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I speak in the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

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Amen.

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So today is the feast day of the transfiguration, which commemorates the account of Jesus ascending

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a mountain with some of his closest friends and their encountering God.

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The transfiguration is a sacred mystery.

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What exactly happens on that mountain is one for debate and has been discussed to the centuries.

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But what everyone agrees on is that in that moment, God makes a stunning and awesome appearance

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in the life of Jesus.

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God is very close, very present, and the disciples can only watch, cowering in fear as their

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Lord draws so very near to them.

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They can only watch as Jesus, their friend, their teacher, their mentor is drawn fully

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into God's presence.

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This story is one of the few times in Luke's gospel where Jesus' divinity is the central

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point of the story.

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Luke is often very focused on Jesus' humanity, showing Jesus as fully human, living a human

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life with all of its complexities, its fears and emotions and goals and desires.

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Luke does fully claim Jesus as the Messiah, but for Luke, the point is often that God

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chose to be fully human, to live as one of us, and has because of that felt the breath

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of the human life and has redeemed all of it, the good, the terrible, and everything

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in between.

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But in the transfiguration, Luke reminds us that this Jesus is no ordinary prophet, no

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ordinary teacher.

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Luke reminds us that when we encounter and interact with Jesus, we are encountering and

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interacting with God.

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The context of the story of the transfiguration is important.

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It comes in a jam-packed ninth chapter of Luke.

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Several verses before this one, Luke will give his version of the feeding of the 5,000,

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a story with two loaves, or five loaves and two fish, somehow feeding 5,000 people with

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12 baskets of leftovers.

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God's people come empty-handed and God always provides.

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And it is this miraculous feeding story that in just a few verses later will prompt Peter

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to profess his faith in Jesus.

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Jesus asks his disciple who people say he is, to which some of them provide tentative

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guesses that he is a prophet, perhaps John the Baptist.

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But it is Peter who cuts to the noise and who gets right to the heart of it, claiming

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that Jesus is the promised Messiah, whose ministry will make all others pale in comparison.

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This is one of the first times in Luke's Gospel that Jesus will be named the Messiah,

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Peter, one of the first people to claim it, one of the first people brave enough to name

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it out loud, that he is caught up in part of God's salvation happening right in front

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of him.

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But to this stunning confession of faith, Jesus provides an unexpected answer.

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He tells his disciples in just a few verses after that exactly where his ministry is headed.

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Jesus who has come into the world to preach love and hope and freedom and release and

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joy and peace, this Jesus will be met by betrayal and anger and fear and suspicion.

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Jesus who has come to preach light will be met with death.

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This is surely not the message the disciples were expecting.

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They have just indeed had confirmed for them that they are in the presence of the Messiah.

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Surely they were not expecting Jesus to tell them that death follows.

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Their ministry has been one of large crowds, adoring groups of people, waiting expectantly

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for Jesus' next miracle.

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So far they have met excited people and good things.

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It has been easy for them to write off the handful of angry religious leaders who have

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come to challenge Jesus because Jesus has so far easily dispatched them and sent them

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away.

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So it must have been difficult for them to hear that this ministry was leading to pain

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and suffering and death.

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How could the person just named as the Son of God be headed for disaster?

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It is unthinkable.

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It is unacceptable.

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But here is Jesus telling them that this is where they are headed and that anyone who

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would choose to follow God must also be willing to walk the way of the cross.

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It is only one week later, eight days, that Jesus will take three of his closest disciples

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up on the mountain for the transfiguration.

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Peter's profession of Jesus' divinity and Jesus' following revelation of his own impending

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suffering and death are the lens through which we can fully begin to understand the magnitude

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of what is happening on the mountain.

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In the transfiguration, we are reminded of God's great majesty, of God's divine power.

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In the transfiguration, God, God self confirms those prophetic words of Peter, that Jesus

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is indeed the Son of God and that through him we will learn what it means to live a

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life patterned around following God above all else.

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Through Jesus, we learn what it means to love, what it means to feel joy, what it means to

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once and for all be truly free from sin.

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The transfiguration ties all of this into one.

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It places humanity and divinity, death and life, revelation and miracle inextricably

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into the person of Jesus.

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Jesus' mission on earth is nothing short of the salvation of God's beloved fallen creation.

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Hurt and suffering, pain and death are not things that Jesus will seek to avoid.

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Death isn't the bug in the system.

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Jesus isn't divine despite the fact that Jesus suffers.

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This is all part of God's plan of salvation.

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And Jesus, the model of discipleship, has the trust and the faith needed to follow God

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even and especially under the cross.

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The good news, of course, is that in choosing to walk through pain and death and suffering,

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God breaks their hold on the world and God opens for us redemption and salvation and

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life.

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In choosing to suffer for us, God ties all the broken and jagged pieces of this world

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into God's self, all the terrible things that can and do happen in this fallen world,

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and God redeems them.

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I've never been a big believer in the concept that everything happens for a reason, but

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I am a big believer in the idea that God can and does take everything that happens, all

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the pain and the hurt that we feel and all the pain and the hurt that we cause, and that

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God can and does make good things come out of them.

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I'm a big believer that God is greater than the very best things that we have to offer,

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but more importantly, I'm a big believer that God is better than our worst mistakes,

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that God continues to walk with us and show us how to love, how to be loved, even when

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we do and think and feel things that are altogether unlovely.

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In the Transfiguration, we learn that the disciples learned all those years ago that

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God does not shy away from suffering with and for us, that God would willingly choose

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to walk the road at the cross in order to bring us home.

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This is the kind of God that we have that God revealed in the Transfiguration, the one

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who understands suffering, who understands pain and death, the one who knows what we

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feel when we face those terrifying things.

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We have a God who keeps redeeming, a God who keeps promising to be with us as we walk through

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all the challenges and the changes of our life, and we have a God who keeps calling

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forth good out of all of the things that we get into.

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Amen.