Transfiguration and Transformation...

Thanks to the writings of Lawrence Moore, Matt Skinner, and D. Mark Davis for their insights into today's reading.

MARK 9:2-9

Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus. As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.

This is the Word of the Lord.

How many times have you heard sermons and lessons on the Transfiguration? I mean, Transfiguration Sunday happens every year, the last Sunday before Lent begins. And while not every preacher follows the church calendar, I would think that it's a pretty safe bet that a preacher can't resist telling a cool story like this at least once a year...

So if you come to church regularly, you've heard about the Transfiguration a whole lot. So have I. I've preached a sermon on the Transfiguration every year I've been here, obviously, but if you were to back me in a figurative corner and ask me to state, definitively, what the transfiguration of Jesus means... well, I couldn't give you one answer, and honestly, I think that if we were to package this event into one specific, over-arching explanation, we'd be selling the narrative short. God always speaks to us where we are, individually and as a church.

And God speaks to us directly in the Transfiguration: “This is my Son, the Beloved...” One translation of this phrase reads, “This is my beloved son in whom I take delight.” Far from an event that invokes sober reverence and awe, for God, Transfiguration is an opportunity to declare love, to be delighted with Jesus the Son.

And it is a shared delight – Jesus is not alone, after all, Peter and James and John, not to mention Moses and Elijah, are there in the presence of God, enjoying the delight that God feels! Delight is an aspect of the holy – and this holiness is a participatory, shared holiness. God loves, so God interacts. God gives of God's self, because self-giving is just what happens when someone adores and celebrates someone else.

So Transfiguration is an opportunity to simply enjoy the presence of God in Jesus Christ, to be ourselves transformed by the light of his grace and love.

Because, make no mistake, we cannot stand long in the presence of God without being transformed. The word for “transfiguration” and for “transformation” is the same one: “metemorphothei,” the word we get “metamorphosis” from. Romans 12:2 tells us “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.” Which is all well and good, but I like being told the “what” without the “how” just about as much as I like paying sales tax. The good news is that God tells us the “how.” In 2 Corinthians 3:18, “And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.”

The light of Transfiguration lives within us in God the Holy Spirit, bringing us into the image and presence of our loving Creator! That's something to delight in, isn't it?

So yes, the Transfiguration is for us. It is, perhaps, Mark's Resurrection account, a picture of the risen and glorified Christ in a Gospel which, in its original form, doesn't really have one – it ends like it begins, with a sentence fragment, and empty tomb and some terrified women.

On this mountain, we have Jesus, the Christ, as King of Kings and Lord of Lords, robed in the blinding glory of God, attended by Moses, who represents the Law, and Elijah, who represents the Prophets. This is the Jesus of the Final Judgment, prepared to separate the sheep from the goats.

From this perspective alone, it makes sense that Peter and James and John were terrified (in fact, a literal translation might be that they were “freaked out”). After all, it's all well and good to talk about the Final Judgment, especially when we're talking about all those other people who'll get judged for their sins. Face to face with the reality of the Judge Himself, we might not be so quick to point at others... just sayin'.

On the other hand, the promise of a resurrected Christ is, after all, why we believe in the first place, isn't it? Without the real and physical resurrection of Jesus Christ, we might as well just sleep in on Sunday, we might as well live our lives as if this is all there is, and once we are dead we are dust.

But God identifies Jesus as the beloved, in whom God is delighted! The resurrection is God's seal of approval on the completed work of Jesus the Son, and the promise of our faith is that in the same way that Jesus rose and lives eternally, we will rise, and we will live.

But yet again, I think if we leave it at this, settle for the triumphalism, we may well be missing something that God is saying to us.

After all, it is no small matter that, in order for Jesus to rise, he must die. And not a simple death, what Rush Limbaugh might refer to as “assuming room temperature.” Yes, I just quoted Rush Limbaugh in a sermon, and no, I am not proud of it.

There is one path down from that mountaintop for Jesus. One path that leads to Jerusalem, one path to the Garden of Gethsemane, one path to the Pavement and the whip and the crown of thorns, one path to Golgotha and the nails, one path to the cold, cold tomb.

It's easy, far too easy, to simply view the crucifixion of Jesus in the light of the Resurrection, and what I mean by that is to too easily dismiss the fear Jesus felt, the mortal terror that caused him to sweat blood at Gethsemane, the hopelessness of his cry, “My God, my God, why have you forgotten me?”

