Be Ye Transfigured
Matthew 17:1-9
Homily given at
St. Luke Episcopal Church, Renton, WA
Feb 15, 2026
The word for today is Transfiguration. This story is an experiential story. Lots of the Bible is aimed at being instructive
- teaching what we should and shouldn’t do.
The Church at large through the ages has treated faith as something to
be taught – so that the noses of people can be properly adhered to their moral
grindstone. But this story is different.
It’s experiential. You have to
feel your way into it!
One of my stories that I’d like to invite you
into experiencing with me is my encounter with an ice storm. One of the ways I paid for my seminary
education was working for campus security.
My seminary campus had maybe six buildings on about 4 square
blocks. My p/t job was a step below Mall
Cop. The training was zip. The only
uniform was a blue shirt, a cop-shaped hat, a walkie talkie, and a big ass
black flashlight. Nightly, I’d go around
checking the doors that were supposed to be locked and driving the school’s beat
up ’68 Pontiac station wagon around and around for 4 hours – on watch for
people who might need an escort – either across campus or off the grounds. One night there was a warning out for coming
of a Midwest ice storm. It started at
the start of my rounds. A couple hours
later the freezing rain was piling up. I
took a shortcut down an alley to get up a slight hill and a small flash of
light caught my attention. Bored out of
my mind, I rolled up to a bare-naked bush – not a leaf on it, but each bare
branch was getting weighed down with like ½” of ice. What really stunned me, however, was the
twinkling of hundreds of miniature
rainbows. I stopped the car and just
stared at the lustrous beauty and the thought hit me: here were the most
ordinary elements: a common streetlight, a bare bush, and some ice —they came
together to form the raw beauty of the Divine.
The most ordinary transfigured to the holy. That is the story of faith. That moment lives
with me to this day. A vital experience of God that has done more for my faith
ever since than those three years of theology study, right teaching, and praxis
education. But if we’re asleep, if our
heads are down, and we’re just slogging it through a day, and aren’t keeping in
the back of our mind, the Holy, we might miss those quiet visitations by the
Divine.
The Church has been very
focused throughout its history of trying to boil faith down to a set of correct
tenets to which we must assent in church on Sunday. That we just need to be taught the right doctrine.
But true Transfiguration happens when we feel it and the arc of it
changes our perception of the world and everything in it.
Theologians beginning with
the early Church Fathers – as they’re called - discussed, lectured, taught,
preached, and shaped what the “official” meaning is supposed to be. Catechisms
and Inquisitions served to keep teachers and commoners in the narrow right
interpretations (or be burned as a heretic.)
But fortunately, that’s not our practice, but I still think it’s valuable
to have basic knowledge of the steps that led us to where we are so we can make
clear in our heads what is archaic old stuff and what actually means something
to someone today. So, here’s my outline
of Transfiguration for Dumbies. The story
takes place on an unidentified mountain where Jesus & his three disciples attend
a get together with two influential people.
There was Moses who represented the Law and Elijah who represented the
Prophets. These two people with
God-knowledge were the essence of faith to Jews. At the moment of Transfiguration, Jesus gets elevated
to their level --added beside them when God’s word came from heaven: “This is
my beloved Son with whom I am pleased, listen to him.” With that word, Jesus is added as an
authoritative voice – and depending on who you talk to – might even mean that
Jesus is elevated above The Law and The Prophets. If you are curious about the
extraordinary theological swamps you can get into- Wikipedia has a well sourced
substantive article about the Transfiguration.
