A Fourth Church Sermon by Calum I. MacLeod

February 26, 2006 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

On the Mountain

Calum I. MacLeod
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 50:1–6
Exodus 3:1–5

Was it a vision?
Or did we see that day the unseeable
One glory of the everlasting world
Perpetually at work, though never seen
Since Eden locked the gate that’s everywhere
and nowhere?

Edwin Muir
The Transfiguration

Well, it is very nice to be in the pulpit this morning and looking out on a sanctuary that has got wooden pews and not plastic chairs in it. We’re delighted to be back to normal. Thank you to all of you who’ve borne with us during this time of transition. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t worry; we’re back in good shape.

I had to disappoint the 8:00 congregation by sharing with them the news that they were not the first congregation to be seated on the new pews. We had a wedding here in the sanctuary yesterday afternoon at which I officiated, and so I was pleased to share with the gathered congregation then that they were the first to have, as I put it, their bums on the pews—much to the chagrin of the priest with whom I was sharing worship, I think.

John Buchanan called me earlier—John is preaching at Nassau Presbyterian Church in Princeton this morning—and I think he was a little jealous not to be here on the first Sunday when the pews are in place. We’re grateful to everyone who’s been involved in this project, which has gone so efficiently, and particularly to our own building crew and house staff who have worked so hard during this time.

One of the occasional hazards of ministry is that people like to ask you questions. This may not seem unusual to you. In many ways that is part of the job that we have as pastors—to be open to conversations and questions as people go on the journey of faith and seek companions for parts of that journey. For me especially—whose responsibilities include welcoming new members—I often get to engage with people who have questions and who want to explore more about the life of faith.

The hazardous piece comes more in the sense of being something of a publicly accessible figure, we might say. I had two such situations this week, the first by email—a series of questions from a student at Loyola University here in Chicago who is a first year studying theology. She is doing a project asking lots of different churches about their congregations, beliefs, practices, and how the congregation is engaged in the life of the community and the wider world. Fair questions, which I’m working at replying to. Then my second experience was a good friend of mine here at church who is in seventh grade and doing a project for humanities class. He wanted to interview me, and so we did that, and of course his questions were much more difficult to deal with than those of the Loyola student, because they were dealing with things that were perhaps a little more personal than some of the questions that the student was dealing with.

I was surprised to learn from my young friend that the project was to find and interview someone who’s different from you! I wasn’t sure what to make of that, but we went ahead anyway and went through his questions: where I was from; about my family and what I like to do; who were my heroes and so on, and then the hardest question of all. He asked, “What do you miss about Scotland?”

And there I was, stuck in the exile’s dilemma, because the answer to that, of course, is everything. I miss everything about Scotland. I particularly miss being there today, because Scotland beat England at rugby yesterday for the first time in six years, so anyone who might be downloading this during the week from the Internet—Hooray for Scotland!

I engaged a little more seriously than that, and I said to him, “I really miss the mountains.”

That may not surprise some of you who’ve either been to Scotland or who come from parts of this country that are mountainous, but living in the prairie lands is a very different experience from that of living where mountains and hills are easily accessible. As someone said to me recently, there are parts of Illinois where you can watch your dog run away for a week—a very interesting reflection on what it is to live in the Midwest and the Plains.

As I thought about missing the mountains and the importance of landscape, my mind went to Psalm 137, where the exiles from Israel are in Babylon praying, “There we wept, when we remembered Zion”—Zion, the mountain of the Lord on which the temple was built. Mountains have an important part to play in our biblical story and in the story of Christianity itself.

In scripture in the Old Testament, the mountains are places where special things happen: they are liminal places, meaning they are places on the edge of normal experience. The mountains are places that provide settings for God to self-disclose, to give revelation. We heard that in the text that Dana read from Exodus, that very familiar story of Moses on the mountain encountering God’s presence in the bush that is on fire and yet is not consumed, that has this supernatural fire that signals the presence of God. And, of course, Moses is the one who receives the law, from God, on the mountain. Elijah, the great prophet figure who figures in our story of the transfiguration this morning, encounters God on Mount Horeb in that most beautiful text where God comes not in the earthquake or in the wind or fire but in silence, in the “still small voice” as the King James Version renders it. In Matthew, that central manifesto of God’s promise to God’s people, the Beatitudes, the promises of blessedness, takes place on a mountain as Jesus preaches. Then for today, this very hard and important story of the transfiguration, the transformation, the metamorphosis of Jesus that takes place on a high mountain. We find ourselves again here with the mountain as a liminal, mystical place, a place that T. S. Eliot describes as ”the point of intersection of the timeless / with time.”

The timeless erupting into time. The story I’m sure is known to many of you: Jesus chooses Peter, James, and John, who so often appear to be a kind of inner circle of the disciples, and they encounter the special revelation in which the clothing that Jesus wears becomes white with a brightness that’s not of this earth. Susan Mangam, a very fine writer and thinker, writes about this that “on the mountain the disciples wake up to the reality of Christ.”

So God uses supernatural means as a way of taking us into the deepest reality of who God is and who Christ is. This is about waking up. It’s an eye-opening experience—visual and also auditory, really seeing, really listening for who God is.

