Transfiguration Sunday (Year A, RCL)

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

It’s hard to let go of what we once had.

While struggling with this question as a church songwriter, I came up with six guidelines.

Hope smells like barbecue.

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

Craig Detweiler draws on art history, psychology, and religion to argue that staring at ourselves can be an act of faith.

In the eastern tradition, theosis—union with God—is the goal of the Christian life.

There is no "on the mountain" and "off the mountain."

Matthew 17:1–9

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.

Jesus’ transfiguration is a mystery that defies a straightforward explanation. I find that instead of clarifying anything about his unique nature, it only adds more confusion.

I grew up in Southern Baptist congregations. By the time I left high school I knew the four steps to salvation and the meaning of Jesus’ sacrificial death as a substitutionary atonement for my sins. I could articulate this understanding of salvation in clear and simple terms. Within the metanarrative of evangelical Christianity it made perfect sense and was logically coherent.

Then my fundamentalism began to unravel. 

It’s the second movement of Leonard Bernstein’s choral work, Chichester Psalms. A boy soprano (or a countertenor), in the “role” of the shepherd boy, David, sings in Hebrew the opening verses of Psalm 23. He is accompanied–sparingly, fittingly–by the harp. The first several measures are tender but not tentative; filled with sentiment, but without sentimentality (this per Bernstein’s instructions). When the women’s voices take over the text at גַּם כִּי־אֵלֵךְ בְּגֵיא צַלְמָוֶת . . . (Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . .) there’s an ethereal echo-canon effect. This part of the movement, when executed well, is something sublime.