But from my vantage point
of participating with a variety of other Christian traditions (and a few
Buddhists), living faith demands that we take what our ancestors have given us
and tend to those teachings and gifts such that they bring us the awareness of
the Spirit’s moving harmony, her wholeness, or another frame: a blueprint or a map,
for our personal and collective spiritual lives today. We cannot recite and mimic
doctrine of the Church of the 1st Century or the Middle Ages and
hope for it to have much relevance to folks today because our contexts are so
radically different. Science did not
exist in 1st century Palestine, but in our time, some are strongly
attached to science & might look askance at a story of a Middle Eastern man
glowing on a mountaintop and slam the door – like on a Jehovah Witness knocking
at our door. Another group of modern conspiracy theorists might see in it as evidence
of space aliens who beamed down to give cosmic advice to Jesus. (Don’t
laugh!) Making real sense of gospel
lessons is a challenge for us in the Church today! With the Church under fire from lots of
different angles, it is important we understand our truth! As Christians, we are standing on a threshold
of making a huge difference in humanity. We are at the edge of a spiritual
prism that is refracting the Light of God in a multitude of colors that span
time and space. This edge holds cosmic importance to the continuance of the only
human life we know of in the universe. The
seriousness is profound. To appreciate our place, we must get good at critical
thinking and better at experiencing the guiding light of the Holy Spirit. With
that combination, standing in God’s sacred streams of light, Truth shines. Spiritual truths bring light and wholeness to
our being. We discover those truths by exchanging experiences that we’ve had in
our faith walk, being open, and unfortunately, those are things that even at
church we struggle with a bit because we don’t want to be judged cuckoo. So, I volunteer to maybe be cuckoo & share
3 truths that arose while I was living with this passage this week.
Truth number 1: This man,
by the name of Jesus, is the embodiment of a Cross. Historically, the Cross has
been wrapped in the theology of Jesus’ blood and his sacrifice for my sins so
that I could be saved. It’s a remarkably individualistic view. All about me. But today we share the planet with over 7
billion people. Almost instant communication across the globe. Global
cooperation and community building is now what’s crucial to our survival. Watching
it be torn to shreds is painful! But, nobody has more experience in
community building than the Church. In fact, the crux of our horrid governance
presently is the glorification of an individual – all about their white wealth
and white power – Definitely NOT about Beloved Community. So, I’m not thinking of the Cross as
something personal (we got more than enough of that!) but more like Jesus
brings us to a Crossroad. A crossroad of
right and wrong. When we approach the
person of Christ many choices come into focus, and it’s been my experience
& is my belief that He is the best way, the right way, the healthiest way
and his choices are something we all should seek and incorporate into our
reflexive actions.
Truth #2: We are loved by
an infinite God who can come to us in an infinite number of unexpected ways –
if we’re alert. And every one of us is called
to transformation. We must stay open to
more information, more interactions, more experiences. We don’t live our lives in a cloistered space
set apart from the world. We are of the world.
As busy people we get caught & carried along in the ebb and flow of
societal tides, but as disciples of Jesus we’re charged with bringing holy
perspectives and moral clarity to a world of corruption and sin that we have
witnessed like in Selma, and which we ARE witnessing in spades like in
Minneapolis. We are called
beyond the gutter to a higher plane.
Called to a transformational mountaintop if you will – to experience
holiness & bring back into all our relationships. Passing on the sacred dimension of life.
Truth #3: The instant we
acknowledge Jesus as our authority of righteousness, ALL the other choices come
into view – “…save us from the time of trial” we say in the Lord’s Prayer. The greatest purpose our spirit serves for
the health of our lives is what I’ll label the Compass Point. Jesus
brings us to the crossroads of the good/bad/ugly. Helps us see all the choices
for what they are. Then he points in the
Right Direction to the True Way – for us as individuals and for us as a PEOPLE
of God. In each moment, every moment,
moving forward in time, if we stay true to his Compass, we connect into deeper
communion and holy awareness together! Another
spiritual term we hear is metanoia: the spiritual experience of collective
transfiguration. The net effect of
metanoia is a brighter vision, a more profound hope, wider inclusion, a deeper compassionate
connection, stronger commitment – within ourselves, with our divine spark, with
divine purpose, with morality, in our society, with other holy ones on the
Road. It fires our inner light. So it widens and expands the Table where we
partake of the Body of Christ, which sends us out to bring profound peace and radical
inclusion of all people – all people!
Thomas Merton, a
well-known Christian contemplative & one of my favorites, said it well I
think in his book, “The Hidden Ground of Love”:
“I believe the only
really valid thing that can be accomplished in the direction of peace and unity
at this moment is the preparation of The Way by any movement that is able to
unite and experience in their own lives all that is best and most true from the
various great spiritual traditions.”
He goes on to talk about
how such people become “sacraments,” touchstones of grace, new seeds of
thought, pioneers of hope. I believe St Luke Church is part of that moral Godly
movement that is able to “unite and experience in life all that is best
and most true.” So, people of God, I ask
you FIRST to stay awake. Then allow
yourselves to be transfigured. And go
out thinking of yourselves as sacraments to the world. Blessings!
