The moment in “The Wizard of Oz” when Dorothy steps out of her cabin into Oz must be one of the most memorable sequences in movie history – and it must have been very difficult to achieve with the technical resources available at the time. What, of course, really “makes” it is the transition from the dreary sepia of Kansas to the glorious Technicolor of Oz – no wonder Dorothy was filled with wonder and amazement. I’m sure that audiences were, too!

Authors and film-makers have long been fascinated with the idea of parallel universes, planes of being that can exist alongside what we would call the physical world or reality. So we have the children in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” entering the magical world of Narnia, we have Alice going through her looking-glass (I’ve always found those stories a bit creepy), and then of course there’s Harry Potter and his companions going through the wall of platform 9¾ at King’s Cross station to board the Hogwarts Express.

Christians, of course, have always believed in a realm of existence – “heaven” or “the spiritual” or “the numinous” or “glory” – which isn’t physical. We accept that there’s a cosmos which we can’t touch or see, fully understand or explain lying beside our “real world”. Unlike small children who, when asked where heaven is, point to the sky and say, “Up there”, we know that this realm isn’t confined to any specific location: we can’t find it on a map nor travel to it for a nice weekend break. Yet we believe that this spiritual world really does exist; and that, just occasionally, the boundaries between heaven and earth are ripped open and ordinary people get a glimpse of unimaginable glory.

We read about one of these special moments this morning: Jesus’ transfiguration, which is one of the most mysterious sections of the entire Gospel story. It seems to me that we can’t know exactly what Jesus’ disciples saw that day; not because they lied, but because (like John in Revelation) they were attempting to explain something that lay completely outside normal human experience, something literally “indescribable”. Who can know whether a cloud really did come down, or whether the disciples really did see Moses and Elijah, or whether they physically heard God speaking? Could this have been a vision or a trance, rather than something more physical? And, if it was, does that even matter? – for these people were completely convinced by their experience. Something profound had definitely taken place.

So what do stories such as the Transfiguration teach us? I can think of several things, and the first is that they expand our knowledge and understanding of God. I’m sure that if you’d asked the three disciples who they thought Jesus was, before they’d gone up the Mount of Transfiguration, they’d have replied, “He’s rabbi who mingles with the people and teaches at our level”, or “he’s a prophet sent by God who does amazing miracles” or “he’s a person who we’re hoping will turn out to be our Messiah and set Israel free from the Romans”. But I’m sure that, after they had had their transcendent experience, they would have recast their ideas about their friend. They were probably very puzzled by him, but they would certainly have looked at him in a new way. As Peter wrote later, “we were eyewitnesses of his majesty”.

Few of us ever have these intense religious experiences. I don’t know why – it may have as much to do with our personalities as with God. But we can all reflect on Bible stories like this one and so cultivate a mental picture of Jesus which goes far beyond our usual images of “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” who patted children on the head and told nice stories, even the gruesome scene of him dying on the Cross. It’s easy for Christians to fall into the trap of thinking of Jesus as little more than “my friend”, or to so emphasise his human life and acts of mercy that we forget his divinity. The Transfiguration presents an aspect of Jesus which we must never forget; that whatever else he may be, he is primarily God almighty. I’ll come back to that a bit later.

Moving on, I want to say that the disciples found their experience absolutely terrifying. I know that Peter says, “Lord, it is good for us to be here” which sounds confident and bold; but I always think of him stuttering it out because he really doesn’t know how to react. Equally, I think his suggestion of making three little booths or tents for Jesus, Moses and Elijah comes simply from a desire to try and “get a handle” on a situation he cannot control (what would he build them with, anyway? – they’re on top of a mountain, for goodness’ sake!) When the bright cloud comes down, they slump to the floor: they’re run out of human resources and, because they know the Jewish Scriptures which say “no-one can see God and live”, they think that they are “doomed” and about to die. Perhaps for the first time in their lives, they realise how “big” God is and how “tiny” they are in comparison.

