February 15, 2026
Through the Noise, This Voice
Exodus 12:12-18, Matthew 17:1-9
Last month, a colleague and his spouse were waiting to board a flight in Atlanta. While they stood at the gate, a TSA door alarm went off. It was a shrill, piercing wail that penetrated the terminal for several minutes. The two of them watched as nobody on the concourse so much as looked up. People scrolled their phones, sipped their coffee, chatted with their children. The alarm blared, and no one moved.
At the same time, the gate agent was trying to make announcements about boarding procedures. Also ignored. Nobody was listening.
But then… When it was time to board, the gate agent spotted a servicewoman with a small child. She invited the two of them forward, thanked the woman for her service, and gave the child a high five. Everyone turned and looked. The whole gate applauded. People smiled.
Two kinds of communication. One was loud and urgent and completely tuned out. The other was human and personal and direct, and it turned every head in the room.
In a few minutes we will baptize Lane Margaret Cox. In that act, we will do something similar to what the gate agent did — we will speak a name, directly and personally, over a child. And we will say: you belong to God. Listen to God’s voice. It will be the most important thing that happens in this place today.
I think we know something about noise in the world and the difficulty of listening to God’s voice. We live in a world that is constantly alarmed. There is the loud, relentless noise of crisis and turmoil, in our feeds and in our fears. Many of us are concerned and rightly alarmed… though we are also exhausted by alarms and overwhelmed by the relentless constancy of them. Unable to hear. That’s one kind of noise.
But it’s not the only kind. The novelist Walker Percy wrote sixty years about a kind of noise that is not as alarming as it is numbing. He called it “everydayness:” not the harsh noise of crisis, but the comfortable white noise of routine in which nothing truly registers, nothing truly calls to you. The kind of noise that helps you sleep. You drift, pleasantly enough, without really attending to anything at all, yet with a nagging sense that there must be more. Percy’s protagonist describes it as being lost in the world — not unhappily, just absent. Unable to hear.
Into this — into the overwhelming noise of alarms and the numbing white noise of our everydayness — the gospel tells us a story about a mountain, a voice, and an invitation to listen.
Two Mountains
Matthew tells us that six days after Peter’s confession of faith, Jesus took three disciples — Peter, James, and John — and led them up a high mountain.
Six days. Matthew almost never gives us a precise time marker like that. When he does, it means something. To know what it means, as my grandmother used to say, “Well, you have to go back.” He is pointing us back to another mountain, another six days, another divine encounter.
In Exodus 24, Moses ascended Mount Sinai to receive the law. The people stayed at the base. A cloud covered the mountain for six days. On the seventh day, God called to Moses, and Moses entered the cloud. He was there forty days and forty nights. And what God gave him was the law inscribed on stone tablets. Permanent, written in rock. The Word of God, delivered through one person, from an immense and terrifying distance.
The people watching from below saw the glory of God as devouring fire. They did not go up. Only Moses ascended. Only Moses entered the cloud. The word came down from on high, through a single mediator, to a people who kept their distance.
Now come back to Matthew’s mountain. Jesus leads three people up — not one. And look at who appears with him: Moses and Elijah. The lawgiver and the great prophet. The whole inheritance of Israel’s faith, gathered on a mountain.
Jesus’ face shines like the sun. His clothes become dazzling white. And then a bright cloud — the same cloud of Sinai, the cloud of divine presence — overshadows them all. And from the cloud, a voice.
At Sinai, the voice gave commandments. Here, the voice points.
“This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him.”
This is the theological hinge of the whole story. God is not giving new stone tablets. God is pointing to a person. The Word of God, which was hidden in a cloud on Sinai and was handed down in stone, now stands in front of these three disciples with a voice, with a face, with hands that will soon reach out and touch them.
The disciples, understandably, fall on their faces. They are terrified. This is the living God of fire and smoke, the God of their ancestors, present on a mountain.
And then Jesus does something that never happened on Sinai. He comes to them. He touches them. He says: “Get up. Do not be afraid.”
When they look up, they see no one except Jesus alone. Moses and Elijah have receded into the cloud of witnesses. The law and the prophets have given way to this one. What remains, standing with them on the mountain, is the One whom the voice named.
What Listening Looks Like
“Listen to him,” the voice said. It sounds simple but it’s not.
I’ll be honest with you. When I try to think of a single moment when the voice of Jesus came to me on a mountain — clear, unmistakable, life-changing — I struggle to name even one. What I can name are slower and more ordinary things.
I think of the people over my life who have resonated with the voice of Jesus through their lives: through regular prayers and presence, through week-by-week servant faithfulness, through passionate commitment to truth and justice, by living with integrity, and humility, and kindness. The voice of Jesus resonated in their lives, like the vibrations of a string that creates music from an instrument made by the master maker.
