The sight of them confirmed Jesus’ words that he was the fulfilment of the Law and the prophets, that he was the one for whom the children of Israel had been prepared, down through the ages.
 
With hindsight, with reflection, we can see and understand that, but in that moment, with the light from Jesus’ face and clothes streaming into his eyes, Peter was confused. To be fair on him, he had been on a steep learning curve. When, six days earlier, Jesus had asked, “Who do you say that I am?” and Peter had answered, confessing Jesus as the Christ and the son of the living God, Jesus had blessed him and told him that he was going to build the whole community of believers on him, a simple human being. At that moment, Peter can have had little idea of how daunting a task that would be. But Jesus tried to tell him right away what difficulties lay immediately ahead. Though when Jesus spoke of his own imminent death, Peter argued with him, declaring he would never let it happen. He still saw death in terms of defeat and the Messiah as a hero who would conquer. Jesus let rip with some of his harshest words – “Get behind me, Satan!”
 
On the mountain, Peter struggles for a response. “Let us build some shelters here for you, he offers. His response is both bizarre and mundane. His human instinct is to make some tangible, physical memorial to this experience, to respond, as so many have done since, to an experience of God’s presence, by building a shrine or a church.
 
But something physical was not in God’s plan, nor Jesus’. A voice, the voice of God, speaks to Peter, James and John, telling them to listen to his beloved Son. Devotion is not to be expressed in building but in hearing and speaking. And, raising them from where they had fallen in terror, Jesus showed them where he wanted his church to be – not in buildings, but in people on the move, walking with him.
 
It is this walk back down the mountain that provides the connection between the vision and the everyday, between the heavenly and the earthly. Even when a valley is shrouded in cloud and you cannot see the foot of the mountain on which you stand, still you know them to be connected. So it is with this story. The mountain top experience stayed with the disciples as they made their way down, as they lived through the terror of Christ’s passion and death, as they found hope and life reborn in his resurrection and through the gift of his Spirit. It helped them make sense of all these events and it helped them connect their everyday lives with their new calling to lead Christ’s Church and spread his gospel.
 
And it serves to remind us that all things, the earthly and the heavenly, are connected. It is a story of God sometimes visible but always present. It is a story of revelation sometimes coming unexpectedly but always for a purpose. It is a story of the religious experiences of life connecting with the everyday, making sense and giving strength.
 
Amen.
 

Many people want to lose weight. I want to lose weight. But: I want to drink wine. I want to eat cakes. I want to have sugar in my tea. I want to believe that spending summer days off and holidays climbing Munros will make a difference to my waist and the fish and chips in Tyndrum on the way home won’t.
 
A friend recently told me he’d lost more than three stone. How did you do it? I asked. It’s really very simple, he said. Portion control.
 
It’s really very simple.
 
That reminds me of Naaman, the army commander in the Old Testament, being told to wash seven times in the Jordan to cure his leprosy. He was angry at being asked to do something so simple. When something is difficult – and losing weight is difficult – like Naaman, we want there to be something heroic about what we have to do.
 
Millions of people have devised and followed elaborate diets and demanding exercise regimes to tackle weight loss – all to avoid the simple truth. Eating less is the only thing that works.
 
Listen to Jesus. He said these things: Turn the other cheek. Go the second mile. Pray for your persecutors. Love your enemies. Be perfect, just like God. If you think losing weight is difficult, wait till you start trying to do these. It is no wonder that Christians have devised elaborate explanations to try to avoid these commands. You may have heard some of them, such as these.
 
We are told that being slapped on the face with the back of the right hand was a particularly offensive gesture to Jews. Turning the other cheek made it impossible for the action to be repeated. But we’re not Jews, so we’re told this no longer really applies. We are told that going the second mile refers to a particular law in force in the Roman Empire. We’re not in the Roman Empire, so we’re told this no longer really applies either. We are told that Jesus must have meant that we were to love our enemies in our hearts, that surely he can’t have been so unworldly as to tell us not to fight back if necessary. So, we’re told, bombing is ok, then, so long as it is “necessary”, so long as it is done regretfully, so long as, in our hearts, we love those who unfortunately have to be killed.
 
What a load of nonsense. Worse than that – how false these interpretations are. They are alternative interpretations, like Donald Trump has alternative facts. They’re just wrong. They’re wrong because Jesus makes it clear, over and over and over again, that he says what he means and he means what he says. So when he says, “Turn the other cheek”, he means it. When he says, “Give more than you have to”, he means it. When he says, “Go the second mile”, he means it. When he says, “Give to all who beg”, he means it. When he says, “Don’t refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you”, he means it. When he says, “Love your enemies”, he means it. When he says, “Be perfect, like God”, he means it.
 
But how can we? We’re only human. We can’t be perfect, surely? We cannot really be like God. People have been saying that for thousands of years.
 
