What Do You Talk About on Transfiguration Mountain?

For yesterday's sermon, my pastor focused on this part of the Transfiguration story in Luke 9:

³⁰Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. ³¹They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.

Our pastor focused on that word "departure."  In all my years of Transfiguration Sundays and that text in other settings, I had somehow never realized that the story tells us what Moses, Elijah, and Jesus discuss.

Our pastor told us that the word for "departure" is also "exodus."  And from there, we launched back to the Passover story.  The Israelites find themselves out of Egypt, but like many of us who have found ourselves miserable on vacation because we've brought ourselves along, the Israelites can't stop their habits of whining and complaining.

They're out of Egypt with nothing between them and the Promised Land, nothing but themselves.  They have to learn to trust God and that God will follow through on God's promises.  We need to do that too.

Jesus will come down from one mountain and trudge towards another, the mountain of Golgotha:  God keeping God's promises.

Our pastor reminded us that we are called to live the Good News, to live the story so well that people will want to know what we know.

He said that we could see it as God's wisdom or God's sense of humor that we are the way that God has chosen to tell God's story.   God counts on us to get the message out there into the world.

You might protest that you didn't sign up for such a task.  Like Moses, you might see people that are better suited to declare God's mission and wonder why God doesn't pass over you.

God has infinite capacity for knowing what is best--and God has chosen us.  So, live like the Resurrection Person that God knows you can be!