Today’s Scripture passage is often referred to as “the transfiguration.” What is it to transfigure? The word implies a change in form, a movement from what is, into something perhaps even more profound. In our Anabaptist Community Bible, which uses the Common English Bible translation, the heading of this passage reads, “Jesus Transformed.” What is this transformation, this transfiguration? Is it merely a change in appearance, or is it something deeper, more profound, a shift that evades words?

As we enter the text, Jesus, Peter, John and James have retreated up, into the mountain for rest and prayer. I can imagine it is quiet, contemplative, the air peaceful, cool, yet charged. As Jesus prays, before his disciples’ sleepy eyes, he undergoes a transformation. The change is physical: his face changes, his clothes become white, electric like lightning. And yet, there is more to this change. Suddenly present are Moses and Elijah, in “heavenly splendor” (Luke 9:30) talking with Jesus, affirming the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy that will be realized through Jesus, in Jerusalem. This is a profound depiction: Moses and Elijah, revered figureheads in the Jewish tradition, have made a post-mortem appearance to affirm Jesus as Messiah. Their very presence validates the person and divinity of Jesus of Nazareth, weaving him into Israel’s ancestral line. Not only do the ancestors declare Jesus’ divinity, but God’s voice speaks into the cloud-covered moment: “‘This is my Son, my chosen one. Listen to him!’” (9:35). As the voice speaks, Jesus is once again alone, in the company of “speechless” (9: 36) disciples. A shocking, radiant transformation has occurred.

Our transformations are not often as radiant as this one. Transformations imply change, and change can be confusing, painful and grief-filled. Even when out of change arises something new and beautiful, it is likely accompanied by the end of something else. We live in the constant cycles of life and death, gain and loss. These are our ever-in-flux realities. This is transformation. This is human existence. Perhaps it is in our own relationships with change that we can empathize with the disciples, moments after the transfiguration, “They were speechless and at the time told no one what they had seen” (9:36).

Our transformations are individual, but they are also communal. This worship series—Interweaving Indigenous Stories—reflects the ongoing transformation of our Columbus Mennonite Church community. As with all human communities, we are ever-immersed in cycles of change, both unchosen and chosen. Our community has chosen particular commitments, that reflect intentional, continual processes of learning, unlearning and change.

As a community, we have committed to be an Open and Affirming congregation, have committed to the Sanctuary movement, to racial justice, to disability advocacy and to paying reparative debt to local Black and Indigenous siblings. A significant aspect of our collective repair work regarding Indigenous siblings and lands has been—and continues to be—transformative truth-telling.

Repair itself implies change and transformation.

As individuals, and as a community of Anabaptists, we recognize the complexity of our familial and communal stories, particularly when it comes to our Indigenous siblings. Our stories are stories of harm, but also of healing, stories of complicity in injustice, but also stories of collective resistance, beauty and hope.

Our stories are no one, single thing.

The transformations that occur as we acknowledge these multiplicities, these complexities in our stories, are deeply spiritual—both individually and communally—and actual. These spiritual transformations lead to actual relationships with human and Earth siblings that are more spacious, more life-giving, more vibrant than what might have been otherwise. Indigenous peoples, Indigenous lands and Indigenous stories have always been, and have always been interwoven with ours. For some of us, Indigenous stories may be ours through ancestry or family ties. The transformative miracle occurs as we recognize our interwovenness in new ways, opening ourselves tothe sacred work of transformative understanding and transformative justice.

Jesus demonstrates transformative understanding leading to transformative justice as he comes down from the mountain to a waiting crowd. The transfiguration of the mountaintop is not the pinnacle of his ministry, but a moment in its ongoingness. As he encounters the crowd, a man cries out to him in anguish, begging for the healing of his only son, who is possessed by a demonic presence. And, Jesus heals him. His healing is both spiritual and bodied, prioritizing the lived realities of the people in his midst. Luke demonstrates that Jesus’ power responds to the forces of the spirit, and the forces of the body. Neither are beyond Jesus’ capacities for response.

We see through this moment with the crowd that the mountaintop transfiguration is not an end, not an arrival. Jesus is en route: into retreat and back toward the people, toward life and healing and toward his own death, through which he will undergo another transfiguration. What might this en route, in-flux, transfigured, healing Jesus extend to us in this moment? We are certainly in a time of societal, global flux, realities that are endangering the most at-risk among us. And yet, Jesus, too, lived in a time of societal, political flux; he would be executed at the hands of the State. He was born into political crisis, as the State declared all people must return to their hometowns and register (or, sign a registry…sound familiar?). He death was a political one, at the hands of Empire. Political chaos is not unique to us, today.

For me, one of the most powerful aspects of the transfiguration story is in the act of transfiguring, transforming itself: Jesus, Divine Jesus, changed. This implies a bodied, shifting being, not a static deity. This transforming Jesus—even in a miraculous, ancestral moment—is a human Jesus. One who transformed in the midst of an ever-changing society. One who responded to human realities. One both transcendent and imminent: God with us.

This is the God who is with us, within and around us: God of transfiguration, God of transformation. This is a comfort in uncertainty, that the God of transformation enables us to transform as well. As we navigate the turbulence of this particular moment, may we be open to the transformations within and around us, open to the grounding, connecting presence of ancestors who came before, and may we continue to return to the crowds after we retreat and restore. May we in this season engage this life-giving spiritual praxis: restore, connect, restore, connect. And, as Jesus did, atop a mountain with a trusted few: restore-in-connection, restore-in-connection, restore-in-connection.

In these transforming cycles of life and death, may we embrace the transfigurations within and among us. Ever in flux, holy Divine.

We are interwoven.