We should remember that Jesus was not being original when he said these things. How does, “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect,” differ from, “You shall be holy, because I, the Lord your God, am holy,” the words we heard from Leviticus? They differ hardly at all. They basically mean the same. Jesus was only saying anew what God had said to Moses hundreds of years before. So why repeat them? Why say it again? Isn’t Leviticus enough?
 
The answer to that is No. Leviticus is not enough. It is not enough for the same reason that all rule books and law codes are not enough. Rules and laws are external. No matter how sensible we think them to be, still we feel they are, in some sense, imposed on us by others. They are not a part of us. What is new when Jesus says these things isn’t the content, but the speaker. He embodies this teaching. No longer do we have only the written word. Now we have the word made flesh. Because of Jesus, these teachings, this ethic for life, is already present. Present in Jesus Christ.
 
What Jesus was saying was not – you have heard it said: now I’m telling to you to try harder, because you’ve not been trying hard enough. That would be a recipe for despair. What Jesus is saying is that this is how God loves. And I am showing you how God loves because this is how I love.
 
In his own loving and living, Jesus shows us that: God does not answer violence with violence. God does not answer oppression with oppression. God gives when we ask, when we don’t ask, and carries on giving. He teaches us that: God gives, even when we are ungrateful. God gives, even when we are wasteful. God gives, even when we are sinful. In his own death, Jesus declares that: God loves us, even when we set ourselves up in enmity to him, even when we reject and turn against him. God does all this because God is holy.
 
I have to confess to a long confusion with the idea of holiness. I’ve thought it to be something only for the Mother Teresas, the Pope Francises, the Dalai Lamas of this world. Not for people like me. Our general discomfort with the idea of holiness can be heard in the phrase, “Holier than thou,” – It’s an expression of disdain.
 
But God and Jesus, the Father and the Son, make it clear that we, not just they, are to be holy. But how? Well, we can’t answer that without first asking – what is holiness?
 
In the teaching of God to Moses in Leviticus, and the teaching of Jesus to the disciples in Matthew, holiness is not an ethereal state of being. It is not living on some exalted spiritual plane. It is how one acts in everyday places, in everyday situations, and in everyday relationships. Holiness is not being greedy while others are hungry. Holiness is not stealing, even when we really feel we deserve the thing we so desire. Holiness is not lying, even when the truth exposes our failures. Holiness is treating people fairly, even when it costs us to do so. Holiness is being kind, even when we can’t be bothered. Holiness is acting justly, even when we come under great pressure not to. Holiness is standing up against what is wrong, even when we’re frightened to do so. This is holiness because this is how God is. We are holy by living our lives as God lives his.
 
And that makes us different. It means we must often swim against the tide of the world. In a world which responds to violence with more violence, the holy ones of God respond with disarming non-violence. In a world which hoards its possessions, the holy ones of God respond by sharing. In a world in which evil often seems to triumph, the holy ones of God respond with truth and compassion, with kindness and care, with what is right rather than meeting wrong with more wrong.
 
Being holy because God is holy, being perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect, is the very goal of our life as disciples.
 
It really is very simple. But that’s not to say it will ever be easy.
 
Amen.

 
When you come to church, you probably normally expect to hear one sermon. But today is a little different. Yes, there’s the sermon you are listening to, or not, right now. But we’ve already heard little bits of other sermons, much more ancient than this one, in our Scripture readings.
 
Our Gospel reading gave us some verses from Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. It is at least arguable that Paul’s letters were a kind of sermon, albeit one delivered at a distance, because it is generally thought that his letters would have been read aloud to the congregations to whom they were addressed. And the book of Deuteronomy is presented as if it were a sermon delivered by Moses in the desert east of the River Jordan, at the point at which the Children of Israel would enter the Promised Land.
 
If I were to try to deliver a sermon like Moses’, I doubt if any of us would last the course. It runs to thirty-four chapters, and it is packed with teaching. But naturally, it isn’t a sermon in the modern sense. It blends teaching with story with commentary. Modern scholars would not suggest that Moses did actually preach the Book of Deuteronomy, still less that some scribe wrote it all down. Rather, it is a collection of different materials which is given an overarching structure through the voice of Moses.
 
But this does not make it any less of a sermon. A sermon is not simply a text delivered by a preacher in the course of a service of worship. It can, as we have already noted with Paul’s letters, take a variety of forms. These days, the church is being challenged to explore different kinds of sermons. In all probability, Jesus’ sermons would have been more interactive than we’re used to here. Perhaps we should be exploring that. New technology is offering possibilities to deliver sermons in different ways, well beyond church buildings and set times. This raises challenges to how we understand what sermons are and indeed what worship is. What does it mean to ‘gather in worship’ when people are physically remote and connected only by technology? Is it still worship if you are accessing a recording of something which happened some time ago? These are important questions as we explore new opportunities to communicate the gospel in new ways.
 
