Transfiguration of the Lord (Year 3, NL)

What Peter, James, and John see on the mountain cannot be neatly packaged for resale.

In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus—like Moses and Elijah—is a figure of departure.

Any conversation about salvation should include both an eschatological aspect and one that is relevant to our lives here and now.

God’s presence transfigures here, now, in the familiar.

The thing Peter needs is right there in front of him.

Jesus’ transfiguration should have implications for how its witnesses will live.

There is no "on the mountain" and "off the mountain."

I am a fan of mysteries. I love watching detectives in movies and on television. I love mystery novels so much that I don’t just read them on the beach. But I’m one of those people who doesn’t try to solve the puzzle before the end of the story. I like to experience the mystery as it unfolds. I especially love unsolved mysteries, those brainteasers that simply cannot be wrapped up tightly leaving no lose ends. Stories like mountaintop visions of transfigured splendor.

What might change if we could see something up there greater than the suffering world below? If we could get a glimpse of heaven, we would have proof—an experience that we could refer back to for the rest of our lives.

Let’s build shrines, Peter says. He doesn’t know how to respond to a mystical mountaintop experience, and he’s afraid.

The Transfiguration has a hundred sermons in it. But to me the most touching element is the subplot.

Jesus’ transfiguration is a mystery that defies a straightforward explanation. I find that instead of clarifying anything about his unique nature, it only adds more confusion.

I grew up in Southern Baptist congregations. By the time I left high school I knew the four steps to salvation and the meaning of Jesus’ sacrificial death as a substitutionary atonement for my sins. I could articulate this understanding of salvation in clear and simple terms. Within the metanarrative of evangelical Christianity it made perfect sense and was logically coherent.

Then my fundamentalism began to unravel. 

For this Transfiguration Sunday, the preacher faces at least two temptations.

The first is to move too quickly to the pastoral and personal dimensions of these texts, to consider how we, too, are transfigured by God’s love, glory and grace. And the epistle lesson does bring this theme up. But Exodus and Luke invite us to explore the nature of God’s glory itself, and it’s rewarding to focus first on these rich texts.

The pastor was prepared for questions about the Transfiguration. Instead, one first grader asked, "what does 'obviously' mean?"

Learning to see in new ways is one of the most difficult tasks of the transformed life. Old habits of selective vision, old choices about what to leave out and what to focus on tend to dominate us, even as we search for new ways of living that are in closer communion with the life of the Spirit. Transfiguration--that mysterious transformation of vision that is narrated in today's readings--is a radical, if brief, way of illumination.