Sermon March 2 2025 – Luke 9:27-38 Transfiguration                 Rev. Betsy Hogan

I've always found Transfiguration Sunday a teensy bit exhausting. Every single year on the last Sunday of Epiphany, right before we begin the season of Lent: we hear the same gospel story, year after year, of Jesus taking a few of his disciples up a mountain to pray –

and suddenly he's shiny and sparkly Jesus, apparently out of nowhere. And suddenly he's joined by shiny Moses and shiny Elijah as a sort of sparkly trifecta of divine manifestations in earthly form.

And suddenly, bewildered disciples and clouds descending and the thundering voice of "This is my son, my beloved, listen to him."

And then stillness. And back down the mountain and back to work, with Peter still wondering if somehow they missed something. Which to some degree I think I've always had some sympathy for him, wondering that.

Because why? Why this weird interlude? Why this sudden, random, shiny, sparkly Transfiguration EVENT up on a mountain, which isn't warned about or predicted in any way before, and no one's supposed to talk about it after?

But I think in fact, far later when the disciples actually begin to write these stories down into the collections that we now call the gospels – I think in fact that maybe it only WAS later that the randomness and suddenness and weirdness of the transfiguration began to make some sense for them. And so can for us too.

Because it really does happen right smack dab and randomly -- in the middle of a whole lot of otherwise already meaningful moments that are mattering to the disciples.

Healing moments and teaching moments, and welcoming moments and embracing moments, and also confrontation moments and argument moments and dealing with conflict moments -- each of which and all of which are Jesus' disciples basically learning on the ground what this faithful path they've chosen is actually going to look like.

Everything from kindness and welcome to everyone, including particular protection for those marginalized as "sinners", to miracles of healing that restore not only well-being but community, to even how to deal with people who reject the message or seek to harm them – 

Because for all Jesus teaches and embodies love and forgiveness – and he does -- it's right before this Transfiguration passage that he ALSO tells all those who are sent out to share that message of love and forgiveness that if a village or town won't welcome them, they should just wipe that town's dust from their feet and keep going.

So it's all been very moment by moment, for the disciples, this learning on the ground this "way" of following Jesus.

And maybe it’s become TOO moment by moment. Maybe there was a sense in which the disciples had begun sort of domesticating the goodness of Godness, either locating it or wondering where it had got to, in the particularity or the specificity of this encounter or that confrontation or the other episode. 

Like, 'wasn't the spirit of God alive and at work when we met up with that leper on the way to Jericho' – or maybe alternatively 'my goodness, there certainly wasn't much godliness in THAT little village, was there?'

Because it isn't hard to see how that could happen, in the moment by moment by moment like that. I mean, we do it ourselves all the time. "Oh what a blessing, I can feel God's spirit" – and there's nothing wrong with that. We can! But it does sort of implicitly domesticate the Goodness of Godness into something the realness and power of which winds up limited to our personal experience of positive "moments". 

It's an easy trap to fall into. To get so focussed on moments. And so I think when the disciples were casting their minds back and collecting the stories together into the gospels, that that's when they realized why the transfiguration event happened and what it was for.

That it was God purposefully reminding them with every ounce of supernatural elemental glory at God's disposal that the Goodness of Godness, the sovereignty and righteousness and justice of Godness, is not limited by moments, cannot be measured in moments, far transcends any moments –

because no matter what things may look like in the particularity of a moment, the actual POINT of the gospel is that the goodness of Godness will not fail.

It's not just "oh what a blessing" in this or that moment, and hope that the blessings’ll just keep on coming. It's "fall on your knees" before all the shiny and sparkly power, even when they don't. 

It's God who in Moses is the God who frees from oppression, even though some died in the wilderness. It's God who in Elijah restores the exiled, even though some perished in Babylon. It's God who in Jesus ushers in the New Age, even though the Romans remain, even despite the torture and the death.

It's "the arc of history" sometimes being long, long, long in its bending toward Godness and goodness and justice. But bending toward Godness, and goodness, and justice, and fiercely, nonetheless.  

