Luke 9:34.
While he was saying this a cloud came and overshadowed
them, and they were terrified as they entered the cloud.
Focus, if you will this morning, on the cloud that overshadowed
those three disciples, and so filled them with fear.
There are, as we know, many kinds of clouds that we see and experience
in different ways and the Bible speaks in several places of God speaking
from a cloud, and of God leading through a cloud, and even of God being
in a cloud. Our gospel reading concerns a cloud high on the
MOUNT OF TRANSFIGURATION, that engulfed the top of the mountain,
and filled the disciples with fear -- and we will return to that in a moment.
But clouds also feature on our agendas, and are significant in events
of recent times. Not all of them through positive mountain-top experiences.
I want to take you to a much later cloud that shocked the entire world
61 years ago today. It was a cloud so vast and so deadly that the world
had never seen the like before. It was a cloud that terrified those who saw
it coming. Although they were few in number and has terrified every
generation since. Today is the anniversary of that cloud for on the morning
of August 6th, 1945, the United States Army Air Forces
dropped a nuclear weapon,
nick-named `Little Boy', on the city of
HIROSHIMA, JAPAN,
followed three days later by the detonation of a similar bomb, `Fat Man',
over
NAGASAKI, JAPAN.
The cloud that transfigured the whole city of Hiroshima had taken 140,000
lives by December, 1945, and has gone on taking lives ever since.
In Nagasaki the figure was 74,000, making a total of 214,000 people
-- mostly civilians. Often when we remember the victims of war
-- those terrified beneath the cloud, a large cloud of transfiguration
-- we offer a prayer that has meaning for the countless victims and for the
loved ones who somehow emerged from the cloud and remain.
They grow not old as we that are left grow old.
Age shall not weary them nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.
So today we remember the dark, godless cloud of the nuclear bomb --
the victims who were terrified when it overshadowed them and the victims
who have died since.
But there is a terrifying cloud hanging now over parts of our world, and the
victims beneath it are filled with fear. Unlike the bright, illuminating
cloud on the Mount of Transfiguration, signifying the presence of God,
this one, like Hiroshima, is also dark and foreboding, and transfigures what
is beneath it. It hangs over
Israel
and Lebanon,
where a war is being waged that should never be. It is a cloud that needs
to be penetrated by peace-makers and peace-keepers, but it seems they fear
to enter the cloud, and struggle to turn darkness into light. Are we not
the witnesses of a negative transfiguration, and one that is not merely
turning the world upside down, but which is actually destroying the world?
The folk song of the sixties captures our feelings for it contains
the refrain:
When will they ever learn -- when will they ever learn?
Now you may want to remind me that the cloud of Transfiguration in today's
gospel was God's cloud -- it was the cloud from which He could speak --
a cloud through which God could open the eyes of the disciples to see
Jesus as He really
was. It WAS a significant cloud, and I find myself wondering what
the disciples felt before and during and after the cloud experience.
Let's journey with them for a moment:
Three of them selected by Jesus to go on a private retreat. It was a chance
to be on their own -- to have Jesus to themselves and my guess would be that
they were both pleased and excited. But nothing turned out to be as they had
expected. Their joy must surely have turned to amazement as they witnessed
JESUS meeting with
MOSES and
ELIJAH.
Now they were seeing Jesus in a new light -- now their very thoughts
and ideas were being transformed, and then came the almost inexplicable
-- the moment of intense fear as a cloud descended and seemed to cut them
off from the rest of the world. Jesus seemed to glow -- his clothes appeared
to be dazzling white and the voice that seemed to come from nowhere,
but was heard like surround-sound declared Jesus to be His Son and one
to be listened to. They were in the very presence of God and God was
speaking to them. The cloud was His presence as it had been in the past,
for their own scriptures told of a cloud that signified God's presence.
The words they heard underlined what had been said at Jesus' baptism.
The transfiguration was like nothing they had ever known. I believe that
as they saw Jesus transfigured before them so THEY became
transfigured. The experience of the cloud would remain with them
forever -- as does the clouds of Hiroshima and Israel, Lebanon, and
IRAQ,
in this present day.
But their cloud also had a shadow over it too for it was on the Mount of
Transfiguration that Jesus began to seriously face the course of events
that would take him to the cross. The mountain-top Transfiguration was one
to prepare him for the events that were now at hand. It was an experience
to prepare Jesus for his walk through the valley of the shadow of death but
he would make that walk alone -- without the comforting presence of Moses and
Elijah.
It is possible for clouds to remind us of dark things that must never happen
again. It is possible for cloud experiences to deface and deny the Prince
of Peace and the God of love. But it is also possible for a cloud or
mountain-top experience to draw us closer to God who meets us in this
special way. God may indeed be using such experiences to equip and encourage
us to follow in His way and to challenge us for what lies ahead.
We may only see this fully in hindsight as we realize how we have come down
to earth into spiritually more testing and lonely times -- finding too that
God is still with us.
On the Mount of Transfiguration -- as they saw Jesus in a new way, as they
experienced the very presence of God in a cloud, as they witnessed the
meeting with Moses and Elijah, so they wanted to stay -- they wanted, and
perhaps did, build booths or shelters so that the moment could last.
But below was the valley -- below was the rest of the world hidden for a few
moments by the wonder of the cloud -- below was a waiting world to which
Jesus would return and where the disciples would live out their experience.
And here is the message for us as we too might share or have inspiring,
overwhelming experiences beyond our understanding or explaining. We might
even have a positive experience of God that seems like a cloud surrounding
us. But the purpose of any and all such experiences is to send us back --
back into the waiting world to use our experience and new-found power
-- to challenge and empower and work for the living Christ.
Let us follow in the footsteps of those who have gone before that the world
in which we now live -- our own little worlds -- might know that we are His
and He is ours, now and for ever.
All glory to Him for ever and ever.
AMEN.