This is the sermon I preached on March 2, 2025, which was the Feast of the Transfiguration. The lectionary was Judges 4:5-10, Psalm 46, 2 Peter 1:16-21, and Luke 9:28-36.
In today’s Gospel we have a story about liminality. Liminality is the term for when the veil between heaven and earth is lifted, so that what you experience in that moment transcends your typical experience here on earth. We have this when we have Peter, James, and Jesus are on the mountain and suddenly Jesus’ appearance is transfigured, his glory is made visually obvious to them. And then they see Elijah and Moses. I think if I were to ask you who Moses is, you could tell me a few stories from the Hebrew Scriptures about burning bushes and Ten Commandments, the parting of the Red Sea, and Moses looking across the river after 40 years of wandering in the wilderness but not getting there because it’s his brother Aaron who takes up the mantle when the people actually cross the river into freedom and liberation.
If I were to ask you about Elijah, my guess is it’s not as familiar a story. Elijah, like Moses, brought an understanding of God to the people. He lived nine centuries or so before Christ. He is the man who, among other things, goes to a widow who has next to nothing to eat and says, I want some food. I want some wine.” and she says, “Yeah, well this is all I’ve got.” and he says, “Don’t worry about it. It will be fine.” and, of course, it is. He heals people. He rains down fire on people. In some ways he is as significant as Moses in bringing an understanding of who God is and how God is in the world, even though we don’t know as much about him.
So, we have this liminal time when the veil between heaven and earth opens and Peter and James see Jesus standing with these two great figures in Jesus’ history, these faithful men, and Jesus is talking to them. This is a reminder to us that time as we know it, that space as we know it, is not God’s time or God’s space. God can make things happen. What I think is kind of fun about this story is that Peter, the same Peter who denies Jesus not one or two, but three times, and who later falls asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane at a critical time in Jesus’ ministry, is awake and he gets to experience this.
I was reminded of some times that may or may not have been truly liminal experiences in my life, but I know were times when I have been with people and the presence of God has felt different to me, when presence of God was almost palpable to me. I felt as if only I dared to reach out, I could grab onto something and feel in my hands. Those times happened when I was a hospice and a hospital chaplain. It happened only the day before my mother died when she was clearly starting her journey. There was something that said, “Pay attention to the moment.” There was nothing in the moment before that I was aware that made the next moment different, but the next moment was different. She was able to say that she felt as if she were drifting towards God. It was a moment I didn’t anticipate, and it was beautiful.
I was thinking about that moment as I was reading about Peter and James seeing Elijah and Moses alive with Jesus on the mountain. And I wondered what made the moment for me the same as the moment for Peter, who missed so many other critical moments later in the story. What made that moment different, and what I think makes all liminal moments possible, is that Peter was awake, which meant that he was paying attention.
And I’ve been thinking about that in the context of all that the world is showing us today and throwing at us, when our tendency is to want to go huddle up under the covers and not pay attention, to kind of will ourselves to not be awake in the presence of everything that we’re experiencing. A little bit of confession here: I have come to terms this week with the reality that when I choose not to pay attention to what’s happening in the world, two other things are also happening:
The first thing is that I am in a place of privilege that I can do that, and I’m not sure it’s a place of privilege that I want to proudly occupy. When I can turn my back on the news that people are being rounded up, whether they’re citizens or not, whether they are documented or not – when I can turn my back on that, boy am I in a place of privilege. And again, it’s not a place I want to be, so I am trying to read the news a little bit more, although, quite frankly, it is painful, because privilege doesn’t preclude pain. It does mean that we have options about how, when, and how often we want to experience it.
The other thing that happens is that I don’t get to see, as Mr. Rogers advised, “the heroes.” You don’t get to see God at work, fighting against the things that terrify you, that horrify you, that make your body and your soul so heavy you wonder why you’re getting up in the morning. When you’re not awake to things, you’re not awake to all things.
One of the things this Gospel reminds us is that those liminal times, those experiences of God that are different, those experiences that evoke hope and optimism, that ground us in the reality of God’s love for God’s people, those things happen when we least expect them. But even though we are not expecting them, we are awake to the possibility that they can happen, whether we know it or not. We’re awake to the possibility that God will make God’s presence known to us in a way that we need.
So, whatever it is that we need to get through, whether it’s illness or a political situation, we know that we need God, which means we must be awake. We need to be “woke,” as the Black Lives Matter movement taught us and is now a term that has become such a rallying cry for the right at this point, or Christian Nationalists to say, “But we don’t want you to pay attention.” What Christian Nationalists say woke is a bad thing, what they’re really saying is, “Close your eyes, because if you close your eyes, you can’t see good, either. You can’t see the positive things that are happening around you. You can’t see your own potential to be a part of positive things happening.” It shuts us down and, I’ve said it often from this very place, that God always invites us into relationship, but God doesn’t ever insist that we accept the invitation.
If we want to be able to see that we are invited into deeper relationship with God, which does mean taking care of other people whether we know them or not, whether we like them or not, whether we agree with them or not – because that loving your neighbor thing is out there. If we are to be able to accept the invitation, we have to be able to see it in the midst of everything that is happening, the good, the bad, the horrifying, and just the good old, mundane and ordinary stuff, because God is in it with us. God is not making it happen, but God is saying, “If you let me lead you, I will bring you to me. You will see that there is hope for a future that is not some far off, after-you’re-dead future, but a future in the next moment, in the next week, in the next month, in the next decade.”
We get to do that. We get to have that, but we must be aware of what’s going on around us. In our second lesson today, from Peter, we had this idea that, “We didn’t get to this place by complicated mythologies.” It isn’t complicated. It’s not magic. It’s the opposite of magic. It’s a fundamental truth about who we are and who we were created to be. We make it complicated when we think we must close our eyes to what’s happening around us, when we think we can only see God and experience in this one little place, in this one little box. God is never in a box.
We make it complicated when we think that God is only present in this kind of thing, or that, because God is always present with us, all the time. It is as uncomplicated as it can be. It requires only that we accept the truth of our belovedness, that we see and accept the invitation into deeper relationship with God, and that we trust the God who has never, ever lied to us or let us down, to be with us and to show us the way forward, even if we don’t understand a single thing about what’s going on around us.
Our faith is about how we respond to the God we cannot define, that we cannot put in a box, that we cannot describe in the ways that we need certainty. Our faith requires that we trust in what we know to be true in those liminal moments. You may not realize that you’ve had a liminal moment. You may not be able to describe it in the way that I describe what I call liminal moments. I ask you all to search your hearts – and maybe you have to search back quite a while, or maybe it will come to you immediately – but search your hearts to remember a time when you thought you could not take another breath, you could not take another step, you could not see a way out of whatever it was you were in, and then remember that moment when you took another breath, when you took another step, and you realized you were no longer in that place you had been. That, my friends, is a God experience. And, if we can all be awake and aware, and maybe looking , although actively looking for God doesn’t always get you to God, for some reason I haven’t figure out, but sometimes it does – if we can be aware of the possibility, if we can try to see our sisters and our brothers as heroes in this, to try to know that there will be some people who are heroes in this, and they may even be us, if we can be aware of that we will get through this. It will be okay, though perhaps not in a way we can predict or describe, but we will be okay because we are never without God. And that’s a hard truth to remember at times when all we want to do is turn off the news, curl up under a blanket, and chant Kumbaya (something I’ve found myself doing).
Be aware. Take care of yourselves in the being aware. We don’t have to subject ourselves to everything all at once or all the time. Be awake. Pay attention. Allow God to give you what God knows you need and more will come.