[Begin your sermon by scanning your congregation intently. After saying nothing for a period as you scrutinize your people, offer this explanation for your behavior:]

I am trying to see if you sparkle more this week than last week.

How many of you [or, "it looks like some of you"] celebrated Valentine's Day with a little bit of "bling!?" The holiday that elevates the warmth of our love and the softness of our hearts also pushes us to do so with something cold and hard — a diamond.

Diamonds, we are continually reminded, are forever. That's why they are worthy of a significant financial investment. Diamonds are expensive because they are rare, elusive, and found only in tiny bits and pieces. Yet if you could travel 50 light years away from Earth, to star BPM 37093, located in the Centaurus constellation, you would arrive at "Lucy" — a burned out sun, a "white dwarf," whose entire central core is a planet-sized chunk of crystallized carbon — a diamond. 10 billion-trillion-trillion carats worth, to be precise.

This "space diamond" was named "Lucy" after the Beatle's hit, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." By comparison, the largest earth-diamond, the Golden Jubilee Diamond, is 545 carats — a speck of sand on one of Lucy's dunes.

Diamonds are a chosen and cherished gem because of their sparkle and glow. They ignite with a kind of inner fire when the light hits them. Unfortunately for "Lucy," that means that the solid diamond core of that dwarf star is as unremarkable and unassuming as any other stone. You could take a drawer full of exquisite diamond gemstones and dump them in a drawer and — without the gift of reflective light—-you wouldn't know you had anything different than a box of rocks.

The miracle of reflected light is what Transfiguration Sunday is all about. In both the gospel and the epistle texts, it is the miracle of divine light that "transforms" and "transfigures" the moment and the message. In the gospel text the brilliance, the purity, of the light that illumines Jesus — a brightness "such as no one on earth could bleach them" — is what first attracts the attention of Jesus' disciple-companions to the mountaintop meeting.