There are several features and characteristics which distinguish sermons from other forms of discourse, and they are to be found here in the text of Deuteronomy. First, sermons should be sacramental. Sermons are should not just be about something, in the way that a nature programme of the television might be about polar bears. Watching a programme like that, we are grateful that someone else has endured cold, discomfort and danger to show us polar bears, and, if we think about it, we are glad that the bears are not present with us. But a sermon should seek to make its subject real for those who hear. It is hard to explain but has to do with taking the step from passive reception to involvement. A sermon does not propose a hypothesis which the hearer can choose to take or leave. A sermon brings God to the people and the people to God, or at least that is what I think every preacher should aim for. It should make past events a present reality.
 
Moses’ imagined sermon in Deuteronomy does just this, making present to the people waiting to cross the Jordan the events of the Exodus and the giving of the Law. It is saying – these are the things that have made you the people you are, which have brought you thus far, and which will continue to shape you in your new life in the Promised Land. And to subsequent readers, it is making present the act of crossing the Jordan and coming into the promised land, an act laden with theological significance.
 
Second, sermons are exhortations delivered within communities of the faithful. A whole host of material can make up the subject of a sermon; the purpose of Moses’ imagined sermon is to bring the people to repentance and reform, reminding them of their origins, reminding them of God’s blessing, reminding them of the Law. In the view of Deuteronomy, the people of Israel, the hearers, are God’s own people because of God’s choice and actions, not their own. Through its words, the people are called to live in a manner appropriate for those whom God has chosen and it warns those whom God has chosen not to defy him.
 
The part we have read this morning comes near the end of the book and it is the point at which Deuteronomy reaches its dramatic climax. The history of Israel has been rehearsed, the Ten Commandments proclaimed, the Law explained and now, for the people listening, comes the point for response, the point for decision, the point for choice. Moses asks the question – will you follow God’s Law, or not?
 
It is stunningly simple. No one, on reaching this point, could be in any doubt as to what God requires, what his values are, what he offers. Moses puts it very plainly:
 
See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction.
 
Faced with that, one has two choices, but they may not be the ones you first think of. The first is the choice of whether you believe the whole premise, that there is a God who offers blessing, in whose gift there is life and prosperity but without whom there is nothing but death and destruction. You could walk away, saying it is all made up, and many have, but for those who don’t, for those who believe and know that God is real, there comes another choice – life and prosperity or death and destruction.
 
Now, to be clear, prosperity in this context is not about wealth. The choice is not about an offer of riches. It is about well-being, accepting what God provides, not just in material terms but more importantly in terms of the love and care he provides though those he gives to love us and care for us.
 
By any sober assessment, God here is not offering a choice between equal possibilities. Who, knowing that there is a way to life and well-being, would choose the way to death and destruction? Yet the bizarre thing is that that is what we do, all the time.
 
The Book of Deuteronomy was written at a time in the history of Israel when the people had turned their backs on obedience to God and were chasing after idols and false gods. The immediate historical contest was the experience of exile, not in Egypt, but in Babylon. Those who wrote the book were drawing parallels between these two great experiences of oppression, enslavement, escape and return to the place of promise. ‘Deuteronomy’ simply means ‘second law’ – not because the book contains new law but because it is presented in the Bible for a second time. When it was first written, it was re-presenting the Law to a people who had largely abandoned it and forgotten it.
 
All too often, we behave like we have forgotten what God desires of us. Our New Testament readings give examples. Paul speaks of jealousy and quarrelling among the people of God. He addresses divisions in the church based on false loyalties. Some people were claiming loyalty to Paul and others to another teacher of the faith, Apollos. But Paul hates this and exhorts the members of the church in Corinth to work together, giving their loyalty not to any teacher, but to Christ alone, not to follow a servant but to follow the master.
 
Jesus speaks of relationships which have soured getting in the way. The souring of a relationship to the extent that it ends in murder is so obviously wrong that it cannot be accommodated or endured but, Jesus says, we put up with all sorts of soured relationships which divert us from our path to God. Our angers, our jealousies, the things we do wrong to each other, all affect our ability to serve God. They sap our energies; they distract us and ultimately lead us away from our Creator. Jesus says – if you are in that kind of situation, do something about it. He does not say what in detail, because he knows that no situation is beyond our own ability to address. It is all a matter of the choices we have made. His instruction is to make the right choice, to choose the way of God.
 
Deuteronomy forces us to put ourselves in the shoes of the people of Israel, standing on the banks of the Jordan. And their shoes fit remarkably well. It reminds us that we are on a journey with God, that every day we can choose whether we move forward or stay where we are, and, if we move, which way we go. Do we go on the way of God or do we go on our own way? One way lies blessing, the power of life itself to expand and flourish in all ways. The other way lies the rejection of blessing, literally separation from God.
 
Moses said: This day I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life. The Lord is your life.
 
Amen.