Fairhaven Sermon 2-15-2026

When I'm on vacation, above all, I want to sleep. Stormi is not like that. Stormi is very different than me. She's up at or before sunrise every day at the beach.

and she and my dad will go down, go down to the sand and set up the tent, the chairs, long before anyone else can encroach onto our spot. My dad is very territorial on the beach, which I've inherited. Stay far away from me. We spread out our chairs, right? And I can usually get myself out of bed, sunscreened, coffeed up onto the beach chair by like 9:30 or so, by which time Stormy's already starting to sunburn.

But I can't deny the magic of sunrise on an East Coast beach. And I do my best to make it to the sunrise at least once on every trip. Because there's nothing like that silence. And it's hard to express the way a sunrise on the beach feels because it's really not silent.

It feels silent, but it's not. The seagulls are slicing through the air, cawing. You know, you have the little shorebirds skittering on the sand trying to outrun the water coming in and out. And the waves always seem just very peaceful, no matter how big they are, whenever the sun is glowing red.

But there's this spiritual silence there. Yeah. It feels like you're not really supposed to talk. It feels like you're supposed to be quiet.

And the light that you see there can't really be compared to anything else. Somehow the sun starts very small, this little red-pink disk, and over the next couple minutes it turns into a big orange ball of fire, and then just the regular daylight. And how is a person supposed to react to something like that? What are we supposed to do in moments like these where we can tell there's something divine happening around us? And the way we respond is that we pull out our phones and take some pictures. And that's not the right answer, but that's what we do.

And we want to capture what's happening when we're seeing something beautiful in some way so we can take it with us so we can enjoy it later. That's why you see people doing it in all these silly circumstances. You'll be at a concert and someone's filming the whole thing. You'll be at fireworks, same deal.

And it's kind of bizarre because, no offense in case you're a great photographer, but I have never seen a smartphone picture of a sunrise that was worth looking at. There is nothing that you can capture in a picture that conveys what that looks like, what that feels like, this experience that's just immersive in every sense. And you are not going to feel anything like that looking in that picture. And while you're still there, this desire to catch it puts a barrier between yourself and whatever miracle is happening around you.

And so we might be tempted to diagnose this as a very modern problem. Our inability to be in the moment comes from technology. And I don't know. You think about, back though, James Audubon, the early 1800s naturalist, he sought to record every bird in North America, and he had to sit down and paint every single one of them.

You think he knew them pretty well. And in 1909, Robert Peary was the first explorer to ever reach the North Pole. We have no pictures of that voyage. We just have his diary where they calculated, looking at the son, that they must have been there.

We have evidence in pencil, right? And even 30 years ago, you didn't have to put a forceful note in your wedding program requiring people to stay seated and refrain from taking flash photos during the ceremony. Without the possibility of some random aunt or cousin stepping out to snap a picture with her iPad, right? Right. Now, things have changed in that way, but I don't think the general phenomenon is new. And the world we live in makes it easier than ever to keep ourselves from really absorbing what's going on.

But the Apostle Peter shows us today that this is a human condition, right? Today is Transfiguration Sunday, the day that marks our transition from the season after Epiphany, which looks at the early, exciting, new, fresh moments of Jesus' ministry into Lent where we walk along with Him to the cross. The symbolic turning point from uphill to downhill happens on the Mount of Transfiguration this morning. Jesus' upward journey up the mountain, up to the shining moment. gives way to that long downward drift to betrayal.

But the apostles don't know any of that. The apostles don't know that they're standing in this symbolic moment. They're just walking with Jesus up a mountain. So here's the scene.

Jesus has taken Peter, James, and John, three of his first disciples, to the top of a very high mountain. And we don't know that he's given them any explanation as to why they're supposed to go. And in fact, based on what we've seen in Scripture over the past couple weeks, you remember when he called them at the seashore and just said, follow me? We can probably speculate he didn't tell them much at all. He just said, let's go.

But the four reach the top of this mountain. Jesus is in the lead and is out in front of them. And miraculously, Jesus is transformed before their eyes. His face starts to shine like the sun.

