Transfiguration Sunday, Year C

Then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!”
—Luke 9:35
 
…where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.
—2 Corinthians 3:17
 
We have all been to the mountaintop a time or two. We have had those experiences, those moments when we are unusually close to the knowing, the understanding, the awareness of things timeless and enduring and life-giving. Everything else fades away in these instances. There is the one thing, and the one thing only. Perhaps this sense is what the author of the second letter to the Corinthian church was evoking when penning the words: “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”
 
The problem is that these pure moments are so fleeting. The shine wears off. The sharpness of the memory and its confidence fades like a dream. The story cannot be told in polite company because, well, who would believe it? You had to be there.
 
In times of testing it can be especially difficult to hold to the core of who we are and what we believe, the best that we want to be. We have been to the mountaintop. But we live in the valleys. This is where our faith is worked out with fear and trembling. And surprisingly, this is where the Spirit meets us.
 
Enter into worship.
 
Readings: Exodus 34:29-35 † Psalm 99 † 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2 † Luke 9:28-36

About the Art: Theophanes the Greek and workshop. Transfiguration, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=59721 [retrieved February 16, 2025]. Original source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Transfiguration_by_Feofan_Grek_from_Spaso-Preobrazhensky_Cathedral_in_Pereslavl-Zalessky_(15th_c,_Tretyakov_gallery).jpeg.
 
More About the Art: Jesus is represented floating not on the top of the mountain, as he’s described in the Gospels, but above and in front of them. He is superimposed, in a way, on a series of arrow-like vectors, a kind of six-pointed star. And that six-pointed star in turn is superimposed on a series of concentric circles, all of these executed in white and gold, as if he is hovering, almost three dimensionally, off this gold background. (From commentary on The Visual Commentary on Scripture: https://thevcs.org/campaign/transfiguration). 

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