2022-02-28
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text
Scripture: LUKE 9:28-36
Stowe Pinnacle. It’s not a high mountain—only 2651 feet. Nestled in central Vermont, it’s one of my favorite places in all the world. A fairly steep climb, it takes three to four hours to reach the summit. And when you arrive, you see mountain ranges on three sides of you, and lush, verdant, pastoral valleys below. Mary and I love to take a sandwich and some water and apples and raisins and nuts, and sit at the top and soak in the beauty and the peacefulness.
We humans revel in mountaintop experiences for a reason. Elevation, in some way, yields elation. We are transported and renewed. We are removed from the mundane and given a glimpse of awe and magnificence.
And while this can happen literally on top of a mountain, it can also happen figuratively at a random moment driving down 480 or washing the potatoes or shoveling the walk. Suddenly you see the world in a new way, as full of loveliness and peace. I can still remember, as a child, being overcome one day by a sense that all was right with the world and that there was nothing to fear and that nothing could ever happen to me that would destroy that sense of peace and incredible joy. It was a mountaintop experience right there on the sidewalk in Bangor, Maine. That memory, of course, has faded. But I never completely forget it—it lives in me, that vision, as something transforming and true.
My guess is a number of us, maybe most of us, have experienced something similar, a time when we have seen what the world was intended to be, when we perhaps knew that all would be well no matter what happened. And in a world where cancer strikes and relationships disintegrate and businesses fail and Russia unconscionably invades Ukraine, we may yearn for some mountaintop moment that says to us: beneath all the strife and the suffering and the fear, there is something stunning and transforming that is bigger and truer than any of it.
Three of Jesus’ disciples get to experience something like this. They accompany Jesus up a mountain to pray. And when they do, Jesus’ face is changed and his clothes shine, and Moses and Elijah join him, and there’s this mesmerizing voice from the cloud. And you can only imagine how riveting and reassuring this must have been.
Moved as they are by this transfixing event. Peter does what we, too, might well do. He says, “Master, this is a great moment! Let’s build three memorials: one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah” (9:33, The Message). Peter wants to hang onto this moment and make it permanent. He wants to tie it down and never lose it. Who can blame him?!
And we’re not immune from that same desire. I can remember wanting to recapture certain stages of our children’s childhoods, basking in the memory of our toddlers being enthralled by excavators and backhoes, or of our playing hide-and-seek in the end-of-day gloaming, or of attending their athletic events and concerts, or of lying on the bed together reading Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, and being totally entranced. Part of me wanted to box it all up so I could return to it again and again, to fix it as a permanent chapter in my life.
Nor are we immune from that here at church. Some of us may find ourselves yearning for what we think of as “the good old days,” when the sky seemed to be the limit and pews were full and the Sunday School teemed with children. ‘Let’s fix that moment in time,’ we may well think. ‘Let’s build a memorial.’ And of course, there’s something completely understandable about missing something we loved. Those feelings are to be acknowledged. If we’re wise, though, we come to realize that that was another era, and there is no returning to exactly what it was, and that to memorialize that, to build a “tent” or a “dwelling” to such a bygone age, is to neglect to live in the present. It’s to fail to take up the mantle of the gifts and challenges God offers in this very moment.
One of the dangers of that sort of “nostalgia church” is that we miss the heart of the mission that’s given to us now and we focus our energies in the wrong place. Too often our conversation descends into a mode focused on institutional maintenance. ‘We need more people, we need more money; how else are we going to survive?’
And when we think or talk that way, we’ve really missed the point of what it is to be the church. Because the church isn’t about numbers. It’s about mission. It’s about making a difference in the world. It’s about loving people who may seem unlovable. It’s about forgiving even when the wrong is heinous. It’s about partnering with vulnerable people on what are sometimes their perilous journeys. It’s about articulating and living a vision of a world in which wolf and lamb lie down together and grace is allowed to beam and reconciliation is the order of the day.
Whenever—and I literally mean whenever—someone says “we need X in order to survive as a church,” the gentle retort should come from us: “No, we don’t need anything superficial to prop us up. There’s no money, no imagined church member or staff member or clergy who is suddenly going to make everything right. The deep truth of the matter is that everything is right just as it is.” Let me say it again: everything is right just as it is. The only thing—and again, I literally mean the only thing—that will make us whole is a willingness to open ourselves to the love God pours down upon us, and an eagerness to share that love wherever we’re called to share it. That’s what makes a church vital. That alone is what makes a church come to life. Receive love. Share love. As our Living Water association minister, Nayiri Karjian says, “The church is not about the ‘good old days,’ it is not about ‘filling the pews,’ it is not about ‘coming to church,’ it is about continuing the ministry of Jesus Christ, the ministry of love and grace, of healing hearts, communities and world, of changing lives and restoring the world to what God intended it to be” (https://files.constantcontact.com/aa35375c201/2036dba7-ba0f-42f5-88fc-840a30146175.pdf).
