Hi friends,

I wanted to share with y’all a sermon I got to guest preach last weekend. It’s on the biblical story of the Transfiguration, with the current U.S. political context very much in mind. Working through this text helped me see some glimmers of hope in a difficult time, and I hope it might do the same for you.

Here’s the scripture text:

Luke 9:28-36 (NRSV)

28 Now about eight days after these sayings Jesus took with him Peter and John and James and went up on the mountain to pray. 29 And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightning. 30 Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. 31 They appeared in glory and were speaking about his exodus, which he was about to fulfill in Jerusalem. 32 Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep, but as they awoke they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him. 33 Just as they were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us set up three tents: one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah,” not realizing what he was saying. 34 While he was saying this, a cloud came and overshadowed them, and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. 35 Then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” 36 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.

And here’s the sermon:

When I read the part of the gospel of Luke that our passage this morning comes from, I wonder if Jesus’ disciples may have sometimes found themselves thinking, I don’t know if this is what I signed up for. 

These days, it seems like all Jesus wants to do is talk about how he’s going to suffer and be rejected and betrayed and killed. That’s what he’s talking about in the verses right before the Transfiguration story. 

Why does Jesus keep going on about taking up crosses and losing our lives? The disciples might have wondered. What is this that we signed up for? Who is this that we’ve been following?

I think Jesus really wants them to think about these questions. Because right before this conversation about suffering and betrayal, he asks his disciples this: What are people saying about me? Who do they think I am? (v. 18). This is a big deal. A big question. They go back and forth.

His disciples reply, and of course I’m paraphrasing and extrapolating and imagining with all of this, but they reply: Well, if you really haven’t heard, people are saying all sorts of things. Nobody really knows, but everyone has their theories. Some say John the Baptist, come back from the dead after Herod beheaded him. Some say Elijah, the prophet from hundreds of years ago who was known for walking so closely with God that God took him up to heaven in a whirlwind, in a chariot of fire, no traditional death required. Some say you’re some other prophet from a long time ago. There’s lots of theories. Lots of talk. No definitive answers. 

Jesus says, that’s nice. He says, in effect, I’m not going to confirm or deny any of that. What I want to know is, Who do you think I am? You’ve been following me around as I teach and heal. You just saw me multiply five loaves of bread and two fish and make it feed thousands of people. Just before that, I gave you power over demons and diseases and sent you out to bring good news and healing in more villages and to more people than I could personally go to on my own. What do you say about me?

I imagine a moment of silence, maybe a moment of hesitation. Maybe they all have different opinions among themselves, and no one wants to be the one to speak up and risk being wrong. Maybe they’ve been arguing about exactly this with each other, and they’re realizing now that Jesus knows what they’ve been bickering and debating about. 

After a beat, Peter is the first to speak up—as he often is. Whether we love him for it or hate him for it or a little bit of both, he’s willing to go first, to be wrong, to risk looking foolish. And he often is wrong. He often does look foolish. But maybe we kind of respect him because he just keeps trying. He just keeps risking. 

Peter says, You’re the Messiah of God. 

And Jesus doesn’t say, You’re wrong. He doesn’t say, as he tells Peter at another point, Get behind me, Satan.

Instead, Jesus says, Don’t tell anyone this. Let them think, for now, that I’m John or Elijah or another prophet or whatever they want to think. And then he talks about his own soon-coming death. 

—–

I go into all this stuff right before the Transfiguration story, because our text this morning starts with “eight days after Jesus said these things.” With phrases like these, I think it’s always worth asking: “eight days after what?”

What things was Jesus saying, eight days before? He was talking with his disciples about his identity—about who people think he is, and who he really is—and then he talks with them about what it means that he is the Messiah of God, this messianic savior figure, this healer and deliverer and liberator that a whole culture has been waiting for for a very long time.

He talks about what that means, and about how part of this whole Messiah deal is that, at some point soon, things are going to get really bad. He’ll experience suffering, betrayal, and death. It’s going to really, really, look like he lost. Like he failed. He’s going to die.