Our passage today begins with the words, “six days later.” That's how long it had been since Peter had declared that Jesus was the Messiah, and Jesus had begun trying to prepare his disciples for what was to come: “...that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again.”

But the disciples don't get it – they either can't or won't understand. Peter and the rest continue to impose their own terms on what following Jesus means. Before and after the Transfiguration, the disciples refuse to accept Jesus' political fate, they discuss who will be greatest among them when Jesus takes over and imposes Empire upon the face of the earth; James and John try to do an end-run around the rest to get the best seats in the house.

So on the Mount of Transfiguration, Moses and Elijah meet with Jesus to talk about what's to come – I think that this was for Jesus, reassurance that the path down from the mountaintop was the right one; and when God speaks from the cloud, he says something to Peter and James and John – and to us – “...listen to him!”

For Peter, James, and John, this means to stop trying to frame the Kingdom of God in their own template. Yes, life under the boot of Rome was tiresome and unjust, and yes it would be nice to overpower, overthrow, destroy the Romans, grind them to dust, and establish David's throne on earth by force. But the Kingdom of God is more than mere earthly empire. There is more to the Messiah than who gets to sit next to him in the throne room.

And – this was for the disciples and it is for us, today – we will never transform the world, we will not change people, by force. It simply cannot be done, not in the name of Christ, and Christ knows we've tried. Kings and emperors and Presidents and prime ministers too numerous to count have conquered and ruled and have claimed to do so within the will of God. One after another over the millenia, each on the ashes of the one before, and what do we have to show for it?

Poverty is still rampant. Government is rife with corruption. People the world over die every day from a lack of food and clean water, people die of easily preventable diseases, and even more despicable, far more shameful: children in our own city go to bed hungry, and far too many without a roof over their heads, every night. I will disagree with the governor and with the chief justice and with the senator and the attorney general in that it is this above all else which is the greatest sin in our state, that if Alabama is to incur the wrath of God it is for our inattention to the least of these in our midst, and the fact that we do it in the name of God.

Jesus was transfigured by the love of his Father, who delighted in him. We are transformed through the love of God in the risen Christ, through the renewing of the Holy Spirit.

It is love – not power, not weapons, not empire, which will ultimately transform this state, this country, and this world into one where all are fed and can drink clean water, where all are healthy and freed of poverty, where every child and every veteran has a home, a world where men and women and children from all walks of life enter the Kingdom of God not from fear of damnation or promise of prosperity, but because of what God's people have done to demonstrate the love of God in their lives, a world where God truly is glorified not just with our lips, but with our lives.

What does the Transfiguration mean to you, today? By that I mean, how is God speaking to you? How are you being transformed by the renewing of your mind? Which path is yours, off the mountaintop of your transfiguration? How will you, in turn transform your world?

Remember...

"If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.”

-William Blake

 Audio of the sermon:


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I am indebted to the writing of Bruce Epperly, Kathryn Matthews Huey, and Sarah Henrick for guidance in writing this sermon.

Some theologians and scholars suggest that the Transfiguration is a later addition to the Gospels, that the event didn't really happen, or didn't happen in the way it is related, in any case. I have no problem respectfully disagreeing with that viewpoint.

Because I think that, for a moment on a mountaintop, Peter and James and John experienced William Blake's "doors of perception" cleansed and wide open.

2 Kings 2:1-12

Now when the LORD was about to take Elijah up to heaven by a whirlwind, Elijah and Elisha were on their way from Gilgal. Elijah said to Elisha, “Stay here; for the LORD has sent me as far as Bethel.” But Elisha said, “As the LORD lives, and as you yourself live, I will not leave you.” So they went down to Bethel. The company of prophets who were in Bethel came out to Elisha, and said to him, “Do you know that today the LORD will take your master away from you?” And he said, “Yes, I know; keep silent.”

Elijah said to him, “Elisha, stay here; for the LORD has sent me to Jericho.” But he said, “As the LORD lives, and as you yourself live, I will not leave you.” So they came to Jericho. The company of prophets who were at Jericho drew near to Elisha, and said to him, “Do you know that today the LORD will take your master away from you?” And he answered, “Yes, I know; be silent.”

