Mark 9:2-9

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

Peter wants to capture that mountaintop experience forever.

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

Strange things are happening on this mountain.

I love a good mountaintop experience. It’s a moment when everything changes. Insight flares up in the mind, illuminating the moment, the experience, the problem in a whole new way. You’re never quite the same again.  

One such moment for me happened in prayer when I was on a three-day silent retreat.

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.

If the disciples hoped before that Jesus didn't know what he was saying, these hopes are now gone.

Do not look for this mountain on a Bible map. It juts out not from the topography of Galilee, but from the topography of God.