Scripture: Exodus 24:12-18; Matthew 17:1-9; Hebrews 11:1; 1 Corinthians 13:12 Series: Epiphany
Preached on Transfiguration Sunday before Lent, the sermon takes three honest questions—why can’t we hear, know, or see God—and treats questioning as an act of faith rather than its absence. Pairing Exodus 24 (God’s voice at Sinai) with Matthew 17 (the Transfiguration), Wilson argues that God speaks ‘slant’ (illustrated by Dickinson), that faith rests finally on trust in witnesses and the resurrection (with Josephus and a teacher’s saying as supports), and that God’s glory cannot be contained—seen now only dimly, fully in the new creation, but truly visible in the neighbor, the poor, and the suffering. Drawing on Rowan Williams, he concludes that Christian belief always pushes toward love of neighbor and enemy, and sends the congregation into Lent to seek new ways to see, hear, and remember that God is real.
Illustrations: childs-question-about-god, dickinson-tell-it-slant, josephus-testimonium, teacher-on-resurrection-belief, rowan-williams-tokens-of-trust, grackle-hearing-god, searching-like-house-car-job
February 15, 2026
Exodus 24:12-18 Matthew 17:1-9
Shining
The Lord said to Moses, “Come up to me on the mountain and wait there; I will give you the tablets of stone, with the law and the commandment, which I have written for their instruction.” So Moses set out with his assistant Joshua, and Moses went up onto the mountain of God. To the elders he had said, “Wait here for us, until we come back to you. Look, Aaron and Hur are with you; whoever has a dispute may go to them.” Then Moses went up on the mountain, and the cloud covered the mountain. The glory of the Lord settled on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it for six days; on the seventh day he called to Moses out of the cloud. Now the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the Israelites. Moses entered the cloud and went up on the mountain. Moses was on the mountain for forty days and forty nights. - Exodus 24:12-18
Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became bright as light. Suddenly there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him. Then Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will set up three tents here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” While he was still speaking, suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear. But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Get up and do not be afraid.” And when they raised their eyes, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone. As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus ordered them, “Tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.” - Matthew 17:1-9
Why can’t we see God?
This is a very important question. It’s usually a question asked by a child or young person, as grown-ups are accustomed to ignoring important questions in our lives and just doing what we’ve always done. But why can’t we see God?
There are many responses I give to this in a pastoral context. Usually, there is another question connected to this one: How do we know that God is real? The knee-jerk response is usually, “Well, you just know.” This is deeply unsatisfying—especially to somebody who doesn’t just know. It also doesn’t explain anything, nor give an account of your faith.
Why don’t we hear God? Another very good, very important question.
I want us to think about these three questions this morning:
- Why can’t we see God?
- How do we know God is real?
- Why can’t we hear God?
First of all, I want us to be able to say that these are good and important questions. It is not a lack of faith that causes anyone to question. It’s a lack of faith to not ask questions. It’s a lack of faith to shut down questions. If you believe so little that a question rattles the structure of your belief, that is its own issue that needs to be addressed.
As the author of the Letters to the Hebrews has it, Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen. Faith is an assurance about what we hope for. What is our hope? Peace. Solidarity. Flourishing. Love. Faith is an assurance about these things—a conviction about them, even when we don’t see them.
Why Don’t We Hear God?
So let’s start with the last question first: Why don’t we hear God?
This is what the passage from Exodus is about. It’s about hearing God, about God speaking to the people. That’s where the law comes from—the way, Torah, to follow the law. Those people heard God from the mountain. The next generation didn’t hear God in the same way, but they heard it through their parents. They heard God’s voice through the people who had experienced theophony, a fancy word for the voice of God.
The question then becomes: Are they reliable witnesses, that generation that came before? At some point, it has to be a measure of trust—trust in the testimony and witness of others. You could go further down the rabbit hole of what is called epistemology, the study of knowledge and how we know things. It’s a deep, deep hole. But on every level, it ultimately comes down to a moment of trust.
The law was given by Moses. Part of it was heard by the people. It was always given by God. There’s a powerful displacement going on in Exodus at Mount Sinai. The voice of God speaking to Moses and the people is the word of God.
And we as Christians have a deeper understanding of what the word of God is, for we see that word enfleshed in Jesus Christ. The word spoken from the mountaintop became a child in Bethlehem.
That is a radical claim—a claim only possible by faith, by an assurance of something hoped for: an assurance that the God who created everything loved us so much that God’s son became human. The word through which God speaks to Moses and the people became a child.
Why can’t we hear God? People have heard God before. We don’t hear God the same way we hear a grackle. God is immaterial—that is part of our faith: that God created everything from nothing. God does not have a material body to create sounds. Nor is God a puppet master speaking through us by mind control. This is also false.
The answer to the question usually reverts back to: What are we paying attention to? Where are we listening for God?
The people of Israel, freed from slavery in Egypt, wanted God to speak to them on their own terms, and God refused to do that. We today want God to speak to us on our own terms, and God still, most of the time, does not do so.
