Dazzling light blazes, music soars, and one man is chosen to come up into the light and glory. No, it’s not our text for this coming Sunday, Exodus 24:12-18 nor our corresponding Gospel text about the Transfiguration, Matthew 17:1-9. It’s the end of Steven Spielberg’s iconic, remarkable film, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” At the end of what Spielberg clearly portrays as a kind of religious quest, Roy finds what he has been seeking in his mashed potato sculptures of Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, and is welcomed up into the alien ship and soars off into space.
Our ability to read the Bible texts for this Sunday and perceive in them a revelation of the glory of God, both in the Lord whom Moses encounters and in the transfigured Jesus whom Peter, James and John encounter, is severely impaired and distorted by Spielberg’s film and any number of movies (such as “Contact”) that have followed. They invite us to take our desire for God and confuse it with a longing to know that “we are not alone,” but share this universe with other beings who are like but different from ourselves, maybe because they are a bit smarter and kinder.
I truly enjoy science fiction. It was my genre of choice as a youth, and I still look for books and films that capture some of the wonder and fun I experienced reading Asimov or Heinlein, and watching “2001” or the original “Star Wars.” Yet the Bible, especially our texts for today, invite us into the discovery of a glory and wonder that is both further away and closer to home than any which alien visitors might bring us.
That the creator of the universe would choose to be present with us is a glory which surpasses all the surreal light shows that Hollywood can create, even with the extra help of CGI these days. When in our text in verse 12 God calls Moses up to join Him on the mountain, it’s not for a mystical, surreal experience. It’s to receive God’s instruction for living in the very concrete form of laws written on tablets of stone. The point is not to transcend ordinary life. It’s for the glory of God’s own life to enter into ordinary life, to enter our daily living and transform us.
The same is even more true of the Transfiguration of Jesus. It is glorious, it is wonderful, but in many ways it is all very down to earth. In the midst of the same sort of cloud of glory which covered Sinai, this Man Jesus is identified by the voice of God as His beloved Son, the one to whom they, and everyone, should listen. God’s glory enters into human life, even takes on humanity in the person of Christ.
All those films suggest we should be looking for sound and light extravaganzas if we’re going to have true experiences of the glory of God. Our texts suggest we may need to be looking in simpler, more mundane places. Perhaps one of the most truly dazzling display of God’s glory is in the lives of those who by the grace of Jesus are living out in concrete, solid ways the kind of life described in the Commandments and modeled by Jesus Himself. And if we wish to encounter our Lord Himself, perhaps we need look no further than the bread and cup resting on the Table before us as we gather Sunday morning.
Forget the sculpted mashed potatoes, mysterious music, and the light show. Come and meet the Lord as we eat and drink in His glory through His broken body and shed blood on Sunday morning, then go out into the world to display that glory in our own lives.