March 2, 2025: God Transforms Us

Old Testament Reading Exodus 34: 29-35
The Gospel  Luke 9: 28-36   

Both Moses and Jesus were physically transformed by their experience with God. But who was this visible transformation for?

Moses and Jesus already knew, had already experienced, that connection to God. Moses spent 40 days and nights conversing with God about, I am sure, a whole lot more than the 10 Commandments about rituals. Those 104 words would not have taken that long to say, understand, or even carve into stone. 

Moses, instead, was primarily having the experience of God with him. I imagine that in those 40 days, many of which were likely spent in silent prayer, Moses had to make room for God. He would have to let go of all the pressures of leading the Israelites, their bickering, disappointment, and transgressions. He would have to put aside his doubts about himself, whether he was truly called to be a leader, whether he truly had the ability to persuade the people to follow God. He would have to quiet all these doubts and thoughts, breathe deeply, and be still in order to know God: to be able to feel God’s presence and hear God’s words. 

Moses was essentially going through a process of peeling off the layers of distraction and doubt to discover God’s guiding voice within him: to be covered in God like a cloud of knowing.

 That experience literally left Moses glowing but Moses did not need to look in the mirror to know this, he could feel it in the core of his very being. His shining face was for the Isrealites to assure them that these ritual commandments came from God, not Moses. Yet the effect of God’s presence with and within Moses does not just disappear, it remains, requiring a lampshade like veil so that he did not blind the people with God’s light.

For Jesus, as God’s son, it does not take as long. He also went up on a mountain to pray and in this act, while Peter, John, and James are sleepily watching, they are startled awake by Jesus’ dazzling brilliance. Even though this alone would probably have assured the disciples of Jesus’ role as the Messiah, it becomes even more clear with the appearance of Moses and Elijah and then God overshadowing them as a cloud and declaring, “This is my son, my chosen one, listen to him!” 

While these transfiguration miracles certainly persuaded the people of God’s presence with them, it does not have to take that kind of miracle for us to feel God’s presence with us and within us. However, like Moses, we do have to shed the layers of doubt, distraction, anger, and busyness in our lives to hear and feel God and, especially, to shine God’s light outward.

We can take some advice from the mystics in this process. As Father Richard Rohr says, “mystics honor the experience of the essential mystery and unknowability of God and invite us to do the same.” It’s not about figuring God out but about listening, connecting, and dwelling in the mystery of God. 

Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1328) was a German Catholic priest, theologian, philosopher, and mystic. He said, “The inner person is the soil in which God has sown the divine likeness and image and in which God sows the good seed, the roots of all wisdom, all skills, all virtues, all goodness—the seed of the divine nature.”

James Finley from the Center for Action and Contemplation from whom I took a course last summer, offers a practice to help us understand Meister Eckhart’s teaching that we are the image of God: 

This is a paraphrase of Eckhart: Imagine you’re standing before a full-length mirror, and imagine the image of you is conscious, that it can think. And this image of you has been through a lot of therapy; it’s taken a lot of courses on being an insightful image. And it has come to a point in which it informs you that it doesn’t need you. 

You say to the image of you, “Well, you know, this is going to be rough, really, since you’re an image of me.” 

“No,” the image says, after a pause. “I’ve worked on this; I’ve come to this point.” 

And so, to gently help the image out, you step halfway off the side of the mirror, and half the image disappears. The image has a panic attack and goes back into therapy and says to the therapist, “I’m not real! I’m not real! I was working on my affirmations. I bolstered up my confidence, but I don’t know where I went. I buckled!” 

Now, the image was real, but the image wasn’t real in the way that it thought it was real. It was real, but not real without you. It was real as an image of you. See? 

Eckhart says, “The image owes no allegiances to anything except that of which it is the image.”… There is nothing that has the authority to say what it is except that of which it is the image. And so it is with us, Eckhart says, that we are the image of God. Without God, we are nothing, absolutely nothing. In being the image of God, we owe no allegiances to anything but the Infinite Love in whose image we are made. And the idolatry of diversions of the heart where we wander off into cul-de-sacs with the imagined authority of anything less or other than Infinite Love to name who we are? This is the problem.

Moses and Jesus were radiating because they were in touch with God within their very core and they were reflecting God’s image outwardly. We are all made in God’s image. It is only in quieting our minds and hearts, closing out the busyness,  division, anger and chaos of our lives and society that we can be receptive not only to hearing the still speaking God, but to living into that loving image enough to radiate it out for others to see. 

God transforms all of us if we are open to it. It is not just Moses and Jesus who had the ability to be radiant. Don’t we all want to radiate God’s love?

Here at the United Church of Ludlow, we have taken that on as our mission “Striving to live God’s message of inclusive love through Jesus Christ in our community, nation, and world."  If this is truly our mission, as I believe it is, then this should be apparent to others not just through the words on the website but in our actions - not just in this building and not just on Sundays but everyday, everywhere. It should radiate from each of us individually and from all of us collectively.

Just over a month ago, we took a light-filled step toward living into that mission by voting to be Open and Affirming to All. We passed a covenant, a promise, that reads,  “ We are an Open and Affirming (ONA) and Reconciling church, believing that each of us is created in God’s image. We celebrate everyone, including: people of all ages, races, cultures, sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions, family configurations, economic circumstances, education, physical, cognitive, or emotional abilities, spiritual and religious traditions.
​
We welcome all to participate fully in the life, leadership, ministry, and mission of this church as we seek to grow together spiritually in an open, safe, and nurturing community of faith. We strive to live God’s message of inclusive love through Jesus Christ in our community, nation, and world.

We commit ourselves to the ongoing work of being an ONA/Reconciling congregation, seeking peace and justice as we live out the belief that God is still speaking. With God’s grace, we journey together in Christian faith.

With this covenant we affirmed that all people: Children, adults, seniors, Black, Brown, Yellow, White, migrants and citizens, able-bodied, differently-abled, rich, poor, educated, uneducated, gay, lesbian, transgender, bi, protestant, Catholic, Jew, Muslim, Hindu and more- all are not only welcome here but able to participate in any aspect of our ministry - to feel safe, to feel nurtured, and to be able to grow. 

Do you think all those people know that? How can we show them? That is both an individual task for each of us and a collective task for all of us. 
Jesus didn’t just say feed the hungry - he fed them multiplying loaves and fishes. Jesus didn’t just say take care of the sick - he healed them from demons, illness, and injury, Jesus didn’t just say love your neighbors and your enemies - he invited them in or invited himself into the lives of tax collectors, prostitutes, foreigners, and even the very people who persecuted him and his followers (think about Paul). 

Striving is an active, present-tense verb that cannot be completed with a sign outside the church that simply says “All are Welcome” and an invitation to coffee hour. It is an ongoing effort - a forward motion that follows the model of Jesus Christ: sharing Christ’s message of inclusive love for all inside this building in our relationships with each other, outside this building in our relationships with our community, and well-beyond in our relationships and dealings with our country and world. It is shown in our welcoming kindness to people who may be, live or think differently from us. 

We are all made in God’s image and should strive to reflect that by connecting to God who is within each of us, speaking to us and guiding us, showing us how to lead with love, especially when it is hard. Only then, will we truly radiate God’s message of inclusive love through Jesus Christ. Amen.

Pastor Michelle Fountain

---