February 19, 2023 – Transfiguration
Exodus 34.29-25
I Kings 19.9-18
Luke 9.28-36
Moses’ Mulligan, and Ours
Transfiguration
This morning’s passage from Exodus 34 likely constitutes one of the greatest “do-overs” in the Old Testament. At first it might have sounded like a familiar story, Moses coming down from the mountain bearing the two tablets of the ten commandments. But on closer examination, something is wrong with this picture. Didn’t Moses already receive the ten commandments once before, way back in Exodus 20? Well, as a matter of fact, he did! Then why is he doing it again fourteen chapters later? Well, you may recall between the first time and the second, there was that nasty little incident with the golden calf, which made Moses so angry he took the original tablets and smashed them to sacred smithereens. So the story we heard from Exodus 34 this morning was actually the second time Moses brought the commandments down Mount Sinai from God to the people. Moses’ anger fired hot, but luckily for Israel, and for us, God was in a more forgiving mood than Moses was, and recast the tablets.
Elijah also had a mountain experience of God which constituted a do-over of a sort. You probably noticed that I Kings pretty much repeated an entire paragraph of the encounter between God and Elijah word-for-word. In verses 9 and 10, and then again in verses 13 and 14, God said,
“What are you doing here, Elijah?” [And Elijah] answered, “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.”
And in the end God sent reassured the prophet of the divine presence, sending Elijah to the rescue of all the Israelites who did not bend their knees to the idols.
I don’t know how much truth there is to this next story, but it too is a story of a “do-over,” one which lent its name to all subsequent do-overs. Legend has it that it was the former manager of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, playing golf on the St. Lambert course in Montreal some time in the 1920s, who either a) hit a poor tee shot and re-teed to get a better lie, b) was allowed by his golfing partners a second tee shot because his drive to the course along the bumpy Canadian back roads had left him shaken and unnerved, or c) was given an extra shot after having overslept and rushed to the course in order to make his tee time. Regardless of which story is true, if any, although the golfer wanted to call his extra shot a “correction shot,” his partners would have none of it and decided to name the shot after the golfer himself, and so it is that David Mulligan’s name came to be forever fixed to the golfer’s do-over.
The God-given mulligan is not the only feature our two Old Testament lessons share. I chose those passages this week because they are the back-stories, if you will, to Jesus’ transfiguration, that experience Jennifer described for us, which is the turning point of Jesus’ ministry. While Jesus will still perform miracles and teach as he did before, from this mountaintop moment onward, his face and his intent are pointed toward Jerusalem, toward his eventual betrayal and crucifixion and resurrection. This is why we read the story of the transfiguration on the Sunday just before Lent begins, because it is a pivot point, and Jesus’ appearance with Moses and Elijah, as Peter, John and James witnessed it, propels him toward his fate.
Today’s gospel lesson from Luke in some respects echoes our Old Testament lessons, and Jesus’ appearance with Moses (from Exodus) and Elijah (from I Kings) is only the start. All three, you may have noticed, are mountain experiences: “Moses came down from Mount Sinai;” “[And God said to Elijah], Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord;” and Luke tells us, “About eight days after these sayings Jesus took with him Peter and John and James and went up on the mountain to pray.” Three mountaintop experiences. Each of the three lessons also describes an encounter with the holy: Moses was given the commandments by God; Elijah stood in the cleft of the rock as God’s glory passed by; God’s voice boomed from the cloud that engulfed Jesus, Moses and Elijah, “This is my Son, my Chosen – listen to him!” But each passage, as we also heard, has about it the whiff of idolatry: remember, the whole reason Moses needed to get a second set of tablets was because he broke the first set when he saw the golden calf; Elijah was charged with exposing the idols of Israel; and Peter, James and John wanted to construct booths, or memorials for Jesus, Moses and Elijah, hoping to somehow capture and contain their glory. One final similarity is that even though the transfiguration story is reported in each of the first three gospels, only in Luke do the disciples get a do-over of sorts: their urge to build booths to memorialize the moment, to solidify what had been a numinous and holy encounter was misdirected, and it too teetered on the edge of idolatry. Only Luke gives the disciples a mulligan by having them half-awake, half-asleep while the vision occurred, thereby absolving them of a somewhat groggy culpability.
