“If God answered all of your prayers tomorrow, would it just change your life, or would it change the world?”

I heard this question asked on a podcast recently¹ and it stopped me in my tracks.

What is it that we pray for? For almost a year now, many of our prayers have been focused on the COVID-19 pandemic. We have prayed for the safety of our loved ones, for health care workers, for teachers and students and anyone who is on the front line in this battle against a virus that has upended all our lives.

We have also prayed for an end to the conflict and divisions that have been eating away at our country. We have prayed for families separated by our government to be reunited and made whole again. We have prayed for the victims of police brutality and for all the who are harmed by brutal power of white supremacy. We have prayed for the courage and insight needed to eradicate racism, the sin that killed and enslaved millions, and that still spills out in so many ugly and even deadly ways to this day. We have prayed for an end to poverty, homelessness, and so many other social ills.

When I consider the prayers we have prayed this past year, I am stunned by the enormity of it all. Just think of the prayers we write on our chalkboard or type into our chat boxes, the prayers we recite together in church, the prayers we utter in the privacy of our own homes, the prayers we say at the dinner table or before going to bed. And that does not even touch on those prayers that the Bible describes as being like “sighs too deep for words.” I would imagine that every one of us has prayers that are buried in our hearts, prayers we do not even whisper aloud, prayers that only God knows about. Prayers, perhaps, that speak of hidden fears, hidden shames, hidden wounds.

We have prayed and prayed and, if we are honest, we are, most of us, pretty worn out at this point. Some of our prayers have been answered. Many have not—or at least not yet. We may wonder if our prayers are changing anything, let alone changing the world. We might be tempted to withdraw or even to give up. Although there are always exceptions, I doubt very much most of us would say that, at the end of nearly a year of dealing with the pandemic and so much else, we are feeling on top of the world. Maybe we’re not even looking to feel on top of the world anymore—we’d settle for a good night’s sleep, a worry-free day, a return to something like what we used to consider normal.

Once again, our church calendar and the Sunday readings are here to offer another perspective. Today’s feast day, the Feast of the Transfiguration, is often understood to have something to do with being on top of the world. I mean, that’s what a mountaintop experience is, right? And that might well feel a little irrelevant or even jarring right now, for all the reasons listed above. Here’s the thing, though. When readings feel sort of “off” to me, when a liturgical season or feast day does not match my mood or feel in sync with the state of the world around me, I sometimes think that that’s a nudge from the Holy Spirit, inviting us to try to dig a little deeper.

And it occurred to me that my usual interpretation of these readings—the one that says it’s not mountaintop experiences that matter nearly as much as how we live in the tedium of day-to-day life—just wouldn’t cut it this year. Deep down, I think we’ve all had enough tedium, enough hard-luck, suck-it-up, day-to-day reality. Deep down, I think we’re all ready for a mountaintop experience, for anything that can lift us up and give us a new way of seeing the world.

This year, what I see in these readings is a reminder of why mountaintop experiences are so important, not a warning to us that they might become idols or lead us astray. It says it right there in the collect of the day—those high points, those moments of transformation, are exactly what we need to help us be “strengthened to bear our cross.” They are like bread for the journey, giving us sustenance and inspiration for when things are hard. However, they don’t give us strength primarily by giving us something to look back on. Rather, give us strength because they change the way we see the world, and in so doing they change everything.

Consider what is going on in today’s Old Testament reading. The question was never whether or not Elijah would be taken up into heaven instead of dying a normal human death—the narrator has already told us what’s going to happen, and neither Elijah nor Elisha really question that it’s a foregone conclusion. Instead, the whole time the real question was whether Elisha would see Elijah taken up into heaven. It’s not what will happen to the supposed protagonist—it’s what happens to the person seeing the action.

In a similar way, when Jesus undergoes his dazzling transfiguration on the mountain top, nothing about Jesus actually changes at all. The fullness of his divinity has been there all along. What changes is that his closest friends see that divinity unveiled for the first time. They now have a more direct experience of the truth, of reality. They see Jesus as divine, they hear God’s voice proclaiming him to be his beloved child. In other words, what happens to Jesus may not really be the point of the story at all. What happens to the disciples, the viewers, the witnesses—that’s what matters immensely.

At mountaintop moments, reality is revealed, not transformed.
One of my favorite collects in the Book of Common Prayer asks God to “open the eyes of our faith, that we may behold [Christ Jesus] in all his redeeming works.” ² That is what feels so necessary to me right now, so urgent—that we see things in a different way, that we view the world in the light of faith, in order to see reality more clearly.

Because when we see reality more clearly, we respond to our world in a different and more compassionate way. We know in our bones the interconnectedness of all beings; the web of mutuality and interdependence is revealed to us. And, honestly, I cannot think of a single more effective way to change how we see the world than through prayer.

We can’t conjure up a mountaintop experience whenever we want one. But we can pray. Always, Always, we can pray.

So, back to that question: “If God answered all of your prayers tomorrow, would it just change your life, or would it change the world?” My response is this: Prayers don’t have to be answered to change our lives. Praying itself changes us. Praying for others connects us to them. Praying for an end to thing that harm others, especially those on the margins, makes us more aware of ways that we can change our own hearts and beliefs and actions, question our own complicity, dismantle our prejudices and our privilege.

Which also means that prayers don’t have to be answered to change the world—because the world is changed when we are changed. The world is transformed when we see things in a new way. When the eyes of our faith are opened, when we see the world with more compassion, more hope, and more clarity, we see Christ reflected everywhere. That is the change that the world needs. That is the change we need. And it’s already happening. Amen.

1The podcast was the February 9, 2021 episode of “Pod Save the People” with Deray. I hope you check it out!

²The Collect for the Third Sunday of Easter in the Book of Common Prayer.