February 10, 2013 | 8:00 a.m. | Transfiguration of the Lord

High Places

Judith L. Watt
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 99
Exodus 34:29–35
Luke 9:28–36

You were within, but I was without. You were with me, but I was not with you. So you called, you shouted, you broke through my deafness, you flared, blazed, and banished my blindness, you lavished your fragrance, and I gasped.

St. Augustine
Confessions

Both of today’s lessons involve mountaintop experiences, significant events that took place on high places. Moses had a face-to-face conversation with God on Mount Sinai, and as Moses descends the mountain, his face is still shining from the experience. His face is shining so brightly people have to turn away. And in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus invites three of his closest disciples to another mountaintop because he wants to pray. The three disciples, Peter and James and John, go with Jesus, but they are not really into the experience. They get up there with Jesus, and while he starts to pray, they doze on and off again. Suddenly this spectacular thing happens, and they are awake enough to see it. The appearance of Jesus’ face changes, and right before their eyes, his clothes become dazzlingly white. One of the translations implies that the words used to describe the whiteness of Jesus’ clothes convey a white “whiter than bleached white.” Peter and James and John wake up to see all of this, and they also seem to be allowed into what Jesus experiences as he prays—a conversation with Moses and Elijah. This is the story the church refers to as the transfiguration of Jesus. And these readings always fall on the Sunday before Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent.

Alan Culpepper describes this experience Jesus had as one of those moments, which we don’t often have, when everything comes together, when the future becomes clear, when the shape of the whole is apparent. He likens it to the hiker in the woods who climbs a tree to get a clear fix on the peak that lies ahead. He says: “In the transfiguration, we, like the disciples, witness such a moment in Jesus’ life” (Alan Culpepper, The New Interpreters’ Bible, Volume IX, p. 207).

Barbara Brown Taylor describes the experience as “Jesus catching fire from within” while he prayed. And she says, “In the circle of his spotlight, two other figures appeared—Moses the lawgiver and the prophet Elijah—dead heroes of the past alive in the present, as if time were nothing but a veil to be parted” (Barbara Brown Taylor, “Dazzling Darkness,” Christian Century, 1998). This experience on the mountaintop was no usual experience.

As usual, the disciples didn’t get what was going on. They didn’t understand the appearance of Elijah and Moses. And how could they understand, anyway? They were in the middle of the events of Jesus’ life. The canvas was unfinished. They would never understand who Jesus was or even hope to get the big picture until they saw how Jesus’ life played out, until they witnessed the events in Jerusalem, from the foot of the cross.

What they didn’t seem to notice in the conversation Jesus was having with Elijah and Moses was that the two men were speaking to Jesus about his departure. They used the word exodus, translated for us into English as departure. Jesus was to begin the next chapter and lead his people toward Jerusalem—the departure was about to begin, the journey toward Jerusalem, the exodus. Barbara Brown Taylor says,

With Moses standing right there, the parallel was hard to miss. Jesus, like Moses before him, was about to set God’s people free, only it was not bondage to pharaoh they needed freeing from this time. It was bondage to their own fear of sin and death, which crippled them far worse than leg chains ever had. . . . Elijah’s presence was the divine seal of approval on this plan. He was the one whose reappearance meant the Messiah was due. To see him standing there with Moses and Jesus was like seeing the Mount Rushmore of heaven—the Lawgiver, the Prophet, the Messiah—wrapped in such glory it is a wonder the other three [the disciples] could see them at all. (Taylor, “Dazzling Darkness”)

It was a mountaintop experience. Peter was obviously affected by it and told Jesus it was good that they were all up there on that mountain together. He suggested making the whole experience last, holding onto to it, and thought they could build a dwelling or booth to memorialize the event—a dwelling for Jesus, a dwelling for Elijah, and a dwelling for Moses. I don’t blame Peter. I think most of us want to hold onto those big spiritual moments—a worship service that is particularly moving, the feeling of celebration of a completed church addition that has taken years of prayer and lots of contributions and much hard work on the part of many of God’s faithful disciples, a moment in one’s quiet time or prayer time when it seems like God is right there, right with you. We’d love to hold onto those moments forever. They are the high moments of the spiritual life. And Peter wanted to hold onto this moment: memorialize it, build dwellings.