He’s going to resist, with his whole being, the violent, soul-sucking, dehumanizing, isolating, illness-inducing, dividing, hierarchical, abusive, demoralizing, anxiety-inducing, human-harming ways of empire, and they’re going to kill him for this resistance

Things are going to look really bad. Things are going to be really bad. 

And yet, Jesus wants his friends and followers to know that this is all to be expected. They will have to live through it, and it won’t be easy. But they shouldn’t be shocked or unmoored completely by it.

And, crucially, it won’t be the end of the story. It’s not the end of God’s story—because Jesus also tells them, on the third day, he will rise.

This is the conversation that happened eight days ago. Today, in our passage this morning, Jesus takes three of his closest friends—I’m not going to say “his three closest friends” because there were also women in his innermost circles, but three of his closest friends—and says, hey, let’s go get away from it all for a little while. Let’s go up on the mountain and pray. 

I imagine him saying, It’ll be a nice little mini-retreat. We’ve been teaching and learning and feeding people and healing people nonstop. Let’s take a break. Let’s go somewhere, just for a minute, where we’re not going to hear any more bad news of the evil things the Roman empire is doing.

We don’t need to know right this second what territories Rome is invading and conquering now, or what statues the emperor is building of himself, or what actually helpful resources and services the empire is cutting, or what war budgets they’re increasing, or what people they’re enslaving.

We don’t want to stick our heads in the sand, but it’s also okay to take a break. We’re here to care for one another, and we’re here to meet our communities’ needs in every way we can—but we also need space, sometimes. We need to breathe. We need to be in nature. We need to be still. We need to be with trusted loved ones. We need to seek God, to pray.

He says, Let’s go up to the mountain. And they do. 

When they get there, Jesus starts praying—as the three disciples expected. But then something happens that they didn’t expect. The way Jesus’ face looks changes. Something about him is different, in a way they can’t quite put more precise words to than that. His clothes become bright, gleaming white—literally, white like lightning. 

They probably thought of descriptions of angels they’d heard or read about in their holy texts. They probably thought of Moses, and the story of how he went up on the mountain to meet with God and receive the laws of the people of God, and how when he came back down, his face was shining. 

And then, suddenly, just as they’re thinking about Moses: guess who shows up, but Moses himself. And Elijah, too. They’re just hanging out on the mountain, having a conversation with Jesus, like this kind of thing happens all the time. 

It’s totally out of the realm of things the disciples ever thought would happen as the four of them hiked up that mountain, walking and talking together.

Their recent conversations have revolved so much around Jesus’ upcoming death—around the hard, harsh realities of what people will do to him, because he insisted on living rightly and justly and lovingly in a difficult time. What they’ll do to him because he loved people fully—the ones who loved him back and the ones who didn’t, too. What they’ll do to him because he treated all people equally, giving special attention and care to the rights and dignity and wellbeing of those others may have despised or mistreated—people with disabilities, people who were poor, people who were foreigners or ethnic minorities, people who were female, people who were different or minorities in any way. 

In these last few days or weeks of walking with Jesus, these disciples have placed their feet and their minds solidly within the realm of the hard realities of life under the oppressive Roman empire. And it’s good that they’re talking about these things. It’s good that they’re processing the news together, not withdrawing into whatever privilege some of them might have, or pretending the empire’s corruption and greed and violence and inequality didn’t impact them.

But now, up on the mountain with Jesus, something unexpected happens. In the midst of all this difficult, difficult reality, God does something new. Or, more precisely, God does something old, something they’ve heard of from past stories about Moses and other ancient prophets but had never seen with their own eyes. Jesus’ appearance changes and his clothes shine. And then Moses and Elijah show up to talk with him about his coming death.

Literally, in the Greek, they’re talking about his coming Exodus. I like this word here because I think it reminds us that Jesus’ death will not only be an end, an exit, but maybe it’s also the beginning of something. An Exodus from somewhere, to somewhere else. The First Nations Version of the New Testament says that Moses and Elijah were shining like the sun and were talking to him about his crossing over from this life to the next. 