We might think of this day of the transfiguration as being a kind of a staging post on the journey from the birth and baptism of Jesus to the Easter events, the death and resurrection. The day of transfiguration, today, marks the end of the season of Epiphany, after Christmas, and transitions us into the season of Lent, preparing for Holy Week and Easter. That’s why today the pulpit fall and the paraments are white. White is the color of celebration in the church, for days like Christmas and Easter, so this is symbolic that today we are entering deeply one of the mysteries of our faith. We’re encountering part of the continuum of God’s promise that the world will be transfigured, transformed by God’s particular action in Jesus Christ.

To engage in this as Christians, I believe we have to be open to the supernatural. By that I don’t mean magic, but a kind of openness to God, a state of mind, a state of being, in which we are open to God’s actions and God’s presence close to us in the world, immanent. Thomas Merton, a great mystic and writer of the twentieth century who I’ll reference a couple of times this morning because he’s so important in Christian spirituality, Merton writes of this in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.

Merton says, “We’ve got ourselves into a position where because of misunderstanding the distinctions between the natural and the supernatural we tend to think that nothing in a person’s ordinary life is really supernatural except saying prayers or performing pious acts of one sort or another.”

Merton indicts us for separating what is spiritual and what is secular, arguing that in the incarnation, God taking on human flesh, everything becomes holy, touched by God.

This is put beautifully by Gerald Manley Hopkins, a great Victorian poet of faith and of nature and of God’s immanent presence. The poem is God’s Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God,
It will flame out like shining from shook foil.

Part of the beauty of Hopkin’s poems are the cadences and alliteration—surely that “flame out” is a reference to the transfigured reality charged with God’s glory, God’s grandeur.

Merton again, in a story that he shares about what this means for him in his ordinary life:

In Louisville at the corner of Fourth and Walnut I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs—it was like waking from a dream of separateness. To take your place as a member of the human race. I had the immense joy of being man—a member of the race in which God himself became incarnate. If only everybody could realize this. But it cannot be explained—there is no way of telling people that they are all walking round shining like the sun.

Isn’t that beautiful—how Merton’s sense of the supernatural is rooted in the reality of relationships with ordinary people like you and me, whom he sees with faces shining like the sun?

This is what the Scottish poet Douglas Dunn calls “the transfigured commonplace.”

Another British poet, the great Welsh Anglican R. S. Thomas, renders this in a beautiful way and with reference to our Exodus story:

Life is not hurrying
onto a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth once
but is the eternity that awaits you.

The timeless dipping into time. It’s what is called in Celtic Christian spirituality “thin places,” the idea that there are places in our lives and in our world where there’s only a very thin veil, gossamer thin, separating heaven from earth.

I am sure you know intuitively what I mean. Where are the thin places for you? Perhaps a geographical place. Perhaps a mountain or a sunrise over the lake. Perhaps in a line of poetry or a piece of music where we find our hearts transfigured as we recognize and live with the indwelling of God in our being.

There is a young woman I know who suffered a very tragic bereavement some months ago in the loss of her husband, leaving her with two young children. I was speaking with her about that great question of God’s presence or God’s absence in these heart-wrenching times of loss. She told me a story that describes this experience of a thin place of transfiguration. She describes how one day in great sorrow and loneliness and with a sense of abandonment she went to the Indiana Dunes and sat there and cried. At one point she looked up and she saw an eagle circling overhead, and she in that moment recognized the presence and love of God in her life, even in that most difficult time of pain and suffering. Supernatural, the transfigured commonplace. And as that experience transfigures our heart, so it transforms our relationships—our relationships and our life of faith.

Merton tells a harrowing story about a young priest who was sent to preach one Sunday in a “white” Catholic parish in New Orleans. This is back in the early ’60s. He based his sermon on the Gospel for the Sunday, in which Christ spoke of the twofold commandment—love of God and love of one’s neighbor—which is the essence of Christian morality. The priest, Merton tells us

in his sermon took occasion that this commandment applied to the problem of racial segregation and that white people and Negroes ought certainly to love one another to the extent of accepting one another in an integrated society. He was halfway through the sermon and the gist of his remarks were becoming abundantly clear when a man stood up in the middle of the congregation and shouted angrily, “I didn’t come here to listen to this kind of junk, I came to hear Mass.” The priest stopped and waited—this exasperated the man even more and he demanded the sermon be brought to an end at once otherwise he would leave. The priest continued to wait in silence and another man in the congregation amid the murmuring support of many voices got up and protested against this doctrine which he saw fit to refer to as “crap.” As the priest still said nothing, the two men left the church followed by about fifty other solid Christians in the congregation, and as he went out the first of them shouted over their shoulder at the priest—“If I miss Mass today it’s your fault.”

Merton says incidents like this “have a meaning.” How, he asks, can one think of themselves as a good Catholic and in their actions be in effect “apostate from the Christian faith”? And this, of course, is not just a story about Catholics. It’s about all of us who seek to follow Christ. To ask the questions—are our hearts transfigured in such a way that we are transformed into hearing the call of Christ to love another?

We are like Peter and James and John, there on the mount of Transfiguration, at that thin place, experiencing the mystery of God’s love in our hearts and in our world. And like Peter and James and John, we’re not allowed to stay there in the thin place and hold on to it and try and make a postcard out of the experience. We must allow the experience to change us such as when we come down from the mountain to where others are that we come down transfigured, changed, transformed in our relationships, in our hearts, inspired by God’s love and ready to answer the call of the transfigured Christ to bring love and light into the world and all to God’s glory. Amen.