Month: February 2026

Sermon preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on February 15, 2026, Transfiguration Sunday. Based on Matthew 17:1-9, with references to Exodus 24:12-18.

---

Let me situate today’s readings in the story arc. First, the Exodus passage. The Israelites had escaped from Egypt and started wandering in the desert. They got to Sinai, God delivered the Ten Commandments along with a few other rules, and then beckoned Moses up to the top of the mountain. There, Moses would spend forty days in the glory of the Lord, the Shekinah, receiving more instruction while the people waited down in the desert below.

Now, the Transfiguration. The Gospel According to Matthew begins with Jesus’s birth and the visit of the magi. Jesus is baptized and God proclaims that He is God’s beloved Son, perhaps as an echo of Moses’s encounter with God in the burning bush. Jesus begins his ministry of teaching and proclaiming the good news of God’s coming kingdom. Eventually, he says to his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” Hearing wrong answers, he challenges them, “But who do YOU say that I am?” Peter answers correctly: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

Peter gets it, sort of. Right after proclaiming Jesus to be the Messiah, Peter tries to get him to act like other Messiahs. Jesus tells the disciples that he will be killed by the Romans, and Peter says, “God forbid it!” To which Jesus replies, “Get behind me, Satan!” Peter is thinking in worldly ways. He expects a Messiah who will expel the Romans, purify the Temple, and restore the nation of Israel to its former glory. Jesus reminds him that this is not God’s way, that Jesus’s glory and our glory lie on the other side of the cross.

As if to hammer the point home, Jesus takes Peter and his two sidekicks, John and James, up the mountain. Here, a true apocalypse occurs: the divine Truth that lies behind the temporary world we encounter in our normal lives is revealed as Jesus is transfigured into the heavenly being he truly is. Then Peter, and two other witnesses, know that Jesus could do whatever he wants. If God’s plan was to establish God’s kingdom by force, Jesus could call down legions of the heavenly host and lead them into battle.

But that’s not God’s way. As Jesus repeatedly reminds his disciples, his path of glory is through the shame of the cross. He must reveal not only his own divine nature, but also the evil of a world that chooses death, so that he might conquer death once for all. The glory awaits him, but only after the shame.

As suddenly as it began, the transfiguration is over. Time to go back down to the valley. And what awaited Jesus? Incompetent disciples who couldn’t deal with a simple problem. Jesus and the three witnesses come down and find that the other disciples were failing to exorcise a demon. Jesus says, “You faithless and perverse generation!” The contrast between Jesus’s divine nature and the brutal reality of daily life in Judea could not be more vivid, except perhaps on the day of his crucifixion.

And perhaps that scene was better than what awaited Moses. In Exodus, Moses goes up the mountain and enters the cloud, the Shekinah, the glory of the Lord. He is gone for forty days, communing with God directly. No problem—he left his brother Aaron in charge as high priest. Aaron can surely handle things in Moses’s absence, right? Wrong. Moses was gone “so long” that Aaron had no choice but to gather up gold rings from the people, melt them down, and fashion a calf for them to worship. I have to say, that’s not exactly the work of an afternoon. That’s a long, hard task, one that Aaron probably worked on for days or weeks while Moses was away.

Isn’t that the way of things, though? We would rather build an idol than wait on God. We would rather fumble incompetently in trying to do what we think is right than wait for Jesus to work through us. God is “up there,” up on the mountain, or maybe our Sky Daddy looking down from a distance. And so we go away to encounter God, then come back to our daily lives unchanged.

Perhaps that’s why Peter wanted to stay on the mountain. He knew that he could experience God’s presence there, but he wasn’t so sure about God’s presence down in the valley. The mountaintop was a “thin place.” Have you ever been to a thin place? A place where God seemed particularly close? Church camp can be such a place. I have a friend who had an actual divine vision at a church camp when he was dealing with some heavy emotional matters. The combination of the location and the time of his life made him more receptive to God’s message. I haven’t had anything that dramatic, but I often feel God’s presence more acutely when I’m elk hunting. I have felt God’s presence on my living room couch, though, too.

See, God is maybe easier to encounter in a thin place, but God is everywhere. We feel drawn to those thin places—a mountaintop, a river, the ocean, a beautiful cathedral, or wherever you have encountered God in the past. We want to stay there. We want to stay in God’s presence. We want to build a tent for God.

