Light Conversation: Sermon by Laura Hudson, 3.2.25 Luke 9:28-45 Transfiguration

Understanding anything requires attention to its context: the conditions, relationships, 

and historical circumstances surrounding it. That’s especially true for today’s scripture reading. Versions of this story appear in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and we contemplate it nearly every year on the Sunday before Ash Wednesday. It’s a moment of revelation that feels like we’ve stepped out of linear, historical time to catch a glimpse of another dimension. But taken out of the context of the entire history of Israel and, more specifically, the surrounding stories in Luke’s gospel, this story cannot be understood.

So let’s briefly catch up to where we are now in the story. Between last week’s Ch. 7 story and this one, Luke tells of Jesus’ deeds of power, raising Jairus' daughter, casting a legion of demons into pigs, stilling the storm, and feeding the 5000. Everyone, including Herod, was asking, “Who is this?” 

So, Jesus and the disciples had a very important conversation. Jesus asked them, “Who do you say I am?” and when Peter answered, “You are the Messiah,” Jesus began to teach how his Messiahship would defy their expectations. He would be rejected, suffer, die, and be raised on the third day, and their discipleship called them to deny themselves, take up their cross daily, and follow him. Eight days later, those words lingered in the air as the disciples headed up the mountain with Jesus. Let us hear the Word of the Lord from Luke 9: read scripture.

Let us notice that this story begins with prayer. Prayer is always a good place to begin—or begin again–on the way of discipleship. Jesus often stepped away to pray and spend time with God. This time, he invited Peter, James, and John to go with him. 

Now, they were tired; the crowds Jesus attracted demanded much of their energy. So after hiking up that mountain, they struggled to pray. They tried to hear God’s voice, but their minds kept wandering. However hard they listened, they couldn’t be certain they'd heard anything. And with all the needy people out there, with all the ministry to be done, perhaps prayer seemed like a waste of time. 

As Jesus prayed on the mountain, I imagine Peter, James, and John gamely tried to participate, but their minds were all over the place. They wondered what they should say to God, or how to say it. They wondered what Jesus was praying. Maybe they wondered, what does prayer do, anyway?

The text doesn’t say how long Jesus prayed. Eventually the disciples were “weighed down with sleep,” until suddenly something extraordinary woke them up. Luke doesn’t use the word “transfigured,” but he emphasizes that Jesus was praying when his face changed and his clothes flared up like lightning. 

In an instant, the disciples were transported to the pinnacle of Jewish religious experience. This mountain became THE mountain, the holy place where Moses spoke with God face to face, where Elijah heard God in the still small silence. In the glow of astonishing light, those great ones, Moses and Elijah, the embodiment of the Law and the Prophets, consulted with the Messiah. 

“Now this is glory,” Peter must have thought. “Does it get any better than this?” Overcome by awe in the mystery of this revelation, he wanted to hold onto this moment, to freeze time and somehow make this fleeting encounter permanent. So instead of listening, he spoke out, suggesting three tents for the holy heroes, three shrines to grab and guard this glory. 

The text lets us know that Peter didn’t know what he was saying. Truth be told, Peter didn’t really know what he was seeing. In the distraction of trying to make the moment last, he stopped paying attention to its continued unfolding. 

Here Peter represents a deeply human struggle. As we seek God in a life of prayer, sometimes we are given a holy moment. Maybe it happens when we are gazing into the eyes of a beloved or into the vastness of a snowy mountain. Impulsively, in our yearning to make it permanent, we try to separate this experience from its unfolding context So we build a monument or we snap a photo and post it on Facebook. 

But so often when we attempt to control divine revelations and encounters or we try to thingify the ineffable, we make assumptions and take premature action. We don’t take the time to understand the complexity, interrelationships, and nuances of the issues we want to solve. We rush to post an instantaneous response instead of making further time and space to watch, listen, remember, and learn. 

Peter’s problem and ours is that we think we know glory when we see it. Easily distracted by shiny objects and impatient for results, too often we mistake human glamour for God’s glory.

The word glamour initially referred to a kind of magical spell that deceives the eye and obscures the true character of someone or something. In fairy tales, glamoured beings seem beautiful and kind but are ultimately exposed as ugly and intent on harming others. 

Strangely for people in an age of science and skepticism, we are taken in again and again by glamour. Whether it is the shine of money, worldly power, magnetic personality, or celebrity beauty, so often we put our confidence in the illusion of success rather than the apparent plainness of faithfulness! 

