2LA23.    Genesis 12:1-4a.  “The Lord said to Abram: ‘Go forth from the land of your kinsfolk and from your father’s house to a land that I will show you.’  ‘I will make of you a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great.”  “Abram went as the Lord directed him.”  God was commanding Abram to leave his home land, what was comfortable, secure and familiar to make a new life totally dependent on the God in whom he put his whole trust.  He was leaving all that he had in hand for something completely unknown and unimaginable solely on the word of his God.

Psalm 33: 20, 22.   “Our soul waits for the Lord, who is our help and our shield.  May your kindness, O Lord be upon us who have put our hope in you.”

Matthew 17: 1-9.   In Matthew 16:20-23 Jesus tells his disciples that he is the Messiah and furthermore that he must suffer greatly, be killed and on the third day be raised.  Peter rejects that scenario for Jesus; but Jesus rebukes Peter for thinking as human beings think.  The transfiguration takes place soon afterwards in order to assert undeniably the Messiahship and divinity of Jesus.  The presence of Moses and Elijah declares that what God had begun in the Hebrew People was coming to fulfillment in the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus.  God the Father was telling Peter to think as God thinks, since now God’s voice makes known to Peter what God knows, that Jesus is his beloved Son.

2 Timothy 1:8b-10.   “Beloved: Bear your share of hardship for the gospel with the strength that comes from God. He saved us and called us to a holy life.”  We live out our call to holiness in a world that generally rejects the invisible and the spiritual as not being genuinely real.  This requires that we live and act in the strength that only our God possesses and readily makes available to us.  What is visible and material passes away; what is invisible and spiritual lives forever.