His clothes become as white as pure light. And Jesus is completely different now. at a fundamental level from who they thought he was seconds before. It's not just that he's the same guy but glowing.

Something is different. And as if that's not enough for the disciples to take in, suddenly Moses and Elijah, who are respectively long dead and bodily taken into heaven, they show up. And they're there having a conversation with Jesus. And there's a sense in which Jesus is really bringing the story together.

Jesus. Old Testament prophets, law in this new promise. This is the first time that Moses has set foot in the promised land. Really fascinating.

So Peter, naturally, is overwhelmed. He's standing in the midst of this glorious moment, brighter and more immersive than the most incredible sunrise, and he is just overtaken. And I imagine Peter is trying to stay firmly in his rational brain, to keep control, to hold on so this high-voltage emotion, the spirit in the air doesn't just knock him down. And he says to Jesus, quite sincerely, in doing his best to be a servant of the one he has very recently called the Son of God, he says, Lord, it is good that we're here.

Off to a good start. And then he says, if you want, I'll make three shrines. One for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah. And it's this beautiful gesture.

We're always attempted to kind of raise an eyebrow at Peter for being clueless, but he's not. He's talking about the kind of tent, the kind of shelter that the Ark of the Covenant was kept in. This is a tabernacle. He's trying to make this holy place.

Yeah. Peter wants to build the kind of structure that's intended to be a shelter for the presence of God. So he kind of gets what's happening here. And he thinks, understandably, that doing something is the way to respond to this moment.

You know, I'm here. I must be here for a reason. I've got to do something. And Peter's mistake is not in his intentions.

His intentions are good. His mistake is that he's refused to just let himself be overwhelmed. He has this desire to stay in his right mind, to keep a handle on the situation, and, yeah, to put something between himself and this act of God that's happening before his eyes. He puts the smartphone up, so to speak.

He's attempting to make tangible and permanent something that God intends to be fleeting, something that's a special gift just for those who are there. Peter is you and me, standing in front of a sunrise, trying to figure out the best way to capture it. He doesn't have a phone, so he wants to build a monument. It's not a sin or anything.

It's just this intensely human tendency to do something whenever all God wants is just for him to be there. And it's the stark contrast to the example we see from Moses in our Exodus reading, if you listen there. When Moses goes to be with God, although Moses has had kind of a longer standing relationship with God at this point, Moses goes to be with God on the top of Mount Sinai, and when he does, Moses fully unplugs. He is there to be with God.

God doesn't even show up for the first seven days, and everything else gets left at the foot of the mountain. So Moses' warning to the people before he goes up the mountain, I think is actually kind of funny, but it's really powerful. It's important. He basically says, you know, if you guys, the people of Israel, if you guys have any complaints, any legal disputes, go talk to Aaron, go talk to her.

Somebody's name is Hur. I'm off the grid. You know, I don't have the bandwidth to deal with your silly nonsense. There's people here who can handle it.

Leave me alone until I come back. Moses is ready to hear. Notice how differently Peter responds. He's just desperate to maintain control, to be a responsible disciple, to keep up this job that he has.

And it results in him speaking before God does. How often have you done that? He's ready to hear. Have you wanted to do something and spoken then before God has actually spoken? I would say most of the time for me. And if we're lucky when that happens, we experience in these moments what Peter does, and that's that God cuts us off.

God cuts us off to say what God needs to say. And so in this case, on top of the mountain, this cloud descends, this physical representation of the Father. It's the same cloud that surrounded Moses at Mount Sinai. The same cloud that leads the Israelites across the desert.

And here on the mountain, from that cloud, God reaffirms to the disciples what he said at Jesus' baptism. They weren't there the first time around, but they get to hear it this time. This is my son whom I dearly love. I'm very pleased with him.

But God adds a little addendum to this, something that he didn't say at the Jordan. Listen to him. Moses received the law for the first time on a mountaintop from God. That's what Moses went up for in our Exodus reading, to get the tablets.

