Read Mark 9:2-9
Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them anymore, but only Jesus.
As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.
This Sunday we celebrate Jesus’ transfiguration on the mountaintop. For the next three days, Pastor Margo offers devotions on this extraordinary moment in Jesus’ life recorded in the books of Matthew, Mark and Luke.
Today’s devotion is from the poet Francine Marie Tolf
https://www.christiancentury.org/article/poetry/transfiguration-north-minneapolis.
(Fun-fact-to-know-and-tell: a fuller was one who cleansed cloth and made it “fuller”. The practice died out with the modernization of the industrial revolution. In Roman times, fulling was conducted by slaves working the cloth while ankle deep in tubs of human urine. Urine was so important to the fulling business that it was taxed. Stale urine, known as wash, was a source of ammonium salts and assisted in cleansing and whitening the cloth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulling).
Transfiguration in North Minneapolis
Blinding white, the sudden wings beat
in front of my windshield, as if
the gull had dropped from a horizon
of sapphire sea and chalk-bright cliff
instead of this dreary March sky
hanging low over a parking lot edged with a Dollar Tree, a Taco Bell,
black-crusted snow.
I watched him ascend, dazzling white,
such as no fuller on earth could bleach. . . .
wings that might have flown straight from the womb
of the first day.
Pray: Transforming God, bless our imaginations to conceive of such a sight as Jesus’ blinding white clothes and transformed face. Amen.