“Mountains and Valleys”

Sunday of the Transfiguration

Sunday February 14, 2010

Exodus 34: 29-35

Psalm 99

2 Corinthians 3: 12-4:2

This past September, I was at a week-long meeting of the World Council of Churches in Geneva, Switzerland.  After the meetings was concluded, I stayed for an extra couple of days in order to spend some time with one of my best friends, named Kevin, who was the best man in our wedding party – and his wife, Anna.  Kevin works for World Vision, has been living and working in Geneva for a few years now, and we do not often get a chance to spend time together.   He and Anna took the day off, and the three of us went for a long hike far up into the Alps, a few hours outside of Geneva.

It was a great experience, trudging up through Alpine meadows, past shepherd’s huts and flocks of grazing sheep.  Even though a rainy mist blew in just as we were hiking up to the summit, we could still see for miles.  Spread out before us was a huge panoramic view of the mountains, valleys and hills that lay below us.  The hills in which we were hiking were just across a huge valley from the snow-capped peaks of Mont Blanc, which is the highest point in Europe.

Far, far below us, we could make out the little ribbons of road, the miniscule dots of cars, the winding rivers, the little houses and chalets that dotted the valley floor.  Even though we could observe them from that lofty height, even though we could see all the signs of life below, that journey up into the mountains meant that we were removed, we were distant, we were unconnected.

We were way up the mountain. 

Today is Transfiguration Sunday, on which we are invited to read the story of Christ’s transfiguration in the presence of the disciples.  Transfiguration Sunday is always celebrated on the Sunday immediately preceding the beginning of the season of Lent, which begins this coming week, on Ash Wednesday, when we begin the journey that will lead us to the foot of the cross on Good Friday.

The story that we are invited to read, each year, on Transfiguration Sunday, recounts the story of Christ’s journey up a mountain with Peter, James and John, where they caught sight of his transfigured glory in the presence of Elijah and Moses.

There are a host of different levels and meanings that contribute to our understanding and interpretation of this passage. 

We might ponder, for example, the fact that the presence of Elijah and Moses in conversation with Jesus may have been the Gospel writers’ invitation, to us, to ponder Christ’s relationship with the prophetic tradition, represented by Elijah, and the ancient Law, represented by Moses. 

We might ponder the meaning of the glorious light that shone in Christ, a glory that was usually veiled from the disciples’ sight.  Our brothers and sisters in the Orthodox tradition celebrate the Transfiguration as the moment when the disciples caught a glimpse of the mystical uncreated light of the glory of God revealed in the face of Jesus Christ. 

We might ponder the reasons why Peter, James and John – who would be the same three disciples who would come with him into the deepest parts of the Garden of Gethsemane and see his anguish on the night of his arrest --  were the only disciples who were invited to come and see him in this moment of glory. Those who saw him in glory would also see him in anguish – and while they wanted to set up dwellings in order to stay in that glorious moment, they were only too quick to leave him and betray him in the midst of his anguish.

We might ponder why this scene took place on a mountain which – from ancient times, represented a place of special encounter between God and humanity.   Moses’ journey up Mount Sinai when he received the Ten Commandments; Elijah’s journey up Mount Horeb when he heard the still small voice of God; in these, and at many other significant moments throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, mountains were often depicted as the place of encounter between the human and the divine.  So too, in this story, that mountain seems to have been a place where the veil between the divine and the human became quite transparent.

It is this last possibility – of the mountaintop as a place of encounter with God – that often invites our meditations on the image of the mountain as a metaphor for some wondrous spiritual experience.  We speak of mountaintop experiences in life, by which we mean those moments of clarity, of vision, and of renewal for which we all long.  On the night before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King Jr. famously spoke of having had the chance to go up the mountain and see the promised land of liberty and equality for which he had worked for so long.

Clearly, there are many great levels of meaning and interpretation to be drawn from this passage, many opportunities for our spiritual and theological musings. 

But this morning, I would invite us to reflect upon the fact that a mountain is not only a metaphor for a spiritual ‘high’ or some ecstatic epiphany.  A mountain is also a place that is physically cut off from the regular events of life – it is a place that is topographically and even geographically removed from the stresses, struggles, joys and concerns of ordinary life. 

When Kevin, Anna and I stood on the top of that misty Alpine hill, last September, we might have been able to catch a glimpse of the little towns and moving cars in the valley below, but we were, in no way, connected with the people who were going about their business, driving in their cars, playing with their kids, struggling to pay their bills, living life.  We were removed; we were distant; we were unconnected.

And Jesus’ words to Peter, James and John served to remind them that he did not want them, nor would he permit them, to stay in that removed, isolated, disconnected place.  He wanted them to go down from the mountain.  He wanted them, as his disciples, to get back into the midst of the real world.  Yes, he had invited them to go up the mountain with him.  Yes, it had been a wonderful transforming spiritual experience for them.  But he did not want them to stay there.

He wanted them to get back to the real world.

It is a lesson that we do well to remember, to relearn and to re-explore in every generation.  There is a tendency, in so many forms of spirituality and religious practice, which lulls us into thinking that the place of encounter with God is to be discovered when we remove ourselves from the normal, ordinary, daily stresses and struggles of life.  If we could only ‘get away from it all’; if only we could find a more serene place to pray; if only we could cultivate a few more of those epiphany-inspiring situations; or if we could spend time apart from the horrors, the injustices, the brutalities and the challenges of this world – then our faith would be strengthened, then our spirits renewed, then our souls would be revived.

But this story constantly and continually reminds us that Christ calls us back down from the mountains, reminding us that the call of discipleship is not an invitation to seek some removed, disconnected reality; the place of encounter – and the place where his followers were supposed to be found – was into the midst of human life.

The calling of the Christian disciple, all of us who have been baptized into Christ, is to be actively engaged with the world, fully alive to both the joys and the struggles that are a part of the human experience.  We are not called to extract ourselves from the world for the sake of a holy faithfulness. 

We are called to be in the world, as agents of God’s redeeming, reconciling, saving love.  As those baptized by water and the spirit, we are called to seek to animate life itself with the loving spirit of the One who is life.  It is, therefore, not enough for us to lament the tragedies that we view on the news each night; it is not enough to set ourselves up in some situation of lofty, distant moralistic judgement on the mistakes of those who lose their moral compass, even when their mistakes are splashed across the front pages of our newspapers; it is not enough to wring our hands in despair at the senseless and evil brutality of serial killers hiding behind respectable uniforms; it is not enough to lament the depraved tendencies of a society that would use an appeal to freedom to justify plastering subway platforms with explicit invitations to break God’s command to live with loyalty towards those to whom we have pledged fidelity; it is not enough to excuse ourselves from addressing the destructive consequences – to human community and to the natural world – of the rapacious and exploitative greed of business leaders by simply assuring ourselves that either the free market or legislated government intervention will put things right.  Christ calls us, compels us, sends us down from the mountain; to be engaged with the issues and challenges that perplex and trouble the human community.  The place of the Christian disciple is at the bedside of the dying patient, the lonely room of the Alzheimer’s patient, the homeless drop-in center, the company office party, the community meeting.  And as we journey into the world, Christ calls us to build communities of goodness, of light, of love, of holiness, of acceptance, of forgiveness, of grace in this world – not out of it.

We must give thanks for the mountaintop moments; but we must also come down the mountains into the world.

And, when we summon up the courage to do so, we discover, as the season of Lent is about to remind us, that there is One who goes before us directly into the heart of this world’s brokenness – One who goes before us to a cross. 

We have seen the glory on a mountaintop; let us stay faithful until we see the agony of a cross so that we might also see the wonder of an empty tomb.