Then Elijah said to him, “Stay here; for the LORD has sent me to the Jordan.” But he said, ”As the LORD lives, and as you yourself live, I will not leave you.” So the two of them went on. Fifty men of the company of prophets also went, and stood at some distance from them, as they both were standing by the Jordan. Then Elijah took his mantle and rolled it up, and struck the water; the water was parted to the one side and to the other, until the two of them crossed on dry ground.

When they had crossed, Elijah said to Elisha, “Tell me what I may do for you, before I am taken from you.” Elisha said, “Please let me inherit a double share of your spirit.” He responded, “You have asked a hard thing; yet, if you see me as I am being taken from you, it will be granted you; if not, it will not.” As they continued walking and talking, a chariot of fire and horses of fire separated the two of them, and Elijah ascended in a whirlwind into heaven. Elisha kept watching and crying out, “Father, father! The chariots of Israel and its horsemen!” But when he could no longer see him, he grasped his own clothes and tore them in two pieces.

2 Corinthians 4:3-6

And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake. For it is the God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

Mark 9:2-9

Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.

As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.

This is the Word of the Lord.

I wonder if they remembered? James and Peter, I mean, as they stared across from their hiding place at the cross on the hill, where Jesus hung dying – John, too, from his place with the women at the foot of that cross – did they remember the mountaintop, the glory, how Jesus was transfigured before them, shining with the glory of God?

You would think such a thing would be unforgettable, of course. It isn’t every day that you get to see Moses and Elijah carrying on a conversation with anyone, let alone the man you’d left everything to follow. And it confirmed what they had all been hoping for, what they all believed, that Jesus really was the son of God, really was the Messiah!

In Jewish thought, since Moses had been buried by God when he died, and since Elijah had been taken bodily to heaven, this meant that they were both available to come back and announce to all of humanity that God’s reign was at hand. And here they were, talking to Jesus!

I wonder if they remembered? Peter, burning with shame at his betrayal of Jesus, John trying to be strong for Jesus’ mother as they watched him, beaten beyond recognition, struggling for breath. None of the disciples could put it together in their head, all those times Jesus talked about having to suffer, all those times he predicted his death, and especially all those times when he spoke of rising from the dead on the third day. Kings didn’t suffer. Gods didn’t die.

No, but that one time, when ‘way up on the mountaintop, the barrier between heaven and earth was stretched thin and drawn close, and where Jesus spoke with the prophets of old, and where God spoke aloud to Peter and James and John, that made a whole lot more sense, when you think about it. Jesus was a King in his glory, and the Kingdom was present and tangible.

That’s why Peter had said that thing about the booths. He wasn’t babbling just to hear himself talk, he actually had a point. The thought at the time was that the reign of God was to take place during the Feast of Booths, where the Jewish people remembered the Exodus by living in booths for seven days. These booths were likely a lot of work; you had to gather branches to make the frame, then gather palm leaves and such to make the sides and top, after all. These booths were supposed to be a reminder of the fragile structures the children of Israel lived in during their years in the wilderness. If they were going to bring in the Kingdom of God, why should Moses and Elijah and Jesus have to build their own booth?

I wonder if they remembered. I wonder if Peter thought back to that day, how excited he’d been that Moses and Elijah had come to put an end to all that silly suffering-and-dying talk Jesus had been making. Awesome, Moses and Elijah could get Jesus to go ahead and bring on the Kingdom right then and there! I wonder if James, probably cowering in the shadows right next to Simon Peter, remembered what God’s voice sounded like from the cloud, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” And I wonder if, as James stared across at that bloody, naked, dying man on the cross, he thought, “if this is what God does to the beloved…”

And John, did he remember? Sitting there, did he remember how the clothing that those bored Roman soldiers were dividing up between them had shone bright-white with the glory of God?

How would it have felt, I wonder, to remember? Bitter and hateful, like a lie told by someone you trusted, like a broken promise? Or would it have been more like a diamond in the dust, a glimmer of hope, a promise that this was not the end?

