Column on transfiguration

When you are a minister for a while, some Sundays become harder to preach. We get a few early in the year: baptism of Jesus and Transfiguration Sunday today. We try to host a gathering of clergy to read a piece every few months, and we decide dot work with transfiguration, and it proved one of our bett4er gatherings, partly due to the anxiety of the preachers present.

Many know the story. Jesus goes up with three disciples and takes on a decidedly heavenly aspect and speaks with Moses and Elijah in their vision. First the word we translate as transfigure is metamorphosis. We know the word from rocks that are transformed by heat or pressure into something different: limestone into marble. Some think that this is a preview of resurrection. Elijah, recall, was taken up in a chariot of fire, and by the time of Jesus, some thought that Moses, without a burial spot, was assumed into heaven as well.

Mary Gordon cites a translation of Matthew 17:5 that has God saying, “This is my beloved son in whom I take delight. At the Transfiguration, then, “we are in the presence of delight. Delight as an aspect of the holy.” It’s tender moment. God loves, so God interacts.” These words repeat the baptismal announcement, but add: Listen to him.

What kind of voice did they hear? I tend to think that god sounds like Charlton Heston or James Earl Jones. A piece of rabbinic tradition holds that we can speak of the divine voice as soothing, the daughter of a voice, like an echo, or the soundless hum of the creation of God.

Transfiguration tells us that the ordinary is being transformed, transfigured to reflect something deeper, something higher, something more than basic appearance. When we will be receiving Communion during the Sundays of Lent, we are in a classic experience of transfiguration. The elements retain their character but are filled with the very presence of the living Christ. That life is being incorporated into our own. How can we not be changed? Another way of saying it would be treasure in earthen vessels.

“It is good that we are here.” Preachers often laugh at impetuous Peter and his desire to make it a religious ritual to build some makeshift tents. Perhaps better, it was good for Peter to behold the vision, so he w could work down in the valley.

Paul Lehmann wrote: “In that light, the mystery and meaning of the ultimate presence and power by which reality is, and is defined and directed, are unveiled and concealed in the hiddenness and openness of a human person whose presence and power set the whole off-course world and human story on course again.”

In the new Presbyterian Outlook, Jill Duffield recalls an experience with an immigrant cab driver in San Francisco who was complaining about his hard life. “He pulled over to the curb, I paid, and he got out to get my bag. As he handed my suitcase to me he said, "Pray for me." Then emphatically again, "Pray for me." I asked his name. I told him mine. Suddenly, I saw him in a whole new light. Not just a cab driver, but my brother, one for whom I had been entrusted to pray…Not one contained in the boxes in which I place him, but one who transcends any limits I try to impose upon him, as  close as the person right in front of me. In those moments of revelation, transfiguration, I don't know what to say, but I am left only to listen, for God, to Jesus, in the clouds and in taxis too.”