Transcript
Shine, Jesus, Shine!
First Baptist Richmond, March 2, 2025
Transfiguration Sunday
Luke 9:28-36
Now about eight days after these sayings Jesus took with him Peter and John and James and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightning.
When I do premarital counseling I often say that what all of us are looking for in life is someone who knows everything about us and loves us anyway. But getting to know another person is a process; it takes time.
It might start on some enchanted evening when you see a stranger across a crowded room and feel that little spark of interest that makes you ask, “Who is that?” You might find out everything you can from secondary sources until you have to know for yourself and work up the courage to ask that girl out. And then you might take her to a nice restaurant and tell her only the most flattering things about yourself, because you want her to like you. And if she wants you to like her she does the same. You might as well read your resumes to each other.
But on the second or third date you might begin to get a little more honest. You might take her out for a greasy hamburger and tell her about one of those times when things didn’t go your way. You might tell her about that thing you tried that didn’t work out. And if she’s interested she may begin to tell you some of the same things about herself. It’s a process that involves taking the risk of revealing something about yourself and then waiting to see if she can receive it. If she can, the level of intimacy goes up, the level of trust goes up. And if that
happens often enough you might look at her one day and realize,
“She’s the one.”
I say to that couple I’m counseling: “If you’re at that place, that place where you know everything about each other and love each other anyway, it’s probably a good sign that you’re ready to get married. But if you’re not at that place, if there’s some big secret you haven’t shared yet because you don’t know if the other person will be able to receive it, then by all means do it before you get married. You wouldn’t want to find out on your fifth anniversary that you were married to a Russian spy.”
That process of revealing yourself to someone in the hope that they can receive the truth about you reminds me of what happened for Jesus and his disciples. They weren’t there at his baptism, not in Luke’s Gospel, and even if they were, they may not have heard the voice that identified him from the beginning as the Son of God. That message appears to be intended for Jesus and Jesus alone. The heavens are torn open, the Spirit flutters down in the form of a dove, but the voice of God is little more than a whisper: “You are my Son, the Beloved; in you I am well pleased.” Still, the Devil seems to have overheard it, and in those 40 days in the desert he comes to Jesus again and again saying, “If you are the Son of God then do this, or this, or this.” Jesus withstands every test, and comes out of the desert full of the Holy Spirit.
He went to his hometown synagogue and said, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me.” He went down to Capernaum and cast out an unclean spirit. He went to Peter’s house and healed his mother-in-law. By the end of the day he’d healed everybody in town. The next day he preached from the bow of Peter’s boat and afterward told him to put out into the deep water to see if they could catch any
fish. Peter told him it wasn’t any use; they’d fished all night and caught nothing; but at Jesus’ word he did it and caught so many fish the boat was sinking. He fell on his knees and said, “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” In other words, he got to know something about Jesus he hadn’t known before, but he was able to receive it, and Jesus was able to receive him. He called Peter to follow him.
Over the course of the next few chapters Jesus cleanses a leper, heals a paralytic, calls other disciples, confronts the religious authorities, teaches the crowds, preaches the sermon on the plain, and in all of this the disciples are getting to know who he is. Even so, every once in a while he does something so astonishing they have to ask themselves all over again, “Who is this?”
That’s the question we try to answer in the Season of Epiphany: “Who is this?” Not only for the disciples but for ourselves. Who is this that comes to the Jordan for baptism? Who is this who turns water into wine at a wedding? Who is this that calms a storm on the Sea of Galilee? Who is this that shines like the sun on the mountaintop? For the disciples it’s a process of gradually getting to know Jesus until they realize that he is the one, the one they’ve been waiting for their whole lives. Up there on the road near Caesarea Philippi Jesus asked them what people were saying about him but then asked, “What about you? Who do you say that I am?” And Peter said, “You are the Messiah!” Which was true, but there was one more thing Jesus needed to reveal to Peter before he asked for his full commitment.
About eight days later Jesus took Peter and James and John up on a mountain to pray. He prayed long and hard, and late that night, while his disciples were struggling to stay awake, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. Imagine that you are Peter, looking on that scene. You see
Jesus as you have never seen him before; you feel the little hairs stand up on the back of your neck; you realize that he is so much more than Israel’s Messiah. And then, suddenly, there are two people you recognize as Moses and Elijah, shimmering with Old Testament shekinah, talking to Jesus about his impending departure. It’s the most astonishing thing you’ve ever seen.
You don’t know what to do, you don’t know what to say. You hear yourself blurting out some nonsense about building three shelters but just as you do a massive light-filled cloud covers the mountaintop and a voice that sounds like thunder says, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” And then the cloud is gone. Moses and Elijah are gone. There’s no one there but Jesus alone, but Jesus in a way Peter had never seen him before.
What do you think that did to him? What do you think it would do to you? Because this is the hope of Epiphany: the hope that as we work our way through these stories about Jesus—even from the distance of two thousand years—we might come to see him for who he really is, and that we might see him as the One we’ve been waiting for all our lives.