When it comes to beliefs, I think especially of my time in seminary, sitting at tables with people whose faith sounded very different from mine. People who read the same scripture and came to different conclusions, who pressed me to reckon with questions I had thought were easy to answer. You know, sometimes the voice of Jesus comes through unexpected people who press us toward a deeper understanding and clarity of who God is, and what God’s love means.
The novelist Marilynne Robinson captures this way of listening so well in Gilead, a book some of us read together as a congregation during a Lent several years ago.
In Gilead the aging pastor John Ames is writing a long letter to his young son, a letter the boy will not read until after his older father has died. Ames has spent his whole life preaching, studying, praying. And what he has learned, in all those years, is not a set of propositions. It is a practice of attention.
He notices light falling through a window. He notices the face of a child. He notices bread broken, water poured, the small and ordinary transactions of grace. He has learned, over a long lifetime, to pay attention — to attend to the world around him as if it is full of God, because, he has come to believe that it is. And underneath everything he has heard in that long practice of attention, he finds love. Always love.
That is what “listen to him” asks of us. Some of us have mountain top experiences, but most of us will not. For most of us the voice of God will come more quietly through a practice of listening. A decision, made again and again, to be where our feet are, and be present enough to hear.
How can we be present to hear? The ancient practices of spiritual disciplines are designed to help us. The study of scripture, read slowly and honestly. Life in community, with others who are listening carefully for Jesus’ voice amid the noise of the world. Weekly worship, gathered around Table and Font. Private daily prayer, where we honestly seek to hear his voice, with the help of the Spirit, speaking to our concerns.
It is not often easy to understand what the voice of Jesus is saying. Many who loudly claim to know what he is saying contradict his clear teaching by their lives and actions. This is the ultimate of what Jesus says: the voice of Jesus never contradicts the law of love. Whenever we are in doubt about what the voice of Jesus is saying, the answer is always love, a costly and demanding love.
What makes the character John Ames more interesting is that he carries the shadow of his grandfather his whole life. His grandfather was a different kind of preacher entirely, a kind that would turn many of us off today: a fiery, one-eyed abolitionist who had visions of God, ran antislavery raids with John Brown, and preached with the force of a thunderstorm. He climbed holy mountains and brought back a message that he preached loudly and boldly. Ames, on the other hand, spent his whole quiet life wondering whether his own gentler faith was somehow insufficient by comparison.
But here is what strikes me as so relatable about Ames, and hopefully for all of us. He is not a mystic. He has never had a vision. He is a tired, aging, ordinary pastor who has shown up, week after week, to preach and pray and sit with people in their suffering. And in the accumulation of all those ordinary acts of faithfulness, he has learned to hear. The voice of Jesus, for Ames, is not loud. But it is persistent. And when you practice attending to it, over time, you begin to recognize it.
Coming Down
As they came down the mountain, Jesus gave the disciples a strange instruction. “Tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man is raised from the dead.”
They could not hold on to the vision. They could not stay on the mountain.
Peter wanted to build three dwellings and hold the moment in place. I understand that impulse. When something wonderful has happened — a service of worship that lifted my soul, a moment of prayer that felt genuinely alive, a transcendent encounter of awe and wonder — the temptation is to freeze frame it. To build a little altar in my heart and keep it there.
But we cannot do that with the living God. The experience of the mountain is where we hear the call to follow. Following happens in the valley, on the ordinary road, in as we draw close to suffering and costly love.
This Wednesday, we begin Lent. Forty days of walking with Jesus toward Jerusalem — toward the cross, toward Jesus’ confrontation with sin, death, and evil.
The gift of Lent is listening. The practices we take on in these forty days — prayer, scripture, silence, fasting, giving up things we lean on too heavily — these are not exercises in short-term self-improvement. They are acts of attention. They are the spiritual equivalent of getting very quiet so that we can hear.
The voice that spoke on the mountain is still speaking. In scripture, in people, in the silence we almost never allow ourselves, in the prayer we keep forgetting to make time for.
What the voice says is still, at its heart, the same: This is the One. Listen to the Son, the Beloved One. Listen to him.
As I said at the beginning, baptism is the most important thing that will happen today. Thankfully, in baptism we don’t hand a child a stone tablet. We don’t give them a list of rules or a set of requirements.
We call them by name — and tell them they loved by the living God, loved first, before they know or earn or have done anything; by a love that will never let them go. We tell them to whom they belong and pray that they will listen for the voice who calls them by name.
We live in a noisy world. Alarms are blaring, and often for good reasons. And white noise is real, the “everydayness” that is comfortable and numbing.
But there is a voice — personal, direct, addressed to each of us in the most personal way and to all of us in the most comprehensive way — a voice that calls us to the deeper questions and deeper realities of life: this is my Son, the voice says. Listen to him… Listen to him.
Rev. Patrick W. T. Johnson, Ph.D.
First Presbyterian Church
Asheville, North Carolina