The Pew Center reports that something like fifty percent of mainstream Christians – that’s folks like you and me, in mainstream denominations like Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans – have had mystical spiritual experiences: everything from a lingering whisper, a feeling of Christ’s nearness, or a call in the night, reminiscent of young Samuel’s, near death experiences, miraculous recoveries from illness or amazing, couldn’t-be-a-coincidence deliverances from accident and death. Perhaps there was a moment in prayer, or at a youth event, or even in church, or at a weekend retreat, where the barrier between heaven and earth was stretched thin and drawn close, and maybe, for an instant, we caught the aroma of glory, of the Kingdom of God not merely now-and-coming, but here-and-now.

So we have a glimpse of what Peter and James and John experienced there on the mountain. And perhaps we also have an all-too-personal understanding of the need to remember that touch from God, when grief or fear or pain or uncertainty comes, when we know all too well what it feels like to look across and see hope hanging naked and bleeding and dying.

Perhaps it helps to know something that Peter and James and John did not know that day, as they watched the man they knew, knew was the hope of Israel, push up against the nails in his feet and catch one last breath. We know that, before the sun rises on Sunday, some women will brave the darkness and go to the tomb and find that it is abandoned, no longer needed. We know that what Peter and James and John experienced that day on the mountaintop, when heaven drew close and God spoke aloud, was a promise.

I wonder, as Peter and John run to the cemetery, and the sun breaks over the eastern horizon, do they remember? All the miracles they had witnessed, all the truths they had heard from the lips of the Messiah, will it take Christ appearing to them behind locked doors, later that afternoon, for the truth to take hold, for them to remember the glory that shone around Christ, not mere special effects, not a chance hallucination, but a promise that God has not left us alone, God is with us?

And will we remember? Because when the storms come, when the doctor calls with bad news, when the casket closes for the last time, in the risen Christ, in the empty tomb, we have a touchstone, a diamond in the dust, a point of hope: the tomb is empty. Christ transfigured is now Christ triumphant.

And what would it mean if we remembered those touches from God – what if we could hold on to our own mountaintop experiences, and gain strength from the experiences of others, as we go though our day-to-day lives? What if we treated every moment, every person, every interaction with one another, as a holy thing? Elizabeth Barrett Browning said, “Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees, takes off his shoes. The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.”

Will we remember?

May it never be that we walk right by the brightest lights and sweetest sounds and miss the most important moments of our journey in faith, where the barrier between heaven and earth is thin and heaven is drawing close, because we were paying attention to something else.

God spoke to Jesus directly at his baptism, and God spoke directly to the disciples at the Transfiguration, proclaiming him the Son of God, and God speaks to us, the Body of Christ, right now, and in our day-to-day life. May we have eyes to see, ears to hear, and may we remember that God is with us, and follow.

We Were Not Meant For This!

Transfiguration - is it a once-in-history event, and for Jesus only, or is it something more universal, more frequent, and perhaps less recognizable?

Is there a message for the here-and-now in the transfiguration, or is it simply an account which reassures us that Jesus is who he claimed to be, or worse, a later tradition inserted into the Gospel account to impose divinity upon Jesus?

Read on...

Exodus 34:29-35
Moses came down from Mount Sinai. As he came down from the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant in his hand, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God. When Aaron and all the Israelites saw Moses, the skin of his face was shining, and they were afraid to come near him. But Moses called to them; and Aaron and all the leaders of the congregation returned to him, and Moses spoke with them. Afterward all the Israelites came near, and he gave them in commandment all that the LORD had spoken with him on Mount Sinai. When Moses had finished speaking with them, he put a veil on his face; but whenever Moses went in before the LORD to speak with him, he would take the veil off, until he came out; and when he came out, and told the Israelites what he had been commanded, the Israelites would see the face of Moses, that the skin of his face was shining; and Moses would put the veil on his face again, until he went in to speak with him.

Luke 9:28-43
Now about eight days after these sayings Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him. Just as they were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, "Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah" — not knowing what he said.
While he was saying this, a cloud came and overshadowed them; and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, "This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!" When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.

On the next day, when they had come down from the mountain, a great crowd met him. Just then a man from the crowd shouted, "Teacher, I beg you to look at my son; he is my only child. Suddenly a spirit seizes him, and all at once he shrieks. It convulses him until he foams at the mouth; it mauls him and will scarcely leave him. I begged your disciples to cast it out, but they could not." Jesus answered, "You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you and bear with you? Bring your son here." While he was coming, the demon dashed him to the ground in convulsions. But Jesus rebuked the unclean spirit, healed the boy, and gave him back to his father. 43And all were astounded at the greatness of God.

