I speak in the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Amen.
So today is the feast day of the transfiguration, which commemorates the account of Jesus ascending
a mountain with some of his closest friends and their encountering God.
The transfiguration is a sacred mystery.
What exactly happens on that mountain is one for debate and has been discussed to the centuries.
But what everyone agrees on is that in that moment, God makes a stunning and awesome appearance
in the life of Jesus.
God is very close, very present, and the disciples can only watch, cowering in fear as their
Lord draws so very near to them.
They can only watch as Jesus, their friend, their teacher, their mentor is drawn fully
into God's presence.
This story is one of the few times in Luke's gospel where Jesus' divinity is the central
point of the story.
Luke is often very focused on Jesus' humanity, showing Jesus as fully human, living a human
life with all of its complexities, its fears and emotions and goals and desires.
Luke does fully claim Jesus as the Messiah, but for Luke, the point is often that God
chose to be fully human, to live as one of us, and has because of that felt the breath
of the human life and has redeemed all of it, the good, the terrible, and everything
in between.
But in the transfiguration, Luke reminds us that this Jesus is no ordinary prophet, no
ordinary teacher.
Luke reminds us that when we encounter and interact with Jesus, we are encountering and
interacting with God.
The context of the story of the transfiguration is important.
It comes in a jam-packed ninth chapter of Luke.
Several verses before this one, Luke will give his version of the feeding of the 5,000,
a story with two loaves, or five loaves and two fish, somehow feeding 5,000 people with
12 baskets of leftovers.
God's people come empty-handed and God always provides.
And it is this miraculous feeding story that in just a few verses later will prompt Peter
to profess his faith in Jesus.
Jesus asks his disciple who people say he is, to which some of them provide tentative
guesses that he is a prophet, perhaps John the Baptist.
But it is Peter who cuts to the noise and who gets right to the heart of it, claiming
that Jesus is the promised Messiah, whose ministry will make all others pale in comparison.
This is one of the first times in Luke's Gospel that Jesus will be named the Messiah,
Peter, one of the first people to claim it, one of the first people brave enough to name
it out loud, that he is caught up in part of God's salvation happening right in front
of him.
But to this stunning confession of faith, Jesus provides an unexpected answer.
He tells his disciples in just a few verses after that exactly where his ministry is headed.
Jesus who has come into the world to preach love and hope and freedom and release and
joy and peace, this Jesus will be met by betrayal and anger and fear and suspicion.
Jesus who has come to preach light will be met with death.
This is surely not the message the disciples were expecting.
They have just indeed had confirmed for them that they are in the presence of the Messiah.
Surely they were not expecting Jesus to tell them that death follows.
Their ministry has been one of large crowds, adoring groups of people, waiting expectantly
for Jesus' next miracle.
So far they have met excited people and good things.
It has been easy for them to write off the handful of angry religious leaders who have
come to challenge Jesus because Jesus has so far easily dispatched them and sent them
away.
So it must have been difficult for them to hear that this ministry was leading to pain
and suffering and death.
How could the person just named as the Son of God be headed for disaster?
It is unthinkable.
It is unacceptable.
But here is Jesus telling them that this is where they are headed and that anyone who
would choose to follow God must also be willing to walk the way of the cross.
It is only one week later, eight days, that Jesus will take three of his closest disciples
up on the mountain for the transfiguration.
Peter's profession of Jesus' divinity and Jesus' following revelation of his own impending
suffering and death are the lens through which we can fully begin to understand the magnitude
of what is happening on the mountain.
In the transfiguration, we are reminded of God's great majesty, of God's divine power.
In the transfiguration, God, God self confirms those prophetic words of Peter, that Jesus
is indeed the Son of God and that through him we will learn what it means to live a
life patterned around following God above all else.
Through Jesus, we learn what it means to love, what it means to feel joy, what it means to
once and for all be truly free from sin.
The transfiguration ties all of this into one.
It places humanity and divinity, death and life, revelation and miracle inextricably
into the person of Jesus.
Jesus' mission on earth is nothing short of the salvation of God's beloved fallen creation.
Hurt and suffering, pain and death are not things that Jesus will seek to avoid.
Death isn't the bug in the system.
Jesus isn't divine despite the fact that Jesus suffers.
This is all part of God's plan of salvation.
And Jesus, the model of discipleship, has the trust and the faith needed to follow God
even and especially under the cross.
The good news, of course, is that in choosing to walk through pain and death and suffering,
God breaks their hold on the world and God opens for us redemption and salvation and
life.
In choosing to suffer for us, God ties all the broken and jagged pieces of this world
into God's self, all the terrible things that can and do happen in this fallen world,
and God redeems them.
I've never been a big believer in the concept that everything happens for a reason, but
I am a big believer in the idea that God can and does take everything that happens, all
the pain and the hurt that we feel and all the pain and the hurt that we cause, and that
God can and does make good things come out of them.
I'm a big believer that God is greater than the very best things that we have to offer,
but more importantly, I'm a big believer that God is better than our worst mistakes,
that God continues to walk with us and show us how to love, how to be loved, even when
we do and think and feel things that are altogether unlovely.
In the Transfiguration, we learn that the disciples learned all those years ago that
God does not shy away from suffering with and for us, that God would willingly choose
to walk the road at the cross in order to bring us home.
This is the kind of God that we have that God revealed in the Transfiguration, the one
who understands suffering, who understands pain and death, the one who knows what we
feel when we face those terrifying things.
We have a God who keeps redeeming, a God who keeps promising to be with us as we walk through
all the challenges and the changes of our life, and we have a God who keeps calling
forth good out of all of the things that we get into.
Amen.