Transfiguration

This is a sermon I gave Feb 15, 2026 on the topic of the transfiguration. The readings I am refering to are Exodus 24:12-18; Psalm 2 ; 2 Peter 1:16-21; Matthew 17:1-9

For that one moment, ‘in and out of time’,
On that one mountain where all moments meet,
The daily veil that covers the sublime
In darkling glass fell dazzled at his feet.
There were no angels full of eyes and wings
Just living glory full of truth and grace.
The Love that dances at the heart of things
Shone out upon us from a human face
And to that light the light in us leaped up,
We felt it quicken somewhere deep within,
A sudden blaze of long-extinguished hope
Trembled and tingled through the tender skin.
Nor can this blackened sky, this darkened scar
Eclipse that glimpse of how things really are.

Malcolm Guite

I don’t remember a time when I didn’t have an experience of God’s presence. I think this experience is different for everyone, but I also think that believers – in whatever God or gods – have something in common. And that is the sense that there is something more than the material world. A sense of immanence. It comes like a sudden realization of deep beauty, the gorgeous colours of a sunrise or sunset, the stars reflected in a peaceful lake. It can also come from those around us – the unexpected kindness of a stranger, the unconditional love of a close friend, or even witnessing one of these, can gives us a sense that there is something more.

It is this sense of something more that draws us to God, and it is this sense of something more that this week’s readings address.

I particularly wanted to look at these stories through the lens of Karl Rahner, a theologian whom I have been studying. He believed that every soul born into the world is always already graced and always already wounded. Being already graced means that we are always and everywhere oriented towards God. Being always and already wounded is the legacy of original sin. I chose this idea because it already begins to take us out of the trap of thinking in a linear way about the stories we encounter in this week’s lectionary.

In our lives there are moments not only of immanence, but also of liminality – thresholds where we meet paradox: where opposites no longer oppose each other but strangely mingle. They are moments of revelation– where God allows the veil that covers this wounded world to pull back just a little. This glorious reality is already there; it’s just hidden from us because of our woundedness.

It’s not always true that the lectionary readings have a clear relationship to each other, but this week, it was easy for me to make connections.

The first reading invites us up the mountain, as God invited Moses. The mountain represents a threshold; an in between space: it is earthly, but reaches towards heaven. It is made of rock, and yet it soars. The reading invites us, as God invited Moses, into the fire of His presence – burning and yet nourishing, so we can ourselves become a threshold –  the threshold between the sacred and the profane. C.S. Lewis famously said, “we are not bodies with a spirit, we are spirits with a body”. I would take it further and say we are spiritual bodies. The division between body and spirit is a false dichotomy. None of us can be just one or the other – the two are paradoxically and strangely mingled. We ourselves are thresholds.

Out of the fire of God’s presence, Moses receives the tablets of the covenant. A covenant of love between God and his people. The covenant is also a threshold, a liminal space between the wandering in the desert and the entrance into a future shaped by God’s love. The path from chaos to vocation. In this moment Moses and the people of Israel are forever changed.

As we move into Psalm 2 we see another juxtaposition of opposites: the psalmist imagines nations in turmoil – but that turmoil is set against the background of God’s already established reign. Not something that is to come – but something that already exists, though it is hidden from us. “You are my son. Today I have begotten you”. We look around at a world in chaos and torment, and we can’t see God’s glory – but the psalmist wants us to know that it is there.

When we come to Peter’s letter we have another perspective: he confirms the eyewitness nature of the encounter. This was not a dream or a metaphor, this was real. And he succinctly interprets the meaning of the event for Christian life: “You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.” He invites us to stay in that in-between state: in this world, of this world, but lit by the glory of God’s kingdom.

By the time we approach the Gospel reading, the stage has been set. We can now see how this story is grounded in prophetic experience through the parallels between it and the Exodus story. We have the two mountains: Sinai is the seat of the creation of the covenant -and this holy mountain is where the promises of that covenant are fulfilled, not with laws or tablets – but with a Person. Moses’ face shines with glory because he has seen God, Jesus face shines with glory because he IS God. It is the same glory. Moses and Elijah appear with Jesus, making the connection to the Old Testament explicit. The voice of God echoes the psalm – “This is my son”. And this all happens before Christ’s passion. The Kingdom has always been here, is here now, and is also coming in the future. It is the hinge moment in Christs mission. Everything before was leading to this moment, and everything after leads down to the Cross.

The witnesses are Christ’s disciples. They bring all their woundedness with them as they ascend the mountain, but God lifts the veil and reveals to them the true nature of the Messiah.

I want to say a word about Peter and the building of the tents. On the surface, this is a little obscure, but the word Peter uses that is translated as ‘tents’ is actually sukkot – the same word that is used for the Feast of Booths. This feast was an ancient pilgrimage feast that celebrated the fact that God dwelt with Israel. It is an eschatological feast, that is, it anticipates the time when God will dwell among us in His revealed form. So wanting to build ‘tents’ is a profoundly Jewish liturgical response to the experience, which underscores the meaning of the eternal kingdom of glory as revealed in time.

The coming of the kingdom is not a distant promise. Our hope does not need to depend on an uncertain future. God’s Kingdom is here now.

If this world that we live in is wounded, as Rahner suggests, and as we can daily see in the news, the transfiguration is God giving us back the world he intended for us. It is not an escape from history; it is the revelation of a new history, a true history. It’s not a magic moment – it is the truth of history as God sees it, breaking through the fog of our inherited distortions.

For Karl Rahner, we live in the tension between that wounded history that we inherit and the redeemed history that Christ inaugurates. “Grace does not happen in isolated instances here and there in an otherwise profane and graceless world… The immanence of grace always and everywhere does not make salvation history cease to be history, because history is the acceptance of grace by the historical freedom of human beings.”

This is not just a suggestion to think positively – It is a profound challenge. Not just to see God’s glory in a beautiful sunset, or an act of mercy, or in our friends and loved ones – it’s to see God’s glory in the ragged homeless person on the corner, in the neighbour that we are always at odds with, the colleague who undermines us at work.

I think of times that I have been very aware of God’s Glory shining through.

I have a vivid memory from my university days of meeting a group of nuns who had just come out of cloister. They had spent most of their lives isolated inside their monastery, doing nothing but praying. They were perfectly ordinary, indeed unimportant women that no one had ever heard of. I don’t know what I expected when I met them, but I was unprepared for the sheer luminosity of their presence. They literally glowed with joy in the love of Christ.

Our challenge is to remain open. The invitation is to be willing to be changed. Not to be afraid to live precariously in the in-between place between this world and God’s glory. That yearning, that sense of something more beyond the merely material is a true signal, beckoning us forward – it is in fact God’s grace, our orientation toward him and we can trust it.

And more recently as I followed the group of 20 Buddhist monks who walked from Fort Worth to Washington, spreading peace and love and generosity as they walked – gathering it up and growing it – I saw another glimpse of God’s glory. If we are alive to it, God reveals himself to us all the time.