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February 22, 2004
Transfiguration of the Lord
First, The Climb
Luke 9:28-36
Most of us know the meaning of the phrase "mountaintop experience."
- In Christianity, the phrase often describes a dramatic religious conversion though which we come "to see God more clearly, love God more dearly, follow God more nearly." [1]
- In our professional lives, a mountaintop experience can occur at a leadership retreat, when we hear a speaker who reframes the way we think about our work so that we leave with renewed and redirected in the calling in which we serve.
- In sports, a mountaintop experience can be scoring a winning goal, playing on a championship team, or, if you are a Yankee fan, watching George Steinbrenner open his wallet and sign Alex Rodriquez.
Mountaintop experiences occur in faith and family, in church and career, in education and entertainment. While they are rare, when we have one, we never forget it.
I.
It may be that the Transfiguration of Jesus Christ was a mountaintop experience, not only for James and Peter and John, who were with him, but also for Jesus.
Jesus is about to face the final week of life, what we call "The Passion": his betrayal and arrest, his trial and scourging, his carrying his own cross to his crucifixion and death.
Before facing this tremendous suffering and ignominious end, Jesus goes off alone to pray with three of his closest disciples — Peter, and brothers James and John.
The four of them go to an unnamed mountain.
On the mountaintop, while Jesus is praying, the appearance of his face changes and his clothes become dazzling white.
He sees the figures of Moses and Elijah, ancient heroes of his faith.
Peter, James and John behold this same dramatic sight.
Speaking for all three of them, Peter asks Christ to allow all of them to remain on the mountain forever.
However, a cloud forms overhead; a voice booms from the cloud: "This is my Son, my Chosen, listen to him"; and then the cloud disappears, as do Elijah and Moses, leaving Jesus alone before Peter and James and John.[2]
Within hours, the four of them leave the mountain. Jesus resumes his work of healing[3] and says: "Let these words sink into your ears: The Son of Man is going to be betrayed into human hands."[4]
Thus endeth their mountaintop experience.
II.
In preaching this story each year, ministers often emphasize the glory of the mountaintop experience for all four involved.
- We often say that Jesus saw Moses and Elijah, pillars of his faith, that the suffering and death he was about to undergo were for the noble cause of the faith in which he had been born, were for the divine will of the Father with whom he was one.
- We also often say that the Transfiguration was a mountaintop experience for Peter, James, and John, in that they saw a glimpse of the way Jesus would appear once resurrected, so as to give them the strength and courage to stand firm in the dark days of trial and crucifixion ahead.
Today's opening hymn hints at the glory of the experience for all four people who were present:
O wondrous sight, O vision fair Of glory
That the church shall share…[5]
A less common ways ministers sometimes preach the Transfiguration is to point to the inevitable return to reality after the event is over.
Just as a player who scores a winning goal must still show up for practice the next day, Peter, James, John, and even Jesus, must leave the holy mountain, return to earth, resume the rigors of their work, and in the case of Jesus, eventually face the cross, and in the case of the others, eventually face the fate of the martyr.
Our second hymn bears witness to the return to reality we all inevitably face once the mountaintop experience is over:
Swiftly pass the clouds of glory,
Heaven's voice, the dazzling light;
Moses and Elijah vanish;
Christ alone commands the height!
Peter, James, and John fall silent,
turning from the summit's rise
Downward toward the shadowed valley
Where their Lord has fixed his eyes.[6]
The church's preaching on the Transfiguration matches its hymnology: we usually interpret the event either as a mountaintop experience or as an inevitable return to reality.
III.
But another aspect of the Transfiguration rarely receives attention. The fact is that before Jesus and his disciples encounter with the divine on the mountain, they first have to be willing to climb the mountain.
This aspect of the story is so obvious we often overlook it. We read along with the text: "Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray." We so focus on these four going off to pray, we skip over the fact that it is a mountain to which they go to pray. The last time I checked, the only way one could get to the top of a mountain — even if it was simply to pray — was to climb.[7]
Listen to a description of mountain climbing written by one who knows:
Of the first day on the trail:
It was hell. First days on hiking trips always are. I was hopelessly out of shape…The pack weighed way too much…I had never encountered anything so hard, for which I was so ill prepared. Every step was a struggle.The hardest part was coming to terms with the constant dispiriting discovery that there is always more hill. The thing about being on a hill, as opposed to standing back from it, is that you can almost never see exactly what's to come. Between the curtain of trees at every side, the ever-receding contour of rising slope before you, and your own plodding weariness, you gradually lose track of how far you have come. Each time you haul yourself up to what you think must surely be the crest, you find that there is in fact more hill beyond…[B]eyond that slope there is another, and beyond that another and another, and beyond each of those more still, until it seems impossible that any hill could run on this long….The elusive summit continually retreats by whatever distance you press forward, so that each time the canopy parts enough to give a view you are dismayed to see that the topmost trees are as remote, as unattainable, as before. Still you stagger on. What else can you do?
