The year I graduated from college I went to Chicago to try to find a social work job. There was no such job available and so I worked as a waitress in Chicago. For a variety of reasons it was a very difficult year, and there came a night so full of grief, loneliness, and dread about the future that, for the first time in my life, I did not know if I had the strength to carry on. I looked into the future and could not see beyond the anxiety and pain that had a chokehold on my usual openness to hope. I paced the rooms of my sublet apartment in the Chicago suburbs most of the night, while my mind hunted for the best exit routes out of misery, until it was time to get ready to board the commuter train into the city for my 6:30 am shift at Nick's Snacks, Grill, and Fountain. I dragged myself into my uniform and headed for the train station to catch the train; captive even in despair by a work ethic that said, "If you're not dead or too sick to walk you have to be at work on time."

As I was trudging my way toward the station I saw the most spectacular sunrise I have ever seen – wild splashes of purple and rose and gold all around me like a strange, wondrous rainbow. And something shifted inside me. There are no words adequate to explain the shift in perception I felt … how hope regained a tiny foothold and there was a sense of being, for a few moments, held in a loving embrace. This sense of powerful, loving presence, which I felt was God's presence, did not take away my troubles by any stretch of the imagination. I sensed, even in those brief comforting moments that they would not last, and there was a part of me that made fun of myself for being nudged closer to hope. At the same time, I felt that there was something trustworthy in those fleeting moments. Not enough to make things okay, but enough to make things endurable; enough to trust the voice inside that said, "Hold on. This pain that chokes off hope is not all there is. This season in your life is not all there is."

I have tried in the best way I can to describe an experience that, in the end, resists my best efforts. The poet T.S. Eliot once wrote these words about words:

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place;
Will not stay still.

I have hardly ever told this story, largely because "words strain, crack and sometimes break under the burden … decay with imprecision … will not stay in place." What I experienced on that long ago but still remembered morning cannot be accurately captured in words. But I reach for them anyway because I need them, imperfect as they are. Words make it possible to tell the story; to bear witness to the light that the darkness will not overcome.

Have you had experiences that you could never find the perfect words to describe, even to yourself? Have there been moments when something happened that transformed – that "transfigured" – your life?

It may be a blessing that Transfiguration Sunday, which has so much to do with the transformation of the human capacity to perceive, falls on Valentine's Day this year. Those who have ever fallen deeply in love know that one sees differently when one falls in love. "Did my heart love 'til now? Forswear it, Sight. For I never saw true beauty 'til this night," says Shakespeare's Romeo. Love transfigures perception.

Love transfigures perception. For this reason it is often said that love is blind. It is certainly true that the "dazzlement" part of falling in love can get in the way of seeing clearly because the present moment can become so captivating that it's hard to look past it. I once knew an engaged couple who seemed to have no common values or hopes for their lives, only an intense mutual need that made it hard to look realistically about what they had to build on as a new family. Caught up in their intensity of feeling, it was hard to look beyond the wedding and the honeymoon to the pots and pans and countless negotiations of daily life that would await them on the other side of their mountaintop romantic high. Sometimes I think that the hymn we are singing at the end of our service, "Swiftly Pass the Clouds of Glory," should be required singing at most weddings.

The "dazzlement" part of love can get in the way of seeing clearly what is beyond the moment. But the opposite can also be just as true: that love helps us to take notice – to perceive clearly the heart-stopping beauty or power in what we might otherwise pass by or sleep through; love can remove blinders. One of my favorite accounts of parish ministry is Pastor Heidi Neumark's book, Breathing Space: A Spiritual Journey in the South Bronx. She has a gift for inviting her readers to see the South Bronx and the people of Transfiguration Lutheran Church through lenses shaped by a deep biblical faith. She never covers up what is ugly and frightening about the forces of destruction at work where there extreme poverty and oppression. Yet just as powerfully as she portrays these powers, she also lifts to the light the strength and resilience that is present in her community as well; the surprising ways that grace illumines and transfigures life together.

