So what exactly did the disciples see? What was the nature of this transfiguration that we just heard about? The Greek word that's translated transfiguration is another word that we know of, metamorphosis. What is the change, the metamorphosis that takes place in Jesus on that holy mountain?

Is Jesus, in fact, changed by nature? Or rather, is He revealed for who He really is, the beloved child of God? The transfiguration is an echo. We remember when we heard that other voice, that same voice, when Jesus was baptized, baptized by John at the River Jordan.

And we heard this voice say, this is my son, the beloved with whom my soul delights. So this seems like a really stupendous and obvious spiritual event. And I wonder how we imagine it changes us, how we live our lives. I've been meeting with the clergy of New Hampshire every Tuesday for a Bible study before we preach, and we often ask each other, so why is the Holy Spirit giving us this particular passage in this particular time in our lives, in our world right now, in our nations, in our world's history? How do we love? Even risk-loving in a world that is so full of despair and shadow, masking, so much injustice and oppression, so much darkness. What does this image of God's beloved child, with all of its brightness and brilliance, what does it have to do with us now?

When we see our siblings being treated as less than God's children, even less than human, less than created in God's image? How does our own nature inform and shape our actions and our behavior? It seems to me that the saints that we think of and we are reminded of when we go through the Christian calendar. They always know that they are God's children, or at least they know it enough that they point the way to that special relationship that they have with God.

And they remind us that that's a relationship that we can have too. We're about to speak with Richard Morrisroe, who was a companion of the martyr Jonathan Daniels, who went to Selma and Hainville, Alabama, I think less because they were told you really should go there or you ought to go there or get yourselves to Hainville. But more, I like to believe, out of a sense of their own identity, that they were baptized into the resurrected body of Christ and that they were connected to something greater than who they knew themselves to be. And they were seeking to live out a fellowship and a relationship, a bond with Christ, knowing whose they were and what their destiny was.

Writing about Richard's journey to that terrible day in August of 1965, when his companion Jonathan Daniels was shot dead and Richard himself was wounded, the chronicler Paul Murray asked, how did a 26-year-old Chicago priest come to join a civil rights protest in the Alabama Black Belt? What prompted him to risk his life on behalf of people he barely knew? When I read the lives of the saints, both those that we celebrate on our calendars and those whom I've come to know more personally, I learned that they rarely lived holy lives because they were told to, but because the light of God shone from within their character. And that started out of lives of prayer and with the nourishment and inspiration that comes from knowing that God moves deep within their hearts.

And they don't do that alone, they do that with others. And of course, there's the example of Jesus, who seems to move in the world knowing always who He is and whose He is, where He's come from and where He's going. Here's a passage from John's Gospel that makes that clear. Jesus, on the night before His death, washes the feet of His disciples, not because God said, Go wash their feet, but because He was free to do so.

In John's Gospel, we don't have the brilliantly washed and bleached white garment of the Transfiguration that we heard in today's Gospel. We have another garment. This is the passage. Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands and that He had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off His outer robe, tied a towel around Himself.

Then He poured water into a basin and began to wash His disciples' feet and to wipe them with a towel that was wrapped around Him. What if you and I are like Jonathan, Richard, and Ruby Sales, who was also there on that day. And the countless saints who knew that they have come from God and are going to God are also given a garment, the garment of our baptism into the birth, the transfiguration, the servanthood, the death and resurrection of Jesus. And that garment frees us from fear of humiliation and even death.

And a most horrid death at that. I wonder if that's what it means to live a transfigured life in Christ. Peter, one of those who witnessed both that stupendous moment on the Mount of the Transfiguration and was there at the washing of his feet, which was also a transfiguring moment, speaks of his close bond with Jesus that he gives us in one of his letters. It's the first chapter in the second letter of Peter.

He speaks of our sharing, our participation with the divine nature. He says, His divine power has given us everything needed for life and godliness through the knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and goodness. What we do flows out of the energy of who we are. Our faith is not a matter of rote obeying orders and duty, but of acting out from a deep well of our identity as children of God.

Just last night, I was at a community supper in the cold dark of the North Country in New Hampshire and there were dozens of people being fed not merely with a delicious meal of warm food, but with conversations around the tables. And I thanked one of the organizers and servers for putting on the dinner bell for so many years. And she responded by saying, this is who we are.

She didn't say, this is what we have to do or this is what we should be doing, she said, this is who we are. I think that's living the transfigured life in Christ, where the motivation of our love is much more lasting and enduring and energizing when we tap into that energy of God's love within us that way. So Richard, and so many others who have risked so much—status, reputation, wealth, position, their dignity, even their lives—because they knew, I want to believe, that in Christ they have already died and are already raised. In the end, the shotgun's blast was not the end, but only a means, like the cross of Jesus, to show forth the power of God's purpose of love.

I wonder how that will change us. So thanks be to God for the saints like Richard Morrisroe and for so many others who point the way to a life that goes from strength to strength and from glory to glory in God's service.