God speaks slant. As Emily Dickinson wrote in a brief poem relevant for today
Tell all the truth but tell it slant — Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth’s superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind —
God speaks indirectly so that we are not deafened by the voice, but it is still speech for us when we hear it, when we see the fruit of God’s speech. God speaks to the people around us, speaks through the people before us. God speaks in those moments of deep comfort, when the person didn’t need to be there but was there, when mercy was shown.
How Do We Know God Is Real?
How do we know God is real?
This, again, can get back to deep questions of epistemology—of how we understand reality to be present before us. We can go on a long rabbit hole of what is really real, the reality of nothing.
One way to talk about it is the evidence and testimony of who Jesus is. The central faith claim for Christians is that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God. Jesus of Nazareth was born at some point around 2,000 years ago, ministered in and around what is now Israel and Palestine, was arrested, killed by the Romans, and three days later, rose again.
Everything else comes after this moment. As one of my teachers would say: If you believe Jesus rose from the dead, it’s not that hard to believe a lot of the other stuff in the Bible. But we have to start there.
So we look at the evidence about Jesus. We look at those early records, both within the church and outside of it. Recently, there’s been a scholarly reappraisal of one paragraph in the work of a man named Josephus. Josephus was a Jewish writer, philosopher, and historian who wrote a history of the Jews and also served as a historian of the period. He mentions Jesus. For a long time, some people read Josephus and concluded that the line about Jesus was interpolated later—that another writer came in and put it there, that it wasn’t really Josephus. But there’s been a recent scholarly reappraisal, within the last year, suggesting it was authentically Josephus speaking about Jesus.
With the resurrection itself, there are accounts that go beyond the Christian scriptures, that go beyond the scope of an organized conspiracy. I think we get back to God the Father and the whole cosmology of creation from the resurrection, from Jesus of Nazareth.
But how we know God is real isn’t just an evidentialist claim or an empirical claim. It comes from our experience of God and our experience of those who claim to follow God—we are shaped and formed in these kinds of ways.
Which gets us to our last question,
Why Can’t We See God?
Why can’t we see God?
This is the power of the Transfiguration. The Transfiguration—this moment, this last Sunday before the start of Lent—when Jesus takes some friends and goes up a mountaintop. On that mountaintop, he reveals himself fully to his friends, gloriously, as the Son of God. And then he tells them to be quiet about it until later—when they obviously told people.
Jesus didn’t take Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John up that mountaintop so that they could post about it. He took Peter, James, and John. And what did they see up there? They saw Elijah and Moses.
They were so overwhelmed by the experience that they wanted to build houses, to build tabernacles. In the Greek, it’s the same word for the tabernacle they carried around in the desert during the Exodus account. It was a place so holy they wanted to try to contain it, but it could not be contained.
The vision of God could not be contained.
We see as well in Exodus how the vision of God that Moses beheld could not be contained. It imprinted on his skin. His skin glowed from the glory of God.
To see God cannot be contained. It’s only fully realized in our eternal future with God in the new creation, when we will see God as God is, in the words of First Corinthians 13: “Now we look through a mirror dimly, through a glass darkly.”
We can see God. We can see Jesus—in our neighbor. That’s what Jesus tells us: where to look for God. Jesus doesn’t tell us to look in the temple, but in the poor, in the hungry and the sick, in the lonely, in those broken by this world. That’s where Jesus tells us we can see God.
It’s not a satisfying answer if we’re trapped inside the expectations of the world, trapped inside expectations of power and wealth. But when we let go of those expectations, it is a truthful answer, and there’s nothing else we could ask of it.
Why can’t we see God? Jesus’s response to this would be, Those who have eyes to see, let them see. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.
The Transfiguration shows us the impossibility of containing God’s glory. It shows the impossibility of satisfactorily putting Jesus in a bucket.
As Rowan Williams wrote:
Knowing God]… call it love, yes, only that can sound too emotional, or call it faith, and that can sound too cerebral. And what is it? Both, and neither… its] the decision to be faithful, the patient refusal of easy gratifications… of Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane and on the cross, that bloody crown of love and faith. That is how I learn finally of a God who will not be fitted into my catergories and expectations… the living truth too great for me to see, trusting that He will see and judge and yet not turn me away… That is the mercy which will never give us, or even let us be content with less than itself and less than the truth… we have seen the truth enacted in our own world as mercy, grace and hope, as Jesus, the only-begotten, full of grace and truth.1
Most of the time, we ask questions and look for Jesus in ways we look for a house or a car or a job, but that is not who Jesus is. Seeing God is never a finished action or question. Knowing God is never a finished action or question. And yet Jesus came as a person so that we, as well, could see God in other people—could love the neighbor who annoys us through the power of seeing God in them. Which is more challenging to believe, that God is real? Or that the reality of God in Jesus Christ compels us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us? Christian belief always pushes us towards love or else it is false.
My friends, Lent is starting this week. As we get closer to this Lenten experience, may you find a new way to look for God. May you find a new way to listen for God. May you find a new way to remember that God is real, that God is there for you.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Footnotes
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Tokens of Trust ↩