This is the Word of the Lord.

One of the strange by-products of taking our readings from the Revised Common Lectionary is that, sometimes, the text seems to be starting off in mid-thought, or leaving something important out of the story. “Now about eight days after these sayings…” the reading starts, and we have to be wondering, “Eight days after what sayings?”

Today’s reading takes place immediately following the familiar account of Jesus asking the disciples “who do you say that I am?” Peter replies “You are the the Christ of God ,” which signals a turning point in their understanding of Jesus. No longer merely “Rabbi,” “Teacher,” “Man from God,” “Maybe/possibly 'The One Who Is To Come,'” but the Messiah, Christ, the Son of the Living God. Jesus warns them to silence, then says, “The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life... If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit his very self? If anyone is ashamed of me and my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his glory and in the glory of the Father and of the holy angels. I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God.”

So eight days after these challenging, these explosive words, Jesus takes Peter and James and John to the mountaintop.

So it’s no wonder that some people wonder if this passage is factual, or if it’s some kind of holy myth that developed later and was inserted into the Gospel, or a resurrection appearance of Jesus that has somehow got misplaced and re-located, back in the middle of Jesus’ ministry instead of right at the end. Neither of these, of course, is my opinion. I think, rather, that the event takes place at the perfect point in the narrative. Jesus has said some very hard things to the disciples. He had made some challenges that, quite literally sounded like a death sentence.

Deitrich Bonhoeffer, one of the authors of The Theological Declaration of Barmen in our Book of Confessions, wrote this elsewhere: “When Christ calls a man to come and follow, he bids him come and die.” That is, after all, what “taking up your cross” meant to people under the rule of the Roman Empire. It meant you were going to die the slow, horrible, painful and embarrassing death which is crucifixion.

So, yes, this story shares some clear links with other passages of Scripture. For example, our Old testament reading today, Moses’ encounter with God on Mount Sinai when he received God’s law. We are told that when Moses came down from the mountain, his face was shining with the radiance of God. Or there is the passage where heaven and earth overlap as Elijah is carried away into heaven.

There is, however, another Biblical account that this story can be linked with. As well as looking back all those years to Moses and Elijah, this story also points us forward… to Jesus’ death on the cross.

Unlike the accounts of Moses and Elijah, however, it is more in the contrasts than the similarities that we see the striking links between the Transfiguration and the Crucifixion.

In this story of the transfiguration, Jesus’ clothes shine with the glory of God; at the crucifixion, the soldiers gamble for Jesus’ clothes. Here in this story, Jesus is accompanied by two great heroes from ancient history; there, on the cross, Jesus is joined by two common criminals. Here, at the transfiguration, Jesus is witnessed by three male disciples - Peter, James and John; there, at Golgotha, three woman are named as witnesses: two Marys and Salome. This scene of transfiguration is one a scene of dazzling light, while at the crucifixion Matthew tells us that darkness came over the whole land. Here, in this scene, Jesus basks in God’s presence, there on the cross He cries out, ‘My God why have you forsaken me?’ Here on the mountain God confesses Jesus as God’s son as a voice sounds forth, ‘this is my son, the beloved!’ There it is left to a Roman centurion to blurt out, ‘truly this man was God’s son.’

So many contrasts. It’s as if the horror of the Crucifixion account were a deliberate inversion of the splendor of the Transfiguration. And if so, then what is God’s written Word trying to tell us?

At this point in the Gospel Jesus is on a journey - a journey that will take him to Jerusalem and to death and beyond, to Easter. Jesus has spoken candidly about the painful, humiliating death that awaits him, and what this transfiguration story is doing is showing us what is beyond, at the end of that journey. It gives us a preview of Jesus’ destination. The cross, the crucifixion, Golgotha, is one stop on the way, but it’s not the end of the journey. We are not left, thank God, with Christ disfigured, naked, abandoned and bloody, nailed up like a scarecrow. Beyond that is the risen Christ who can only be glimpsed here.

But of course, - and this is an important point - what we see revealed here is not just the goal of Christ’s journey, but the goal of our journey too.

Or to put it differently, what Peter, James and John are witnessing here is not just Christ’s destination, but their own destination too, and ours, yours and mine. We too will shine like the sun.

