The Last Sunday After The Epiphany - March 2, 2025

Summary

In this sermon on the Transfiguration, Mother Suzanne explores how Jesus' radiant transformation on the mountaintop offers a model for our own spiritual journeys. She shares how her parish, Grace Episcopal Church, has been transfigured through community service and how parishioners experience their own "everyday transfigurations"—moments where heaven meets earth that strengthen us for life's challenges, just as Jesus' transfiguration prepared him for Jerusalem.

THE GOSPEL                                                                                                                                                           Luke 9:28-43a

  Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him. Just as they were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, "Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah"--not knowing what he said. While he was saying this, a cloud came and overshadowed them; and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, "This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!" When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.

On the next day, when they had come down from the mountain, a great crowd met him. Just then a man from the crowd shouted, "Teacher, I beg you to look at my son; he is my only child. Suddenly a spirit seizes him, and all at once he shrieks. It convulses him until he foams at the mouth; it mauls him and will scarcely leave him. I begged your disciples to cast it out, but they could not." Jesus answered, "You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you and bear with you? Bring your son here." While he was coming, the demon dashed him to the ground in convulsions. But Jesus rebuked the unclean spirit, healed the boy, and gave him back to his father. And all were astounded at the greatness of God. 

Artwork:  Transfiguration of Jesus, by Carl Bloch (1834–1890) 

Transcript

Mother Suzanne:

Proclaim the greatness of the Lord our God, and worship him upon his holy hill. For the Lord our God is the holy one. In the name of the Triune God, father, son and Holy Spirit, amen. Please be seated. Well, in today's gospel we meet Jesus along with Peter James and John High on a mountain. Special things happen on mountains in scripture. They are places very close to God, and often we find that sacred encounters happen high on mountains. Frederick Ner, one of my favorite authors, shares it this way. It is as strange a scene as there as ever in the gospels, even without the voice from the cloud to explain it. They had no doubt what they were witnessing. It was Jesus of Nazareth, allright, the man that they had tramped many a dusty mile with whose mother and brothers they knew. The one they'd seen as hungry, tired, foot soar as the rest of them. But it was also the Messiah, the Christ in all of his glory. It was the holiness of the man shining through his humanness, his face, sow a fire with it. They were almost blinded even with us. Something like that happens once in a while if we are lucky.

The face of a man walking his child in the park, a woman picking peas in the garden, sometimes even the most unlikely person listening to a concert or maybe even standing barefoot in the sand watching the waves roll in. Or maybe for some it's having a beer at a Saturday baseball game in July every once and so often, something so touching. So incandescent, isn't that a beautiful word? Incandescent and beautiful. So very alive. It transfigure the human face. And in so doing it is almost beyond bearing. That is how Frederick Bakner sees the transfiguration to bear witness week in and week out of an entire church. For me, a church campus nearly every square inch inside and out transfigured by those folks who move about this space is probably one of the most humbling things I see as the priest of grace. I see people filled with a desire to love God and to love our neighbors while living into what our scripture this morning reminds us to do. And it is, this is my son, listen to him.

So that begs the question, how do we listen to him? How do we know what God wants us to do? How do we make sense of this obscure and often confusing passage, other worldly passage, truthfully, how do we make sense of it? Well, I can say for a small parish on Lang Street in Alvin, Texas, this is how we listen and continuously give witness to our own transfigurations. We've gone about the hard work of listening to our community and we've heard her needs. We were challenged by the words of a priest years ago who asked this question, if grace were to not exist anymore, would this community miss her?

And so we looked inward and we said to one another, we want to be vital to our community. God, here we are. Use us. We're ready. And so with fortitude and unwavering commitment, we heard what our community was telling us that they were hungry. And so we have fed imparting the bread of life nearly 4 million pounds of the bread of life and have changed the way we see our neighbors, how we interact with them, and most importantly, how we love them. Most of us in this room will probably never experience radical transfiguration as described in our gospel this morning. But you know what? We can make ourselves available to small moments of transfiguration in our own lives where heaven meets earth, this beautiful liminal space of goodness.

Many of you have shared with me some of your own moments of transfiguration. One mother described to me how she has watched her own children be brave and do things she never thought was possible. And do you know what she calls these moments? She'll send them to me, she'll text them to me every once in a while and all she says is, this is my proud mama moment. There's a woman in this congregation. She came to grace from a really fancy Episcopal church, a church so different than grace. When she walked into grace and found out what we were doing, it scared her, scared her so much. So she almost left and didn't come back.

But she has come back and she has found a community that loves her and she is serving in ways she never imagined doing. She tells me all the time, mother Suzanne Grace is a church that I have never known before. And most recently, a young man has showed up to Grace who carried with him a conflicted religious past, but felt led to come to Grace and get this is now praying the daily office. Every single day while his lunch break at work, he desperately wants to find ways to meet God even while at work he's been transfigured.

These are everyday examples of how we can be changed. Moments that in some way maybe sets our hearts of fire, maybe spark a glow. They are moments that propel us forward into new opportunities and avenues, not only for our own lives, but perhaps for the ministries that God has in mind for us to do. They are moments that prepare us for other moments of goodness that are on the horizon if we just keep moving forward. They are what God desires to give us. They are glimpses and a foretaste of what is to come. And we all know that these mountaintop experiences can't last forever, right? We come back down to reality because that's where most of life resides in reality, these incredible special moments, they don't last forever. But what do they do? They give us hope while walking the tenuous spiritual path with all of its ups and downs and turns and curves.

Remember, once Jesus came off the Mount of Transfiguration, he set his eyes towards Jerusalem to face challenge, cruelty, and ultimately his death. And we too face our own challenges, but I have come to understand it is these moments of transfiguration that give us strength just like it gave Jesus strength to face what was coming in Jerusalem. They give us strength and they give us hope to continue to walk the life of faith. We need these moments. And I think God knows we need these moments because it's where we can and do meet God in powerful and life-changing ways. Jesus certainly did, and so do we.

These high points that sometimes we don't ever want to leave. They are manna for the soul. They're needed, and they are pure gift. And so what I would say is to be present to them and to thank God for them. I told my serving team this morning, they are these glimpses of pure grace that God sends to us. We don't deserve them, and yet he gives them to us. Remember, God doesn't make most of our faces glow a bright. I have come to understand that God often comes to us in the slightest, in the smallest, the most unsuspecting, surprising ways to remind us of his gentle unobtrusive presence. If we're ready and if we have the eyes to see his gentleness and if we have the ears to hear, and when we choose to follow that still small voice, the hunches and the leadings that come, you know what I'm talking about. If you have the spirit of God inside of you, those hunches come to you. Now, we can ignore them or we can take hold of them. And when you take hold of them, know that you are following one who has come before, one who has suffered, but who has also come to lead the way to salvation and rest for our souls. We will never be the same. We too are those who are being transfigured. And for that, let us all be grateful. In the name of the Triune God, father, son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.