Another way to put it, as Federated’s Fund Development Associate, Laura Taylor noted recently, quoting the Episcopal bishop, Michael Curry, is that “The church is the only society that exists primarily for those who are not its members.” That’s a pretty striking statement, and one that shows the church as the unique manifestation of God’s mission that it is. We are here, not primarily for ourselves, but for others.
We lose track of that all-too-often, though, because, whether for good or for ill, we live our lives not on some elevated mountaintop, but right here in the midst of ordinary homes and stores and jobs and families, full of the push and pull of competing needs and unexpected challenges and boring routines and draining schedules. It’s here amidst our ordinary lives, in precisely the circumstances we’ve been given, that the spark of God’s holy joy can shine in all its glory. If we pay attention.
Our now-retired associate pastor, Susi Kawolics, shared a piece this week that gives this notion of “grace in the ordinary” a slightly different spin. The author, Heather Farrell, frames it this way: “Have you ever noticed how in the scriptures men are always going up into the mountains to commune with [God]? Yet in the scriptures we hardly ever hear of women going to the mountains. But we know why, right? Because the women were too busy keeping life going; they couldn’t abandon babies, meals, homes, fires, gardens, and a thousand responsibilities to make the climb into the mountains!”
And because they are so busy with keeping life going, as a friend says to Farrell, “That is why . . . God comes to women wherever they are.” God comes to them “in their homes, in their kitchens, in their gardens. God comes to them as they sit beside sickbeds, as they give birth, care for the elderly, and perform necessary mourning and burial rites. . .. Remember, . . . God knows where we are and the burdens we carry. God sees us, and if we open our eyes and our hearts we will see God, even in the most ordinary places and in the most ordinary things” (http://www.womeninthescriptures.com/2020/04/god-comes-to-women.html).
And I would guess, in this world in which binaries are being broken down, that many of the rest of us identify with Heather’s words, as well. Seldom do any of us have those mind-blowing, life-changing revelations that suddenly show us the face of God and make everything right. God comes to us, too, in baking the bread, in finding common purpose with our colleagues, in standing with people who suffer to let them know they are not alone, in singing along with our child or grandchild to Encanto’s “We don’t talk about Bruno.” It’s into our ordinary lives that God comes. Now. And now. And now.
This, I think, is what’s conveyed when these three friends of Jesus don’t stay on that mountaintop. The curious part of the story, in a way, is that the three of them actually come down the mountain. You might think that, after such a captivating experience, they’d do anything to stay there, hoping for some sort of reprise. ‘Please, please, please, God, do it again!’ we can hear them pleading. ‘We’ll wait. We need that just once more.’ They don’t stay, though. They seem to know that fullness of life will come to them only as they descend into the dailiness of their lives.
What Peter and John and James see and feel on that mountaintop, of course, is the luminous brilliance of God, the magnificence that lies just beneath the surface of life all the time. When they leave that peak and descend to the valley, I suspect they have taken in that the light they knew at the top will also shine, maybe in a different way, at the bottom. So often we scurry about, doing our errands, shuttling our kids, making the dinner, and we miss the stunning marvel that is always waiting to erupt, if only we will give it room. As they return to their routines, the story reminds us that the light will go with them, the light will still be there in the valley in its own continuing unique and wonderful form.
Thomas Merton, the great twentieth-century mystic was overcome one day early in his life by a transfiguration of sorts. “In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, . . ..
“This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud .
. .. [If] only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
“Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed . . .. But this cannot be seen, only believed” (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2464342-in-louisville-at-the-corner-of-fourth-and-walnut-in, from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander).
As we gather today for our annual meeting, we have to say it: this is really our very reason for being, to see ourselves and each other the way God sees us, to see ourselves and each other as the chosen ones of God, to see the “secret beauty of [our] hearts” and the hearts of everyone we meet. When we do that, the sky’s the limit.
In the words of the poet Mary Oliver, “It’s simple . . .. you, too, have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine” (“When I Am Among the Trees”). So may we live that way: in this often ugly, war-torn, deeply divided world, “to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine.” That’s the pinnacle. And we stand at its apex this very moment.