Christ came to transform us. He came to transfigure us with the light of God’s grace. And the cross is, in many ways, part of our journey just as it was part of Christ’s journey (the discussion of what it means for a 21st-century American to take up the cross is a long one, and for another day), but because of Christ the Cross is not the end of our journey.

There, on the mountaintop, Jesus is the Christ of the journey’s end, our journey’s end. The Transfiguration is Christ’s destination… and our destination.

But down the mountain, of course, we must go. Directly following our reading this morning, the four of them come off of the mountain and find a crowd, and a young boy who has convulsions.

Here a different image of our humanity - not the transfigured humanity that is our destination, but our disfigured humanity. Here in this fearful scene we are closer to the hill of Golgotha than we are to the mountain of transfiguration. This world is the one we are all too familiar with.

It’s a world where lives are preyed on by evil forces. It’s a world where humanity is denied. It’s a world where people’s destiny is a cruel parody of what awaits us when, with Jesus, we are risen.

And when we look around us we see life lived at the foot of the mountain rather than at the top. We see lives that, in the light of Transfiguration, were clearly never meant for us.

We weren’t meant for this. Every time we see a homeless person begging in the streets: we were not meant for this. Every time we hear of a child dying of a preventable disease: we were not meant for this. Every time we see our terrible capacity for inhumanity paraded before us on the television: we were not meant for this. Every job lost, every home foreclosed: we were not meant for this. Every flood and earthquake and shooting and scandal: we were not meant for this. Maybe that’s why Jesus healed the epileptic youngster. Maybe that’s what motivated Jesus to heal every other poor person he came in contact with, whose life was disfigured by disease or disability or injustice: we were not meant for this!

And what are we to do about our world? I said before that the Transfiguration was not simply an event that happened in the life of Jesus, a pushpin in the map of Christ's journey, but an indication of our own ultimate destination as well.
Taking it a step further, in the same way that the Transfiguration was an event in Christ's life, we too are transformed and transfigured by the ongoing work of Christ in the Holy Spirit in our own lives.

We can, of course, see this transformation in the lives of the Apostles. Though it didn’t happen until after Pentecost, Peter and James and John, along with the rest of The Eleven, dedicated their lives to spreading the Gospel, to healing the sick and ministering to the poor and the forgotten… telling the world this great Good News that we were not meant for this! These eleven, who had been cowering, aimless, and silent, were transfigured into bold evangelists, powerful speakers, gifted leaders, fearless martyrs. They spoke truth to power, and cared for the lost, the forgotten, the marginalized.

We, too, have been transformed by a God who, in the words of Max Lucado, loves us just the way we are, but too much to let us stay that way. Moreover, the transformation, the transfiguration, is an ongoing process in our spiritual journey.

This Wednesday begins the season of Lent in our liturgical calendar. Last week, I suggested beginning early with a Lenten discipline of looking for the fish in our lives – those places where God is speaking, challenging, directing and calling us through the everyday, the mundane, the familiar, the fixed, the ordinary.
Let's broaden the scope of that discipline to include being sensitive to the ways in which God has transformed us, and the ways in which God desires to further transfigure us.

For most of its early existence, Christianity was considered the religion of slaves. People who had been excluded from fellowship with the Living God, whether because of the place they were born or because of some disease or defect, were being welcomed into relationship, were being transformed and transfigured by the love of God in Jesus Christ, and were being brought to the place of response to the Good News by people like Peter and James and John, people who had denied Christ, who had hidden in fear in the dark days following the Crucifixion, who even though they had spent years living with and listening to Jesus didn't understand what it was all about, but who had themselves been transformed by the Holy Spirit.

And it still goes on today. Men and women from every walk of life – rich and poor, in boardrooms and prison cells, in high-rise apartments and mud huts, in living rooms and in homeless shelters, in cathedrals and nightclubs – are transformed by the saving message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and are brought to that transformation by men and women just like you and me. Not well-known evangelists or powerful speakers, but “regular folks” who have experienced the transfiguring work of the Holy Spirit and are sharing it, in word and in deed, with the world around them.

Sharing it because in this wonderful vision of an alternative reality, where streets of gold replace unpaved streets and reeking alleys, where death and sickness and poverty are replaced by glory shining like the sun, in this wonderful promise of the here-and-now, as well as of resurrection and the end of the journey, there is hope.