February11, 2018
Last Epiphany
“Six days later, Jesus took with Him Peter, James, and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves.”
In his excellent book, Who Needs God? Rabbi Harold Kushner has a chapter entitled, “Putting Out the Sacred Fires.” The chapter opens with these words:
To the geologist, mountains are evidence of seismic activity, the process of reshaping the earth’s surface over the course of millennia. To the traveler, mountains are sometimes beautiful, sometimes inconvenient features of a landscape. To the skier, snow-covered mountains are an opportunity to enjoy a challenging outdoor activity. But to the religious soul, a mountain is where God and human beings meet. It represents earth reaching up to touch Heaven, and Heaven bending down toward earth.
Echoing the truth of Rabbi Kushner’s observation, we find that mountains are often connected to significant events in the God-human relationship. It was on a mountain where Moses first encountered God in the burning bushand learned of God’s call and God’s claim on his life.It was on a different mountain that God gave to Moses the 10 Commandments, which today we find in our Book of Common Prayer. And on this final Sunday before we begin the season of Lent, we are told of a life-changing moment in the faith-journeys of key disciples, Peter, James, and John, as Jesus leads them up a mountain where they witness his being “Transfigured” and talking to long-dead biblical heroes, Moses and Elijah. Later, Jesus would lead them back down the mountain to join the others before continuing to Jerusalem and his rendezvous with the cross on yet another mountain we know as Calvary.
And while these God-human encounters and many others in scripture took place on actual mountains, today we have come to refer to those moments when God breaks into our lives in a dramatic and life-changing way, as “mountain-top experiences,” regardless of where they actually occur—meaning that God can bring moments of Transfiguration into our lives, whether we happen to be on an actual mountain or, as I discovered years ago, driving to work one morning, blissfully unaware that I was just seconds away from a freeway “mountaintop experience” that would forever change my life and the lives of my family. Wherever and whenever they occur, mountaintop experiences are those times when God breaks into our lives and draws back the veil of Heaven, giving us a brief glimpse of that kingdom yet to come, while God’s Spirit whispers to us that our present reality is not all that there is, while challenging us to embrace the mystery of Transfiguration and to be forever changed.
Scripture reveals to us that God often reserves such dramatic interventions for those He has been unable to get through to, using a subtler approach. Certainly this was the case with Jesus who, seeing that His chosen disciples just weren’t “getting it,” took His key inner circle of Peter, James, and John up the mountain for a little wake-up call, hoping that seeing Him in a new light might just get them and the others to step up and to do what He had chosen them for. What the Transfiguration did for these disciples was to enable them to see Jesus in a way they had never seen Him before. It’s kind of like the mother and her 6-year-old daughter who were out grocery shopping one day when suddenly they ran into their parish priest on his day off. “Mommy, Mommy, Look!” cried out the little girl, excitedly. “There’s God without his dress!”
I’ve actually had similar encounters and, while it wasn’t exactly like that for the disciples, since in those days pretty much all the men wore “dresses,” they were clearly blown away, seeing Jesus as they had never seen Him before. His clothes a dazzling “Tide-clean” white while talking with biblical legends, Moses and Elijah.
How they knew it was Moses and Elijah, which I’ve sometimes wondered, the scripture is silent. My theory is that they were serving coffee up there, and everyone had nametags. You know, “Jewish Episcopalians” and coffee hour on the mountain. But what we do know is that ever-impetuous Peter, who often suffers from foot-in-mouth disease, but just as often ends up blurting out what the others are thinking, gets a little too excited seeing all these celebrities and wants to prolong the moment: “Rabbi, it is good for us to be up here. Let us make three dwellings: One for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah!”
Classic Peter moment. But can you see what’s really going on here with Peter? Getting over his initial shock, he now realizes that he and James and John are the “chosen,” set apart from the other nine left down in the valley, and up here mingling with the elite. He realizes too, that he kind of likes this status and, being Peter, suggests to Jesus that maybe they should just build a little subdivision up here, far removed from the masses struggling below in the valleys of life. And, if we’re being honest, can we really blame Peter? Can we say with certainty that if we were in his shoes, we might not have said or at least thought the same thing?
Because mountaintop experiences, be they large and panoramic or relatively modest in scope, can too easily become something we wish to cling to and to keep to ourselves. We’d like to freeze those moments in our lives when God breaks into our ordinary, daily routines, giving us glimpses of new possibilities and new paths to follow. At such times it’s tempting for us, like Peter, to feel special, chosen, and wanting to prolong the moment, to remain in the rarefied air of God’s presence and not to return to the difficult and taxing work of doing ministry in the valleys of life. Tempting? Absolutely! Acceptable to God? Absolutely . . . not!
The lesson of the Transfiguration is that the God who, on occasion, calls us to mountaintops to boost our faith and to open new possibilities always calls us back down into the valleys of life to carry on His redeeming work.We see this in today’s Gospel, for as soon as Peter reveals his plan for an extended stay on the mountain, God’s voice, coming from a cloud, tells them “This is My Son, the Beloved, listen to Him!”
And suddenly, the moment was over! The spell broken: Moses and Elijah had disappeared, and Jesus was leading them down the mountain to continue their journey to Jerusalem, to His date with the cross, and to their work of building this fledgling new religion. That work—building the church—is still going on today, and it is upon our shoulders that today rests the mantle of responsibility for carrying on the work started by Peter, James, John, and the others.
I suspect that some of you here this morning have experienced moments of Transfiguration in your lives, probably not so dramatic as the burning bush, or the visitation by Archangel Gabriel to Mother Mary, but times nonetheless, when you just felt closer to God, when you saw things in a different light, one that illumined a path which you had never before considered, making you want to make God a much larger part of your day-to-day life in the valley.
If indeed you have experienced such moments, only you and God know you responded and what effect, if any, it had on your life and your faith. But regardless of how you responded, either by saying “Yes,” “No,” or “Not now” to God’s invitation to a closer relationship or a new direction, I can promise you that more invitations lie ahead, that God is not finished with you and has more mountaintops waiting ahead on the landscape of your life. Whether you see them, ascend them, and return to the valley transfigured and forever changed is up to you. But today the Transfiguration story in Mark invites us all to ascend the mountain, to pray with Jesus and his disciples, and to experience the Holy, as they did so long ago. Transfiguration serves today as our bridge between Epiphany and the Season of Lent, beginning on Ash Wednesday. A valley of a different kind where we will spend 40 days with Jesus; days of deprivation, days of temptation; days of self-discovery, before we witness the betrayal of the Last Supper and the horror of His torture and crucifixion on another mountain called Calvary before we spend time with Jesus in the sealed tomb, only to see the stone rolled away and experience the life-changing joy of the Risen Lord on Easter morning.
May these 40 days and the journey which awaits us be for each of us a time of prayer, a journey of discovery, and a time also of transformation which brings us finally to a place of Transfiguration, a place where we may not only see Jesus in a new light, but also, through renewed eyes of faith, be ready to behold His gracious hand at work in our lives, and in the world which awaits us as we follow Him down the mountain to transform the world which awaits us in the valleys of life.