The Transfiguration of Our Lord
Texts: Matthew 17:1-9;
Ex 24:12-18; 2 Peter 1:16-21
YouTube: https://youtu.be/Gi5din75SrE
Sermon Take-Home Notes
GLIMPSING THE MOST VULNERABLE
IN THE TRANSFIGURED FACE OF JESUS
Diana Butler Bass has been one of my favorite Christian authors for a long-time. She writes with clarity and insight and has helped guide my own sense of conversion from the Christianity with which I grew up. She happens to be primarily an historian by training, which helps us to navigate the dizzying history we are now living. She knows quite a bit about the Great Awakenings outlined in your Sermon Notes. That American history and religious history have often been seen to walk hand-in-hand. They’ve influenced each other quite a bit. And many now crave another Great Awakening to turn around our current spiritual direction as a nation. It would be the Fourth or Fifth Great Awakening, depending on how and what you count.
But what about now? We have become so secularized, could a great spiritual awakening even be a crucial part of our history anymore? How would that work with our spiritual communities shrinking so much? One possible source might be online communities. I’m not sure they will get enough traction to survive if they aren’t also backed up by face-to-face communities. But these online communities seem to offer an alternative to the online social media — currently controlled by billionaires and their algorithms — in order to more democratize communities of choice. One such community to which I’ve come to increasingly participate is called Substack.1 I read and listen to historian Heather Cox Richardson almost every day. One of my favorite ELCA pastors is also there, Clint Schnekloth. And Diana Butler Bass has become a leading ‘voice’ there.
Yesterday, she posted her weekly “Sunday Musings” on the lectionary, relating a time when she was asked to preach on Transfiguration Sunday at the historic church of Jonathan Edwards, leader of the First Great Awakening in America. Much of what follows is from her ‘musings.’2
Jonathan Edwards’ most famous sermon was titled “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” duly noted on the history sign out front of the church. That sermon is popularly believed to have started the First Great Awakening, the series of revivals that rocked New England in the 1730s and 1740s. This is its most famous image:
The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire….
Yes, real ‘fire and brimstone stuff.’ Unfortunately, that’s the Edwards who has come down to us, the father of American revivalism: wailing, gnashing of teeth, and sinners falling down in repentance.
But that’s not how the revival started. Edwards preached “Sinners” in 1741, six or seven years AFTER the great Northampton revival began. When the congregation had begun to fall away from their awakening. And as he preached it, according to Yale historian Harry Stout, the sermon had an “unknown effect.” The congregation appeared indifferent. It does have a “desperate preacher” feeling to it! Let’s be clear about the history: This most famous, or perhaps infamous, sermon was NOT the sermon that started the Awakening.
In 1734, at the beginning of the Awakening, Edwards was preaching on another subject to his parishioners — Light. According to Edwards, light is of God, in God, to God; God “is as the substance of the sun, that warms, enlivens and comforts the world.” He understood light as the Holy Spirit. “Light” was the image of revelation, the inflow of grace, the active, awakening dimension of spiritual enlightenment. Edwards was fascinated by light and had written about it (especially light and rainbows) as early as the 1720s. He more fully explored these themes in 1734, especially in his sermon, “A Divine and Supernatural Light.”
Edwards insisted that we can’t see divine things — the beauty of that which is and surrounds us at every moment — until light illuminates our souls. Indeed, Edwards believed that we don’t even really see ourselves. We can’t see anything that is real, meaningful, beautiful, or just until a divine and supernatural light opens our eyes and flows into our hearts that we might apprehend the deepest realities of the universe. That’s what shook the people in these New England towns to awaken from their spiritual stupor. That’s the Good News that gripped the hearts of those living in these valleys – their eyes were opened. They saw a Divine and Supernatural Light.
Light, the beauty of things, sparked the Great Awakening. And a great spiritual energy pulsed, transforming the lives of many, empowering women to speak and pray in public, surging through communities with an energy of equality and purpose and meaning. Seeing the light made them ask new questions and upend old authorities. People experienced a new, profound sense of personal faith that gave them courage to act differently, form new, more democratic civic and church polities, and seed a new kind of political community that would, eventually, create a new democratic nation.
“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” was a later footnote, preached to the Northampton congregation to “unknown effect.” Indeed, the sermon came at a different stage, a stage when the initial passion of the awakening had begun to subside and people had begun to be afraid of where all this might be leading. And so we might ask ourselves: Why do we remember the spiders and forget the Light?
