Everything I read this week about the Luke passage was a warning to preachers. Don’t let people associate this with something ordinary. Don’t let people think anything like that happens now! Don’t be literal! Don’t explain! Be especially careful of kids. One book listed questions children might have and said, “Don’t try to answer them.” I knew I was I in trouble when I realized those were my questions. All of which left me wondering, what is the point of the Transfiguration, putting it in three of the four gospels, if we are supposed to only have questions about it? The preaching police may be on the verge of busting me for breaking union rules, but I’m going to risk it anyhow.

Preacher’s union rules say, “Don’t ask questions you can’t answer.” But the point of the Transfiguration is mystery and awe. It is an event wholly and absolutely different than anything else. Technically, it is what’s called an “epiphany.” It’s a God event, about glory. We get a hint of the terrifying holiness of glory with the pairing of the trans-figuration story with the one about Moses coming down from the mountain and scaring the liver out of the Israelites. No one can explain what happened, but humans require the transfiguration’s glory. Not for ourselves, of course, but knowing there is God’s glory is essential for how we live. We find meaning for our lives in God’s glory, which hinges on what theologians call “the creative tension between transcendence and immanence.” Transcendence is Biblish for God’s holiness beyond our comprehension—God on a pedestal.

Immanence is Biblish for God’s nearness and intimacy—God living in our hearts. Both are present in today’s story. In the transfiguration, Jesus—fully human, fully divine—literally embodies God, both transcendent and immanent. Jesus isn’t “reflecting” God’s glory like Moses, he is God’s glory. The disciples experience awe and mystery, knowing who Jesus is in a new way, which changes who they are in relation to him.

We need mystery and awe. The parts of life we don’t “know” inspire terror in us. We can experience a sense of panic when life events raise unanswerable questions. We might have an answer emergency. Why did my mother die? How did I get this sickness? Why wasn’t I accepted into this program? What did I do wrong? How can I fix it? If we can explain it, it feels like we can control it. If we’ve got an answer, we are not a failure. Epiphanies—God mysteries like the Mount of Transfiguration—tell us that there are things we can’t explain and we can’t control. And that’s OK.

Is that true? We hate it when we can’t explain. How can that be “OK”? So much of life can only be lived through. It is mystery that saves us from believing we are in charge. It’s a community-maker. Not that “misery loves company.” The awe of being together in the place of no answers makes space for healing. Sometimes, all we have is questions. Why? How? What next? How soon? But there are times when there is no explanation, times when just sharing the question together is all we can manage. Sometimes we need the witness of others who have seen the mystery to know that “reasons” are different than “causes.” A broken leg may be caused by a fall from a tree, but the reason you fell from the tree may be much more complex. The reason may be a rotten branch or a bear chasing you or feeling so bad about being chewed out for stealing cookies before dinner that you were reckless.

It is so hard to live with questions to which there are no satisfying answers. Why have I been rejected? What caused my cancer? Will I ever get well? What did I do to be abandoned? It was the custom for the desert fathers and mothers in the very early Church to give their disciples unsolvable dilemmas, unanswerable questions. The purpose of the dilemma was not to come up with a solution. Rather, the purpose was to give the disciple room to change. When the disciple entered the dilemma personally, entered the mystery and fruitful darkness of the question, the disciple shifted. The “answer” developed out of that shift. The perfectly maddening thing about this exercise was that it was always some really mundane, ordinary thing at its heart. One story is of a disciple required to water the monastery’s vegetable garden from a spring located at a great distance, using a bucket with a hole in it, even though there was a well nearby with a perfectly good bucket. There is more modern story is about a recovering alcoholic, finally getting her life in order, living in a wonderful new place.

The only flaw in her life was that a rat had moved in. The rat really bothered the woman. To her it was an invasion, a violation of her new life. She enlisted the help of the landlord, hired pest control, brought in consultants, but the rat eluded them all. Week after week she complained to her counselor about this rat, until the counselor finally snapped, “I think it’s your rat.” She was shocked at this judgmental outburst and left in tears. The next week she was back with the counselor, bright and optimistic. She had acknowledged that it was, indeed, “her rat.” As her own understanding shifted, she owned the problem, and she could trust the mystery in her dilemma. In that trust she came up with her own solution.

Mystery is at the heart of all things that call us to grow. This week I was in a meeting with a grandmother who had just returned from the funeral of her 7-year-old granddaughter. The grandmother told the heart-rending story of the child’s unexpected death while she shared photos. Kylie, the granddaughter, was born profoundly disabled. She had never learned to speak, could sit only with assistance, and was only just beginning the physical therapy necessary to learn how to scoot around in a walker chair. As my companion and I shared in the grandmother’s grief, we realized we were on sacred ground. Kylie had never contributed great works of art or poetry to the world’s treasure of culture. She had barely been outside the house or care facility. Yet, to look at her photo, to hear her grandmother tell her story, was an epiphany as much as the story of Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration. The mystery of Kylie was that, without the distractions of talents and potentially valuable contributions, all we could see was God’s grace. Her life wasn’t about “there but for the grace of God . . .” Her life showed the mystery that, even in limitations, God’s grace is present. It is raw grace, uncomfortable and severe grace, but it is grace. Talking with her grandmother I realized that it isn’t a matter of explaining or making sense of the “why” of Kylie’s life and death. It was simply embracing the sacred life that had been given. Simply recognizing the human and seeing through it to the divine.

We need the unexplainable, the awe and mystery, to put ourselves in our proper places. That’s why Luke ends the story of the Transfiguration with disciples who cannot accomplish a miracle but a Savior who can. We can’t get to that place if we are stuck in the rut of needing explanations and reasons. We need mystery to get to joy. The Transfiguration is not about “holier than thou” and “self-righteous.” It is about human life with a dimension that transcends the here-and-now. And in transcending that, we embrace the grace that God offers us no matter who we are or where we’re at.