The mountaintop and the valley (Luke 9.28-43)
The mountaintop and the valley (Luke 9.28-43)
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church, Transfiguration Sunday C (March 3, 2019)
Tom James
Have you ever been to the mountaintop? I’m not much of a hiker, but when I was a kid, I did a little mountain climbing. Now, this was in North Carolina, and my wife Michelle says there are no mountains there. She spent part of her summers in Colorado, where the mountains are a little more impressive, I’ll admit. But I think there were mountains in North Carolina. Or, at least, my aching feet told me there were by the time I got to the top of one.
For those of you who have followed a trail up steep inclines, often heavily wooded, and then broken through at the last to a clearing, and a view of the valley below, and know that you’ve reached the summit, you know how satisfying it can feel. And, if you are lucky enough to spend some time up there and just take in the sight (my Dad would always say, “Whelp, are you ready to head back down?”), you might be struck by the beauty of it, with the gentle mountain air and the misty clouds, sometimes well below, and the bright sun, and all the lush greenery down in the valley, partly covered with shadows cast by the mountain, and the awesome silence.
I can see why they call a moment of deep religious feeling a “mountaintop” experience because it gives you a sense of the grandeur and beauty of things and puts your little worries and obsessions in a much-needed perspective. The “mountaintop” can also be a time when your thoughts are elevated by some ideal. Martin Luther King, Jr. began one of his last sermons talking about having been to the mountaintop, where he could see across the land and witness the ways in which God was opening the door to desegregation and equality for African-Americans. We also may think of Moses on the mountain top, communing with God and, at the end of his life, looking out on the land of promise, knowing, as Dr. King must have, that he would not get there himself, but believing that his people would, because the promises of God could be trusted.
On the last Sunday before Lent, we traditionally climb the mountain with Jesus, metaphorically speaking, as we read one of the gospel texts that describe how he took a select group of disciples to the top of what would have been for them a “high mountain” and was “transfigured” before them. The story is supposed to remind us of how Moses also went to the mountaintop, and how the glory of God transfigured him, too. For us, it comes just as we are about to enter Lent, when we walk with Jesus, metaphorically speaking, toward Jerusalem, another sort of mountaintop (people would talk about going “up” to Jerusalem because of its elevation) where he will confront the Temple authorities and offend religious leaders and frighten the Roman governor and end up on a cross.
But the disciples who were with Jesus didn’t know anything about what would come after. On the mountaintop, they were awakened from their near slumber to be dazzled and enthused by what they saw. Peter, doing the “Peter” thing as always, let his enthusiasm get the better of him and gave Jesus exactly the wrong advice. “Let’s build some buildings!” “Let’s make a shrine.” “Let’s raise a temple,” or a “sanctuary.” This little detail makes me wonder, by the way, what was going on when it was written down, some decades later. Were the earliest Christian communities, who had been meeting in each other’s homes, thinking about building separate spaces for worship, so that they could have impressive structures like their pagan counterparts, or like the Jewish temple? Did Peter in the story give voice to what Christians were later thinking about? I ask this because, clearly, Christians much later down the road had those conversations. Clearly, Christians throughout history have tried to capture the enthusiasm and the mountaintop excitement of their experience of grace in buildings and structures. As we know, many of our best church buildings were built during a what seemed a high point in American Christianity—when seemingly everybody wanted to be in church, when we seemed to have incredible influence on society, when people and resources were flowing in, when we had to compete with other churches but never with the rest of society for people’s attention on Sundays. And, as we know, most of our buildings across this country have become something to worry about rather than to celebrate. They cost money. They are hard to heat. They keep needing to be repaired or updated. But we hold on to them for dear life. It as if they are a monument to a great moment in the past, but in many cases also a tombstone marking the passing of that moment.
In any case, it turns out that Peter had it wrong. This mountaintop experience wasn’t a place to stay—it wasn’t something to cling to. It wasn’t anything that even had value in itself: it only had value because of what was to come next.
I mentioned, somewhat bitterly, that my Dad was always ready to turn around and head back down the trail as soon as we got to the mountaintop. I would have liked to spend the whole day there! But, of course, he knew that there were other things to do. For him, getting to the top of the mountain was one stage in the hike and not the end of it, one highlight of the day and not the whole day. And, so, for Jesus, the mountaintop and the impressive transfiguration that happened there only had meaning because they were part of a larger story and a longer journey. In other words, the mountaintop had no meaning apart from the valley—where the real ministry happened; and, if the truth be told, where you and I spend most of our lives.
In the valley, we confront sickness. Jesus found a boy there who was mentally ill, we would say today, and a father who was desperate to find help for him. Illness of all kinds is all over the valley, where we frail human beings really live. It is where we struggle with problems, and sometimes with people. It is where we find poverty. It’s where we find abuse, and exploitation, and oppression, and unkindness. It’s also where we find forgiveness, and strength, and courage, and compassion, and heart. After all, what would be the point of those things if we were all basking in the glow on the mountaintop? In the valley, all the resources we have been given to live the Christian life in the real world have to be brought to bear. It is also where you and are confronted not only with our weaknesses but our shortcomings and our failures. It is where we are exposed for being weak in faith, or lacking in compassion, or lazy about justice, or overbearing with our felt wants and needs. The valley is where we find the need to repent, to use an old Christian word that we will hear again during Lent—to turn around and begin moving in the right direction, to forsake exaggerated love of self for the sake of loving our neighbors and loving God.
None of that is very comfortable, of course. I’m with Peter in Spirit—let’s stay on the mountaintop and build a shrine and try to remember how good it feels to bask in the mountain air and the feeling of God’s embrace. Let’s not leave this place and descend back into the realm of human suffering and constant problems and feelings of forsakenness.
But here’s the thing. When the disciples were at the mountaintop, they had an awesome vision but were not at all that awed by it. They were confused and confounded—they were enthused and maybe even made to feel good by what they were seeing and hearing, but it is clear from their actions that they do not know quite what to make of what is happening to them. And, so, Peter tries to fill the awkward emptiness of the moment by trivialities, by being busy doing things that will not advance Jesus’ mission a single inch. It is as they descend to the valley with Jesus, when they witness him confronting human brokenness with the love and power of God, that we read that everyone one is “awed at the greatness of God.”
Seminary professor Claudio Carvalhaes writes: “Unless we get out of the fortress of our worship spaces, and rebuke the unclean spirits of the powers that be, and shed light into the lives of the poor of our communities, we will never know what transfiguration means. Glory will be an unknown word and experience. We can have a sound theology and say that in that passage, Jesus is the point of beginning and end, the past and the future giving weight to our present, the conciliation of opposite poles, the connection between the shadow and the light of God, the incarnation of the most divine glory. However, if in the name and by the grace of God we cannot heal the boys and girls of our own people and give them back to their parents we will never know what transfiguration means, what shared glory looks like and we will never be “astounded at the greatness of God.”[1]
It’s not about our encampments, our structures, our buildings, our places of sanctuary and refuge—our fortresses. The greatness of God is not built to impress in that way. Instead, the greatness of God is what we find when we are on the move, when we descend to the valley of human suffering and need, when we get real and focus with people on what really matters, when we let go of the moments and the memories of past glories just a little, at least enough to awaken to the moment we are in. The greatness of God is God’s power to heal and renew and give hope where there has been none. The greatness of God is not on the mountaintop but in the valley. It’s not behind us, friends, but in front of us. In the name of God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.
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