Grace to you and peace from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

It's been longer than I care to say now, but I remember during my undergraduate days at Earlham College a concert by James Taylor's brother, Livingston Taylor. He was quite good. He had the same smooth and lyrical tone that earned his brother such fame.

His warm-up singer, whose name escapes me, was fun. And I remember clearly one of his ditties, written by his own hand, called "There's a Tunnel at the End of the Light." Cheerful thought, huh?

It's not what one expects to hear, of course. We're used to hearing the reverse: There's light at the end of the tunnel. Rather than hope, this fellow was expressing the hopelessness and frustration that marks so much of life. I remember it resonated with that group of college students—working hard to learn, to discover who we were, to be accepted, to forge an identity and life.

A tunnel at the end of the light. It's an image that turns our thinking upside down, as does the gospel.

After all, I have enjoyed speaking with you in my first sermons here about how I see the light of the Spirit growing among us, how God is at work in the life and ministry of St. Thomas Lutheran Church. I am continually amazed at the energy, gifts, and commitment that you possess. I am repeatedly surprised at how rich is the life of this congregation, with many engaged groups and a multitude of well-considered ways of supporting one another in spiritual growth and ministry. I am astounded at your generosity; have you heard about the offer from one of our members to pay for a full-time youth minister for an entire year? It's mind-boggling how richly the light of Christ shines here. And we are now in conversation about how we can best multiply this particular gift into at least a three-year commitment as we look to doing a search for a candidate. If you have your own light to shine on this matter—your own ideas—please, share them!

The light here, as at the Mount of Transfiguration, is bright and dazzling. And yet, having celebrated the growth of the light from Christmas through Epiphany, now grown brilliant in the Transfiguration, we also anticipate that it will be extinguished. In a mere three days, we begin the extended path along which the light grows dimmer, culminating in the death of that light on Good Friday prior to it being re-ignited at Easter.

There is a long and dark tunnel at the end of this light of Transfiguration.

It's almost depressing. But that is not the intent. The intent is to enter fully into Lent—surely one of the most counter-cultural activities of the church. What advertising agency would promote the kind of spiritual practices we advocate in Lent? Prayer. Fasting, Self-denial. Taking on a special mission or ministry. Contemplation of sin and evil. There is no selling these. No one in their right mind would market such things.

And yet, these are essential to our spiritual health. Times for practices that may yield spiritual growth and spiritual depth especially in connection with our sinfulness are integral to the work of Christ in our hearts and lives. For we know, when we are honest with ourselves—and Lent is first and foremost about sincerity—that our lives are not what they ought to be. Sin infects every aspect of who we are. Relationships are broken that need to be healed. Our worship of God becomes mere habit and loses the immediacy of personal need. We avoid taking the time to look into our personal motives, how ethical is our behavior, and how dark are our hearts. And there is far too little attention paid to how the light of Christ might illuminate the ways in which we mismanage and abuse God's good created world and all that is in it.

The tunnel at the end of today's light comes intended not as a burden, but a great and potentially very productive blessing. We are not liturgical masochists. We are people of faith who are working to take all aspects both of sin and of grace with the kinds of seriousness and joy they warrant. We put joy on hold that the gravity of sin may be well considered and so that joy may be restored in all of its fullness.

And that leads me to a final liturgical note. You will see an extended closing this morning. It is a brief service related to what is called "saying farewell to Alleluia." Alleluia is a word we have heard often since Christmas. We heard it in the song of the angels at the birth of our Lord. We hear it at every worship service as we anticipate hearing the good news of God in the reading of the gospel lesson ("Alleluia. Lord to whom shall we go. You have the words of eternal life. Alleluia!"). We have sung it in many a hymn and anthem.

But today is the final day for the Alleluia until we complete our journey through the tunnel at the end of this light and reach the new and even more amazing light of Easter. And so, we bid this light-word farewell. Although in truth, every Sunday is always a celebration of the resurrection—even during Lent, we will make a liturgical and spiritual nod towards the upcoming season of arid spiritual reflection by removing Alleluia from the vocabulary of our worship.

It is not absolutely necessary. We could enter into Lent differently. But we will set aside the Alleluia with two hopes in our hearts. First, that this discipline of liturgy will help us turn our thoughts more helpfully towards the desolations of our sins—against God, against our selves, against one another, and against the earth. There is much to contemplate as we move from this day and look towards the multitude of sins for which our Lord suffered so very greatly and gave up even his life for us. Avoiding Alleluia may give a certain poignancy to these contemplations.