But nothing can contain God. God does not dwell in any particular place, but is always near at hand. God is right here among us, wherever we gather, whether in the sanctuary or a park. In fact, I have my most tangible sense of God’s presence when I am surrounded by people. I truly feel the Holy Spirit moving through me, connecting me to the people around me, when people are gathered in true community, places and events where everyone can be their authentic selves.¹

We want to stay on the mountaintop, but our calling is down in the valley. Moses went up Mount Sinai so that he would know how to change a ragtag group of formerly-enslaved tribes into a nation that would bring God’s light to the world. Peter, James, and John saw Jesus’s divine nature and were touched by Jesus. They wanted to stay right there. But the point of the encounter was to empower them to transform the world into God’s kingdom.

We often think that the point of Christianity is for individuals to come into God’s presence. Maybe here in worship, or maybe in heaven after we die. Sure, that’s part of it. But the real point of Christianity is to transform the world so that everyone would flourish. It’s like the vision near the end of Revelation: no lamp is needed because the divine light of God’s presence is everywhere. So too the goal of Christianity is to create a world where God’s presence is felt by all people, where God enables everyone to flourish.

In every time and place, people are struggling. I visit the Mission weekly and am reminded of all the people who are striving to put their lives back together. We see on the news all the people who are victims of crime, or who are victims of government actions here and abroad. People displaced by war and famine. What we don’t see on the news are all the people who are quietly struggling, with loneliness, with feelings of worthlessness, with unhealthy relationships, with estrangement, with hidden illness and disability. This world is a hard place to live. So many people are languishing—maybe not in deep depression, but not thriving, either.

The work of discipleship is a lifelong calling to remember prophetic words and embody them. It is not enough to read the Bible or listen to a sermon or read a book or listen to a podcast. It is not enough to have a changed mind. You must have a changed heart, a heart filled with love for God’s people, so full of love that you must act to reduce suffering and foster flourishing. To seek out the broken-hearted and those who are languishing and help them to heal, help them to find hope.

I think I have spoken before about Better Ways to Read the Bible, by Zach Lambert. Two of his more-helpful lenses for reading the Bible are flourishing and fruitfulness. In almost every sermon, and hopefully in all that I do, I speak about flourishing. I believe that the kingdom of God is universal human flourishing, and that the point of the prophetic words that we read is to foster that flourishing. But what exactly is flourishing?

Well, the fruitfulness lens helps us. A true encounter with the Holy Spirit, whether on a mountaintop or in a Bible study, should yield fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. If you read the Bible and think that it is commanding you to not love, then you’re reading it wrong. If you read the Bible and think it is commanding you to not be generous, then you’re reading it wrong.

Let’s talk a little bit about peace. There are two ways to interpret this: peacekeeping and peacemaking. The Beatitudes say, Blessed are the peacemakers, not peacekeepers. Suppose there is some conflict that you know about. Perhaps a political disagreement, like what’s going on right now regarding the funding of DHS. The peacekeeping approach is to just not talk about it. People have strong feelings on both sides of the issue, so if you bring it up, people will argue. Better to just keep quiet, right? Wrong. The goal of peacemaking is to resolve the conflict. Bring the issues to the surface and deal with them. Be honest about the root of the problem and work to resolve it. In the case of the funding of DHS, on the surface, it is about the actions of ICE that are in the news. But at a deeper level, it is about a difference in priorities. In this finite world, it is impossible to satisfy everyone’s needs at the same time. So what is our priority? Some people say, take care of your family first, then your community, then your state and nation. Others say, take care of the poor and oppressed first, no matter where they are or where they come from. But there must be some middle ground. There’s an old joke that if you sell everything and give it to the poor, then YOU will be the poor! Or as they say on airplanes, if there is an emergency, put on your own mask first so that you are able to help others. I’m not pretending to have the right answer.

My point is that a faithful reading of the Bible, and a true encounter with the Holy Spirit, will motivate us to resolve these issues, not to hide them behind bland platitudes nor to retreat into warring camps. The work of discipleship is to love one another, and to figure out how to manifest that love. The work of discipleship is to be patient with one another, allowing God to guide us towards reconciliation. The work of discipleship is to be kind, even when others are unkind.

This is hard. In fact, it sometimes seems impossible. But that’s why we go to the mountaintop. That’s why we come together in worship. We need to encounter God’s presence so that we are empowered to transform the world. We need to be filled with the Holy Spirit so that we can bear spiritual fruits. Loving God and loving our neighbor are two sides of the same coin: we love God so that we are empowered to love our neighbor, and we love our neighbor so that we can encounter God’s presence through them.

