This morning’s Gospel story, the story of the Transfiguration, is theologically rich and complex. It’s told in the three synoptic Gospels, in Matthew and Mark and also in Luke, which is the telling we are reading and hearing this morning. We always read the story of the Transfiguration at the end of the season of Epiphany and right before we start the season and long wilderness journey of Lent. The Feast of the Transfiguration, which is today, is always August 6, and so sometimes it falls on a Sunday and sometimes it doesn’t. This year it does, so we’re hearing this twice on Sunday mornings. And I think it’s interesting to hear it at this point in the year and in our journey in the liturgical year, trying to understand what the Transfiguration meant for Jesus and his disciples, trying to figure out what the Transfiguration means for us today and for the future.
Today’s Collect is so beautiful, expressing that hope “when we are delivered from the disquietude of this world, that we may behold Jesus in his glory,” as the disciples did on the mountain so many years ago. But I also feel like that we see Transfigurations all the time, every day, if we look for them, if we listen for Transfiguration the way God said, speaking out of the cloud in a loud and frightening voice, “Listen.”
Transfigurations are those moments when we see the world differently, when our assumptions about someone or something are upended, moments when the ordinary fades away and for a few moments, we see glory. Shirley, our deacon, preached on the Transfiguration last year, and she described those moments as “mountaintop moments,” as what some spiritual traditions call “thin places,” when a veil is pulled back and the divine and the temporal almost touch. They are moments when we feel the presence of God, perhaps when healing or reconciliation or courage is needed and found, moments when people reach across differences, when justice is done, when beautiful things are created, moments when we see hope when we could not see any before, moments when we may have been in doubt, unsure of what to believe, and then, in a moment of glory, our faith is affirmed.
And today’s Gospel is one of those moments. And one of the interesting things about Luke’s telling of the Transfiguration that we don’t find in Matthew or Mark is that it begins in prayer. Jesus, Peter, John, and James have gone up on the mountain to pray. They sought God, and God reached back and brought along Moses and Elijah – this divine, dazzling, surreal response to prayer, to the prayer of the faithful. And furthermore, that prayer and the Transfiguration that was witnessed, was communal, was shared. Jesus’ appearance changed – his face and his clothing shone, dazzling – and for a few moments, the disciples saw Jesus not as something or someone different, but as he truly was and is – dazzling, glorious, even a little frightening. God spoke out of a cloud; Peter suggested building houses for all of them, always kind of an interesting moment; and then, suddenly, it’s just Jesus again, just a man, their friend, not dazzling, just real. So the Transfiguration is not about a change in who Jesus was and is, but about a change in how we perceive Jesus. His disciples then and today saw him for the first time, in his humanness and in his divinity up there on the mountaintop.
We see Transfiguration all the time.
And while I was thinking about everyday Transfigurations this week, I thought of the monarch butterfly. Those beautiful – dazzling – orange and black creatures that are probably familiar to many of us. The monarch starts out as a tiny striped caterpillar, first greenish, and then it develops those stripes, and then when it is just 9-14 days old, it builds a chrysalis, a house, a little green bundle like a cocoon, and disappears inside it for a week or two and then finally pushes its way out, its appearance completely changed – transfigured. It emerges as a butterfly with glorious, strong wings. It becomes exactly what it is created to be.
And the monarch butterfly’s transformation we may have all witnessed. I don’t know about you all, but perhaps you were in an elementary school class where you had caterpillars, and they formed chrysalises, and then you watched and waited for those butterflies to emerge, and you wondered, is this the day? Is this the day!?
In watching that life, that change, we learn how God’s creation makes places for beauty and growth, and the metaphor of the monarch butterfly becomes a lesson for our lives in lots of ways. First it reminds us that every created being is beautiful, that our gifts may sometimes seem hidden from ourselves or from others, but with nurture and patience and sometimes even struggle, they will come to light. We, like the monarch butterfly, are capable of transfiguration – and we, like Christ’s disciples 2,000 years ago, can be witnesses to transfiguration, to those moments of glory. Laurie Brandt Hale, a writer and professor at Augsburg University, writes, “Seeing Jesus differently means seeing oneself and others differently too.” We are all caterpillars, and we are all butterflies, metaphorically.
But there is more to Transfiguration than that, and perhaps more to the lesson of the monarch than that. For instance, Jesus appeared in glory at a time when things were starting to move. Just days before, he tried to explain to his disciples, that his work and their work wasn’t going to be easy. It might be dangerous. He was preparing to be persecuted, arrested, and killed. He knows what’s coming. And he is warning them that they could be as well. He tells them just before this, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.”
The monarch butterfly does not transform or transfigure simply to change from ordinary to glorious (though that is a wonderful thing), but it does so in order to live out what it is created to do. The monarch’s story doesn’t end with its release from the chrysalis as a butterfly. The monarch hatches, emerges, and over the course of a few weeks, lays eggs, gives birth to more monarch butterflies. And each generation over the course of a summer only lives a few weeks until the very end of the summer and the very last generation of monarch butterflies in one season, and then they have the really hard part. That generation of monarchs migrates. They catch the wind on their wings, the air currents and the thermals, and they can travel as far as 3,000 miles, those tiny, fragile, beautiful orange and black butterflies. They can’t survive the cold up here, so they go south. And as they travel, at night they gather in trees together, to keep each other warm, and then in the morning they fly again. They winter in Mexico and other places south, and then they turn around and come back. And when they fly north again, into the warmth of spring they look for the very first milkweed plant they see, and they stop and lay their eggs, and then they end their life, giving life to others.
In witnessing Jesus’ transfiguration, we see more clearly the lessons of his miracles, the profound love which shaped his birth, life, death, and resurrection. We see what he was created to be and what he was created to do and the lives he was created to nurture and bring forth. And I believe that we also, along with his disciples, take that lesson to heart and recognize that we are being transfigured for our own work. We are called to live into whatever we are created to be, just like the monarch, whatever that is – to teach, to parent, to grandparent, to heal, to sing, to counsel, to plant gardens, to cook meals, to coach, to build houses, to nurse, to be a neighbor, to be a friend, to volunteer, to write, to make art, to forgive, to pray.
And we may not always do it right. The story that follows this story tells of a father coming to Jesus and saying, please could you come heal my son? I asked – I begged your disciples, and they couldn’t do it! And Jesus, maybe a little bit exasperated, says yes and he does, but recognizes that we may not always be perfect at this work, but we listen.
On the mountaintop, we hear two instructions. One is to Pray, and one is to Listen. In praying, we invite the presence of God, we look for glory, we open ourselves to transfiguration. Prayer is an invitation that works both ways. When we pray, we reach out to God, and God reaches back.
“This is my Son, my Chosen,” God said. “Listen to him!” And in listening, in following the Transfigured Jesus, in paying attention to the life of love that he chose, we find ourselves and each other transfigured, living into our purpose, growing our wings for the journey, flying together, and nurturing new life along the way. Amen.
— The Rev. Cara Ellen Modisett, Curate, Trinity Episcopal Church of Staunton
Transfiguration Sunday, August 6, 2023
Reading: Luke 9:28-36
