Transfiguration Sunday (Year B, RCL)

Sometimes it seems like the believers are the ones for whom the gospel is veiled.

What Peter, James, and John see on the mountain cannot be neatly packaged for resale.

Elisha is unsure of himself at first.

Peter wants to capture that mountaintop experience forever.

Has Paul been unfairly judged?

God’s presence transfigures here, now, in the familiar.

Strange things are happening on this mountain.

“One second-century pagan critic of Christianity was willing to tolerate everything else about Christians if they would only worship the gods.”

I love a good mountaintop experience. It’s a moment when everything changes. Insight flares up in the mind, illuminating the moment, the experience, the problem in a whole new way. You’re never quite the same again.  

One such moment for me happened in prayer when I was on a three-day silent retreat.

Let’s build shrines, Peter says. He doesn’t know how to respond to a mystical mountaintop experience, and he’s afraid.

The Transfiguration has a hundred sermons in it. But to me the most touching element is the subplot.

If the disciples hoped before that Jesus didn't know what he was saying, these hopes are now gone.

Why does Elijah try to spare Elisha? Does he simply prefer to die alone?

My husband and I found the WorldWide Telescope a few months ago, and we’ve been staring into the heavens ever since. “Which planet would you like to see first?” he asked me once he'd loaded the program onto his computer. No question: Saturn. I’ve always been fascinated by those rings. A few clicks of the mouse and there they were, circling and circling, a sash of light, a halo, a crown. We looked at Jupiter next, with its great red spot. We looked at Mercury, Venus, Mars and Pluto. Each planet was unique, different from every other. But what they had in common was this: they shone out of utter darkness.

Do not look for this mountain on a Bible map. It juts out not from the topography of Galilee, but from the topography of God.