The Rev. Pamela Dolan
Would you change?: A Sermon for Transfiguration Sunday
February 11, 2024
Almost 20 years ago, the great singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman released a song called “Change,” that begins with the lyrics:
If you knew that you would die today
If you saw the face of God and love
Would you change? Would you change?
This feels like such a perfect question to ask after hearing today’s Gospel. What would it be like to be in the position that Peter and James and John are in and actually see Jesus in all his divine radiance—to see the face of God and love? Would we change? Or would we want to go back down the mountain and try to act normal, as if nothing had happened, and so to change as little as possible?
The whole season of Epiphany is bathed in light, and it culminates in the Transfiguration, this odd and epiphanic moment captured in today’s Gospel. In terms of connections to other episodes in Scripture, the transfiguration is surely meant to echo the baptism of Jesus, when his identity as God’s beloved son is revealed. We might also notice a foreshadowing of the Crucifixion. Today Jesus is on mountain, with two prophets next to him, and three male disciples as witnesses. On Good Friday, Jesus will be on a hill, with two criminals next to him, and only women as witnesses.
As I said last week, this is a hinge moment in the church year, a turning from one season to another, one mood to another, and it can stir up in us feelings of how fleeting everything is, how swiftly we move from one season to the next. Lent is only a few days away, after all, and some of us have only just boxed up the Christmas ornaments and tucked them away until next year.
Before we move into that next season, though, I think it’s worthwhile to pause here and ponder the lessons of the season of light that is ending. We tend to think of light as an unambiguous symbol of goodness, safety, and truth, associating it with words like illumination and enlightenment. There is more to it than that, though.
Our own experience can teach us that sometimes light reveals things we would rather not see. Have you ever taken a flashlight and peered behind a sofa or under a bed that hasn’t been moved for ages? Most of the time all you find are dust bunnies and a few lost coins, but occasionally ickier things are revealed, and you wish you could just flick off the light and pretend you never saw that mess. Because now that you’ve seen it, you must do something about it, right? When we didn’t see it, it wasn’t a problem. But now we see it, and so it becomes our responsibility.
I read an article recently that reminded me that just because something is invisible doesn’t mean it is missing or absent, although the human brain is so attuned to visual cues that sometimes we disregard the reality of thing we can’t see. As we try to become more conscious of the connections between what is seen and unseen, it might help to remember that whether something is visible or invisible, in light or in shadow, depends in large part on where you’re standing.
We experienced this dynamic so vividly in the year 2020. The twin traumas of the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd and all that represented came at many of us like an enormous flashlight, revealing the ugly truth about ongoing issues of racial and economic disparity and injustice in our country. But for some people, there was no surprise, no revelation.
If you have lived under the sway of racial inequity your whole life, finding out that populations of color fared worse during the pandemic, regardless of socio-economic status, was hardly shocking. If you were working as an aide in a hospital or driving trucks for Amazon, there was no surprise in seeing our health care system strained almost to collapse or realizing that being an essential worker did not necessarily mean that there was a social safety net in place to stop you from falling through the cracks.
For some Americans, what was revealed about our country in 2020 came as a shock, while for many others it was as if the rest of the world was catching up to things they had known forever. Where you stood, what experiences you had had up to that point, largely determined whether the fault lines in our country came to you as a revelation or not.
We are now living in the aftermath of that collective trauma and trying to find out what it means to live with both fewer illusions and fewer certainties. Time after time we bump up against situations that are “unprecedented,” and find ourselves in “uncharted territory.” All of this certainly gives me a lot more sympathy for Peter in today’s Gospel! His inability to figure out the right thing to do or say when he was up on that mountain with Jesus feels all too real to me. Having your close friend transfigured and shining like the sun in front of your eyes, while long-dead prophets appear beside him in the flesh, certainly counts as an unprecedented moment and uncharted territory, even for people who have been hanging around this miracle-working rabbi for a while now.
How many times in these past few years have you experienced that sense that you don’t know what to say? I feel it most acutely when I am trying to talk about the climate crisis and racial injustice, and especially when I am trying to make the case for how inextricably linked those two realities are. Much more mundane situations can leave us feeling speechless, afraid, and inadequate as well. When you are with someone who has suffered unimaginable loss, or someone who is facing a very bad diagnosis, or someone who is angry with you about something you’ve done or left undone–those can be times when words fail us, and we don’t know what to say.
In the end, what we say at moments like this is probably far less important than what we do. Three disciples all saw the face of God and love up there on the mountain. Words failed James and John completely, who apparently said nothing. Peter, meanwhile, said precisely the wrong thing. Making fun of Peter is too easy. What we might do instead is put ourselves in his shoes, and then ask Tracy Chapman’s prophetic question: Would you change? This is the question that prophets have been asking for generations, and that the very life and ministry of Jesus, as well as the world we live in today, continue to ask again and again: Would you change? Would I change? Would we change?
Poet and artist Jan Richardson speaks of the same kind of hope for transfiguration in her blessing called “When Glory.”[i]
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.
Amen.
[i] Copyright Jan Richardson from Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons. janrichardson.com
