The Tabernacling God

Father Tommy Thompson  

The Feast of the Transfiguration 2017

6 August 2017

The festival of booths…It was a time of glory for our ancestors in the faith.  It was a high and holy time…a feast of feasts if you will, and if you remember some of your Sunday School education you know that those Israelites really knew how to live it up…especially during a holy feast.  This one was of no exception.  The spiritual core of the holy time was a commemoration of the wilderness wanderings if the people of Israel—those 40 years Israel wandered in the wilderness, a time when God led them. It was the time of the tabernacle – the temporary dwelling built for the presence of God before there was a permanent temple which would go with God’s people wherever they went.  The tabernacle is described beautifully at the end of the book of Exodus.  When everything was prepared, assembled and its place, that the cloud of God’s glory came upon the tabernacle…and finally God’s people have a place where they encounter the shekinah, the glory: the powerfully, palpable, purging, prodding, provocative presence of the holy, mighty, ever living and Almighty Ones.  The tabernacle—the tent—was the place where God in His glory dwelt.  And to commemorate that season of their journey as God’s people the people of God re-enacted the whole thing complete with little huts, booths, of sticks and branches: temporary dwelling places to remind themselves of the time they traversed through the wilderness after God had delivered them from their oppression as slaves in Egypt—their Exodus.

This year was different, however. Peter, James and John were in for something like they had never seen or experienced before.  Jesus called the three away from the festivities for a while.  Little did they know that they’d have a tabernacle moment like no other.  Up the mountain they went…the disciples were sleepy, but because they stayed awake they saw it –they beheld it….the glory.  The Shekinah that overshadowed and enveloped the wilderness tabernacle was in their midst, right before their eyes. And there in that scene Jesus is transfigured before them, his face shines bright, his clothes are dazzling white, Moses and Elijah appear, talking with Jesus about his departure, his Exodus, which He is to accomplish at Jerusalem.  Moses and Elijah—representing the law and the prophets…the living and the dead (Moses died, Elijah was taken up alive) and there in the center of that blazing glory is Jesus.  

Right there in front of their faces, they had front row seats to the movie spoiler to trump all previews.  In just a few moments the veil between the heavenly glory of God and this earthly tent was drawn back and there for Peter, James and John to behold is Jesus - his whole being radiates with the glory, letting them in on a vision of His resurrected glory to come -- the future glory that is coming for all of God’s people when, as John testified to us, the new heaven and new earth come, and the new Jerusalem comes down out of heaven from God, as a bride adorned for her husband.  I can hear that loud voice coming out from that glory—Behold, the tabernacle of God is with His people!  He will dwell with them and they will be His people, and God Himself will be with them, he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, death will be no more, mourning and crying and pain will be no more for the first things have passed away.  

What a manifestation!  

It’s a wondrous thing when you stumble upon a space where God in His glory dwells.  

I cry out with that hymn writer…O Wondrous Type!  O vision fair! of glory that the Church shall share, which Christ upon the mountain shows where brighter than the sun He glows.  

I don’t blame Peter for wanting to build some booths, some dwellings, some tents, do you?  We’ve accused him for years now when we preach this story of wanting to put God in a box, or hold on to a mountain-top experience that you just can’t hang on to cause we live our lives in the valley, but I don’t think these kinds of things are where Peter’s problem lies. If I were to behold something like that, I’d like to build my little booth near that kind of glory too – who wouldn’t?!  But, you see, that’s the problem – I can’t, Peter can’t,  and we can’t; Because the transfiguration is not about simply beholding glory, it’s about becoming glory.  You see, we don’t need to construct booths for our tabernacling God to inhabit, because His intention has always been to tabernacle, to make His abode, in and among us.  “And the word was made flesh and pitched tent/tabernacled with us.”

Today’s feast is called “the Transfiguration of Christ,” but  I’ve often wondered who or what was really being changed?  Was Jesus really changing, or was Jesus simply being revealed for who He really was?  These disciples on the other hand…I can’t help but think that there must have been some kind of change, or at least the beginning of one as that shekinah glory cloud comes and envelops them…maybe they are the ones being transfigured?  

I think Paul began to unpack it best in his words which I’m going to paraphrase just a bit:  “…And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror are being transformed, transfigured into the same image from one degree of glory to another, for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.”   

This is God’s dream for us…that we would be transfigured, refigured, reformed, reshaped, renewed in the very image in which we were created…that we would bear witness to and show forth the image of God, the likeness of God in the midst of His grand and glorious creation.  And God’s work of tabernacling, from the tent of meeting to the God-man, Jesus Christ, has all been part of His great far-reaching effort to bring us in full conformity with that image we have been previously unable to fully embody.  

Brothers and sisters, this revelation – the transfiguration – is about the glory coming and indwelling us, and as it does, changing us, until we shine forth, revealing to the world around us the very glory that has changed us from the inside out.  It is the hope we have for the future, a bright future of glory in the fullness of God’s presence breaking into the here and now, making us living icons who show forth what is to come for the whole creation. 

I think that’s pretty good news if you ask me.  I have always found it to be a wondrous thing to stumble upon one in whom God’s glory dwells.  Just as Moses came down from the mountain, after being in the presence of God with a new glow about him, such is the glow of one in whom God’s glory dwells, and sisters and brothers, I see a lot of glowing right now as I look upon you, the faithful.  May others, when they look upon the earthly tent that is your life, cry, “Glory!”…because it is what radiates from you, from the core of who you are…and beyond.  May the glow of your transfigured soul reveal the Triune God so that more and more may know the abundance of life in Jesus Christ.  To the glory of the holy, everliving God:  Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Amen.