Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Welcome to the Blessed Sacrament Homilies podcast, where our mission is to help everyone recognize and experience the presence of God. We hope you are nourished and encouraged by the Word. Thank you for joining us.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: The Lord be with you and with your spirit. A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Luke.
[00:00:31] Speaker A: Glory to you, O Lord.
[00:00:33] Speaker B: Jesus took Peter, John, and James and went up the mountain to pray.
While he was praying, his face changed in appearance and his clothing became dazzlingly white. And behold, two men were conversing with him, Moses and Elijah, who appeared in glory and spoke of his exodus that he was going to accomplish in Jerusalem.
Peter and his companions had been overcome by sleep, but becoming fully awake, they saw his glory and the two men standing with him as they were about to part from him. Peter said to Jesus, master, it is good that we are here.
Let us make three tents, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.
But he did not know what he was saying.
While he was still speaking, a cloud came and cast a shadow over them, and they became frightened when they entered the cloud.
Then from the cloud came a voice that said, this is my chosen son. Listened to him.
After the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone.
They fell silent and did not at that time, tell anyone what they had seen. The Gospel of the Lord. Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ. For me, the hardest part of being a priest has always been the fact that you have to pick up and move every once in a while.
And I like to put down roots and make myself at home.
And you just get to a point where you're really comfortable and you know most of the people pretty well, and then you're told you're going to move.
Well, I tried to always stay under the radar in order for that not to happen. So my assignments have been fairly long, and I know that's an unfortunate thing for all of you, but you'll have to deal with it. But part of that benefit is you get to be involved in all kinds of stages of people's lives.
Some of the babies you baptized, you also presided at the wedding of the couple.
There are even times where I've had kids in faith formation that I ended up doing their wedding and then ended up baptizing their kids. And it's pretty powerful. You feel like you're a part of their family.
Well, on one particular occasion, at a baptism of a family I was very close to, there was one little problem that happened, and that is the grandfather, who was actually a good hunting buddy of mine, decided he needed to capture the moment with Pictures.
So he was running around, taking shots and moving like this till finally I. I shut my microphone off and said, knock it off, and got him to stop. Well, afterwards, we were at the family farm, and we're having a meal together and talking, and I sat with him having a beer. And I said, pretty powerful baptism, wasn't it? He said, oh, my God, yes. I said, unfortunately, you didn't experience it, did you?
And he kind of sat back in his chair for a minute and he said, oh, my God, you're right. He was so worried about getting pictures of it, memorializing it, that he never participated in it. Well, here we have Peter, James, and John at a moment there with Jesus where something amazing happened. And I'm sure the scriptures don't even do justice to this story of the transfiguration.
And what's Peter's immediate reaction? Remember, he was sound asleep, woke up startled, saw something. Oh, we got to make a memorial of it. Let's put up three tents. One for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.
He didn't even allow the experience to kind of settle into him a little bit. He was so worried about capturing that moment.
And I think. And someday I'm going to ask him that question.
I hope I want to ask Peter if he's sorry he did that.
Because my guess is the whole story of the transfiguration was meant to give Peter, James, and John a powerful experience of God that would give them the strength to deal with what was about to happen, namely his passion and death.
And my guess is if instead of trying to memorialize it, Peter instead just let it soak in, he might have had an easier time with it.
Well, why are we worried about that?
Because most of us, if not all of us, have had moments where God's presence is so profound in our lives that it. You can feel a tingle.
And we got to make sure we just allow it to kind of wash over us and become part of us. Because it's those moments of real faith, it's those moments of God's profound love that give us what we need to deal with the difficult times in life. Because there are going to also be times where our faith is pretty weak, where we might even have doubts. Is this all really true? And it's those profound moments, those transfigurative moments that give us what we need to get past the others.
