Homily: Transfiguration
For a kid who grew up on the sweeping prairies of western Minnesota,
I’m fascinated by mountains.
Some of my most vivid memories involve mountains,
including the time when I was driving back to Minnesota from California
and drove through the mountains of Colorado
during the early, early hours of the morning.
Driving through the darkness
—surrounded on all sides by walls of stone older than memory itself—
feeling as if God and I were the only people awake in the whole world
and then seeing the sun peak over the crest of the mountains
—slowly at first and then all of a sudden—
was nothing less than magical.
I love mountains.
And, truth be told, I’m a little terrified of them.
It’s that mixture, I think—fascination and fear—
which makes mountains a fitting spiritual image for me.
And not just me.
Mountains have been a spiritual image for millenia
and in many of the world’s religions
including our own.
It was on Mount Ararat where Noah’s Ark was said to rest after the flood.
It was on Mount Sinai where Moses received the Law
and encountered God face-to-face.
It was on Mount Zion where David established his reign
and where Solomon built the Temple.
It was on Mount Carmel where Elijah proved to the prophets of Baal
that the God of Israel was the Most High God.
In the New Testament, of course,
Jesus preaches his most defining sermon on a mountain.
And it was on the Mount of Olives where Jesus spends his last night
before being handed over to death.
The place of Jesus’s execution has been called a mountain
—the Mount of Love, as St Francis de Sales says.
Mountains are mentioned more than 500 times in Scripture.
They are a place where God intervenes into the life of God’s people
and acts decisively.
God always reveals a bit of God’s self on the mountain top.
And it’s no different in the Transfiguration.
On Mount Tabor, Jesus is transfigured
—clothes dazzling white and face shining like the sun—
to reveal the glory and identity and purpose
of the Word of God made mortal flesh.
The story of the Transfiguration which we heard this morning
follows closely on the heels of two important moments
in the life of Jesus and his disciples.
A few verses before, Jesus asks the disciples who they say he is.
Some say John the Baptist. Others say Elijah or another prophet.
But Peter—Peter who usually fumbles his way through things—
answers with clarity: God’s Messiah, the Promised One, the Anointed One.
And then Jesus tells his disciples that his ultimate purpose
is not to overtake Rome and reestablish David’s throne
as some of the disciples may have thought
but to suffer and to die.
And after that revelation where Jesus says that we must take up our cross
Peter, James, and John—the ‘in-crowd’ of the disciples—
heads up the mountain with Jesus in order to pray.
And while they’re there, they encounter God—
just not in the ways they anticipated.
It’s all very theatrical and over the top,
but then again nobody has ever accused Jesus of being subtle.
Moses and Elijah—The Lawgiver and the Greatest Prophet—show up,
Jesus starts to glow,
a cloud surrounds them,
and God’s voice booms around them,
echoing what God spoke more gently at Jesus’s baptism:
“This is my Son, my Chosen one, listen to him!”
And the text says that, when the cloud and the prophets disappeared,
they all kept silent and nobody talked about what had happened
and then the next day they got on back to healing and teaching.
I find it rather hard to believe that last bit.
That after everything
—after the mysterious cloud,
after the face that shone like lightning,
after the prophets showing up,
after the voice of God booming all around them—
I find it hard to believe that, after all that, things went back to normal.
I find it hard to believe that Peter, James, and John—
the Rock and the Sons of Thunder,
good guys, to be sure, but not known for their subtly or their chill—
just went back to the daily grind of being a disciple.
After all, they had come face-to-face with the glory of God.
They had experienced a foretaste of God’s Kingdom:
the Law and the Prophets;
the Son of God and the Spirit of God and the Voice of God;
right there surrounding them on the top of a mountain.
It would sure make anything else seem insignificant.
After all, when Moses encountered God directly, he was forever changed.
Not just spiritually or emotionally, but physically.
His face shone brightly,
so brightly that he had to wear a veil covering his face,
taking it off only when he was in God’s direct presence
and putting it back on whenever he went down from the mountain again.