Moses and Elijah remind Jesus—by their words, and also just by the fact that they are there—they still exist in some form, able to appear and share their wisdom from the other side—they remind him that death is not the end. It can be cruel and brutal and devastating, yes—especially when, like in Jesus’ case, it happens too young, or when it happens at the hands of other people—and, at the same time, it’s not the end. 

The empire can do the worst thing it can think of to do, and yet, it has not won. Because God is still there, bringing life. Resurrecting. Making a way for people to live on in some form.

God is there, comforting. Preparing. Present with us. Walking with us. Empowering us and filling us with courage to live a good and meaningful life for however long we’re here. 

Going back to Jesus’ question from earlier: Who is Jesus? We see in our story today that he’s not Moses. He’s not Elijah. But he’s friends with them, kind of. He’s someone who continues in their tradition.

He continues in Moses’ tradition of showing people how to live, how to do right and act kindly and justly toward other people and ourselves. And he continues in Elijah’s tradition of revealing the power of God, using that power for good and healing, and showing that this power is not stopped even by death.

And as the story goes on, we also see that Jesus is the one spoken about by a voice in the cloud: This is my child. My chosen one. Listen to him. Y’all—the voice speaks to them in the plural, communally—y’all, listen to him.

I’ve been thinking about this part a lot. If we were all having church up on a mountain this morning, and a cloud descended around us, and maybe like the disciples we were terrified but found the courage somehow to walk into that cloud anyway—the Greek here gives them a little more agency here than many English translations do, saying literally not just that the cloud covered them but that they entered into the cloud—if all this happened and then a voice from the cloud spoke just a few brief words, what might that voice say? 

I don’t know about you, but I can certainly think of some people right now whom I would love for a cloud to cover and a voice to speak. I imagine the voice could convict them that they’re doing evil things and harming people. Maybe the voice would tell them they’ll be removed from their positions of power if they don’t repent and do better.

But the voice in our story isn’t speaking to the Roman emperor and his cronies. It’s speaking to Jesus’ friends and followers. And maybe it’s speaking to us, too. Saying, Y’all, listen. Listen to Jesus.

Maybe it’s saying: Listen, and keep listening. Don’t give up on the things Jesus said and taught. Don’t give up on the ways of love and kindness and gentleness, even if it seems weak and ineffective.

Don’t give up on the ways of truth-seeking and truth-telling, even if it seems increasingly difficult and even dangerous. Don’t give up on advocating for equality for all people, even if it puts you at odds with powerful people who want supremacy and control.

Don’t give up on building stronger communities, even when it seems like we’re hopelessly divided. Don’t give up on nourishing yourselves and others, as Jesus did when he fed the five thousand; don’t give up on making space to care for your soul, as Jesus did when he went up the mountain to pray. Listen, and keep listening. 

Maybe the same Divine voice is saying, today: There might be a million ways I seem absent or far away, but I am here. I am here, wherever love is. Be open to the unexpected things I might do, the unexpected places you might find me in this time.

Yes, things look bad. Things are bad. And, I am still moving. I am still moving people toward love and justice everywhere. Look for those moments when my face shines through and you see a glimpse of me. Hold onto those glimpses. 

What does it mean for Jesus to be the Messiah of God, in this time? What does it mean for Jesus to be the chosen one of the voice from the cloud? 

For us, I think it means we listen, and we follow, and we let that be enough—even in times when it might feel like nothing we say or do could ever be enough. We listen for invitations to resist evil, and we join in this resistance as we’re able to.

We look for ways to love one another, in this community and in our other friendships and neighborhoods and communities we’re a part of, in some really tangible ways, even and especially if or when things get much worse.

It means we don’t give up on God appearing and revealing to us the nearness of Divine Love when we need it most. It means we remember that even if resistance to the ways of empire leads to death, death is not the end.

May the holy strangeness of this Transfiguration story give us strength and courage for today. May it give us hope that God still shows up in surprising ways. May we be open to it, now more than ever. Amen.