This week, we begin our Lenten journey by confronting our mortality and our sinfulness on Ash Wednesday. Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return. But today, we encounter the glory of our Lord to remind us of our true nature as beloved children of God who are empowered to reconcile all things to God, one person, one community at a time. Ash Wednesday reminds us that our time is limited, but the Transfiguration reminds us how to spend that time. As you go from here, be empowered by the Holy Spirit to transform the world into a place of universal human flourishing, seeking God’s will for each of God’s beloved children. Amen.

---

1. Some of my most tangible experiences of God’s presence have been at LGBTQ+ Rolla events: Pride, Trans Day of Visibility, and the grand opening of our community center. ↩︎

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Preached on February 8, 2026, Fifth Sunday After Epiphany, at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on Isaiah 58:1-12.

---

We’re in Isaiah again today, but a different section of it. Isaiah’s 66 chapters can be broken down into three parts, chapters 1-39, 40-55, and 56-66. There is some dispute about the division, but there is scholarly consensus that part of the book was written during the 8^th century BCE, when the Assyrians were attacking, as I’ve discussed before, and part of the book was written during or after the Babylonian exile two centuries later. Today’s reading is in Third Isaiah, thought to be written after the Israelites were freed from Babylonian captivity.

Of course, the end of the exile did not mean that everything was hunky-dory. Judah had been ravaged by the Babylonians, Jerusalem and the Temple had been destroyed, and the Israelites were ruled by the Persian Empire. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah talk about the history of this period, during which the nation was re-established and the Temple was rebuilt. The Persians still held ultimate power, but at least the people could return to their homes and worship their God.

So, what kind of society would they build? Apparently, one just like before. The wealthy and powerful were still exploiting their workers. There were still poor, hungry, homeless people in the land. Justice was still withheld from the worthy. God’s people were neglecting their kin, turning a blind eye to their suffering.

And so, Isaiah spoke up. He said, essentially, “Remember all that stuff I told you before we were conquered? Yeah, that all still matters.” The people had rebuilt the Temple and resumed worship. That was a good thing, necessary but not sufficient. Isaiah called them to build a society that would approach God’s designs for humanity. A society where everyone could flourish.

The people were worshipping, praying, fasting, crying out to God. They wanted God to be on their side. I’m reminded of Johnny Cash’s song, “Man In Black”:

I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down
Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town
I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime
But is there because he’s a victim of the times

And I wear it for the thousands who have died
Believin’ that the Lord was on their side
I wear it for another hundred thousand who have died
Believin’ that we all were on their side

America in the 1960’s was, in some ways, no different from post-exilic Judah. There are always poor, beaten-down, hopeless, hungry people in society. There are always people in prison who don’t belong there, either because of their innocence or because of disproportionate punishment. And yet, there are always people who believe that the Lord is on their side as they try to force their will on the world.

In America in the 2020’s, the issue is Christian Nationalism. People who claim the name of Christ, who worship in ways that we would all recognize, and yet whose actions are directly counter to what we understand to be the message of love and reconciliation at the heart of the Gospel. Christian Nationalists are the inheritors of the attitudes of the elites in ancient Judah, who would go to the Temple to give their sacrifices, who would fast and pray, and yet who would also exploit their neighbors instead of loving them.

How can we truly have God on our side? How can we truly draw near to God, or be blessed by God drawing near to us? By being on God’s side, on the side of a positive peace, of shalom, of healing, wholeness, reconciliation, and universal flourishing. There is NO ONE that God does not love. Therefore, as we are called to care for God’s family, we are called to build a society that reflects God’s will: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, freeing the oppressed, and seeking restorative justice that resolves the anger, the hatred, and the economic forces that lie at the root of violence.

We heard this same message from Micah last week:

⁶“With what shall I come before the Lord
    and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
    with calves a year old?
⁷ Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
    with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
    the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”
⁸ He has told you, O mortal, what is good,
    and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice and to love kindness
    and to walk humbly with your God?

Worship is a wonderful thing. Worship is the way we encounter God and renew our commitment to our calling. Worship is the way we connect to people who share our understanding of God’s commandments. Worship is how we demonstrate our gratitude for divine Providence, as we also ask for God’s forgiveness for the ways we fall short of our calling and seek God’s help as we navigate this broken world. Worship is a necessary component of our spiritual journey.

But it’s not enough. If worship leaves you unchanged, or worse, then we have failed as a worshipping community. The Internet is replete with stories about the after-church crowd being horrible to waitstaff at restaurants. I’ll confess to at least one incident where I did not live up to my calling at Sunday lunch. If we think about worship as a way to demonstrate that we are better than people who don’t worship, as a way to mark us as insiders in God’s family, as a way to get puffed up with self-righteousness, then the church has failed. Worship should energize you to do God’s work in the world.