What about you? Have you spent enough time with Jesus to feel that you know everything about him and love him anyway? Or perhaps I should say, have you spent enough time with him to feel that you know everything about him and love him because because of what you know? Are you ready to say “I do”?
That voice on the mountain told the disciples that they had been following none other than the Son of God, and then it commanded them to listen to him. Not Moses, the lawgiver, the author of the Torah. And not Elijah, the Prophet, the one who had called down fire from heaven. No, Jesus, of Nazareth, a former carpenter who became an itinerant rabbi. “This one is my beloved Son,” God says.
“Listen to him.”
I heard a sermon on this passage last week by Preston Clegg, Pastor of Second Baptist Church in Little Rock, Arkansas. When he got to this point he said, “God wants the disciples to listen to his beloved son. Not Moses, important though he may be. Not Elijah, important though he may be. God wants them to listen to Jesus.” And then he said, “Not preachers, or politicians, or podcasters, beneficial though they may be. Not authors, or lecturers, or monastics, faithful though they may be. Not the Apostle Paul, or Mark Twain, or Oprah Winfrey, popular though they may be. No, this is my beloved Son; listen to him. It’s not that we don’t listen to those other voices,” he said, “but that amidst all the voices we listen for the voice of God’s beloved, which then becomes the measure and correction and affirmation and end of all the other voices. ‘This is my beloved Son; listen to him.’”i
I think about how divided we’ve gotten as a nation these days, even those of us who call ourselves Christians. On Facebook I can see one church member arguing with another, saying, “You’ve got it all wrong!” “No, you’ve got it all wrong!” I can tell what’s happening. They’re listening to different news sources. And these days those sources present such different perspectives on the news that you can’t tell what really happened. I talked to my friend G about thisii and he said, “It’s true: the division in our nation is often exacerbated by the fact that people consume different news sources, and those sources frame information in ways that reinforce their audience’s existing beliefs. This is classic confirmation bias—the tendency to seek out and give weight to information that confirms what we already believe while ignoring or discrediting information that challenges us.
Barack Obama once said that the people who watch FOX News and the
people who listen to NPR are “living on different planets.”iii He knew which planet he was living on, but he also knew that he and his fellow Americans didn’t just hear different opinions on the same facts; often, they were presented with different sets of facts altogether. G says, “Conservative and liberal media outlets prioritize different stories, emphasize different aspects of events, and interpret those events through their own ideological lenses. As a result, people live in what some have called ‘echo chambers’ or ‘filter bubbles,’ where they are rarely exposed to alternative viewpoints in a meaningful way.”
But then G said, “This is where the challenge for the church—and for preachers like you—comes in. Jesus wasn’t interested in reinforcing the biases of the people around him; he was always challenging them. He confronted the Pharisees, corrected the disciples, and even told parables that made people uncomfortable because they upended their assumptions (think about the Good Samaritan, for instance, which challenged Jewish listeners to rethink their view of their enemies). If people today are trapped in ideological echo chambers, how can the gospel break through and call them to a higher allegiance—one that transcends partisan divisions?”
I said, “That’s a good question, G. What do you think?” And G said: “One way forward might be to encourage your congregation to listen differently. Instead of simply seeking affirmation, they could practice curious listening—approaching different perspectives with humility and a genuine desire to understand. That doesn’t mean abandoning discernment, but it does mean being open to the possibility that we might not have the whole truth. After all, truth isn’t owned by any one political party or news outlet. As Christians, we believe that Jesus is the truth, and his truth calls us beyond partisan loyalty to a kingdom vision where
justice, mercy, and love define reality. So yes,” G said, “I think you’re absolutely right that our divided media landscape plays a big role in our divisions. But the good news is that the gospel is powerful enough to break through those divisions—if we’re willing to listen.”
If we’re willing to listen.
Isn’t that exactly what today’s Scripture is calling us to? Isn’t God saying to those disciples on the mountaintop, and to us, “Hey! Now that you’ve gotten to know my Son, now that you’ve come to see he’s not just a great teacher, not just a miraculous healer, not just a wonder-working prophet, not just the long awaited Messiah, but also my Beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased, will you listen to him? Will you listen to him above every other voice in the world? Will you say it out loud, in front of me and everybody, that for you, he is the One?”
Preston Clegg ended that sermon I quoted earlier by saying, “This seems so simple and fundamental that I hate to bring it up, but when I think about why I am a Christian today it’s not because of the ethics of our faith or the institutions that buttress it, for they bear the fingerprints of frail creatures of dust as well. It’s not because of the holy text, for all religions have a holy text. It’s not because of the grand tradition of our faith, which is equal parts beautiful and disturbing. When I think about why I am a Christian, when all that fog has cleared, it’s just Jesus left standing there and the voice saying, ‘This is my beloved Son; listen to him.’”iv
—Jim Somerville © 2025
