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Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany
Year B
RCL
2 Kings 5:1-14
1 Corinthians 9:24-27
Mark 1:40-45
Psalm 30 
Clouds and mountain tops, both in jewish tradtion and world religions are associated offten with theophanies or “showings of the divine” in psychology, clouds belong to the realm of dreams, intuitive knowledge, profound wisdom, transient states. There is a defiance of logic, a dissolution of limitations of time and space
Not surprising , marks offers us God as all enveloping cloud, surroding everything on the mountain top.
I find fascinating that the we are here with two pairs of apposite triads. Three disciples go with Jesus to the mountain and Jesus, Moses and Elijah will form the other triad. Mountains tops were special places of God's presence as the Jews learned during the Exodus.
Peter is first mentioned, and then James and John, so a hierarchy of sorts is implied, then confirmed by the story only giving voice to Peter. Jesus is then talking to Moses, The Law and to Elijah, the Prophets. Both for Moses and Elijah there are not recognized burial places, as it will be the case for Jesus, in other words, their bodies do not rest here on earth. So one triad, was firmly earthbound, as Peter voices the need for shelter to be built. While the other triad is in a way is celestial or heavenly. Both of them, meet on the mountain top, waiting for the shekinah, the dwelling of God to be made manifest. If you remember there six people on the mountain, waiting for the seven to arrive.
The Gematria, or the Jewish speculation with the numerical value of the words, assumed to contain secret spiritual value, later use by Kabbalah, although without existence in the Bible itself, was very popular in rabbinical circles at the time of Jesus. The number seven, the most sacred number, occurs in the seven days of Creation, the institution of the seventh year of release, the forty-nine years between the jubilees, the seven altars, the seven lamps, the sprinkling of the blood seven times, etc. (Gen.vii. 2 et seq., xxi. 28-30; I Kings xviii. 43; Deut. xvi. 9; Ezek. xl. 22, xli. 3; et al.).
The shekinah, literally the dwelling of God, is a theological response to Peter's shelter building ideas. The coming of the cloud wrapping everyone on the mountain top complete the scene. In the midst of it, the voice, not unlike we heard at the baptism and we hear again confirming the sonship of Jesus and instructing the nascent church to obey his teaching.
For me the first question I see decided on the Mount of the Transfiguration is one of teaching authority, conferred by God onto Jesus and from him and his other two companions, Moses and Elijah, passed on to the nascent church led by Peter, with James and John. A spiritual lineage has established, not of flesh but spirit.
But I think that the transfiguration occurs as mountain top within the narrative of Mark itself, not just as geographic accident. The insertion of it in the midst of Jesus cross and death talking is striking. Striking because the Shekinah, God's dwelling, here wraps the humane and divine, the heavenly and the earthly, the godly and the faithless -disciples in terror and confused about Jesus predicting of his own death-.
Yesterday afternoon, on the eve of the lowest yet performance of the Dow Jones Industrial Average in six year, Lorenzo, dishwasher at Crescent corner spoke to me as he usually does, but instead the usual inconsequential chatter, he asked me point black, Tu crees que Obama nos saque del hoyo? Literally, do you think Obama will pick us up from the hole? I said, that the situation was very grave and that I would not know for sure, that at best my answer was purely speculative. He asked me again, Do you think Obama will get us out of this one?
No question that some people see Obama as a savior of sorts, but if you have been watching the media portray of President Obama you will notice how sutil changes are taking place, liberal outlets trying to keep a healthy distance from the government and the conservative ones, becoming ever so vicious in their attacks. It will be an interesting study to see how President Obama finishes his term of office. Monster or Savior?.
