Sometimes, especially when in the Presence of the holy, we honor God best by saying nothing.

Recently KGO talk radio in San Francisco conducted a call-in poll. Ronn Owens invited listeners to express their opinion. Thirty-five percent said yes, 33 percent said no and 32 percent were undecided. One listener, aghast at the large number of undecideds, protested, "It's this sort of apathy that's ruining America."

The only problem with all these responses was that the radio station had never posed any question.

It's not apathy that is getting most of us in trouble _ it is shooting our mouths off and shouting our lungs out over things that we know nothing about.

It appears that the disciples may have behaved with surprising wisdom after witnessing the Transfiguration/epiphany event on the mountaintop. They did not understand what they had seen. They were amazed and awestruck at what they had heard. They were confused. Consider how disturbing Jesus' first passion prediction (Luke 9:21-27) must have been to the hearts of his disciples. They had just returned from their first missionary excursion flushed with success (Luke 9:1-6). Jesus had miraculously fed a crowd of five thousand, and Peter finally had the insight to name Jesus "Messiah" (Luke 9:20). Instead of praising Peter for his confession, Jesus responds by foretelling the ominous future that awaits him as the Messiah.

As they joined him in his mountain-top prayer retreat, Peter, James and John must have been deeply disturbed by Jesus' predictions. Then, suddenly, there are prophets and dazzling lights and descending clouds and a voice too awesome to withstand. The voice declares, "This is my Son," but it also orders the disciples to "Listen to him." How can Jesus be the Messiah, the Son of the Divine, at home in conversation with the likes of Moses and Elijah _ and yet be doomed to the suffering and death he has revealed to them? What kind of Savior is this? Confused beyond reckoning, the disciples choose to say nothing and let the future unfold without their commentary.

There are times when saying nothing is the wisest insight we can offer _ both individually and as the church. Sometimes, the most significant, substantive and spiritual thing we can do is to say nothing. Nowhere is it written that, after we become Christians, we suddenly see all and know all and have an opinion on everything.

Both in Acts and at the end of his gospel, Luke records Jesus' command to his disciples to ("Stay in [Jerusalem] until you have been clothed with power from on high.") Other translations state that the disciples are to stay until they receive "the Word from on high" (Luke 24:49; Acts 1:4). Sometimes we, too, need to stay in place, to meditate, to just sit down and wait, until the word and power from on high arrive. "I don't know" can be good theology.

No one really knows what happened during the six days Jesus shared with the trio of disciples on the Mount of Transfiguration. Nobody even knows where the Mount of Transfiguration is. All we really know is that Jesus and his three closest friends climbed a mountain of prayer and entered the presence of God. Something wondrous and miraculous happened to them, something so radiant and mystical that the afterglow never left Peter. Years later, Peter remembered this day, different from all other days, and wrote, still in a kind of holy hush: "We had been eyewitnesses of his majesty" (2 Peter 1:16).

The Transfiguration took place during an experience of private meditation and prayer _ not during a public speech or one of Jesus' tutorials to his disciples. It was an intensely personal experience. While words may fail us after such a profound event, a genuine, spiritual experience can easily withstand our own inability to understand it. We need not "talk an experience out" in order to make it real.

"They saw his glory" (Luke 9:32). High mountains stand in Scripture as places of revelation, glimpses of glory, experiences of revitalization, times of transfiguration. There are only 14 summits in our world above 26,000 feet. The rarefied air of mountaintops is matched by their rarefied occurrences. Peaks in nature and in life don't happen often. Why has God been so grudging and sparing with holy places where the Divine is manifested and divinations confirmed?

We don't know. It remains a mystery. There are times when God has nothing to say, when God is silent _ either waiting for us to speak or waiting for us to grow in wisdom.

But when God answers by saying nothing, it is still an answer. Matthew 7:6 cautions, "Do not give what is holy to dogs; and do not throw your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under foot and turn and maul you." Sometimes a "word fitly spoken" is no "apple of gold" if it is doomed to become applesauce.

Ever notice that in large libraries there are whole floors devoted to "reference books"? We like to be able to put our fingers on the answers as quickly and as easily as possible. As more and more of our knowledge is recorded on easily accessible computer systems, "I don't know" is increasingly taken simply as a sign of laziness, not an admission of truth.

The church needs to recognize that sometimes it takes more integrity and conviction to say nothing than to spout off.

Choosing to "say nothing" isn't just an easy way out _ sometimes it is the way out to God.

Alternative Sermon Ideas

What's it like up there?

1. It is cloudy on the summits

"A cloud ... overshadowed them" (Luke 9:34). It is cloudy on the summits. True, on a clear day you can see forever. But most days, mountaintops are not clear. Most days on mountain-tops, one rubs shoulders less with the sky than with soupy clouds. From the cloudy mountaintops, it is hard to see where one is, where one has been or where one is going. One needs an interrupting voice to speak from the overshadowing clouds. After the Transfiguration, Peter does not know what response to make (Luke 9:33). So he babbles. Peter always has to say something _ even when vision is obstructed, when silence is what is called for and when experience eludes understanding until one is off the mountain.

2. There is little growth on the mountaintops.

Air gets thinner, trees get shorter, foliage gets scarcer, the higher one climbs. On the top of the mountain itself, there is only the stark beauty of rock and dirt. For growth, one has to go into the valleys, where an abundance of water produces lushness of greenery and richness of color. The greatest growth in Jesus' life took place in a garden, not on the mountain, in the Garden of Gethsemane, not on the Mount of Transfiguration.

3. There is nothing to cast a shadow on the mountaintops.

Shadows without, shadows within. Shadows are evidence that the light that shines in and through you is falling on something. Shadow is the homage that darkness pays to light, that hell pays to heaven, that actions pay to dreams. In the words of T. S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men:"

Between the idea
And the reality,
Between the motion
And the act,
Falls the Shadow.

We must not build booths on the summits or remain in mountaintop tent-temples. We visit the mountain-tops. We inhabit the valleys. Because of Jesus, God is no longer on the top of a mountain, but walking on earth in human flesh and blood.

Building plans: Monuments to the moment

Peter, James and John were so startled and awed by their experience on the mountaintop that their first response to the divine in their lives was to build something _ a monument to the moment. It never happened.

The disciples preferred building over being. Being in prayer or being in an attitude of expectancy is very difficult. When Peter, James and John were asked to simply be, they usually fell asleep, as they did here (cf. Matthew 26:36-46). They believed that the best way to preserve a memory, a belief or an experience was to build a temple of stone, rather than a testament of the heart.

Other building programs that went awry:

1. David: It was the right building, but the wrong builder.

David wanted to build a temple, another monument to the moment, designed to immortalize David's reign (see 2 Samuel 7; 1 Chronicles 22:6-11).

2. The post-exilic Jews: the wrong building, but the right builders.

When they should've been building the temple, they were building their own houses (see Haggai 1:1-6).

When we come down the mountain, God expects no monuments except those of (and here, you might fashion a list of your own):

• Obedience
• A listening spirit
• Kindness and mercy
• Peace
• Gentleness

When God touches us with God's transfiguring glory, it is best not to build, but to be!