Sermon Tone Analysis

Overall tone of the sermon

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Prelude
Welcome
Call to Worship            Leader: God said, “This is my Son, the Beloved.”
\\ \\ People: Let us worship you, O beloved God.
\\ \\ Leader: God said, “Listen!”
\\ \\ People: We want to hear your word anew this day.
\\ \\ Leader: God said, “Do not be afraid.”
\\ \\ People: We lay our worries at your feet.
\\ \\ Leader: And after all this was spoken, God was quiet.
\\ \\ People: Still our souls, quiet our minds, and prepare us to be transformed, holy God.
\\ \\
~*Hymn of Praise                       # 294                           I Stand Amazed in the Presence
Invocation        (the Lord’s Prayer) We invite you, the Bright and Morning Star, to shine upon us as we gather to worship.
Fill us with the brilliance of your light and wisdom.
May it be as a lamp to our feet and a light to our path.
Psalm response             Psalm 2
Our  Offering to God                Let us walk toward the mountain tops of life as we bring our grateful thanks to God in our offering.
Doxology
Prayer of Dedication                 O God, the mystery of your being is never separated from the earthly obligations that you give to us to share what we have with others.
Receive our offerings this day.
Amen.
~*Hymn of Prayer                      # 252                           Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus
Pastoral Prayer                         ~*Prayer of Confession       
As we invite your gracious presence among us, Jesus Christ, we know full well how often we flee from you.
We have so many ways of avoiding the encounter with you by excuses and delays.
Sometimes we even use prayers to blot out your voice, sounding the words in our heads and hearts while pushing you away in case you tell us the truth or ask more of us than we feel able to do.
/Silent reflection.
/Forgive us, loving Jesus.
*Take our hands and lead us toward your grace.
*If we refuse to come away with you,
we stay among the crowds of life so that your voice is dimmed and our lives are clouded
with a fog of activity.
Forgive us, loving Jesus.
*Take our hands and lead us *
*toward your grace.
*We rush on ahead of you, refusing to wait to listen to your word for us, making our own plans with little reflection, using the good we are doing to justify our relentless activity.
/Silent reflection.
/Forgive us, loving Jesus.
*Take our hands and lead us toward your grace.
Remind us of your radiant life, we pray.
*
~*Words of Assurance  Stay, stay alone in this moment and encounter God.
Remember the kindness that lies there.
Hold on to the mercy that waits for us.
We are forgiven.
Thanks be to God.  ~*Prayer of Thanksgiving            We thank you, O God, that there is always more to you than we have yet seen, *Our words can never describe you and our thoughts can never hold you, for you are *always more*.
*~*Prayer of Intercession             Call our lives into the heights and depths of your life, O God.  Separate our quick reactions as we try to please you from the wider wisdom of your insights into our life.
Give us the courage to pray our humble human prayers as we realize a little of the measure of your holiness.
/The people pray.
/Hold us into your divine silences, O God, as we listen to your responses to our prayers.
Stay with us on the mountain as we grapple with our fears and doubts.
Reach out and wait with us when we grow impatient, and show us the way of justice.
*Above all, give us faith, that we may more truly follow you wherever you call us to go.
For you are our God and we would be your people.
Amen.*
~*Hymn of Praise                       # 16                             O Splendor of God’s Glory Bright \\ Scripture Reading                     /Matthew 17:1-9/  
1Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain, by themselves.
2And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white.
3Suddenly there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him.
4Then Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”
5While he was still speaking, suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice said, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” 6When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear.
7But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Get up and do not be afraid.”
8And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone.
9As 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.”
Message                                   The Stormy Star
*Like the ball of fire that sustains all life on Earth, Jesus is our source of energy and closest connection to the power of the cosmos.
No surprise that his face, on the day of Transfiguration,“shone like the sun.” *
Good seeing.
\\ That’s what astronomers love more than anything else.
“Good seeing” means that the Earth’s atmosphere is calm and free of dust, and the sky takes on a dark blue color.
Astronomers will climb to the very tops of mountains, well above the cloud deck, in search of a sky clear enough to enable them to capture sharp and stable images of heavenly bodies.
\\ What fascinates a number of astronomers today is the star that sits at the very center of our solar system: the sun.
\\ They study the sun because it is the origin of virtually all the energy that supports life on Earth.
It’s the source of our weather, the controller of our climate, and our closest connection to the processes that power the universe.
\\ “The sun is the Rosetta stone of astrophysics,” says scientist Göran Scharmer to /National Geographic/.
“But it’s a stone that we haven’t been able to decrypt entirely.”
Although the sun has been burning for 4.6 billion years, it is only in the last two decades that scientists have begun to understand it.
\\ There’s nothing boring about this ball of light.
The sun has a halo-like corona around it that is — oddly enough — hundreds or even thousands of times hotter than its surface.
One of the mysteries of the sun is an event called “a coronal mass ejection,” in which billions of tons of charged particles escape from the sun’s corona and dump trillions of watts of power into Earth’s upper atmosphere.
This can overload power lines, causing massive blackouts, and destroy delicate instruments on satellites in Earth orbit.
\\ Our sun is a Stormy Star.
\\ You might say that Peter, James and John are in search of “good seeing” when they follow Jesus up to the top of a high mountain on the day of the transfiguration.
They climb up to an altitude where the sky is a luminous blue, and at the peak Jesus is transfigured before them, and his face shines like the sun (Matthew 17:2).
Through the power of God, Jesus undergoes a metamorphosis, a change in form, a transformation — he begins to glow with the glory reserved for heavenly beings.
His face shines “like the sun,” says Matthew — sending off a blast of brightness that is positively out of this world.
The Transfiguration was a brief glimpse of the true glory of the King (16:27, 28).
This was a special revelation of Jesus’ divinity to three of the disciples, and it was God’s divine affirmation of everything Jesus had done and was about to do.
No sunspots or solar flares or coronal mass ejections could surprise the disciples any more than this.
They know that a glowing human face is a radically rare event, and it makes them think of the spiritual superstar Moses, whose face was radiant after an especially close encounter with God (Exodus 34:29-35).
Like astronomers who struggle to unlock the secrets of the sun, the disciples realize that they are now in a realm that is “surpassingly unusual.”
\\ But the fiery brilliance of Jesus’ face is only the beginning.
Suddenly, Moses and Elijah appear in a heavenly constellation, talking with Jesus.
The disciples are star-struck, and they see that the ministry of Jesus is now far more than a first-century Galilean phenomenon — it is, instead, a continuation and culmination of all the mighty acts of God throughout history.
Moses and Elijah are sacred supernovas, bright lights that have worked amazing miracles, promoted God’s covenant and law, and even faced rejection by people before being vindicated by God, and because of these qualities they are in the same orbit as Jesus.
The three form a kind of divine Dream Team — one that can radiate the awesome power of God to the world.
Moses and Elijah were the two greatest prophets in the Old Testament.
Moses represents the law, or the old covenant.
He wrote the Pentateuch, and he predicted the coming of a great prophet (Deuteronomy 18:15-19).
Elijah represents the prophets who foretold the coming of the Messiah (Malachi 4:5, 6).
Moses’ and Elijah’s presence with Jesus confirmed Jesus’ messianic mission: to fulfill God’s law and the words of God’s prophets.
Just as God’s voice in the cloud over Mount Sinai gave authority to his law (Exodus 19:9), God’s voice at the Transfiguration gave authority to Jesus’ words.
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