We don’t much like the idea of being “fearful” of God. It may remind us of our Christian forebears who seemed to live in constant dread of doing the wrong thing and being condemned to the flames of hell. We probably think that such thoughts are superstitious and outdated; we regard our own notions of God as far more positive and wholesome. But have we perhaps thrown the baby out with the bathwater? After all, the book of Proverbs tells us that “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”; while Paul declares that it’s the “fear” – or even, as the Authorised Version says, the “terror” – of God that compels

I don’t think for one moment that God wants us to live in a state of constant fear; after all, he is the God of love! But I do think that we modern Christians may have absorbed too much of the spirit of our informal age; that we may be too casual in our worship and service of God, that we may treat him without the reverence and respect he deserves, that we’re not too bothered about living holy lives because – naturally – he’ll always be ready to forgive our failures and peccadilloes. That’s not how it should be. More important still, if we make our God too small, if we downscale him to a convenient size, then he becomes a God in whom we can have no confidence or trust. For we need God to be almighty, awe-inspiring and simply “other”; a God who doesn’t arouse a little of bit of fear and unease in us probably isn’t worth believing in. We may teach the children to sing “Our God is a great big God”; but our belief must be more than happy words.

We must press on because, although we’re not told how long the Transfiguration lasted, it does appear to have ended quite quickly: the disciples see (in whatever way) Jesus dramatically transformed before them, they witness him speaking to Moses and Elijah, they hear God’s voice, a bright cloud comes down, and things return to normal. Having said that, Luke’s telling of this story implies that the disciples stayed on the mountain all night and even managed to sleep: had Jesus told them to bring sleeping-bags? We might wonder whether the disciples were secretly relieved that their awe-inspiring experience was over, or disappointed because it hadn’t gone on for longer.

What is clear, though is that, when Jesus and his companions come down the mountain, they are plunged into the melée of life with little time to catch their breath and work out what they had experienced; it was a bit like someone returning to the office after a holiday and finding their inbox full of urgent messages and a long list of outstanding jobs to be done. For there’s a large crowd waiting for Jesus, needy people ready to jostle and shout in order to gain his attention. And the voice of one man is heard above the others: “My son is possessed by an evil spirit, no-one can do anything to help him, you’re my last hope!” In the blink of an eye, Jesus is faced with a challenge which demands a response. And, although we today might quibble at the diagnosis what’s troubling the son, Jesus rises to the occasion and does what’s asked of him. That takes me back to what I said about Jesus earlier: he may be God, but that doesn’t mean he can’t get his hands grubby in our world. I find that comforting in the light of the awful things, both natural and man-made, which are happening just now: God doesn’t just sit back on a cloud and ignore us.

Well, we’ve all known what it is to “come down from a mountain-top” with a bump! Once I came back from my summer holiday only to have the phone ring early the next day, with the caller informing me that he’d found a valued church member dead in his bed when he’d gone round to his house. On a far more serious scale, London’s euphoria one evening in being told that it had won the contest to host the 2012 Olympics was shattered when deadly bombs went off on the Tube and a bus the very next morning. Much as we might want to, we can’t escape from the world and live on that mountain peak; the Bible is very realistic about that. Rather, we snatch those ‘high points’ when they come along, knowing that they are rare and precious gifts from God which inspire us to keep plodding on in the workaday world. We treasure their memory for ever – as I’m sure the disciples did, too.

There’s a lot more that we could say about this mystifying but rich story. It certainly tells us that religion isn’t escapism and that worship should never be more than a temporary refuge from the ‘real world’. It also hints that, while we don’t chase after repeated spiritual experiences in order to keep us going (like a car which has to pay periodic visits to the petrol station to get its tank topped up), we should be open for God to meet us in surprising ways which enlarge our understanding of who he is. Those may come in worship, or from spending times in those “thin” places, or from reading, or as we pray, even through intellectual debate: I don’t mind which, as God meets each of us in appropriate ways. But we do all need to consciously open ourselves to his Spirit, however wary we might be of encountering him in an unexpected way which we had never imagined.

You may not realise it, but today is the last Sunday in the Epiphany season; next Sunday Christians will have entered Lent. In the last six weeks we’ve travelled a long way: from the Wise Men visiting the child Jesus and offering their gifts, to the disciples climbing the mountain with the grown-up Jesus and seeing a glimpse of his glory. As the word “epiphany” means “a revealing”, it seems appropriate that the season is bookended by these stories which give us such contrasting but complementary pictures of Jesus: the one of him as a child with illustrious visitors is a puzzling but easy to visualise, while the one of him blazing out in glory blows our minds. Yet both, we believe, are true and must be coupled with others, such as the teacher who inspired crowds, the troublemaker who upset the Temple tables, the good companion who ate with his friends, and of course the Saviour who died on the Cross. These are all pieces of the jigsaw which must be fitted together if we are to understand Jesus properly; today’s story shows so clearly that Jesus is both a caring man and almighty God.