This final week of our Epiphany sermon series, we conclude in our focus on God’s enduring promises with one that perhaps ties all the others together: God’s promise of wonder. Wonder and awe and amazement is our response to being in the presence of something overwhelming; something that we cannot explain; something we did not make happen. I think of wonder as one of the first characteristics that are present in children, and so maybe it is no accident that Jesus tells us to have faith like a child. Perhaps only when we surrender to wonder in our lives will be nourished in our spirits enough to embrace all of God’s other promises: new life, faithfulness, ministry, blessing, guidance and freedom.
This is also Transfiguration Sunday; the ultimate Epiphany of who Jesus really is; the bridge between this season of Epiphany and the season of Lent. We read about God’s glorious reveal of luminous divinity, but it is bookended by the somber realization of the inevitability of the cross and of struggle. Can we hold the struggles of life in tension with the glories of life?