Glimpses of Glory

(This is very similar, but not identical, to this sermon from nine years ago.  I was not Planned to preach this Sunday, but stood in for someone who found themselves unable to do so)

Do you ever watch sport on television?

It doesn’t really matter which sport –

football, rugby, athletics, gymnastics, cycling, ice-skating –

whatever it is you enjoy,

the point I’m about to make is the same.

What we see on television is just the tip of the iceberg, the pinnacle of the sport.

They show you the very best athletes at the peak of their game.

What they don’t show you is the endless hours of practice every single one of those athletes puts in,

often training at unearthly hours of the morning to fit in with the day’s work, grinding along,

day after day after day,

getting injured,

recovering,

plodding on.

And then, every once in awhile, realising how much they’ve improved,

how much they are “getting it”.

Suddenly, all the hard work has paid off –

they’ve been selected for their team, or their club, or even their country!

Or perhaps they’re finding a certain aspect of the skill easy that six months before they could barely do.

A glimpse of the glory of what they’ve been working so hard for.

Perhaps you’ve taken a sport fairly seriously in your time, so you know what I’m talking about.

But even if you haven’t, isn’t it the same with our Christian lives, too?

We plod on, dutifully using what John Wesley called “The means of grace”,

that is, the Sacrament,

public worship,

the Scriptures,

prayer and so on,

and yet nothing seems to happen. 

Sometimes it feels as though our relationship with God is all down to us, not to God,

and doubts set in. 

But then, just sometimes, God breaks in and we get a glimpse of his glory. 

I know that has happened to me, and I hope it has happened to you.

In our readings today, various people get glimpses of God’s glory.

Firstly, Moses and the Israelites. 

Moses is spending time in the mountains with God. 

This passage is set shortly after that infamous episode with the golden calf,

and I think the authors are trying to emphasize that it is God, Yahweh, who is in charge,

not Moses, not a golden calf, nor anybody else. 

So Moses’ face shines when he has been in God’s presence,

as he is speaking with God’s authority. 

The Israelites caught a glimpse of God’s glory. 

And we are told that Moses did, too;

he was allowed to see just the tiniest shadow of the back of God –

as though God had a human form, but then, he was told,

he couldn’t see the face of God as he wouldn’t live through the experience. 

Nobody can, nobody except Jesus. 

We can only come to God through Jesus;

more of that in a minute. 

The Israelites could only see God’s glory reflected in Moses’ face, and it scared them. 

Moses, who hadn’t at all realised anything was different,

had to put a veil over his face while he was among them, so as not to scare them.

The New Testament reading set for today, which we didn’t read,

points out that Moses was able to take the veil off, eventually, because the glory faded. 

Moses was back among the people, involved in the every-day tasks of running the Exodus,

and gradually the glimpse of glory that he had had,

and that he had passed on to the Israelites,

faded.

Okay, fast-forward several hundred years to the time of Christ.

This time, it is Jesus who is going up the mountain and he asks his friends James, Peter and John to go with him.

I don't know whether Jesus knew what was going to happen,

only that it was going to be something rather different and special,

and he wanted some moral support!

And so the four friends go up the mountain –

and suddenly things get rather confused for a time,

and when it stops being confused,

there is Jesus in shining white robes talking to Moses and Elijah.

Peter, of course, babbles on about building shelters,

but more to reassure himself that he exists, I think, than for any other reason.

And then the voice from heaven saying "This is my Son, listen to Him".

In other words, Jesus is more important than either Moses or Elijah, who were the two main people, apart from God, in the Jewish faith.

To good Jews, as James, Peter and John were, this must have almost felt like blasphemy.

No wonder Jesus told them to keep their big mouths shut until the time was right,

or he'd have been stoned for a blasphemer forthwith.

Peter, for one, remembered this momentous day until the end of his life.

Years and years later, he –

or someone writing in his name –

was to write:

"For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ,

but we had been eyewitnesses of his majesty.

For he received honour and glory from God the Father

when that voice was conveyed to him by the Majestic Glory, saying, `This is my Son, my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.'

We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven,

while we were with him on the holy mountain."

For Peter, James and John, it was to be proof that Jesus is the Messiah, and through all the turbulent times that followed they must have held on to the memory of that tremendous day, when they saw a glimpse of God’s glory in Jesus.

