For everyone, there comes a time when your faith is tested and you will have to face difficult and inconvenient truths. We may want to take the easier path, the path with less pain. We may want to cling to easy or simplistic answers. Instead, what does it look like to welcome complexity? Can you stay fixed upon your convictions while also expanding your perspective?

Mot only does Peter declare the truth that is foundational to the church’s faith, Jesus pronounces Peter to be the foundation on which he will build his church.

Faith is not being able to walk on water — in the Biblical witness, only God can do that. But perhaps faith is daring to trust, regardless of whatever factors are at play, that God is near to us, extending a hand, encouraging us in our uncertainty, rescuing us from that from which we need to be saved.

Ultimately, in Peter’s story, we are reminded that God loves imperfect people — in fact, time and again, that’s precisely who God claims and calls. And that includes us.

It is not just Jesus who can be changed into form that properly embodies a particular inner essence. His followers – we – can be too.

Naming this tension between the world as it is and the world as it should be is the very job of the prophets, including Micah from last Sunday, and Isaiah today.

As we stand before the mountains, looking for a revelation, desperately asking what God requires of us while hearing Jesus proclaim beloved, we are reminded of our call to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly.

Into our new year that was never going to be immediately, magically, remarkably different from last year steps John the Baptist with a testimony.