That’s what the weirdly random, suddenly shocking Transfiguration event is about. That’s what it’s for. It’s “fall on your knees” crashing into the disciples' domesticated moments of “oh, what a blessing,” to remind them that there’s a transcendant POINT to everything they’ve been living and learning. So get focused. Because here it comes.

When they come down off that mountain, Jesus aims squarely at Jerusalem. To bring directly into the heart of the powers and principalities his fierce protective uncompromising embodied message that all lives matter, and ESPECIALLY those most at risk from hurt and harm and violence and greed.

The Transfiguration is where Jesus gets focused. Because to use a metaphor I’m sure he’d have used if he’d had any idea what it meant, this is where the rubber hits the road.

It’s not incidental, I think, that this is the first time for me, after thirty-five or so years of being vaguely exhausted by the relentless annual weirdness of apparently having to care about the Transfiguration – at least, according to the lectionary cycle of Sunday preaching texts assigned to us in most mainline churches –

That this year I’m actually finding it quite compelling. As a full-on shiny sparkly “fall on your knees” alert from the heavens of “Hey. Focus. This is what our faithfulness is for, and this is when the rubber hits the road.”

What do we value and WHO do we value? Who are we not willing to let get erased. What are we not willing to allow on our watch. I have to say, after the last six weeks, that the Transfiguration’s “fall on your knees” reminder of the powerful Way of Love that’s fixing to start overturning tables in the temple in just a few weeks’ time, is pretty compelling indeed.

It's amazing to me how quickly I could suddenly get really seriously hard-core about buying local.

But that’s not the only thing. Because the other piece of the past six or eight weeks for me that I wanted to tell you about this morning, in relation to the “focus” moment at the heart of the Transfiguration event, comes from the class I’ve been taking this semester at Atlantic School of Theology for Continuing Education. Which has been a pastoral care class on Death and Dying.

Kind of a re-up for me, that I wanted to do because of the new elements introduced by our access now to MAiD – medical assistance in dying. And it’s been excellent, and useful, and I’ll be sharing things about it during Lent –

But by far the most spiritually useful piece for me has been the wisdom in the readings we’ve done about “dying well”, by palliative care physician Dr. Ira Byock. 

Because I think in fact that it’s actually wisdom about LIVING well. And it’s not even particularly surprising wisdom about living well. Or indeed dying well.

It’s just that absent the sudden shocking “fall on your knees” FOCUS moment of crashing into a terminal diagnosis, like the Transfiguration that changes everything, it probably just hovers. Like goodness we’ve domesticated into “oh what a blessing” in the unfolding moment by moment of day-to-day life.

Because for Byock, working in palliative care, what he counsels as key to dying well he distills into just finding ways to articulate four simple phrases. “I forgive you.” “Forgive me.” “Thank you.” And “I love you.”

It’s so not in least rocket science that it’s kind of breath-taking. In terms of embodying the kind of healing and wholeness in our spirits that’s the whole entire POINT of leaning into Godness and leaning into Jesus’ Way, it’s the wisdom in a nutshell. 

Certainly for dying well, compelled into sudden inescapable focus by the shocking transfiguring of everything there is -- but in fact for living well. So much so that as I’ve read through Byock’s book during this class, what’s kept striking me over and over in the stories he shares about people’s journey through palliative care… is thinking “wouldn’t it be great if it didn’t take a terminal diagnosis for us to do this: to find ways to speak to each other those four simple phrases: I forgive you. Forgive me. Thank you. And I love you.”

Wouldn’t it be great if we had that degree of focus all the time. Wouldn’t it be great if we were impassioned to stand up and be counted for our core values all the time. 

Thank goodness God’s met us. Why on earth the weird Transfiguration event on the mountaintop, and sparkly Jesus and Moses and Elijah, and whirlwinds and chaos? 

“Hey, focus” God says to the disciples, to us. “You were made for such a time as this.”

Amen.