Toynbee, the historian tells us, that to all of those who are aware that are living in a declining civilization have four possible responses available: archaism, futurism, escapism and transfiguration. Archaism is the yearning for the good old times, futurism is a fantasy of a new age utterly unrelated to nothing that happened before, escapism is the escape into contemplation, but transfiguration is faith whereby we bring the total situation as we ourselves participate in it, into a larger context which gives it new meaning. Its is a recasting of the present into a wider scenario.(Hughes) In these days of financial upheaval and uncertainty, I have chosen to cast in wider scenario my own anxiety, I have decided to take it into the cloud of the divine shekinah. Allowing God the creator to re-create and recasting its meaning, freeing me to be creative and ingenuous about what I need to do in order to continue living, and living abundantly.
Paul told the stunned Athenians on Mars Hill in his famous sermon to the "Unknown God" For in Him we live, and move, and have our being; as also certain of your own poets have said, `For we are also His offspring.
For in Him we live, and move, and have our being
One of my first classes of theology dealt with this subject, and I remember that the professor told us that we are in God in the same way the fish is in the water. The fish can not make the water a subject separated from the self, the fish can not be objective about the water, studied it and observe it without dying.
In the Cloud of Unknowing an anonymous English work from the 14th century we find this advice:"Our intense need to understand will always be a powerful stumbling block to our attempts to reach God in simple love [...] and must always be overcome. For if you do not overcome this need to understand, it will undermine your quest. It will replace the darkness which you have pierced to reach God with clear images of something which, however good, however beautiful, however Godlike, is not God."
Like the Fish, God is not just everywhere or just midway between you
and me in Him we live, and move, and have our being He is wrapped
around the core of our being so God is never objective knowledge but
belongs to the realms of the intuitive knowledge and profound wisdom of
the Spirit He defies logic and make the impossible possible
Peter wanted to build houses for the Three Divine Beings and that was
precisely where he awoke out of his oniric state and Jesus ready him
for the passion and pain and death of Jerusalem God meets us a in cloud
of that keep our senses open to understanding of the kind of here
(belly) not here (mind) cloud of pondering, glimpses of the divine
reality insights in the truth of God deep wisdom that can only come
from God that sudden insight when we can see the interlocking
connections of all things living and our part of it.
God, the God of Jesus, Elijah and Moses the God of Peter, James and
John can not live in man made huts where he can be controlled God is
the ground of all reality and therefore and by nature can not be
contained or defined, nor speech can not even begin to describe Him and
His works
He like in the cloud is where we become content of that one that can not be contained.
God wraps his existence around us in a cosmic hug, and in that hug he
appeals to my sense of kinship we all created beings, he appeals to all
the best things he planted in my heart when he created me, and you.
John W. Fountain is a professor of journalism at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was formerly a national correspondent
for The New York Times. This is his testimony in the NPR series, "This
I Believe":
I believe in God. Not that cosmic, intangible spirit-in-the-sky
that Mama told me as a little boy "always was and always will be." But
the God who embraced me when Daddy disappeared from our lives-from my
life at age four-the night police led him down the stairs, away from
our front door, in handcuffs. The God who warmed me when we could see
our breath inside our freezing apartment, when the gas was disconnected
in the dead of another wind-whipped Chicago winter, and there was no
food, little hope, and no hot water.
The God who held my hand when I witnessed boys in my 'hood
swallowed by the elements, by death, and by hopelessness; who claimed
me when I felt like "no-man's son," amid the absence of any man to wrap
his arms around me and tell me, "everything's going to be okay," to
speak proudly of me, to call me son.
I believe in God, God the Father, embodied in his Son Jesus Christ.
The God who allowed me to feel his presence-whether by the warmth that
filled my belly like hot chocolate on a cold afternoon, or that voice,
whenever I found myself in the tempest of life's storms, telling me
(even when I was told I was "nothing") that I was something, that I was
his, and that even amid the desertion of the man who gave me his name
and DNA and little else, I might find in Him sustenance.
I believe in God, the God who I have come to know as father, as Abba-Daddy.
It wasn't until many years later, standing over my father's grave
for a conversation long overdue, that my tears flowed. I told him about
the man I had become. I told him about how much I wished he had been in
my life. And I realized fully that in his absence, I had found another.
Or that he-God the Father, God my Father-had found me.
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