But they, too, had to come down from the mountainside and carry on,

and immediately they are confronted with a crisis:

a child who has been brought to the disciples for healing, but nothing has happened. 

In this version of the story, Jesus sounds almost cross –

well, you can’t blame him, can you? 

He was probably tired after being on the mountain,

and rather wanting a quiet supper and his bed,

and now the disciples were all talking at once, explaining how they’d tried to cast out this demon,

and the boy’s father is adding to the confusion, and yadda, yadda, yadda….. 

Basically, back to normal! 

We know from other accounts of this story that afterwards Jesus tells the disciples that they can only cast out that sort of demon with prayer and possibly fasting. 

So it seems that glimpses of God’s glory are very rare, and the normal gritty, hum-drum, everyday life is the norm. 

And that’s as it should be. 

You can’t live on a mountain-top all the time, you’d get altitude sickness! 

If you were on holiday all the time, you wouldn’t appreciate the rest and relaxation that being on holiday brings. 

It’s not much fun waking up and knowing you have no work to go to and, when you get up, the big excitement of the day will be deciding what to have for supper! 

We are never quite sure where God is in all of this. 

But God is there. 

Those very special glimpses of his glory, such as Moses saw,

such as Peter, James and John saw, are just that:

special. 

They happen maybe once or twice in a lifetime, if that. 

But God is there, acting, working in our lives, even if we don’t always recognise Him.

My father tells a couple of stories about this. In the first, two men are talking in the pub, and the first is telling of an adventure he’s recently had in North Africa. He got lost in the desert, and ran out of water, and quite thought his last hour had come, so he prayed out loud to God to come and save him.

“And what did God do?” asked his friend, realising that something must have happened as there he was, large as life and twice as natural, in the pub enjoying his pint.

“Oh,” said the first man, “God didn’t need to do anything, as just then a caravan came along, and I was able to go on with them to safety.”

The second story tells of the time there was a big flood, and people had to climb up on to the roofs of their houses to escape.

One person – let’s make it a woman this time, as we had a man in the last story, but it doesn’t really matter – one woman thought this was a remarkable opportunity to demonstrate, so he thought, God’s power, so she prayed “Dear Lord, please come and save me.”

Just then, someone came past in a rowing-boat and said “Climb in, we’ll take you to safety!”

“Oh, no thank you,” said our friend, “I’ve prayed for God to save me, so I’ll just wait for Him to do so.”

And she carried on praying, “Dear Lord, please save me!”

Then along came the police in a motor-launch, and called for her to jump in, but she sent them away, too, and continued to pray “Dear Lord, please save me!”

Finally, a Coastguard helicopter came and sent down someone on a rope to him, but she still refused,

claiming that she was relying on God to save her.

And half an hour later, she was swept away and drowned.

So, because she was a Christian, as you can imagine, she ended up in Heaven,

and the first thing she did when he got there

was go to to the Throne of Grace, and say to God,

“What do you mean by letting me down like this?

I prayed and prayed for you to rescue me, and you didn’t!”

“My dear child,” said God, “I sent you two boats and a helicopter –

what more did you want?”

When we pray for someone to be healed, quite often we want to see God intervening spectacularly, like the disciples expected to see with the boy with a demon from today’s reading. 

After all, if you think of it, there’s a limit to what medicine can do. 

When you have an operation, the surgeons can cut you open and do what needs to be done inside you, and then they can stitch you up again – but they can’t make that cut heal up!

They can, of course, do all sorts of things to encourage it to heal –

they can’t actually make the flesh grow back together again.

That has to be left to natural processes –

or is it God? 

I believe God is involved in healing, whether it is by direct, supernatural intervention,

or, more usually, through the normal processes of one’s immune system,

aided by medical or surgical intervention when necessary. 

But those glimpses of glory that I started with –

when you realise that you are making progress in your chosen sport or hobby, or perhaps when you are out there competing –

I believe those times, too, are from God.

I think, then, that what I want to leave with you today is this:

as we go into Lent,

which is a time when we are apt to think about God, and our relationship with Him,

perhaps a little more deeply than at other times of the year,

let’s be on the lookout for touches of God in our everyday lives. 

They don’t have to be spectacular, they probably won’t be. 

But each of them is a little glimpse of glory.  Amen.