why Peter was right, and we're wrong, about the Transfiguration...

     I'd like to descant for a moment on why I hate sermons about the Transfiguration of our Lord.
     In many western communions which observe liturgical calendars, today is indeed the Feast of the Transfiguration. It's also hard upon Ash Wednesday and thus the season of Lent. Priests and pastors in those communions which observe liturgical calendars feel compelled to connect this feast with the impending season of ascetical deprivation (otherwise known as 'giving up something for Lent'). This is a wise homiletical and exegetical intuition, but how to make that connection? 
     How fortunate that Peter is an actor in the pericope. 
     Peter, you see, is always helpful. In this case, after the great vision of the Transfiguration of our Lord, with Moses and Elijah in attendance upon Jesus, Peter says 'Lord, it is good to be here,' and then lays out his plan for how they could in fact stay right there for all time. It's a good plan. But Peter, dear reader, is universally supposed to be a rather affable moron. This is his homiletical and exegetical role. And thus he provides the perfect pretext for bringing Lent together with the Transfiguration of our Lord.
     It's simple. When Peter says 'Lord, it is good to be here', and then lays out his plan for how they could in fact stay right there for all time, we are supposed to find this an expression of his affable dimwittedness. The preacher will latch on to this, and say, 'Yes, like [dimwitted] Peter, we would like to stay on the Mountain Top [more about Mountain Tops in a moment], but alas, we must come down off the mountain and walk the valley of Lent.' Then there's some such nonsense about how God doesn't like it when we ascend to him, but comes to us in the thick of death and so on etcetera et al.
     Of course, that's precisely what God does, but I see no evidence that any ascent to him is forbidden us. In fact, he does seem to favor Mountain Tops for all the significant encounters in scripture. That we must in fact go back down the mountain has more to do with the fact that in our current condition most of us would in fact starve to death than with the character of God. What's more, the fact that God usually meets folks on the Mountain Top to send 'em on their way with a mission again has more to do with the condition of this world full of stiff-necked boneheads than anything else.
     What I'm saying is simple, that Peter was precisely right, it was and is good to be on that Mountain Top with Jesus. Perhaps in our haste to leave that Mountain Top, to go down into the thick of death and so on etcetera et al, we have missed something. Perhaps this haste is itself a symptom of sin and rebellion, the very sin and rebellion that renders penitential, ascetic fasts like Lent necessary in the first place. For it seems to me that this haste to come down off the Mountain Top manifests a desire to flee from the presence of Jesus, who is God incarnate, and get on with the work we've decided is important and urgent. 
     Note again that rarely is the season of Lent commended to us as a time of ascetic discipline with the end of clearing out the passions that keep us from fuller communion with Jesus. No, Lent is all too often commended as a time of action in the world. Indeed, we are encouraged to 'give stuff up' so's we can do more and give more to others. It is, to be sure, a fine and Godly thing to give ever more to the poor and the hungry of the world, but all this activist furor often becomes a fine way of shunning Jesus.
     Yes, my friends, Peter was on to something. Contemplative prayer; stillness in the midst of our panicked world; fasting in community as training for freedom; meditation on scripture; eucharistic devotion - these are the practices of Lent as much as if not more than the giving of alms to the poor and hungry. All the fasting and other mortifications are only there to open us more and more to our dependence upon ever closer communion with, and contemplation of, our Lord in whom and through whom we also have communion with the Father in the Holy Spirit. Lent is, in short, a longish practice of remaining right there on the Mountain Top in the presence of the transfigured Jesus. So again, Peter was precisely right, for there is nothing better, nothing we need more, than that.