Whether or not the disciples went back to their daily lives following the Transfiguration,
it’s clear that something had changed: their purpose.
They were no longer following around a nice teacher from Nazareth,
Mary and Joseph’s boy who could work some party tricks
and who cared about the poor and disadvantaged.
Rather, they were disciples of the Son of God,
the One whom God had tasked with saving God’s people,
the One sent from God’s side to make God’s presence known,
not by retaking Jerusalem from their Roman overlords
but living among the people, showing them how to love,
and then dying for them.
When we encounter God in God’s fullness,
in the fullness of God’s glory,
everything changes.
The good news, my friends, is that you and I encounter God every day.
Every day of our lives, we encounter God face-to-face.
Whether or not we know it,
whether or not realize it,
we come face-to-face with God every day and in all places.
In fact, you are sitting next to God right this very minute.
In the pew next to you and in front of you and behind you,
pushing the cart ahead of you at the grocery store,
riding their bike next to you on the bikelane,
holding the door open for you at the coffeeshop,
sweeping the floor or taking out the trash,
sitting on the park bench.
We are, right here and right now, surrounded by people
who are made in God’s own image and likeness,
people who reflect God’s presence and God’s glory,
people who are, in the waters of baptism, made to be God’s chosen ones,
God’s beloved sons and daughters.
Every day and in every place we encounter God’s presence in the form of our neighbors and our friends and our lovers and our enemies.
Every day we encounter God,
every day we come face-to-face with God’s grandeur.
Do we veil our faces like Moses?
Or do we sit in silence like the disciples?
Or, more likely yet, do we even recognize it?
Are we even aware that God is even this minute present to us,
that we are sitting on the peak of a mountain top
surrounded by clouds and prophets?
Are we even aware of it?
Most times, I suspect we’re not.
I know that I’m not.
I know that I miss the presence of God all around me.
I know that I engage with a neighbor or a friend as if they are simply them
and not a reflection of God’s majesty.
I know that I fail to recognize God’s presence and God’s glory
in the faces of the people I encounter.
In fact, I’d wager I forget that presence and glory more than I remember it.
How might things be different if we recognized God’s presence around us?
How might it be for us to walk through this world knowing
that the full glory of God was shining all around us?
How might it be for us to go to work tomorrow morning—
or to the dentist’s office or the grocery store or the bank—
knowing that the people all around us reflect God’s radiance,
knowing that the postmistress or the barista or the cashier are shining
with God’s presence made manifest?
How might it be for us to realize that we are standing, right this minute,
on Mount Tabor or Mount Sinai or Mount Carmel?
How might we respond to coming face-to-face with God?
Both Moses in the lesson from Exodus and the disciples in the Gospel
show us that the response to God’s presence,
to engaging head-on with God’s glory and radiance
is to keep it close to the heart.
Moses veils his face because what he has seen is powerful.
And the disciples keep silent because, after all, what can you say
when something like this—amazing, beautiful, terrifying—happens to you?
But in neither instance—neither Moses nor Peter, James, and John—
does a person leave God’s presence unchanged
and without greater and greater clarity of purpose.
My dear friends, how will you leave this place this morning?
Will you go out these doors
—after encountering the fullness of God in Word and in Sacrament,
after having sat next to and in front of and behind God’s chosen ones—
as if nothing has happened?
Or will you go out changed and transfigured yourselves?
Will you go out into the world to proclaim God’s message
of restoration and redemption,
of the powerful being brought low and the weak being made powerful,
of peace and justice and mercy and compassion,
of losing yourself in order to find yourself,
of taking up your cross and following?
Will you recognize God’s glory and grandeur in the world around you,
in the people and places and scenarios of your daily lives?
As the great novelist Marilynne Robinson wrote,
The Lord is more constant and far more extravagant than it seems to imply. Wherever you turn your eyes, the world can shine like transfiguration. You don't have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?
Who could have the courage to see it, indeed?
By God’s own grace, may we have that courage. Amen.
This homily was preached by the Reverend Cody Maynus on 6 August, 2023 at All Saints Churhc, Northfield, MN.