Transfiguration

Tomorrow is Transfiguration Day, which falls on a Sunday this year. In the Gospel Reading we read of Jesus transfigured before his death. The Rev. Ken Kesselus' sermon for tomorrow (written for the Episcopal Church's Sermons That Work series) connects the readings for Transfiguration to the fact that tomorrow is also the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima:

August 6, 2006 reminds us that sixty-one years ago flyers of the U.S. Army Air Corps dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan—a profoundly dramatic event that forever changed the world. This cataclysm released such energy that a blue sky was transfigured into a blinding white light of an intensity never before witnessed...

This is an extreme, dramatic example of how we on earth can treat on another, how fearful we can become when we are threatened, how easily we can forget why we were created, despite what God desires and longs for us to become. It illustrates how easy it is for us to pervert the energies God has created...

Today’s Gospel, however, reminds us of a deeper reality—that God insists always on having the last word. The dazzling, blinding white light cast on the mountain declares that God insists on transfiguring hell into heaven. God will not let the hell of Hiroshima that we speak of be the last word. God will not let the selfishness and inhumanity of nuclear annihilation win out...

As we remember August 6, 1945, always the image of the mushroom-shaped cloud comes to consciousness. But Christians who remember that August 6 is the Feast of the Transfiguration know, too, that another cloud overshadows the mushroom-shaped one. It is the cloud of the mountain from which the voice of God reminds us that Jesus is God’s chosen one to whom we must listen.

The full text of the sermon is online here: Transfiguration Day