Preacher: Julia Baker

Scripture: Exodus 34:29-35 and Luke 9:28-43

My junior year in college, I lived in the Peruvian Andes.

And one ordinary morning, I met God or maybe God met me in a way I could see. 

The river flowing by the meadow I was in was steeped glacial turquoise. 

At 14,000 ft the air was so thin each breath was an awareness.

I was hiking with a heavy backpack of questions, 

brought from late night college dorm room conversations.

I was exhausted and bored by their weight. 

What/who was God? Did I believe? Did it all matter? 

Perched on a boulder in a field of potato flowers 

I was given an answer that has unfolded like a strip of tie-dyed silk, 

long simmered in indigo. 

Love filled the space between clouds.

For a moment the parade of internal voices, my constant companions, stopped. 

I saw everything around me in a way I had not before. 

Everything dripped with love. 

The snowy magnificence of the Cordillera Blanca peaks in the distance, the billowed castles of white clouds, the dainty wings of yellow butterflies, the veins of silver through the rock’s skin: each day I marveled at the beauty. But that day the colors, textures, and lines sharpened, the inner haze through which I had seen everything, for that moment, lifted. 

And I was a part of this beauty. The mountain, the cloud, the wing, the stone were inside me and I in them. All a part of a shimmered brilliance. What made the beauty was love.

I decided at that moment to believe this was true. To believe that this profound love was God. And this God — in stone, butterfly and cloud — was clearly good. And that maybe, just maybe, since I was a part of this great flowing, churning, sparkling, mess — I was good also.

—-

I invite you to think of your own “mountain top moments” 

Or maybe it was a city sidewalk or subway ride moment — those inbreakings when time shifts, when an inner silence comes, when a veil is lifted and we see reality, ourselves, an answer to a question, God newly.

—–

Today we are on a threshold day in the rhythm of the Christian year.

We are leaving the light of Epiphany

and turning towards the shadows of Lent.

At this turn we are given a story of a mountaintop experience.

It is a story that seems to unfold almost outside of time. 

Or blurs time, goes into Deep Time

we see the crossing of the temporal — the world where John, Peter and James

lived and the external — the world where Moses and Elijah are 

and Jesus interacting with both worlds.

We glimpse what maybe is always true 

humming under and within the reality of everything, 

the world of time and the world beyond time as interconnected.

Jesus pulls back the curtain 

and with the disciples we glimpse the intersection.

Col. 1:17 “In Christ all things hold together.”

And Eph. 1:10 – the plan of the fullness of times is to bring all things together in the Messiah—both things in heaven and things on earth, all in Him.

—–

We are also “overhear” Jesus speaking with Moses and Elijah

about the future, about Jesus’s departure or exodus,

about the events about to take place.

—-

I have been really interested in Peter’s response 

to witnessing this time bending moment of 

Transfiguration when Jesus’s face changed

and his clothes became dazzling light, 

this revealing, in radiance, of Jesus as the Messiah.

At first glance I read Peter’s response

“Wow, this is great, let’s set up tents…” 

as a desire to simply stay in this “mountaintop experience.”

Which, can I ever relate 

I think of many a retreat I have been on, a weekend camping trip,

or even just a Sunday into Monday. When I also ask, “Can I stay here?” 

—-

There seems to be even more happening though in what Peter is saying.

In some translations “tents” is rendered as tabernacle or booths.

This alerts that maybe what Peter was talking 

about was the Jewish “Festival of Booths” or Sukkot.

Sukkot is a annual autumn harvest festival to commemorate the Exodus

and the 40 years in the wilderness — to remember how God kept God’s promises.

As a Jewish scholar says,

“Living in sukkot on the Feast of Tabernacles is our way of spending 7 days living in the future. We may still be living within the temporal on Earth, but for those 7 days we live as if the Ephesians 1 has been fulfilled and The Earthly and the Heavenly are together. We live by Hebrews 11:1 Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of realities not seen.”

—-

Peter is seeing the beauty of what is unfolding

and wants to honor this sacred ground, this fulfillment,

these promises kept. It becomes clear though that the way

to honor that is not by staying on the mountain —

The Transfiguration story ends 

when clouds come and overshadow those gathered and 

God’s voice speaks —

“This is my Son! The Chosen One! Listen to him.”

—-

Listen to him — 

Jesus knows they cannot stay on the summit. 

The very next day they heal a boy possessed with demons.

Love cannot stay on the mountain. 

Love must come down.

Love must go where it is needed in the Valley of the shadow of death.

1 Corinthians 13 — 

“Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” 

Love is grateful for the experience on the mountaintop 

and knows it cannot stay there.

Love is there when the glory has fades, the flames of romance 

dwindle, when the really really hard and messy is present. 

Love goes to Jerusalem. Towards that donkey, towards

those thorns, towards the darkness of human pain and suffering,

Towards death.

God does not engage us from a cut off aloof place.

God is not a distant observer of the misery of the world.

Jesus is about to embody the embrace of God for the aching world.

—–

This story that blurs time — 

draws the disciples, and us deeply back into time.

That morning in the Peruvian meadow, that choosing and being chosen, 

has forever changed the course of my life. 

Peter, James and John can no longer see Jesus or the world as they once had. 

What they saw on that mountain infuses how they will go on to live. 

The Transfiguration is a story about opening our eyes to glory and allowing that glory to change us, and thus becoming willing to walk where it leads us. 

The story urges us to trust that the gifts we received on the mountaintop are enough, and will carry us in the moments when the shimmering clarity of them feels distant.

On a cross-country ski yesterday through snowy Maine woods, 

I was talking with my parents about this sermon and my Mom spoke of these words of Rene Dumal: 

“You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.” 

—–

On this particular Transfiguration day 2025, in a time when it is not hard to see all the places where Love is calling us to be in the valley. 

How do we do this long-haul, deep time, wilderness work with the grace and “art of conducting ourselves in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up”?

What message of dazzling-glory, what message of Love come down, might God be inviting you to remember to re-embody today and in this upcoming Lent journey?

—-

There is a beautiful song by Sujan Stevens called The Transfiguration

We are going to play now in closing and I invite you to sink into the soothing melody as you prayerfully reflect on what you might called to see. 

 —–

When Glory
A Blessing for Transfiguration Sunday – Jan Richards

That when glory comes,
we will open our eyes
to see it.

That when glory shows up,
we will let ourselves
be overcome
not by fear
but by the love
it bears.

That when glory shines,
we will bring it
back with us
all the way,
all the way,
all the way down.