Sunday Sermon - 15 February

This morning, before anything else, I need to begin with an apology.

Last Sunday, during coffee hour, I repeated a joke I had heard about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. It went something like this: “Trump was saved by climate change—if there just hadn’t been that gust of wind.”

It was wrong of me to say it. It was wrong to speak that way, and wrong to let anger and frustration turn into words that wished harm on another human being. No matter how upset, fearful, angry we may feel, there is never an excuse for speaking in hate. So I am sorry, and I offer that apology openly and sincerely.

In a strange and sobering way, that brings us directly to today’s feast—the Feast of the Transfiguration.

We use the word transfiguration a lot in church, but it’s worth slowing down and asking what it really means. Transfiguration is not just change. It’s not improvement or adjustment. It is a revealing—the unveiling of what is most true and most glorious.

That’s different from transformation, which suggests becoming something else over time. It’s the opposite of disfiguration, which is what happens when something beautiful is distorted, twisted, or marred.

The scriptures today place those ideas side by side.

In Exodus, Moses goes up the mountain into the cloud of God’s glory. The people see fire and smoke and light but Moses enters the presence of God and is changed by it. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up another mountain. His face shines, his clothes blaze with light, and for a moment the disciples see who he truly is. Not a magician’s trick. Not a the gospeller's excuse for a set and costume change. It is a revelation of the divine glory that had always been in Jesus.

Peter, overwhelmed, blurts out something foolish (as we often do when we don’t know what to say). He wants to freeze the moment, build tents, stay on the mountain, but the voice from the cloud interrupts him saying: “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him.”

Listen. Not build. Not capture. Not control. Listen.

There is something deeply human in our fascination with transfiguration—our longing to become something more than we are. That’s why we love stories of radical change.

When I think of radical existential change, I am always reminded of a book I read when I was in my early teens, Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, where Gregor Samsa, a salesman, suddenly finds himself transformed into a massive insect who becomes isolated and a terrible burden on his family. It’s about alienation, existential angst, the dehumanization that can occur as a result of the pressures of life. Gregor’s transformation becomes grotesque and isolating—a warning about losing one’s humanity and the despair it causes through life, to death.  

Now that’s really depressing. When I get caught in that state of mind, I’d rather think of the opposite kind of story, the uplifting stories, the ones that give hope in the midst of that same suffering and existential angst. The ones we cheer for: the underdog stories, the chump-to-champ arcs. Movies like Rocky, the story of a punch drunk, washed up boxer who digs himself out of his desperate situation. With hardwork, perseverance and dignity Rocky finds glory even when he doesn't win, when he doesn’t beat the bad guy and win the championship belt, he is transformed. 

Those stories resonate because they echo something the Gospel tells us is true: we are meant for glory. We are meant to be changed - in a good way. We are meant to shine.

But here’s the danger. The same forces that can lead us toward transfiguration, that bring out the beauty in us, can also pull us toward disfiguration, bringing out the ugly in us. When fear, anger, resentment, or despair take hold—especially in a world that often feels cruel and unstable—they can distort us. They can make us say things we would never say if we were grounded in love. They can put thoughts in our minds that harden our hearts. I know this because it happened, and happens, to me. I let frustration become contempt. I let anger turn into hatred. Sometimes it comes out of my mouth.

That is what evil does if we let it. It doesn’t always show up as grand wickedness. Sometimes it simply bends us, slowly and quietly, away from love.

That’s why the Transfiguration matters. Not just as a moment in Jesus’ life, but as a mirror held up to our own.

Peter tells us in today’s epistle that this was no myth, no clever story: “We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven.” In other words, God’s glory is real. God’s light is real and it is stronger than the darkness that tries to deform us.

I was reminded of this when Bishop Riscylla visited and spoke about the work of Greg Boyle and his ministry with gang members in Los Angeles. I recently finished reading his book Tattoos on the Heart, where he writes about choosing compassion over condemnation, presence over punishment. He doesn’t deny the reality of violence but he refuses to let it have the final word. Again and again, lives that seemed irreparably broken are revealed to be radiant with dignity.

