Preaching on Transfiguration Sunday feels like trying to explain what the transfiguration means. What is going on here? Why were his clothes dazzling white? How did Moses and Elijah, centuries dead, appear? How did the disciples know it was Moses and Elijah? Nametags? Family photos?
The Transfiguration is not as memorable as Christmas or Easter. But the story is included in Mathew, Mark, and Luke’s gospels and celebrated each year halfway through Jesus’ ministry between his baptism and his resurrection.
We each have our own “mountaintop experiences”. Then, as quickly as it started, it was over. They came down off the mountain; back to the other disciples, back to the towns and villages, back to the crowds. Back to the work, back to the same ol’ same ol’. But things were fundamentally different.
Today is Jesus’ mountaintop. Then we move this week to Ash Wednesday and the start of the wilderness of Lent — towards Jesus on top of another mountain, Golgotha, the place of the Skull. On the mountain of Golgotha, there is no reassuring loving voice from Heaven. God feels far away, even to Jesus, who cries out, “My God why have you forsaken me?”
The mountain experience of the cross is not the mountain top moment of glory like before. It is a mountaintop moment of state terror, lynching, and public execution.
It is the valley between these two mountain moments, that we move into a time of Lent — both fasting and new life.
The time between the two mountains is set apart to find ways to intentionally strip down the excess or disrupt our status quo. On this journey through the wilderness, as we are seeking God, remember that God does not often come to us in the ways that we might expect or recognize. Sometimes God is present in shining glory. But at times the veil is removed and the clearest picture we have of God is on the cross.
As he witnesses Jesus’ transfiguration, Peter’s understanding remains veiled.The glimpses we get of God’s glory—through the veil or reflected in the mirror—are expectation-shattering, alarming, overwhelming, and awesome. The love of God shines too brightly to view directly, and yet we do have the privilege of directly experiencing that love. The veils we contend with daily are the barriers that prevent us from truly loving those neighbors, caring for creation, and seeing the shining face of Jesus in the faces of people who are different, hungry, difficult, enemy, invisible, or poor. God is always revealed in ways that surprise and confuse us, whether shining on the mountaintop or dying on the cross.God is most clearly in the crucified ones:
- God is being profiled and detained.
- God is kept awake at night by the sound of air strikes in Gaza and Ukraine.
- God is the transgender student whose parents fear letting them paint their nails because of safety concerns.
- God is sleeping on a park bench.
- God just got the news that her dream job at the National Park Service no longer exists.
- God is in prison because he cannot make bail.
- God is separated from family because of borders.
- God is rationing her medicine because she can’t afford insurance.
- God is crouched behind his desk practicing active shooter drills.
- God is on the ventilator in the ICU.
The people we crucify and cast aside as disposable and try to forget? That’s where God is.
But what if Jesus’ face is always shining? What if Jesus’ clothes were always sparkling? What if God had always been talking from the mountain? And what if mountaintop experiences allow us to see our neighbors, the world, and ourselves as we are? Perhaps then we could see ourselves as change agents. We could have ways of seeing our neighbors as dazzling. We could see the church gathered as powerful for good against injustice. Perhaps the reality of Transfiguration indeed shows us more of how Jesus didn’t change, and the disciples did change.
And if the disciples were changed, we are changed as well. We are changed every time we pray. Changed every time we open up the scripture. We are transfigured every time we visit with our neighbors and learn about other perspectives, needs, and personalities. Every time we respond to ministry needs. Every time we expand our definition of family. Every time we let our light shine. Every time we remember in our daily life that we are the salt of the earth. Every time we realize that the least of these as blessed.
God tells us, too, that we are beloved. The light of Christ shines through our prayers, our giving, our compassionate acts so that others, too, may see that we are changed by the glory of God in us.
We veil God because of the pain and can fail to comprehend God working in suffering, detachment, and death as necessary before the resurrection. And our acceptance of Jesus’ death and our own allows us to fully engage in life in all its joys and hardships.
Because the story of God’s glory on the mountain today that we read isn’t the pinnacle of the story. The cross is.
