Week 9 (Year 2, NL)

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

The dams on the Klamath River are coming down. Their removal reflects a very different theology than their construction.

In the life of early Israel, Gottwald found a God of economic justice.

Peter wants to capture that mountaintop experience forever.

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

Strange things are happening on this mountain.

George Steiner said that "the translator invades, extracts, and brings home." In this remarkable volume, Everett Fox does all of this.

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.

Apparently insomnia is a family trait. My mother often lies awake at night. Her father (my grandfather) was a man of immense energy who routinely read until 1 or 2 a.m.I recall lying awake as a child, listening to murmurs of the television shows my parents were watching. As an adult I developed the sometime and uneasy rhythm of one night of wakefulness until 3 or 4 in the morning, followed by a night of a full eight hours’ sleep. I decided long ago not to lie awake in the dark. Instead I read or listen to music.

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.