PSA 19 February 2012

Ken Howcroft.  “Transfiguration: transforming the way we see”. The story of the Transfiguration is not about Jesus changing from something he wasn’t into something else. Jesus was always filled with the glory and the love of God. What the story is about is the change in the way the disciples understand Jesus, the way they see him and recognise what God is doing through him. God says “If you want to hear me speaking, listen to him”. And the first place we hear Jesus speaking is not through some mystic new communication, but in his words recorded in the New Testament.  Yet somehow we do not want to pay much attention to the words of Jesus, and we do not really want to see what God was doing in Jesus and still is doing in Jesus in the world. It is as if the social conditions, the ways of thinking of our age dim our eyes, put curtains across our understanding, says St Paul. But God has said “Let light shine out of darkness”. God therefore can light a light in our hearts, the light of the love and glory of God that you see shining in Jesus, which as you respond to it and accept it, starts to glow in your own life, in your own heart. And other people will start to hear God speaking through you, will start to feel God loving through you  - and you probably won’t even know that it is happening. The Transfiguration is a transfiguration of us. May we all be committed to be followers of Jesus and start to glow with the love and the glory that we see in Christ. A Sermon for the Sunday before Lent. The readings were 2 Kings 2.1-12; Mark 9.2-9 and 2 Corinthians 4.3-6.