I watched a really interesting NOVA last night on PBS about Australian paleontologists who were exploring a recently discovered cache of bones in one of the many underground, limestone caves that honeycomb the subterranean Outback.  They found several complete and nearly complete skeletons from little known and previously unknown species of marsupials.  The one that really interested me was a man-sized species of kangaroo, now extinct, that clearly had horn-sockets on its skull above its eyes.  The Aborigines have long remembered, in their oral tradition, giant, horned kangaroos. 

            Senator Clinton has taken a lot of criticism this week for the creative memory she frequently shared about a trip she and Chelsea made to Bosnia during her time as First Lady.  She remembered sniper fire, and a mad dash across the tarmac, dodging bullets until safety was reached in a waiting military vehicle.  The news footage of the trip shows instead a warm, safe welcome after an uneventful landing, and the beaming faces of Bosnian children.  When I heard her tell the story I knew it was a creative memory.  Most of us were alive at the time, and would have remembered our first lady being fired on, if that had actually happened.  Besides, we know the military would never let a plane carrying our first lady get within ten miles of sniper fire. In addition – what mother would let her fourteen year old daughter leave the safety of a military transport plane to dart across a bullet riddled tarmac?  I don’t fault the senator for her creative memory – I think we all like to be the heroes of our own memories, and, like Barbara Walters, insist the heavy filter is used when those memories are replayed.  Any three people, remembering the same event, will have their unique, Rashomon version of it.  But the truth is out there, and it is there for us to know.

            Peter, in his second letter, and at the end of his life, deals with the subject of his own memories, their certain truth, and our need to share them.  In II Peter 1.13-15 he says that, as he knows his death will shortly occur, his great responsibility is to remind us of the things preached – the things he, himself remembers.  “Paying attention” to these facts will cause us to shine “like a lamp in a dark place,” (v.19).  He insists that we understand the certitude of what the Bible tells us.  The accounts are certain, not only because of the collective memory of what has been prophesied, but because of multiple eye-witnesses – among whom Peter is primary (vv. 16-21).

            We did not follow cleverly devised tales – we were eyewitnesses… (v.16) Peter insists.  This has been central to his preaching since Pentecost:

"Men of Israel, listen to these words – Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with miracles, wonders, and signs which God performed through him in your midst, just as you yourselves know……This Jesus God raised up again, to which we are all witnesses."(Acts 2.22, 32).

            What is striking is the one event from Jesus’ life he specifically mentions in II Peter 1.  It was the time, on the “holy mountain,” when they heard the voice of “Majestic Glory” say of Jesus “This is my beloved son...,” (v.17).  There, on the Mount of Transfiguration (Matthew 17.1-13, Mark 9.2-13, Luke 9.28-36), Jesus, most likely standing in the snow of Mt. Hermon, flanked by Moses and Elijah, receives an infusion of glory from God in view of Peter, James and John.  In this story Peter is certainly not the hero, but, again, the one saying the inappropriate thing – further evidence the story is true.

            We have talked this month about the specific communication strategy God has used to share His will with us.  God tells the story.  The story we are told, from Genesis to Revelation is true.  When we say this we are not speaking of the story merely containing a truth – the way an Aesop’s Fable, or a Calvin & Hobbes comic strip do.  We mean that the text is factually true and accurate in its details.  Jesus actually walked on water.  The tomb was empty, because he did rise.  We know these things to be true not based upon the collective and ancient story of prophecy – but because it was confirmed by the accounts of multiple, and plentiful eye-witnesses who provide a consistent and perfect account of the events on the ground that make our home in heaven possible.