Luke 9:28-36

   When my father was 12, his family moved from Columbia, California in the Sierra foothills to Stockton in the Central Valley.  His family was poor and he hadn’t had much moral guidance.  His future looked pretty grim when he stumbled into the Stockton YMCA.  There, a Christian youth leader named Woody got to know my dad, and let him know he was valued in a way no one had done before.  Woody arranged for scholarships so my dad could go to Y camp at Lake Alpine in the High Sierras, and eventually invited him into leadership roles.  In a leadership initiation ritual on a High Sierra mountaintop, each boy chose a tree that represented his life.  My dad found a tree that was gnarled close to the ground.  It was probably stunted by heavy snow in its early years.  About four feet above the forest floor, the tree shot straight and tall into the sky.  My dad was 14 years old, and in choosing that tree, he was making a decision about his life, a decision that was made possible by Woody’s love.  It was a decision to love others in that same way.  It was a mountaintop experience for my dad.  It changed my dad’s life, and, I daresay, the lives of the family he’d have one day, including my life. 

   The possibility of transformation is the essence of hope.  My dad wasn’t stuck with the way things had been.  We aren’t stuck with the way things are.  Our nation isn’t stuck with the way things are.  Things can change, the world can change, we can change, and this is the very purpose of the life of faith.  Transfiguration – change, transformation – is both an event in the life of Christ and a process in the life of the world.   

   The event in the life of Christ that we call the Transfiguration is described in this passage in Luke’s gospel; it’s a story we find in Mark and Matthew as well.  We hear it every year on Transfiguration Sunday, the Sunday before Ash Wednesday, which begins the season of Lent.  It’s one of those stories drenched with meaning and truth, and we aren’t supposed to get distracted by whether it’s a factual account of an historical event.  It’s called the Transfiguration because Jesus’ appearance is transfigured, but it isn’t just Jesus who is changed.  The disciples are given an utterly transforming glimpse.  They understand who Jesus is in a whole new way, and it changes everything.  It is, indeed, a mountaintop experience. 

   Encounters with the real Jesus are always transforming.  One pastor writes, “The person who knows Jesus becomes a different person.  A person who has not changed has not met Jesus.  It is that simple.  Christianity is not an intellectual belief, an acceptance of a creed or a doctrine or the particular beliefs of some particular denomination.  Christianity is a personal encounter with God, a personal contact with Jesus that makes life different.  It is a life that is transformed in the home, at the office, at school, and in … personal conduct.”

   But in what way are we to be transformed by an encounter with the real Jesus?  We see vastly different answers to that question in our culture right now.  I believe Brian D. McLaren is on the right track when he writes, “Of the many radical things said and done by Jesus, his unflinching emphasis on love was most radical of all.  Love was the greatest commandment, he said.  It was his new commandment, his prime directive – love for God, for self, for neighbor, for stranger, for alien, for outsider, for outcast, and even for enemy, as he himself modeled.  …  Love decentered everything else; love relativized everything else; love took priority over everything else – everything.”

   Over the centuries, Christianity has been defined by a list of unchanging beliefs, beliefs that denominations fought over, and Christians killed and died for.  How utterly tragic, and how utterly ironic, when an encounter with the real Jesus reveals a life centered on love.  Many followers of Jesus are in the process of shifting from correct beliefs to practicing the ways of love that Jesus taught.  Lent is a season for practicing, training, shifting, even repentance, which simply means to turn and go in a different direction.  Lent, then, is the perfect time for practicing the way of love, trying our best to love our fellow human beings as Jesus loved.  Will we get it perfectly right?  No.  Will we be transformed by it?  Count on it.

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:

John Ortberg, The Life You’ve Always Wanted (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1997).

Howard E. Butt, Jr., “Confessions of a Skeptic,” in The Library of Distinctive Sermons, Vol. 8 (Sisters, OR: Multnomah Publishing, 1998).

Brian D. McLaren, The Great Spiritual Migration (New York: Convergent Books, 2016).