What didn't make it into last week's sermon (sort of)

For those interested in where I get stuff for my sermons--keep reading. For those who really don't care where I get it just as long as I'm not boring you to death, skip to the next post.

When I presented last week's sermon, I gave the gist of a couple of ideas that were not original to me. Since I'm doing it without notes and had wandered from the pulpit, I didn't quote them verbatim. In the written versions of the sermons that will be available this Sunday, you can find the full quotations I was working with along with the full documentation for them.

(It may sound a little obsessive to footnote stuff, but I've known a lot of ministers who presented other people's ideas as their own. So, I'm trying to be intellectually honest and to keep myself from the delusion that I actually thought up the really good thoughts I'm quoting.)

Anyway, an article I found helpful is by Barbara Brown Taylor and was in Christian Century a few years back. It's worth reading for her thoughts on Transfiguration. Here's the part I took:

With Moses standing right there, the parallel was hard to miss. Jesus, like Moses before him, was about to set God’s people free, only it was not bondage to pharaoh they needed freeing from this time. It was bondage to their own fear of sin and death, which crippled them far worse than leg chains ever had…So God had planned another exodus for them -- in Jerusalem this time -- where the Red Sea of death would be split with a cross and Jesus would lead his people through.

Here's another good quote from that same article:

To lead our exodus, Jesus had to die like we do: alone, with no particular glory. Otherwise he would have been an anomaly instead of a messiah, and it would have been hard for us to see what he had in common with the rest of us.

Also, as I mentioned in the sermon, I have usually heard the story of the Transfiguration described as a "mountain top experience" in the sense of a spiritual high or epiphany that the disciples did not want to come down from. When you read the text, however, the disciples are "terrified" and the bizarre events sound nothing like my days at church summer camp. I discovered this obvious interpretation (or I guess I should say not so obvious, since I never thought about it this way before) in an article by Dennis Bratcher, a Nazarent minister who runs a pretty nifty web site full of scripture commentary, etc. (Maybe it's only nifty if you have to come up with a sermon every week.)

Grace and Peace,

Chase