For days and maybe weeks, Jesus had been teaching. The disciples had been listening to him teach the crowds. They’d watched him heal folks. They’d seen him cause trouble among the religious leaders. They saw the crowds following him get bigger and bigger. They had asked questions of him. And he kept asking them if they understood. Who do you say that I am? Peter, just days before, had confessed Jesus as Messiah. But no one really understood what that meant yet, because none of them grappled easily with Jesus’ continued statements that he, the Messiah, was going to have to suffer and die. And even when Moses and Elijah on the mountaintop started talking to Jesus about his departure—his exodus, his life-saving work—the disciples still didn’t get it. It’s not an easy message to take in. It wasn’t easy to understand then, and it’s still not so easy to hold onto now. Of course they wanted to stay up on that mountain with all of the light and the beautiful vistas and the visits from heroes of faith. And, of course, Peter suggested erecting some permanent dwellings for Jesus and Elijah and Moses. He wanted to freeze the moment.

And then, as if to emphasize a point, God speaks from the midst of a cloud that descends all around them—so thick that no one can see. Only God’s voice is audible: “This is my Son, my chosen, listen to him.” It’s as though God said, “OK, you still don’t get it, but just listen to him, for in fact, he is my anointed one.”

John Shea, Catholic theologian and storyteller, writes that the point of spiritual experiences and of times of great awakening is not to hold onto these special experiences, but to listen to them (John Shea, Matthew, Year A, p. 101). The extraordinary vision is not valuable in itself. Instead, the high moments recommit us to the challenges of goodness. The disciples wanted to build booths and stay on the mountaintop, but they could not stop time or live on in the radiance of that moment.

Early in my faith life, I had one of those high experiences, a time when I heard what could only have been the voice of God one night. Did I hear words? I don’t know, but I heard a voice, different from my own internal conversations with myself. God spoke to me about something that almost embarrasses me to tell you about. I had heard a sermon that morning that somehow particularly touched me about the power of prayer. It was during a time when my journey of faith was in its infancy stages. I was just being opened up to a life of faith and to who Jesus was. And so that evening, as I lay in bed, I found myself praying and asking God that God would help me quit smoking, which is something I really wanted to do and had tried over and over again to do but had not been successful in doing. Something in that morning sermon made me offer a pleading prayer that evening, and I heard this voice right inside my ear, but bigger than that. It felt as though it was inside all of my body, saying, “You’ll be able to because I will help you.” The next day, I quit, and for the first time ever, it wasn’t a struggle. I had a determination I’d never had before. I kept thinking about that voice I had heard, but I didn’t say anything to anyone about it—for at least three months, until I finally screwed up my courage to tell my husband, and then an acquaintance at church who was also struggling to quit smoking.

I kept quiet because I didn’t understand what had happened. I thought everyone would think I was making up a story or that I was a little nuts. I wasn’t so unlike the disciples in my non-understanding, because back then, I thought the point of God’s voice, spoken to me, was simply about my ability to quit smoking. I didn’t realize then that God was revealing to me the nature of who God is: a creator who cares about human struggles, all kinds of them, down on the streets and in the trenches. I thought the experience was all about me and didn’t realize that while, yes, it was about me, it was about much more than that. It was about God revealing God’s self to me, and it was about God continuing to pursue me so that I would become a follower. And it still took a long time before I figured out that following Jesus was about a lot more than following the rules and being good and praying at night before I went to sleep. Little by little I learned that it was about giving myself over to being used by God to bring blessing to others and to wrestle with moral decisions and to try to keep shedding all that hindered me from being courageous enough so that I could let myself be broken open and poured out for the sake of others. It all took a long time. And I’m still learning. And of course, back then, I wanted to hold onto that experience—to make it happen again and again, to hear God’s voice tell me all sorts of things—but that wasn’t God’s objective either. It wasn’t God’s objective that I freeze with that high experience of God. The high places are nice, but we have to go back to the streets again. You all look pretty good to me from this vantage point and it’s awfully heady to be up here in this pulpit, but I know that I need to make my way down again to that table, where people come with needs, where I come with my own needs, where I admit my need to be fed in order to continue the journey, following this Jesus, the Messiah, in living a life that is an offering. Barbara Brown Taylor says, “It’s a lot to believe: that God’s lit-up life includes death, that there is no way around it but only through” (Taylor, “Dazzling Darkness”). It is the message of this Sunday, as we prepare for the beginning of Lent. Jesus starts his departure, his exodus, toward Jerusalem and the cross. Will we stay with it and descend the mountain with him, back to the streets, back to the table where hunger exists and wounds need healing and people need love and forgiveness? It is my prayer that we will have the courage to stick with it, to stay on the journey, and to keep trying to figure out who this Jesus is.