And now the disciples are receiving the fullness of that law. Listen to him. Listening to Jesus, that's God's orders now. And it's simultaneously so much simpler and so much more complex than the law of Moses.

It's not just a bunch of yes or nos, it's listen to him. And Peter is probably more than a little bit embarrassed because he has not been doing a lot of listening in this couple moments. But hearing the voice of the Father, he does hear, he does listen, he drops to the ground, which was the proper response all along, just to take it in. Jesus then comes to them, comes to the three disciples, reaches out and touches them and encourages them to get up and not to be afraid.

This moment is a moment of wonder, of grace. It's not judgment. You know, Peter, you got it wrong, but here's your opportunity. This is what you're here for.

But as they lift up their heads to see what's going on, it's done. that special liminal moment of the sunrise, this brief miracle after the darkness has just drifted as it always does into the plain light of day. And then they head back down the mountain. It's done.

And Jesus does something, I think, really puzzling at this point. And he tells Peter and James and John, don't tell anybody. Don't tell anybody about this vision until the human one is raised from the dead. Interestingly, they don't seem to have any questions about that.

But he says, don't tell anybody. That incredible experience of transfiguration, of meeting face-to-face with God, with these great heroes of Israel's history, of watching Jesus be transformed into pure heavenly light, don't tell anybody. Don't tell anybody. That's just for them.

Don't tell anybody, Jesus says, not the crowds coming to hear me preach, not those wounded souls who are coming to you for healing and for exorcism, don't say anything to the people who are trying to decide whether or not to believe in me. Don't even say anything to the other nine disciples. levels. It's as if they've gone out alone to the beach at daybreak, submerged into this ocean of color and sound and smells they couldn't have imagined, and now they're just supposed to go back home, slip into bed before anyone knows they left.

left. Envision doing that, though. I have done this. Doesn't it feel more sacred not to tell anybody? You've seen something that nobody else has seen with you.

This gift that was given from God to you, and it remains between you and Jesus. it's easy, I think, in our lives to believe in a Jesus who's either just completely beyond us and very distant. You know, he's removed from our lives. He's seated up on a heavenly throne.

Or to believe in a Jesus who's very abstract. You know, he's contained in like the words of the Sermon on the Mount, these commandments. It's easy to think of Jesus being distant in that way. But the transfiguration shows us a Jesus whose most fantastic miracles and signs are sometimes just one-on-one.

Who gives those who love him the overwhelming power of his presence. Not for public consumption. Not for any purpose of convincing other people. But just because.

Just because he wants to give it to you. You know, we don't go out and look at a sunrise for any reason, you know, to help us see in the dark. We go because it's beautiful, because it's a great, wonderful thing to see. And once we have seen it, once we've seen the sunrise for ourselves, we know every night that that same thing is coming again in the morning.

And so if Peter had distracted himself from what he was seeing to build these three tabernacles, these three tents, or if the disciples had spent their time engulfed in this cloud of God debating among themselves, trying to nail down the meaning of what they were seeing, what is this about? That would have been as good as missing it. Why even go? the presence, their presence with Jesus, is the entire point in that moment, just being there. That's it. Wrestle with the theology, wrestle with the meaning, talk it out later.

For now, just be there. And so as we move into Lent this week, we do that walking alongside Jesus and the disciples down the mountaintop. We have the opportunity to wrestle with the meaning of all of this. But we often think Lent is about what we're going to do, what we're going to give up, what new practice we might take on.

But the voice from the cloud doesn't say, copy him. It doesn't say, obey him, at least not yet. God says, listen to him, which is a very different thing if you think about it. Listening and obeying are not the same thing.

And so the question is, before you do anything for Lent, before you do anything, can you just sit in the sunrise? Can you put down the phone to take pictures, the plans that you're coming up with to build tents, and just sit down, just listen? So for the next 40 some days, we're walking towards Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey. We're walking towards the Last Supper, towards the Garden of Gethsemane where, again, the disciples have trouble just being there. We're walking towards the foot of the cross. At every step of the way.

we can devote ourselves to taking seriously these words from heaven. Listen to him. Just be with him. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.