Booth Building
Matthew 17:1-9 

Introduction:
        Everyone including the young people by now has had a mountaintop experience.  When I was working at the Montreat Conference Center, mountain climbing was a part of the curriculum of the conference center and we had a whole staff of young people who served as guides so people would not get lost.  Once when my young brother in law was visiting I took him up to the top of Lookout Mountain which was an easy climb unless you took the last leg up “suicide”.  When we reached the top and looked over the valley below I said to George:  “Isn’t it a wonderful thing to conquer a mountain.” He never forgot that statement and every time we have an exciting experience even today he will say:  “Tom, isn’t it a wonderful thing to conquer a mountain.” 

The scripture today talks about a mountain top of mountain top experience.  Jesus took Peter, James, and John, his closest friends up the Mountain.  There they saw a vision of Jesus’ conversation with Moses and Elijah.  God, himself, addresses the gathering of six and said:  “This Jesus is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.”
   I.                    Transfiguration.
       There on the mountain Jesus was transfigured.  His face shown like the sun; his                garments glistened like a blinding light. 

Moses first appeared.  He, of course, was the primary leader of the people and led them out of exile in Egypt and continued as their leader through 40 years in the wilderness.  Moses, you may remember, had announced Jesus’ coming at the assembly at Horeb: 

      “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you – listen to him” [1]  

Then Elijah appeared, the greatest of the prophets. Hew took on Jezebel and the prophets of Ba’al.  He also took to his heels and fled to Horeb and God spoke to Elijah with that famous still small voice.[2]  Elijah, the forerunner to Jesus, as predicted in the final words of the Hebrew Scriptures: 

            “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet

      Before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.   

II.                 Peter, James, and John. 

Gathered there in this mountaintop experience were Jesus’ closest disciples, the inner circle.  Here were the outstanding church leadership up on the mountain – Luke says to pray.  They were his companions.  He knew what he was going to have to face in Jerusalem.  Luke’s gospel suggests that this was the conversation with Moses and Elijah.  He took his closest friends to be with him on this brief retreat. 

Peter’s reaction was to build a booth – to build three booths –

·         to make it last

·         to keep this great feeling alive

·         a perpetual high on the mountaintop 

Jesus’ reaction:  too soon Peter.  The vision is still going on.  God speaks from heaven:  “This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased – listen to him.”[3]  Sound familiar?  These were God’s same words at the baptism of Jesus.  Same words, same song; second verse.  Get the point?  This Jesus, this carpenter’s son, is Messiah!

                        The disciples, the inner circle, were so awed by this vision that they fell on their faces, before the awesome vision of God.  Peter, James, and John must have thought: “WOW!”  We cannot wait to tell the others what we have seen on the Mountain.  Jesus’ response:  Shhh!  Don’t tell a soul – until after Easter – they won’t understand.  It won’t make any sense without the rest of the story. 

III.               So What? 

Confession: 

1. Jesus is our Lord and Savior.

                        2. Get the whole picture –capture the whole scene

                        (they were acting like children they went to

                        Get some ice cream and missed the banquet)

3.          They were getting their exercise by jumping to

conclusions.  Let’s build booths to capture this

neat scene, this mountaintop experience before

we understand what’s really going on.  They, like us need to “look beneath the obvious to the significant.”

4.          They needed to come down off the mountain to tend the business in the valley – the epileptic boy.  They needed to tend to a faithless and perverse generation 

Conclusion: 

            Just as the transfiguration ties the Old Testament to the New Testament, so the vision ties us to Jesus (when the smoke clears there was “Jesus only.”  And so, the vision ties us to the valley below.  Get the point?  You cannot stay on the mountain and simply enjoy the mountaintop experience.  You must come down off the mountain back to the daily grind of day to day trouble and activity.   

            # Raphael’s The Transfiguration:  Beneath the hill are depicted a father and his demoniac son.  The disciples, unable to heal the boy, point upwards to the Master.[4] 

            # Westminster Presbyterian Church, Charlotte.  In the narthex (glassed in to make a statement to the community) stood three rough hewn crosses on the back wall with the inscription:  “Come unto Me” and in the chancel (it was planned to have) a stained glass window with Jesus pronouncing the benediction:  “Go into all the World.” 

To the broken world of troubled, confused, seeking, and dying folk the message was come into the sanctuary and gain strength and light and hope.  And to the hail and hearty ones who have heard the message and have caught the mission of Messiah has come to save, the church was saying:  Go out into the world, come down from the mountain and be about the business of bringing the vision to a lost world. 

A sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. E. Thomas Miller, Interim Pastor, Georgetown Presbyterian Church, February 6, 2005, Transfiguration Sunday.