That is transfiguration. Not erasing the past, but revealing the belovedness that was always there. This is where the Church comes in. The Church, too, is called to be transfigured. We carry a complicated history, one that includes colonialism, coercion, exclusion, and unspeakable violence, but the Church has chosen to speak. The Church knows it is not meant to remain frozen in its failures. It is meant to move from the darkness of its historic ways toward the light of God’s true purpose.

We are being called, again and again, down the mountain and back into the world—not with dominance, but with love; not with fear, but with service; not with judgment, but with mercy.

When we care for the poor, feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, shelter the homeless, and speak with loving humility, the Church begins to look like what it truly is meant to be—the Body of Christ, shining quietly in a dark world.

I stand before you today as someone who was briefly disfigured by frustration, and who is deeply grateful for a God who calls me back.

When I stop. When I turn again toward God. When I name my sin, seek forgiveness, and choose love instead God does not cast me aside. God restores me. God forgives me. God continues the slow, patient work of transfiguration. This is not just my story, it is your story too. I, like you, are a human being in God’s process of redemption.

We stand today at a threshold. The Feast of the Transfiguration always comes right before Lent for a reason. The Church, in her wisdom, knows that before we dare to walk into the wilderness, we must first be shown the light. Before we confront our shadows, we are given a glimpse of glory.

In just a few days, many of us will wear an ashen cross on our foreheads and hear the words: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Lent asks us to dig honestly into the shadows of our humanness—to acknowledge our sins, our failures, our brokenness, our capacity to wound and be wounded. Lent strips away illusion. It tells the truth about who we are.

Lent never tells that truth without hope. We are dust, but dust breathed into by God. We are fragile, but beloved. We are sinners, but never abandoned.

This is the crucial thing we must remember: Lent is something we pass through. It is not the end of the story.

We do not enter Lent to remain there. We enter Lent knowing where we are going.

Transfiguration Sunday stands like a gateway. It reminds us that the road through repentance leads somewhere. That the descent from the mountain is not a fall into meaninglessness, but a journey toward resurrection. Jesus does not stay transfigured on the mountaintop. He walks down into suffering, betrayal, and death. But he does so fully knowing that Easter awaits. The glory revealed today is the glory that will break open the tomb.

That is our promise too. As we journey through Lent, through confession and fasting, through prayer and self-examination, we do so trusting that we will emerge on the other side changed. Forgiven. Renewed. Glorified not by our own effort, but by the resurrection of our Christ.

Lent tells us the truth about our dust. Transfiguration tells us the truth about our salvation. That is our hope. Not that we will never fail, but that God’s mercy is stronger than our failures. Not that darkness won’t touch us, but that it will not have the final word.

I’d like to end by looking closely and intentionally at the words that began our service today, the words of this morning’s Collect. When we pray today, “mercifully deliver us from the darkness of this world,” we are not pretending that darkness does not exist. We are naming it honestly. The darkness that lives in our politics, our institutions, our histories, and yes, in our own hearts. We are asking God to deliver us not only from the darkness around us, but from the darkness that can take root within us when anger hardens into hatred and fear eclipses love. This prayer is an act of humility. It is the prayer of people who know they are dust—and who trust that God is still at work in that dust.

And when we pray, “change us into his likeness from glory to glory,” we are claiming the promise revealed on the mountain and fulfilled at Easter. We are confessing that Lent is not our destination, but our passage; that repentance is not the end, but the doorway; that failure is not the final word. From apology to forgiveness, from disfiguration to healing, from wilderness to resurrection, God is the one who carries us forward. From glory glimpsed on the mountain, to glory revealed at the empty tomb, and onward into the quiet, faithful glory of lives shaped by love.

Let us now pray together again our Collect:

Almighty God, on the holy mount you revealed to chosen witnesses
your well-beloved Son, wonderfully transfigured:
mercifully deliver us from the darkness of this world,
and change us into his likeness from glory to glory;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

Amen.