Last Sunday after Epiphany 2026

THE REV. E. WAYNE ROLLINS

 ​ The days between the Feast of the Epiphany and Ash Wednesday are a time of revelation of who Jesus is. The first one comes when travelers from distant lands show up and present gifts. The last one comes with a story of Jesus leading three close friends up a mountain where they witness him in conversation with two giants of their faith—Moses and Elijah. 

These two represent the law and the prophets, the foundation of our ancestral Jewish faith. If you look back at their personal histories you’ll find two leaders who were sometimes imperfect in their own faithfulness, yet here they are. The fact that they are present is another revelation, that being life beyond, or after, if you will, death. 

Part of that may be that there is no witness to the death of Moses. He just wanders away after giving a bunch of former slaves some final words before they cross into a land of promise. And, more dramatically, Elijah was swept up in a chariot of fire as his successor looked on in amazement. Did something similar happen with Moses? We won’t know until we possibly get our own one-on-one time with him. 

Today’s revelation of who Jesus is might be a bit more difficult to explain than a disappearing liberator or even chariots of fire appearing in the sky. How do we explain the process of tranfiguration, a term sometimes translated as metamorphosis? That is the Greek word used by Matthew. 

We might be tempted to resort to words like “magic” or consider some type of secret ritual. But those attempts stem more from our own desire to control or express our enlightened rational ways of thinking. 

Just before Christmas I read a book by Richard Rohr that described what he understands about a minute particle called “neutrinos.” Fr. Rohr writes of these as tiny particles of light found throughout the universe and in every living thing. As we preach and teach of the “light coming into the world” during this time of year, it’s easy to translate that into the presence of our Creator in everything that is, and in all that lives. 

It’s a bit more complex than that, as you might imagine. Yet, consider that in the one whom the Gospels say referred to himself as “the Son of Man” the possibility that the cosmic Christ could embody all that lives isn’t out of the realm of theological and Christological study. 
So before I dive completely into esoteric language in an attempt to describe the indescribable, let me redirect. 

I receive a lot of mail offering different avenues to church growth. It seems there are a great number of disciples of marketing ready to take a credit card number. Most of them urge us to spend much time (and money, of course) using their amazing methods to transform the numbers of our membership. They want us to name all those wonderful things about ourselves to let everyone know just how wonderful it would be if they would come and be just like us.

It’s the equivalent of “let us make three booths” except with skee ball and cotton candy. The trinkets wouldn’t be all that different, though.
Today isn’t about who we are, or even who Moses, Elijah, Peter, James and John are. It’s about who Jesus is, and even not just about who Jesus is for us. Who Jesus is goes way beyond our language and our attempts to explain it.

Yet, here we are in the time after the time when we are to start telling the story of our witness of who Jesus is. That story is always personal before it becomes universal or cosmic. And the language most suited to the telling of that story is often silence, for the change created in us after our encounter with the cosmic, risen Christ, will be unmistakable when witnessed by those who knew us “back then.”
Even if we were baptized shortly after our first diaper change and were then raised in a community of the faithful, an encounter with the one whose transfiguration we hear about today defies explanation. That’s especially true when we consider that we, too, are to be transfigured into his eternal life when life as we know it changes from our present journey into being in Christ’s eternal presence.

We cannot make even a glimpse of transfiguration happen, nor can we claim it for ourselves. It is to be witnessed by others as they see what a glimmer of the light of love makes possible in all our lives. When it all comes together, when all the ingredients given to us in our journey as disciples of the crucified Lord form a new creation, it’s just possible that the unexplainable transfiguration of creation itself will become the place where the Beloved is heard and seen.
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It’s time to tell that story, and, if necessary, to use inadequate words.