Glory, in comparison, to glamour, is the beauty and splendor of truth. It is the glow which illuminates that which is truly praiseworthy, that which is truly honorable, that which inspires gratitude, that which reveals the image of God. 

God’s glory doesn’t always look shiny to us. In Jesus, God’s glory is revealed, not in strength or wealth or success as the world defines it, but in vulnerability, humility, and loss. God’s anointed one, the Messiah, comes not to conquer his enemies but to forgive them from a cross. 

“This is my Son, my Chosen: Listen to him!” What does it mean “to listen”? It is more than the process of sound entering our ears. In the context of this passage, listening includes not only waiting to hear the full word spoken, but also taking the time for further prayer to discern what actions God would have us take.

If Peter had been listening, he might have heard what Jesus, Moses, and Elijah were saying. Luke’s gospel is the only one that describes the content of their conversation, which centers on the Greek word “exodus”--translated into English as “departure”--which is soon to be “accomplished” by Jesus in Jerusalem.

Looking at Moses, we recall the first exodus, God’s deliverance of Israel from slavery in Egypt. The trouble was, once the people were free from Pharaoh’s tyranny, they were still enslaved to sin and fear of death.“Whenever they got too brave and eloquent in the face of death,” writes Barbara Brown Taylor, “all someone had to do was threaten them and they would go back to being good slaves again, minding their own business and forgetting who they were.” 

Now, in Jesus the Christ, God was preparing to lead God’s people again to freedom, but this time the passage through the deathly Red Sea will be made by Jesus at Jerusalem through his body on the Cross.  

Elijah’s presence is the promised confirmation that Jesus’ impending departure is the fulfillment of God’s covenant with God’s people. It’s the affirmation of what Jesus had taught eight days earlier.Jesus would not be a military Messiah, defeating the Romans in a glamour of violence. He would carry a cross, he would give his own life, and he called his disciples to pick up their own, daily, to lose their life so they might save it.  

But for many of us, this exodus of Jesus Christ still seems like an impenetrable mystery. And we are afraid, like the disciples in the story, when the lightning radiance is followed by the shadowy cloud. 

In the midst of that darkness, the Word of God is a clarion call: “This is my Son, my Chosen: Listen to him!” Friends, these words highlight our trouble, but they also speak God’s grace. In light or in darkness, God teaches us to discern between glamour and glory, as we stop, turn, and listen to Jesus, God’s Son and Chosen One. 

In Jesus’ words and actions, in the pattern of his life, death, and resurrection, God reveals what is good, beautiful, and true. When we look to Jesus, when we listen to him, there is God’s glory. 

So how do we practice listening to Jesus? How do we learn to recognize God’s voice and to be guided by the Holy Spirit to join God’s work in our world? 

The story began with prayer, and now we come back to it. Jesus prays for us and empowers us to pray. There are many ways to pray, but foundationally, prayer is opening ourselves to listen. We begin by slowing down and showing up. 

We show up in this sanctuary on Sunday morning. Here–like the disciples on the mountain–prayer brings us to a place apart. We step away from the self-absorbed individualism promoted by our culture, we are restored to the whole context of creation, redemption, and transformation, and we remember our inextricable connection with God and one another in the Body of Christ.

From there, we pray that we may listen with yet greater compassion to the pain of God’s world. We pray that we may respond with courage to Christ’s call to pick up our cross daily and follow him. We wait and we watch and we trust that God will speak through scripture and through the Living Word within and among us. We pray to receive the Spirit’s guidance so that we may act in God’s purpose, presence, and power. 

Prayer is not easy, and its workings remain a mystery. The challenges the disciples faced are ours, too. But let this story with its luminous listening and dazzling darkness be our assurance that our prayers matter, that God is transforming us in the freedom of Christ’s exodus, that God has made us to witness the truth of Christ’s glory. 

Richard Rohr writes, “Following Jesus is actually a vocation to share the fate of God for the life of the world. Jesus invited people to “follow” him in bearing the mystery of human death and resurrection. It is not a requirement in order that we can go to heaven later, it is an invitation so that we can live an entirely full life now.”

Friends, as we pray, we are immersed in Christ’s fullness. Even as the disciples go back down the mountain with Jesus and enter the valley where demons still harm children, where the world yearns for transfiguration. Even as we leave this sanctuary and face the concerns of our daily lives, the struggles of our neighbors, the turmoil of our nation. 

Whatever our context, praying with and for us, Christ empowers us

to show up in prayer with and for each other, letting go of our fears and trusting God

to pray in and through us for the whole world. Alleluia and Amen.