In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

This morning the Apostle Peter is making an important point for us as he says: “We did not follow cleverly devised fables”. Instead, they lived in the truth of the response to the personal encounter with Him who is the Truth. The Apostle Peter is recounting again the Events of the Mount of Transfiguration which we are celebrating today, and which the Gospel has reiterated.

We human beings are very much interested in systems and control. You could say that human beings are, to use a colloquial expression, “control-freaks”. We can’t somehow accept that the Lord should be in charge of everything. We want to run everything ourselves. We want to control things. We want to have things under our thumb. We want to know what is going to happen next and next and next. We want to know months ahead exactly what is going to happen. We try to plan everything out. Of course, I have been taught, and I am always saying that there is nothing the matter with planning.

However, it is important to make sure that the Lord is in charge of the plan. If we are making plans, we allow the Lord to adjust them. Hence comes that famous English expression (but it is in every other language, too): Man is proposing, but God is disposing. He is always re-organising things according to what is right, especially for us who are trying to live a life which is reflecting this experience. This experience is common to Christians throughout the whole world of the one Lord, Jesus Christ, who “is the same yesterday, today, and forever" (Hebrews 13:8). We are handing down, and living out as Orthodox Christians not a system (although our lives do have a system). We are passing on our common, personal experience of the living God.

Today in the midst of the experience of the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor, the Apostle Peter is saying (as it were): Let us just keep it like this. It is so wonderful. Let’s build some booths here and stay here, and always be like this in the presence of the Lord. This is not because of the shining light and the cloud, and so forth. It is because when you are in the presence of the Lord, there is an intensity of joy and love that produces everything else, and produces this sense of not wanting to let go of this moment.

I think we, also, ourselves, have experience of such moments in our lives. There have been many Divine Liturgies in which I have participated that have been electric with the love of the Lord. I really strongly wished that each of those Liturgies could have continued like that because it was so beautiful. However, each Liturgy inexorably went on to its end, as it must, just as the moment of the Transfiguration came to its end as was necessary. The Lord, in His encountering us in His love, does not let us just sit there and be stagnant in the experience. The experience, the encounter, has to bear fruit. Just as He, Himself, on the Mount of the Transfiguration, immediately descended and began healing people, the same thing happens with you and me. This encounter with the Lord, which we would like to stay the same can’t be static. It has to go and bear fruit. So we have to go and share this encounter with the Saviour, this loving relationship with the Saviour, and give joy, and this sense of peace and hope to those around us in the same way as the Apostles have been doing.

The Apostle Peter said that he was going to pray for us, as well as for everyone else, and that there would be reminders. Read his words again, and see what he says. I think we get plenty of reminders to this day that it is the Lord that is in charge. The joy is real. Our encounter is real. Our mutual encounter is real because for 2,000 years we have been inheriting the same experience of the same Lord, Jesus Christ. Through parents, through friends, through relatives, through whomever it is the Lord sends to us, He does come to us. He meets us. We know Him, and our hearts resonate all the same together. It is the same Lord, the same joy, the same peace, the same hope, the same goodness, the same loving Person with whom we wish always to be. I guess there will come a time later on for all of us when that moment, that sense of being in the Lord’s presence can become a real, unending possibility (I mean at the end of our lives). God willing, we will be able to enter into His Kingdom, and at such a time will be able to live in a perpetual moment of this love.

When I start talking about the Lord in this particular way, it is difficult to stop talking about it. Let us simply end with the words of St Herman, which are the fundamental words by which we all ought to live. He said: “From this day, from this hour, from this minute, let us love God above all, and do His holy will”, glorifying the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

† Archdiocese of Canada - Orthodox Church in America