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.
- 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. ↩︎
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