Transfiguration

 

Kreg Yingst

August 6, 2023

+ Today is an important anniversary.

If any of you have seen the film Oppenheimer you know what happened on this day.

It was on this day in 1945 that the Atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

Now, not a lot of people know this, but I actually know a fair amount about Hiroshima, because I actually wrote a book about it.

I know. None of you have read this one.

Not many people have.

My little-know third book, Cloud, published  way back in 1997, is a long (166 page), two-act poem (verse play) about Hiroshima and its after-effects in the lives of five people.

It was based in Japanese Noh drama.

And the five main characters were the ghosts of five people killed at Hiroshima, each dressed in the clothes they were wearing at the time of the blast.

And because it is a Noh drama, they also wear masks.

I think three people read the book.

It’s now  out-of-print.

I saw once that a copy of it was for sale on Amazon for $49.99.

(Trust me, I never saw that 50 bucks!)

The theme of that book is the light of the bomb, and how that light illumined more than just the event of that day.

We, in a sense, are still living in the afterglow of the Light of that event.

It changed all of us and transformed us in ways we could never imagine.

In that white light, a violence like we have never known was unleashed upon the world.

Today in our Gospel reading we also get light—a very different Light—and hear the story of Jesus’ being transformed on the mountain top. 

Actually, we more than just hear it.

We get to see it.

It’s a very vivid description of what happened.

And it’s truly one of those incredible moments in scripture.

It’s incredible because, for one holy moment, the veil between our world and God’s world is pushed aside.

On that mountain top, Jesus seems for a moment to have one foot in each world—one in this world, in which he is a human being just like the rest of us, and one foot in the next world in which he is much more than just another human being.

That would have been, in and of itself, enough.

But Jesus is also seen standing between Moses and Elijah—a sign obviously that what they foresaw in their prophecies of the Messiah, the Chosen One of God, in their visions of what was to come, is fulfilled in Jesus who stands between them.

Jesus is the fulfillment of what those great prophets foretold.

This is a visual sign from God to those who witnessed it that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God present among them.

The presence of Moses and Elijah shows us that—in a sense—their mission is complete.

Here, in this glorified person they flank, all that they foretold—all that they looked forward to—has found its completion.

Everyone who witnesses this vision is affected by it.

The Apostles who witness it—Peter, James and John, that inner sanctum among the Apostles—don’t quite know what to make of it.

They have been roused from their tired state by this incredible experience.

They are obviously baffled by what they saw.

And in doing so, they do the only thing they can do—they offer to build three sanctuaries there—to worship what they see as divine.

Finally, they seem to come down from the mountain in what I’m sure was a dazed state.

But why is any of this important to us?

Why is this story that seems so strange and so exotic—so much like a technicolor scene from a 1950s Biblical epic—so important to us—in this day and age?

We have a hard time wrapping our minds around these images of dazzling white light and booming voices from clouds.

We don’t experience God like this in our lives.

I suppose the question could be: why not?

Certainly, we are longing and searching for God in our lives, aren’t we?

We hear about it all the time.

We hear of people searching for God.

But, to search for God means that, somewhere along the way, we seem to think God got lost.

But…we know better than that.

We don’t worship a lost God.

And we don’t come to church on a Sunday morning to search for God.  

We come to church because we long for God—we long for an experience similar to the experience those apostles encountered on the mountaintop.

So then, what is this story of the Transfiguration saying to us?

Do we too need to be crawling around on top of hills to find a place in which the veil between this world and God’s world is lifted?

Well, to some extent, that is exactly what we do every Sunday.

In a sense, when we come together today, here at this altar, we too are coming to a place every much like the mountain top experience we heard about in this morning’s Gospel.

In the scriptures we have just heard, we have heard God’s voice, speaking to us.

Here, we get to hear God say to us, just as God said to Jesus, that we too are God’s beloved, we too are chosen ones of God.

We too get to be reminded that God planned for us from the very the beginning.

And here we too get to be infused with the Light of God, and show that Light to others.

And we too get to experience God in each other—in all of us who are gathered here together.

But I think the interesting thing we need to remind ourselves of is this: it’s all right to seek out these experiences of God’s presence in our lives.

But why our searching and longing for God is different than others is that, in our case, as followers of Jesus, our God is not evasive or elusive.

God is not playing hide-and-seek-with us.

God is here.

God is with us.

Right now.

All we have to do is ask.

All we have to is look.

All we have to do is seek.

And we will find.

We have never lost our God.

God has come to us as dazzling Light, yes.

God has spoken to us—at least through the scriptures.

God is no further from us than right here, in our midst, when we gather together to worship, to hear the scriptures and to break the sacrificial  bread.

And like those disciples, we must, when we’re done, go from here.

We must leave the mountaintop experience and go back down, to share our experience, to live out what we have learned and seen and felt here.

We are compelled to live out that experience out in the world.

We do that be by being, honest, humble, authentic followers of Jesus.

Being an authentic follower of Jesus means being loving and compassionate and accepting people.

It means walking in love.

Of course, we will fail in that.

I fail in walking in love—in being compassionate and loving—all the time.

I get angry at the guy who cuts me off in traffic or at the injustices in the world around me.

I complain.

I grumble.

I can tell you, I am not always a walking talking billboard for the Christians faith.

But hopefully, our experience here—our encounter with God in this place on this day—can make enough of a difference in our lives that we will be able to carry it with us throughout our week and into our very day-to-day lives.

Hopefully, we can go from here glowing with the experience we have here.

That glow might not be a visible glow, but hopefully it is one we can feel within us.

That glow—that aftereffect of our experience of God—is what we can carry with us and cherish within us long after we leave here.

Our experience on the mountain-top—like all life-altering experiences—will fade from us eventually.

It did for those apostles who accompanied Jesus there.

All of them—Jesus, Peter, James and John—would experience much sorrow in the weeks and years ahead of them.

The experience of the mountaintop cannot be preserved.

We cannot build “booths” to preserve the experience.

Like all the wonderful moments in our lives, they can only be cherished.

And they can be shared.

But we have the continued opportunity to come back here to the Eucharist and to participate in it again and again.

God is here.

God is present among us—God’s people.

God is longing too.

God is longing for us—to know us and to have us experience God.

So, let us go from here—let us go back down the mountain, into the valley below, with our experience of God glowing brilliantly on our faces.

Let us cherish this experience we have of God.

And most, importantly, let us live out this experience in our life, as we walk in love.