Running up that hill

Rev. Paddy Cavanaugh, Last Sunday after Epiphany, Year C, 3/2/25

Readings: Exodus 34:29-35 (Moses on Mt. Sinai), 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2 (Removing the Veil), Luke 9:28-36, [37-43a] (The Transfiguration)

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, amen.

Today is the last Sunday of the season of Epiphany, which is a season focused on helping us see the ways that God shows up for us tangibly in the world. It begins with the first Epiphany experience, when the Magi visit the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Christ child after His birth and it ends with this mysterious event known as the Transfiguration, which we hear of today. Now before I get into the Transfiguration, I want to say that it’s always been fascinating to me to think about sacred geography; that is, where spatially God shows up for us. Throughout scripture you’ll notice a common pattern of God revealing Himself to us in two specific places – deserts and mountaintops.

Now, in a theological sense, deserts and mountaintops are really opposite extremes when you think about it. Deserts are harsh, low places of isolation, scarcity, and solitude. In scripture deserts are often employed as a literary device to mirror outwardly the inner landscape of those who find themselves wandering there. Take for example the Israelites, who wander in the desert for forty years, wondering if God has abandoned them, or Jesus who is tempted by Satan in the desert before he enters Jerusalem to be crucified.

Then, on the other end of the spectrum, we have mountaintops. These are high places which convey a sense of awesome closeness to God. Literally and figuratively, they change our perspective of the world by drawing us up and away from the commonplace smallness of daily life and reorient our view to a horizon that is vaster and more majestic than life as we know it on the ground. Thus, it’s no surprise that a mountaintop is the setting in which the disciples Peter and John see Jesus for the first time, transfigured as who he truly is – the Son of God. It is a moment of awe and exaltation.

Now for most of us, the majority of our lives are spent somewhere between deserts and mountaintops. Between the extremes of desolation and exaltation. And don’t get me wrong, God is no less present to us in our quotidian life. However, it’s been my experience that humans are more inclined to either seek or to see God in during those high highs or low lows of life, than we are when things are simply normal.

So whether you find yourself in a desert, or on a mountaintop, or somewhere in between this morning, I have good news for you. God is eager to meet you in this very moment. And in fact, sometimes the desert and the mountaintop moments are closer than they might appear.

Our Old and New Testament lessons are both prime examples of this. In Exodus, the Israelites have been wandering in the desert for decades now and have been wondering for some time if God is ever going to lead them out of this terrible place and into the Promised Land. In their desperation, some have abandoned the faith and turned to other gods to save them. Then, in that critical moment when hope is in the balance, God calls their leader Moses up to this mountaintop to renew His covenant with them. After communing with God directly, Moses’s once ashen face becomes shining with God’s glory, which is then reflected upon the people, restoring their hope that God never faltered from His plan to save them.

Then, in Luke’s Gospel, in the passage immediately preceding another mountaintop moment, Jesus foretells of his suffering and death to his disciples. It’s important to remember that at this point, the disciples had already given up everything familiar to follow Jesus, and now, they are told by the man whom they believe to be the Messiah that he is going to be executed like a common criminal. Surely, like the Israelites in the desert, this caused some of the disciples to wonder if they have been led astray, for what kind of a Messiah dies? And if he does, does that mean that they are risking the same fate by following him? As if anticipating these fears, Jesus then takes Peter and John up Mount Sinai where He is revealed in the Transfiguration as who he truly is. More than a kindly teacher or a prophet, Jesus is the Son of God. And if Jesus is then Son of God, then surely there is something better in store for his followers than deserts and death.

These two passages are mirror images of one another, and they both speak to the power of Transfiguration – of God’s ability to reorient our sight from a low place of desperation to a high place of confident hope, where we can see a horizon which leads to victory.

Now truthfully, there are times when that mountaintop seems out of reach. Or even if we can see the mountain, perhaps we have been walking in the desert for so long that our legs don’t have the strength to carry us up. When that’s the case, I can tell you that we always have a darn good hill. And that hill is right here. This altar is a holy hill at which transfiguration happens reliably for us at every single Eucharist.

And every single time Rev. Shearon and I celebrate the Eucharist from behind it, our gaze is fixated upward and outward at that window right behind you. Turn around for a moment and take a look at it. Do you see what that is? That’s the Transfiguration. And when we are celebrating the Eucharist, I often imagine an invisible golden string connecting what’s happening in this bread and wine to what the disciples are witnessing happen in Jesus. These elements are transfigured into the real presence of the Son of God before us. We might not always perceive it in the way that the Moses and the disciples did when they saw God face-to-face, but if we open our eyes and our hearts wide enough, we might just catch a glimpse of that mountaintop from this hill.

And if we can climb up this hill to catch a glimpse of Jesus, then we can make it to the next hill. And if we can make it to the next hill, then we might just find ourselves a little closer to that mountaintop, and from that mountaintop we can then see that at the periphery of the desert which once seemed so vast and consuming, there is a lush and verdant garden, where streams of living water will wash away the dust from our tired bodies, and Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is waiting to receive us with radiant love.

So come, climb this hill with me another day and rest in God’s glory. Amen.