Where does God stay when he's camping?

Where does God stay when he's camping?

In omnipo-tents.

I'll see myself out.

No no no, hold on.  Bad jokes aside, this is one of the few moments in the scriptures, the Transfiguration, in which Peter offers to get a tent for Jesus.  At the moment of Transfiguration, Peter looks at Jesus and says to him 'Lord, it is good to be here.  Let us build three tents, one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.'  And that's a good place for him to start.  You see, Peter appraised the situation the same way you or I would.  If you find a place where Jesus seems really real, if you find a spot or a moment where God seems to coalesce, you want to keep it pristine.
Have you ever noticed the rich adornment of churches?  Have you ever noticed how elaborate and ornate older churches especially are?  If you wander into ancient sanctuaries, in which the tapestries are rich, the glass stained, and the art representative, you'll be hopefully awe-struck by the beauty of it all.

But, of course, this had the opposite effect from what was desired of it.  If you've ever been to Europe, you will have se

en the massive and elaborate churches, and you will also have seen the masses of people who are clamouring to get inside.  On a weekday.  Not for prayer, mind you, but to look around.  The big, famous churches, like Notre Dame, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's, they're crammed full of people all the time, and they're full of people who just want to have a peek around, and a look at things.  And the desire to make a tent for Jesus in which he would live, and where we could always find him, totally backfired, as people became more interested in the tent than they did in the inhabitant.

Now, this remains an issue for us today, in the here and now.  I can't tell you the number of weddings I've done for people who just wanted a nice church to get married in, or baptisms for people who

wanted something to be nice and in a church, but who don't want things to get too churchy.  And in a sense, they're right. They have in mind that they're in a tent, but they're using it as a tent, and not to meet or glad hand with the resident. And we Christians, we exascerbte this problem, as we behave differently, dress differently, and have a different attitude when we're in the tent.

But, of course, as you know from your own lives, it's not so much the tent that's important, is it?  It's the resident.  It's not just the shell that we've made for him, but it's the person who is inside.

We ought to know better, but we don't.  We tend to reduce the Christian faith to magic and sorcery.  We make crosses into talismans, we make prayers into spells, and we make churches into tents.  I had a conversation with someone the other day in which they asked if you put holy water on your bed, you wouldn't have bad dreams anymore.  It's a fair question, and one in which we as

Christians have to admit that we've done a darn fine job of presenting our faith as a matter of magic and sorcery, a matter of explaining to people that if they pray hard, good things will happen, that if they have crosses in their homes, or hanging from their rearview mirrors, then vampires will recoil from them.  We've done a great job of telling people that all they need to do is to own a Bible, to have possession of a cross, to have their children baptized, and to be nominally Christian, and then we're fine.  It's less of the faith, more of the having of things.  And it's that way with crosses, Bibles, churches, all those things.

We build tents for Jesus to keep him where he may still be found.  We build tents in all sorts of places to keep him locked up, to keep him somewhere where we can go and find him if we need to.  We can find him in the spot that we've set aside for him.  And this has the unfortunate effect of making God seem rather small.  He can be found in these buildings we've made for him, or on a mountaintop, or in a temple, or in a certain patch of land, or in a book or anywhere else like that.

God is Spirit, and the time is coming when those who worship God will not worship him in that temple or on that mountain, but in spirit and in truth.

The truth of the matter is that Jesus is not confined to any particular place where you can go and find him, and that's the real, genuine mystery of the Transfiguration.  The great mystery is that Jesus walks up onto the mountain with his disciples, is transfigured, and then walks back down the mountain with them again.  He isn't placed in a tent, he isn't put in a temple, he isn't locked in a bottle of holy water, he isn't trapped in a Bible, none of that.  He's wherever you are.  If you think about the greatness of Christ and the work that he does, the magic is only that God left heaven, and goes to where his people are.  The magic and the glory of it, is that Jesus is fully God and fully man.  That means that up on the mountaintop, he will flash like lightning, he will glow like the sun, but while you're walking around for the rest of the week, he will be approachable, proximate, and human.


This, then, is the glory of the transfiguration, is that up on the mountain, in the temple, in the church, surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, and Jesus seems so real, and so divine.  In the church, we pray and give thanks, we are enraptured, we are carried aloft like incense in our prayers and worship.  We see the fullness of mercy and truth in elaborate wonder and grandness.  And then we walk down off the mountain, we leave the church, and Jesus seems a lot less clear in his divinity.  He seems a lot less clear in his magnificence.  His divinity is harder to see, because Jesus looks like a regular, everyday guy.  And that's okay.  He looks like a regular guy, because you look like a regular guy.

But he still speaks like God.

The other mystery of the transfiguration is that whether Jesus is lit up like the sun, or whether he's walking around in sandals or whether he's speaking to you from the pages of the Scriptures, he's always going to be divine in his words.  It's not like it would be where he is divine part time, he's always divine.  But whether he's lit up and majestic, or earthy and human, he's still God, if you take time to listen.

This is why the end of the voice from the cloud's one bit of dialogue is so important.  Hidden in there is why Jesus always tells people not to tell about what he has done, this is why Jesus tells his disciples not to tell anyone about the vision that they have just seen, because Jesus doesn't want to be looked at.  He wants to be listened to.  And herein is the magic. That Jesus is with us always.  He understands our human condition because he's been human.  He is part of our lives in a way that a God in a tent could never be.  Look at the story of the wandering people in Exodus, and in there, you see the elders having to leave the rest of the people and go up on a mountaintop and worship Jesus there.  You see the people being separate from God, and trying to find him all over the place, but always in seclusion and in a crowd.

Throughout these forty days of lent, we have Jesus being his most human.  He works as a suffering servant, and he tirelessly tries to work with us fallen people.  And as he gets closer and closer to the cross of calvary, he becomes more and more beaten down, more bloodied, more injured, culminating with his final statements to the world on the cross.  And as he looks down, he says to those who are there: "It is finished."  My work is done.

He doesn't look lit up like the sun anymore, he doesn't look like he's flashing like lightning.  He just looks like a guy, and a dying guy at that.  But the voice from the cloud doesn't tell us to look at him.

"Listen to him."

Nowhere is this more important than during lent, in the throes of humility.

Blessed and meaningful lent to you all.

PJ.