It is not very often that life gives us mulligans, but these stories from the Bible seem to suggest that when it does, it is both prudent and faithful to seize upon them and make the most of them. For Moses, it was more than just the ten commandments, it was very nature of the covenant itself between God and Israel; for Elijah, it was the presence of God sandwiched in between those two encounters, and the commission to rescue the Hebrews as a result; and for Jesus as well as for Peter and James and John, it was the beginning of the final chapter of a book that ends with redemption and eternity.
It is not very often that life gives us mulligans, but when it does, we are wise to seize them. I remember once, in an orchestra I was playing in, we performed a symphony by Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. The symphony begins with the strings playing a pulsating rhythm. Next came the woodwinds noodling their melody, followed by the horn section playing a gorgeous brass chorale. We had this symphony down cold, or so I thought. Come performance time, the symphony began. The strings pulsed their heartbeat rhythm; the winds noodled their notes; and then – silence. The horns somehow missed their cue, and I thought to myself, “Well, this will be interesting.” Most often, when something like this happens in performance, we go on and count on the missing players to catch up. But at that moment, our conductor very wisely hushed the orchestra, turned to the audience, and said with a grin, “I think we’ll try this again,” said to the orchestra, “Let’s take it from the top!” And we did, we took our mulligan and sailed smoothly through Sibelius. In all my fifty plus years of playing in symphony orchestras, this was only the second time a conductor did this, and it was precisely the right thing to do. It is not very often that life gives us mulligans, but when it does, we are wise to seize them.
You may have read in Friday’s New York Times that Antarctica’s Thwaite’s Glacier is in peril. Thwaite’s is one of the fastest receding and least stable ice shelves on the continent, and it is melting in ways scientists had not anticipated. In spite of the frigid temperatures, warmer water is both seeping through small but growing channels in the glacier, threatening its structural integrity, and oddly enough, it is also deteriorating from underneath. A recent examination by an underwater robot revealed just how much has already melted and how precarious and unstable is the ice shelf which anchors the glacier. Peter Davis, an oceanographer with the British Antarctic Survey estimates that the glacier’s collapse will trigger a 24 inch rise of the global sea level. Folks, don’t think s mullihsn is possible when we’re talking about climate change. We don’t get a do-over with creation, but the good news is a) it’s not too late yet and b) there are many, many good people doing whatever needs to be done for the good of creation, including, I pray, all the people in this room.
Because after reading the three stories from Exodus, I Kings and Luke this morning, one of the things I come away with is that ours is a God of second chances. God gave Moses a second copy of the ten commandments. God passed by Elijah twice, overcoming the prophet’s understandable fear of confronting the idols and their idolaters. And Jesus walked the disciples back down from the mountaintop, his face steeled for the fate that awaited him.
You and I have likely all done some things we’re not very proud of during the course of our lives. We’ve spoken words we have wished we could snatch back, made choices we’ve come to regret, harbored thoughts that we’re grateful have never reached the light of day. We heard the story last week: we’ve all taken at least one bite of the apple. But the forgiveness of God that we know in Jesus Christ is meant for every one of God’s children. A second chance doesn’t mean that our mistakes are rationalized away, but rather that in Christ we can be bigger than our blunders and we can right our wrongs.
Lent begins this Wednesday. It is a season of righting wrongs, besting blunders and mitigating mistakes. It is a season of understanding and overcoming whatever it is that leads us into temptation. It is a season of walking with Jesus as Peter, John and James did, back down from the mountaintop into the world God calls us to love. Even if we didn’t get it right the first time, Lent is one way that God gives us the same mulligan Moses and Elijah and the disciples had. May we use it with wisdom and faith.