Jesus and Peter, James and John, discover that "every step [up a mountain] is a struggle" and "there is always more hill." Their experience teaches us that in order to have a mountaintop experience, we first have to climb a mountain.
IV.
For Peter and James and John, climbing is not simply physical. It is also the rigorous process of figuring out what it is they have experienced once they reach the top.
When they see Moses and Elijah appearing, and Jesus transformed in appearance, God is showing them, in dramatic fashion, that Christ is the fulfillment of the law and the prophets, the entire system of God's promises and Jewish hopes that have been in existence for two thousand years. That is why Moses and Elijah appear on the mountaintop first with Christ, and then vanish, leaving Christ alone.
Even though James and Peter and John have a dramatic and powerful mountaintop experience, they still don't understand that even as the Messiah, Jesus will have to suffer and die.[8]
They want to freeze the experience, stay on the mountain forever, never return to reality.[9]
Even though they return with Jesus from the mountain and continue to serve him, listen to his teaching, be present when he heals people, they still "don't get it."
- Peter denies Christ.[10]
- James and John stand "at a distance" with his other followers as he is crucified.[11]
It is only after the resurrection, when he appears much as he appeared in the Transfiguration, that they "get it," make a connection to the Transfiguration, become leaders of the church and eventually even martyrs themselves.[12]
Their slowness to understand their mountaintop experience simply reinforces the point: in order to have a mountaintop experience, we first have to climb the mountain. Even after we have climbed the mountain and encountered the experience, it may take us a lifetime to understand fully what we have experienced and what God wants us to do with it. But first, we have to climb.
V.
Those of you who attended the Adult Forum today heard me read from a variety of poems in which I saw themes consistent with the Christian faith. One of them, I believe, speaks to how important it is to climb the mountain in search of God and how significant the change once we have made that climb. In this poem, by Tony Hoagland, the image is not that of climbing a mountain, but of searching for grail. But the human experience is similar. The poem is called "Why We Went and What We Found."
We will find the grail.
We will gallop our horses all night
and at dawn, descend from twisted mountain roads
at the plaza of a town without a name.
At the bronze hour when the sun
melts on the horizon like an old doubloon,
we will sail our ship into the harbor,
--salt crusted in our beards, trembling from years of motion,
without maps or compasses; a little daffy from the velvet
sibilance of waves.
The prow will touch the stone wharf
without a sound, the nightingales
will trill, the dead oak shaft of the
No Trespassing sign will blossom morning glories.
The mute beggar by the church will launch into an aria
in perfect, unaccented Italian
and we will hoist the bucket from the courtyard well
on its frayed robe
and drink the sacred water
as the horses nicker
and the almond trees
drop their white petals of applause.
If the order comes to burn the bridges,
we will burn the bridges.
If the order comes to cast ourselves into the sea,
we jump.
When we wake in the morning, we will be ourselves again, and begin our post-grail lives.
We will return to our people
who eat mud and say that it is good,
and we will eat mud with them and say that it is good.
But it will never taste the same to us
in our post-grail existence.
Something will be missing we can't say.
No one will understand the Ph.G. we sign after our names, or why we press our faces deep into the artificial flowers,
half-hoping to be stung by bees.
Why we always go astray inside the glittering maze
of the department store,
and always end up at the perfume counter, wearing
scents called Shangri-La, Obsession, Holy Night,
finding none of them quite right,
none of them equal to a blow on the head
with a silver mace, a word whispered in a dream
like a gold key slid across a grate.
They won't understand, and we won't remember,
but we will never again be sad — never sad again! —
or rather, never sad in the same way.[13]
**
To find the grail, to see and touch God on the mountaintop, first, we have to climb. But when we climb, "we will never again be sad…or rather, never sad in the same way."
Amen.
1 http://www.lyricsxp.com/lyrics/d/day_by_day_godspell.html go back
2 Luke 9:28-36. go back
3 Luke 9:37-43. go back
4 Luke 9:44. go back
5 "O Wondrous Sight, O Vision Fair," John Mason Neale, translator (1851) in The Presbyterian Hymnal: Hymns, Songs, and Spiritual Songs (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990), #75. go back
6 Thomas H. Troeger, "Swiftly Pass the Clouds of Glory," (1985), in The Presbyterian Hymnal: Hymns, Songs, and Spiritual Songs (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990), #73. go back
7 This insight concerning the necessity of climbing comes from Robert E. Dunham, "Transfiguration — Year C," presented at The Moveable Feast Preaching Seminar, 2004. Dunham also wrote the hymn "Lord, Your Mountain," which we are singing at the conclusion of the service. go back
8 Luke 9:43b-45. go back
9 Luke 9:33. go back
10 Luke 22:54-62. go back
11 Luke 23:49. In Mark 14:50, the disciples desert Jesus and flee. go back
12 Luke 24:36-53. go back
13 Tony Hoagland, Donkey Gospel (St. Paul, Graywolf Press, 1998), 45. go back
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Church of Cedar Rapids
310 Fifth Street SE Cedar Rapids, IA 52401
Phone: 319-364-6148
E-mail: church@fpccr.org
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