One of these stories has to do with Transfiguration Sunday. Neumark describes going over to the church after a huge snowfall on the Saturday before Transfiguration Sunday. When she gets there she remembers that she has not arranged for someone to bring flowers for the Sunday service. She consoles herself that the stalky poinsettias left over from Christmas will suffice and that the flowers probably do not matter so much, anyway. And then Ben comes into the church with two enormous bouquets of yellow orchids, daisies, white carnations, and small, pale, purple flowers. Ben is a parishioner who is unable to find steady work, but that week he had been hired by the local flower shop to work on Valentine's Day and the day after. Then they didn't need him anymore and let him go, but he begged to be allowed to work an extra day and be paid in flowers. He worked 12 hours to bring flowers to church for Transfiguration Sunday. In recounting that experience Neumark said it was like what St. Augustine once described as being an alleluia from head to foot. "That's how I felt," she said, "a song from head to toe!" "How could anyone not love being allowed to be a pastor in this place?" she says of a place and people who are written off by so many.

When Luke tells the story of a moment of dazzling glory up on the mountain, the story is bracketed on both sides with more earthy and fearful realities. Before they head up the mountain, Jesus tells his disciples that the road they are taking will lead to Jerusalem; that before there is rising to life there will be dying. Before there is glory there will be rejection. Before there is resurrection there will be the cross. Come along, he invites, but know that it is no magic carpet ride I am offering – whatever I reveal in the way of glory is going to be revealed at the epicenter of human need and agony, not above it or beyond it.. "Those who want to save their life will lose it and those who lose their life for my sake will find it." These are the "sayings" Luke (and Matthew and Mark) tell us come before Jesus takes Peter and John and James up on the mountain.

Something happens on the mountain that is so hard to put into words that Luke tells us that Peter, John, and James were completely silent about all that they had seen "in those days" – telling the story only later, in the light of resurrection. When the witnesses later tried to put the experience into words, their words connect with other cherished memories of God's transforming power. It is no accident that it was Moses and Elijah Peter, John, and James saw with Jesus. Moses went up on the mountain and so did Elijah, and God spoke and acted in ways that changed life and were forever remembered. At the end of his life, Moses is said to have climbed Mt. Nebo to look out at a land he would never be able to enter … a destination promising freedom and wholeness, toward which he had led his people for 40 years. He got to see something on that mountain that made it possible for him to depart his life in hope, trusting the future of his people to God.

When Jesus went up on the mountain to receive strength and assurance for the journey ahead, Luke lets us know that Jesus was helped by those who had gone before him up the mountain and through the wilderness. As Elaine has reminded us … Martin Luther King, whose constantly-threatened life filled haunted him with premonitions and fears about death, said in his last great speech that he had been there, too, on that mountain. As he made his testimony, he called on the memory of people who knew the story of Mt. Nebo to convey his confidence in a God who is trustworthy and who will see freedom strugglers home, so matter how treacherous the journey may be.

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place;
Will not stay still.

Yes. That is what happens with words. But actions and the stories that arise from them endure and help us remember the words. It is possible that the story I was taught as a child about the rainbow that appeared after the horror of flood helped me to envision that long-ago sunrise as a rainbow. It is possible that the memory of hearing the familiar words of Psalm 30, "Weeping endures for the night, but joy comes in the morning" prayed throughout the years of my youth, evoked the memory of a promise I was challenged to trust. But what is even more likely is that the actions of the people who told me the story and prayed that Psalm made the vital difference. Their faithful lives showed me how faith endures the night and trusts what we are not always able to see. It was their lives in the valley that made the difference.

Neumark says it better than I can. " … living up high in the rarified air [of the mountaintop] isn't the point of transfiguration. It was never intended as breathing space for the precious few; never meant as a private experience of spirituality removed from the public square. It was a vision to carry us down, a glimpse of unimagined possibility at ground level. When Peter proposes construction, he doesn't get the permit: "A cloud overshadowed them … then a voice came from the cloud that said, 'This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him.'" And Jesus took them down. Way down …

When Peter and the others came down the mountain, they found a father and a child gasping for life. But Jesus rebuked the unclean spirit, healed the boy, and gave him back to his father. And they found transfiguration.

And so it is. When the disciples of this Bronx church unlocked the doors of their private shelter and stepped out into the neighborhood, they did meet the distress of a community convulsed and mauled by poverty, corruption, and crime. But they also discovered transfiguration as a congregation in connection with others. 'Transfiguration' behind closed doors existed in name only. The glorious reality was outside in the most unexpected places …

As Neumark says, "Listen again to the father: 'I beg you to look at my son. He is my only son.' His words echo those of another, 'This is my only Son, my Chosen; listen to him.' The voice on the mountain and the voice in the valley are one and the same." Amen.

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