The Spirit Moves in Clouds

Sermon for February 11 

So...

When you think of God, when you pray for example, what images comes to mind?

In the transfiguration story, God comes to Jesus who is talking with Moses and Elijah, in a cloud with a voice, but with no obvious embodiment. In other biblical stories God comes as a dove or a fire or a whirlwind. But God only comes as a person in human form in Jesus.

But remarkably that’s not usually what most of us think of when we think of God, especially when we pray.

Our minds it turns out, are wired for things concrete. We are very, very visual, and we are human, corporeal, made of flesh and blood, and so want at some level God to be corporeal too.

We want God to be “real”, that is something with substance and heft, solidity, and well humanness, though we would want it on a Godlike scale I would think.

Which is why in movies, TV, the internet, paintings, stained glass windows, and statues, when God is portrayed, God is usually visualized as humanish, sometimes on a colossal scale, herculean as it were, like the Greek and Romans gods; but oddly, not like the God of the bible.

Movies and pictures imagine God for us. You would think that would be good, but images are a funny thing. While they enable us to picture something we maybe haven’t before, they also lock out our imagination!

They tell us what God looks like, or at least their version of what they think God looks like. But inevitably they tell a story that is much different than scripture because scripture never really describes God in a way that leads to images.

Why not?

Because God is a spirit. A spirit with personality and consciousness, with the ability to communicate, with values - but not with a physical presence, except as revealed in Jesus’ human form.

The second commandment given to Moses was “Do not make idols that look like anything in the sky or on earth or in the ocean under the earth.  Don’t bow down and worship idols. I am the Lord your God, and I demand all your love.”

It turns out that images of God head us in the wrong direction it seems, looking at creation for inspiration, our brains and hearts focused on what God has made, not God, the one who made it.

So, it’s both crazy and fascinating how many of us walk around with some image of God burned into our heads.

The old man with a long beard, choir robe and sandals of the comics. The God in the painting by Michelangelo, the big white dude surrounded by cherubs reaching down and touching Adam.

Or, depending on your generation, actors who played God like John Huston, George Burns, Morgan Freeman, Whoopi Goldberg, Alanis Morrissette and most recently Octavia Spenser in The Shack.

All of them meant to invoke in us some picture of what God might be liked based on what God’s creation looks like, and none of them adequate. Because as scripture reminds us early and often, God is a spirit, and all who wish to worship God must do so in spirit and truth.

Which is why the story of the transfiguration is so amazing, so powerful and so filled with possibility. If we could only listen to what it tells us, that when God came to be with Jesus, God came as a spirit, as a cloud, as the Shekinah, the divine visitation, the spiritual presence of God on earth.

Much like the fire at Pentecost, and the dove at baptism, the glory cloud is God at work not in limited physical form, but as presence.

Jesus, who is about to begin on his pathway to glory, is fortified by this presence of God, and his disciples get to see the evidence that Jesus is who he says he is. They know all the stories of God’s visits to Israel, and they understand what they are seeing.

God comes to us as a spirit, as a comfort and hope, as love and joy and peace, as strength in times of weakness and gentleness in our times of distress. God comes as no human can with the power of creation and the awesomeness of eternity, the one made personal in the very breath of life.

In that moment, in the glory cloud, Peter, James and John saw God as God is, spirit; the spirit that lives in us each day as we stop to breathe in the love and grace of Jesus Christ and his gift to us of God’s indwelling.

The transfiguration pulls it all together. God is spirit, and the Spirit is in us!

The Breastplate of St. Patrick, a prayer attributed to the missionary to Ireland says in part:

Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me.
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

We the people of God, live in God’s presence, in the midst of the glory cloud.

Think about that, and remember…

God is with us, always!

Amen.