A Sermon for the Feast of the Transfiguration
Linda M. Maloney

Exodus 34:29-35
Ps 99:5-9
2 Peter 1:13-21
Luke 9:28-36

The Transfiguration is a feast that is hard to relate to our own lives. For most of us it seems like something out of another reality. (Just imagine the headlines in the Weekly World News if something like this was reported today: "Men on Mountaintop: Ghosts or Aliens?") But the Bible is meant to be for us "a source of mirrors that sharpen our view of what our past has been, of what we believe and do not believe, of what we must transform, and of who we are to become" (Rita Brock). What kind of mirror does the feast hold up for us; how can Jesus' transfiguration serve to transform us?

I am going to make the audacious suggestion that the story of the transfiguration is a story about the church, that is, about Christians in community-that for all its strangeness it can tell us much about the everyday business of getting acquainted, getting along, and getting to be something more than we knew we were.

We have heard a million times about how Jesus found his first disciples, and called them, and they followed him. Why did they do that? Well, unless you are going to say it was purely a matter of ambition, or just boredom with life on the fishing boat and a chance to get in on something new, I think you have to say they fell in love. It's a very human thing to do. Those men and women saw Jesus not as some kind of God-in-disguise walking the earth, but as another human being to whom they were drawn in that breathtaking moment of revelation that is love. They dropped everything and followed him. And Jesus didn't just call those men and women because he thought they would look especially good in stained glass. He chose them to be his friends; he loved them.

The stories that come after that, in the gospels, tell (among other things) about the power of love among Christians, and how it worked, or should have worked, among Jesus' first followers to drive out mutual suspicion and make of them a real community living toward the reign of God. Eventually, after some time when Jesus has been teaching his disciples about being a community together and inviting others to join them, and they have had a little practice at both, we get to this story.

According to Luke, the transfiguration takes place at a time when Jesus' closest friends are quite upset with him because he has been talking about his destiny-persecution, crucifixion, death. He has even told them that if they really love him and want to be his followers, they have to follow him to the cross. They are worried about him; if there had been such a thing as "therapy" in the first century, they would have suggested it.

How strange, after such a gloomy episode, that the very next thing to happen is this scene on the mountain. How does it fit in? Is it just some kind of dream caused by denial? Does it contradict what Jesus has just said? Is it an anticipation of his resurrection glory, as if to say: never mind the bad stuff, there'll be a happy ending to the story? (You will read in some commentaries that this is a "displaced resurrection appearance.") Or does it have something to do with what happened before?

When Jesus goes up on a mountain (aha, says the Bible reader! a mountain!) and his garments begin to shine (oho, says the Bible reader! shining!) we know we are getting some heavy symbolism. Peter and his companions are clear about this, especially when they see Moses and Elijah, two characters heavily associated with mountains and bright lights and such. They want to freeze this "positive" moment; to set up shrines for the three prophets: presumably with Peter, James, and John as presiding officials. But the response to that suggestion is a voice from the cloud, like the voice on Sinai, with the same message as the one given to Jesus at his baptism: Jesus is God's beloved child. Added to this is a command: "Listen to him!" Disciples are to listen to everything Jesus has to say, so they will get the whole picture: his life is about suffering and death as much as it is about being God's only-begotten beloved. The two are not separable.

But why not? Why does the story have to end the way it does? Why should not the life of Jesus, God's Son, be always like this glorious moment on the mountain? The disciples, when they see Jesus transfigured, think that at last they are seeing him as he really is. And they are not wrong. That is the way Jesus really is. But it is not all that Jesus really is, and until the disciples are ready to accept everything he says about himself, to know the whole Jesus, their vision of him transfigured is only partial, only transient, and surely misleading. So the other part of the message, besides "listen," is "don't tell anyone." If they tell before they listen, before they learn by knowing him better, they will tell it wrong. They have to go through the whole searing experience of crucifixion and death and resurrection before they will see Jesus really transfigured, glorious and shining, but also wounded with the prints of the nails. That is why to call this a "displaced resurrection appearance" is about half right, if that.

The first reading for the feast day is about Moses on the mountain, to remind us of the symbolic context in which this all took place, in which those first witnesses would have understood it. But there is an important difference between the story of Moses on the mountain and the story of Jesus on the mountain. Moses went up alone. Jesus went up with friends. Those friends are not just there as witnesses, to make the story work-they are companions. They are the people who love Jesus best, the ones he wants to share his sorrow and his joy and his triumph and his tragedy with. Maybe he wasn't all that wise in his choice of friends-after all, these three, and all the other men, deserted him and ran away. Only the women stayed. Jesus showed himself very human in choosing his friends. But he showed himself very divine in forgiving them afterward-though he asked us to imitate him in forgiving, human though we are.

We all know how this is, finding friends, loving them, learning to forge ties that hold us together through the bad times as well as the good. That is the way it is with all of us; that is the way it is with those of us who are trying to be church together. I would venture to suppose that each of us at some point came to the church because we had fallen in love with Jesus-and then we fell in love with each other, and stayed. That is how we became church, and that is what keeps us together. To dissolve that love for the unique Jesus and for each of our unique companions in faith into some kind of generalized benevolence toward creation and creator, to disguise our love for one another as allegiance to "the church" would be a betrayal of our deepest reality. (It strikes me that when we think of "the church" it is usually in terms of a "them" to be criticized; it doesn't mean you and you and me.) We cannot love in the abstract. If we love "the church," it is because we love Gladys and Charles and Florence and Dick and Shirley and Ed and Jack and Elizabeth and Rob . . . . We sense this, and we begin to articulate it when we say, in our discussions of inclusive language in our prayers and songs, that we don't want some kind of amorphous and high-flown twaddle that isn't about anything or anyone. It is only in beholding the human face of God in Jesus that we can feel confident that God really loves us as we love each other, warts and all-and God is probably a lot less interested in changing us than we are in changing each other. God loves us so much, for who and what we really are, that it puts Mr. Rogers 'way in the shade.

When we come together as church, in small groups or in big ones, on Sunday and through the week, we come to celebrate Jesus' triumph over sin and death, but also to listen to what he tells us-the hard things and the easy things, the words that comfort and the words that challenge. The more we learn of those things, the closer we get to really knowing this strange and loving God who is revealed to us in Jesus Christ. And we get to know each other as we get to know him; we learn to know each other as lovers of Jesus Christ. And then one day, one surprising day after another, we begin to see each other, one by one, transfigured- we see each other as we really are; we see in each other the love of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Amen.

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