The Gospel tells a similar story of the Transfiguration – Jesus and his friends go up to a mountain. And there, Jesus changed: “his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white.” Jesus transformed by a divine and supernatural light! And he wasn’t alone; he was talking with others who had been transformed by light – Moses and Elijah. His friends saw him differently, no longer the one with whom they broke bread, laughed, and served. But a vision: the glory of God made visible. The vision – this divine and supernatural light – allows them to hear the voice of God call out, “This is my Son, the Beloved. Listen to him.”
And then they are afraid. We might ask: They weren’t afraid before? You see your friend transformed in light having a chat with Moses and it doesn’t worry you? But Matthew is clear that they really become afraid when they hear the voice. They realized that this was a big serious deal. God was talking to them. It was rather more than they could take. They hadn’t signed up for this. Seeing a vision of Light was one thing. But that the vision rearranges their conception of reality and that God might want them to do something – like really listen to and act on the things Jesus had been teaching them, things like we talked about last week: ‘Turn the other cheek.’ ‘Love you enemies.’ Well, that was another issue. You never know where Light might lead you. If you knew, would you follow? Would you feel afraid?
Heaven knows that we live in a time in need of another great spiritual awakening. I think that those who support the current Christian Nationalism movement are doing so because of a spiritual vacuum in our nation right now. What should move into the vacuum? They feel that supposed Christian leaders should do so. But I’ve been asking for two years in my preaching, what kind of Christianity are we pushing in Christian Nationalism? The kind that was behind centuries of Christendom, when the church allied itself with the power of empire? Isn’t that the kind of power that Jesus, as an indigenous man, was questioning, too? Isn’t that why God’s voice said we are to listen to Jesus? Because the most important step to an awakening of our humanity was to see in Jesus’ face the face of others, especially the face of our most vulnerable neighbors? Because that’s the real core of his teachings. ‘Blessed are the poor.’ ‘I was hungry and you gave me to eat.’ Can we see that transfigured face of Jesus as the face of our most vulnerable neighbors? Which is probably also why Jesus tells his disciples not to tell anyone until they see the Risen Son of Man. They won’t be able to understand Jesus’ transfigured face until they see the face of the Crucified one, the one who takes the place of the vulnerable.
My friends, I do believe that elements of the Civil Rights movement might be the core, or the beginning, of a Fourth Great Awakening. But here’s how and where. To the extent that we listen to Gandhi showing us how to listen to Jesus. To take seriously his teachings in the Sermon on the Mount. Gandhi also represents a crucial feature of Awakenings: a democratizing of religion. As we recounted last week, he was a Hindu following Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount. Gandhi based his movement of nonviolent resistance on listening to Jesus! Living in true love toward each and every fellow human being must be at the center of any new Great Awakening. It’s the kind of thing I think we’ve been seeing in Minneapolis this year. Neighbors of every kind of background coming together to help one another. This is a spiritual thing, right?
What is the Transfiguration that might help bring our nation into a Fourth Great Awakening? I’d like to end with one of my favorite stories, a story about an old Rabbi who once asked his pupils: how can you tell when the night has ended and the day begun?
“Could it be,” asked one of the students, “when you can see an animal in the distance and tell whether it’s a sheep or a dog?” “No,” answered the Rabbi. Another asked, “Is it when you can look at a tree in the distance and tell whether it’s a fig tree or a peach tree?” “No,” answered the Rabbi.
“Then what is it?” the pupils demanded. “It is when you can look on the face of any man or woman and see that it is your sister or brother. Because if you cannot see this, it is still night.”
Siblings in Christ, Jesus’ face shone with the glory of God in the mountain of Transfiguration. But what did it mean? I believe it means that Jesus came, in taking the place of the least of the human family on the cross, to show us the face of every person as bearers of God’s image, God’s glory. Is that the sort of thing we’re seeing in Minneapolis? Neighbor caring for neighbor. A spiritual movement based on seeing divine light in the face of our fellow human beings? Our neighbors? Could the Transfiguration of the face of our neighbor help bring a new Great Awakening? Could the night of human beings seeking to rule over each other, instead of being family to one another, is that finally the dawning of a new day? A new light? Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, February 15, 2026
YouTube: https://youtu.be/Gi5din75SrE
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Notes
1. See https://substack.com/
2. See Diana Butler Bass, “Sunday Musings: Awakenings and Transfigurations,” for February 14, 2026, last accessed at: https://dianabutlerbass.substack.com/p/sunday-musings-8de