Second, like fasting and other acts of spiritual practice that may help us to focus our hearts and souls, avoiding Alleluia may yield a greater appreciation for the deep joy of that word when it returns to us at Easter. As we bid this word of prayer and praise goodbye at the end of our worship this morning, perhaps you may even then imagine the spiritual sigh of relief that will come upon hearing the grand announcement on Easter morning: "Alleluia! Christ is risen!" along with your response, "Christ is risen indeed. Alleluia! Alleluia!" And we then sing hymns filled with the renewed glory of that declaration. "Jesus Christ is Risen Today! Alleluia!"

Even Lutherans forget what incredible richness is ours through our liturgical traditions. I hope these reminders help you to see just one small part of how the church has refined the ways in which worship may enhance, inform, and challenge our spiritual growth through the years. Knowing something of the fullness of this particular practice, I hope you will join me with great gusto both in our singing and our declarations of Alleluia at the end of today's service.

With that farewell to Alleluia, we enter a tunnel of darkness. This day of brilliant light leads swiftly to the ashes of Ash Wednesday. There's a tunnel at the end of the light, and I'd like to explore one more possibility for that image.

Scripture uses darkness and light repeatedly as a symbol for the absence and presence of God. Moses encounters a brightly burning bush, and when he glimpses God passing by, he thereafter bears a new radiance. The prophet Habakkuk speaks of God with beams of radiance shooting out from the Creator's hand (Habakkuk 3:3,4). Today's Transfiguration text depicts the mountaintop epiphany when Jesus' appearance shone with a dazzling light.

These are examples for us of one of the ways we may think of our calling from God. In the tunnels of life that seem never-ending, in the darkness of this world, the radiance of God's divine light is what we bring to illumine them.

This is also the light that, in the biblical narrative, both looks back and looks forward. There are parallels between the transfiguration and the baptism of our Lord. And there are parallels to the cross.

Jesus' baptism takes place just before he embarks on his successful Galilean ministry. The sound of the divine voice, the opened heavens, the descending Spirit, all serve to legitimize Jesus just as his public ministry is about to commence.

The Transfiguration occurs at another hinge-moment in Jesus' ministry. In Luke 9:21-27, Jesus reveals for the first time the shocking truth of what is to come—suffering, death, and resurrection. After that disclosure, Jesus, Peter, James, and John journey together to a mountaintop for prayer, pausing on the long road toward Jerusalem. Here too the heavens open and a divine voice legitimates this second phase of Jesus' ministry.

At the cross too, prayer precedes—in the Garden of Gethsemane. Heaven and earth are shaken, and the temple curtain is ripped in two—symbols that the separation between earth and heaven, between human and holy, are being breached. And, in the end, a voice—at the cross, a human voice, proclaims Jesus the Son of God.

Even as the Transfiguration echoes the epiphany at Jesus' baptism, it also shares great similarities with the crucifixion. The tunnel of the Transfiguration extends both backwards and forwards. Back to the beginning of Jesus' ministry at his baptism. Forward to the completion of his work on the cross. The light imbues all. The tunnel is lighted from both ends and in the middle.

The text tells us that the three disciples wanted to build three temples of light at the top of the mountain. A transfiguration "booth" would serve as a light at the end of the tunnel, a beacon of light beckoning those squinting from dim tunnel vision or those stuck in long, dark tunnels.

But Jesus rebuked their "light-at-the-end-of-a-tunnel" understanding of discipleship and challenged them to embrace a tunnel-at-the-end-of-the-light discipleship. The church is not called to invite people out of the darkness into the light so much as to bring the light into the darkness. We spend so much time building our booths, our own safe "temples of light"—our church buildings and communities—but fail to spend anywhere near that much time bringing that light into the dark tunnels of this world.

The Transfiguration does not call us to be "a light at the end of the tunnel," waiting for people lost in the dark to blunder their way towards us. The church is to take the light of truth, the gospel and glory of Christ, boldly into the tunnel. There is always a tunnel lurking right outside our ring of light.

The level of tunnel darkness is immense, but the power of the light is far greater. I have always loved that simple statement from the first chapter of John's gospel: "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it." (v. 5)

The light revealed to us today, glorified on the mountain and on the cross that looms before us, is revealed for a purpose. It is meant to give light in the darkness of life's tunnels. It is meant to transfigure hearts with the illumination of gospel truth. It is meant to lighten burdens once unshared and now borne in the community of Christ. It is meant to be used to the glory of God and the benefit of all people.

This is why those four men came down from the mountain. Moses didn't remain on the mountain. Jesus didn't build booths on the Mount of Transfiguration. If they had, the illumination they gained there couldn't have been shared with the world.

Light is not for hoarding. It is for shining. We must not confuse the darkness of the tunnel with the light, nor lose the courage to let our light shine, even as we enter the self-imposed darkness of Lent. Alleluia. Amen.