And what is that work? To do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with God. Humbly. Or as Isaiah says, to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke. To share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them. All of these actions and more are necessary to truly be a part of God’s family.

We are not saved because of our good works. We are saved and grafted onto the Vine so that we might be Branches that yield good fruit. If we do not follow through with God’s commands, then what’s the point of being a Christian?

Isaiah’s preaching sits as an important hinge point in God’s message to humanity. Early in Israelite history, the Twelve Tribes were slaves in Egypt. God chose Moses to lead them out of slavery and to the Promised Land of Canaan. In Exodus 6, God commands Moses, “⁶ Say therefore to the Israelites: I am the Lord, and I will free you from the burdens of the Egyptians and deliver you from slavery to them. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great acts of judgment. ⁷ I will take you as my people, and I will be your God. You shall know that I am the Lord your God, who has freed you from the burdens of the Egyptians.” Isaiah harkens back to this foundational message when he tells the people to remove the yoke, to break every yoke that oppresses God’s people. Then he speaks to the coming of Christ with a message that has echoes in Matthew 25: feed the hungry, clothe the naked, loose the bonds of injustice, because when we do, it is as if we are caring for Christ himself. We are all Christ’s siblings, part of God’s family, so we need to care for one another as an act of devotion to God.

And what does the Bible mean when it talks about justice or injustice? So often, we understand “justice” to mean “vengeance.” That is retributive justice. That’s the idea that someone who does wrong deserves proportionate punishment. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life. But as author Louis Fischer wrote, “The shreds of individuality cannot be sewed together with a bayonet; nor can democracy be restored according to the Biblical injunction of an “eye for an eye” which, in the end, would make everybody blind.”

The Bible, particularly the Prophets and the New Testament, promote restorative justice. It is not enough to punish the guilty. One must raise up the innocent. Jesus did not punish tax collectors; instead, they were inspired to make restitution to those they had defrauded. When Isaiah commands the people to “loose the bonds of injustice,” he is seeking a society in which everyone is free to flourish, rather than being held captive by the rich and powerful. It’s not about tearing down the elite, but about raising up the downtrodden. It’s about eliminating the injustice of unfair wealth disparity, of exploitation of the powerless.

Such a society—one in which everyone is free to flourish—would be the kingdom of heaven here and now. It would be an existence suffused with God’s Spirit. How else can we overcome our desire to rule others, to defend ourselves and our property by oppressing those who are outside our circle? Only by the power of God’s love can we, as Branches grafted onto the Vine, bear fruits of the Spirit. And if we do, our light shall break forth. God will indeed be with us. We will BE the Light of the World. God will be with us, to care for us, to protect us, to help us when we are in distress. If we build a society where everyone can flourish, our gloom will become bright as noon.

And then, as Jesus said, we will be like a city on a hill that cannot be hidden. If we commit ourselves to building such a society, we must be willing to shine forth in the world. We cannot be content to hide away in our precious sanctuary, worshipping God with our words and our songs while our actions outside these four walls look more like those who worship the almighty dollar than El Shaddai. No, we must let our good works be light to the world and carry the glory of the Lord to those who are in darkness.

This portion of Isaiah was written about 2600 years ago. Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount and his later lesson about the sheep and the goats and the judgment of the nation were given to his followers about 2000 years ago. Yet the problems they described are still with us today. Each new generation re-invents ways to oppress the powerless, to perpetuate homelessness and poverty, to withhold justice.

Look around. The world is on fire. The interconnected world created to prevent World War III is coming apart at the seams. People are afraid of the government, for good reasons. The US Congress is just barely functional, lurching from emergency to emergency without ever really solving problems. We talk at each other instead of with each other, never really seeking understanding—only dominance. How can we get out of this mess?

The only way is with the power of God’s love. Only by staying centered on Christ. Only by rejecting a theology that sees America as specially blessed and therefore incapable of doing wrong. Instead, we must see America for what it is: the latest flawed attempt to build a society that will enable everyone to flourish. Isaiah told the freed exiles that yes, they should worship the LORD, but more importantly, they should treat each other as the beloved children of God they all were. Isaiah’s message still holds today. Yes, we are called to come together and worship our Savior. But more than that, we are called to love everyone that God loves, to lift up the poor and oppressed, to make a society that enables everyone—everyone—to flourish. We are called to be Christ’s siblings in the kingdom of God, not exemplary citizens of any earthly nation or empire. We are called to see Christ in each person we encounter. Only then will we be a city on a hill, a light to the world. Only then will our light break forth like dawn with the glory of the LORD as our protector. Let us go forth from here, seeing the world as it truly is and working to transform it into the world God intends. Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download