Preacher: Rev. Anne Jensen
Readings: Deuteronomy 26:1-11, Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16, Romans 10:8b-13, and Luke 4:1-13
I’m sure we all have some internal, intuitive understanding of the expression “mountain top” experience. I confess for years I thought it referred to some special feeling that you get when after climbing for hours you reach a point where you can look out over the world below and marvel at how far you can see, how small the river or the road has become at that height. Maybe there is a touch of relief at being able to rest and maybe there’s even a sense of awe at creation and a corresponding recognition of your own smallness. It’s a good feeling.
Yet when I started studying the Bible, I realized there’s another meaning, and a profound one at that. In the Bible it is on the mountain top that human beings meet God, for example: Moses, Elijah, Jesus and Peter...and John and James. Moses went up on the mountain to wait for God. A cloud covered the mountain; from down below in the camp, that cloud appeared as a devouring fire. And Moses received the Lord’s commandments on the mountain. Elijah was on the mountain, listening for God, who at that time was not in the wind or in the earthquake, or in the fire, but in the still small voice.
Jesus invites his closest circle to join him on a trip up a high mountain. Just the week before Jesus had predicted his death and added an odd part about being raised on the third day. Perhaps they thought they would get an explanation. But that’s not what happened. In front of their very eyes Jesus was transfigured; his face shone like the sun and his clothes became dazzling white. This dazzling white figure refers back to the messianic figure in Daniel, the son of man. There are many threads coming together here.
Transfiguration, as we see it in the experience of the disciples with Jesus on the mountain, is not an end in itself. Moses' experience on the mountain with God is not simply a great event for Moses. Israel is called out of Egypt to live in covenant with God and become a witness to the world as God's transformed people. The disciples catch this glimpse of glory that was to strengthen them for what lay ahead.
The Transfiguration is always a challenge for the preacher, at least for me, because people want to know “what does it mean?” And scholars can give us some help with that, but it was a mystical event, which means that it is truly beyond our capacity to explain. At best humans can experience it, but I think it will be best recognized by the fruits that come from that experience.
What happens in today’s gospel is a revelation of the true identity of Jesus to the disciples. Here they know in a way they never knew before, that Jesus is the Son of God; they experience the presence of God in Jesus; the voice of God made the vision clear: This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well please; listen to him!” Just in case they didn’t get the message at his baptism, and they didn’t get it fully, they hear it again. They won’t really get it until after the Resurrection, but they got it enough that Peter could with absolute confidence claim to be an eyewitness to the majesty of Jesus, the messiah, the Christ. Peter, James and John had a mountain top experience. Jesus' transfiguration is a momentary glimpse of something permanent that is yet to come.
They encountered God, but the encounter is not the end of the story. They must go down the mountain and begin the journey that is ahead of them, the journey to Jerusalem, and eventually a journey to the ends of the earth. They are not the same men who went up the mountain. They have begun a process of transformation that is not of their doing, but of God’s.
When Martin Luther King Jr. said in his “I have a dream…” speech, “I have been to the mountain top,” he hadn’t been trekking on the Appalachian Trail. Indeed, as described by historian Taylor Branch in Parting the Waters (pages 160-162), King’s mountain top experience was in his kitchen in the middle of the night when he was exhausted but could not sleep.
This mountain top experience in the kitchen followed his first arrest in Birmingham during the bus boycott. He was driving some people in the car pool home from work; after being followed by the police for some time, he was pulled over for going 5 miles over the speed limit, even though he was creeping along. The police took him on a circuitous route to the jail, so circuitous that he feared they were taking him to a tree to lynch him. He was shaking and then numb by the time they put him in a cell. King recognized a school teacher from the boycott, and he and all the usual prisoners rushed up to him to hear his story, and before he could finish, someone asked him for help to get out of jail. King said, “Fellows, before I can assist in getting any of you out, I’ve go to get my own self out.” And the entire cell burst into laughter.
Meanwhile his wife and his supporters were trying to get him out of jail; a jailer came to get him and King thought he was going to be released, but he was fingerprinted instead. Word of his arrest spread quickly and the jail was surrounded by a sea of black faces. The jailer came back. This time he was the one who was trembling; King was released on his own recognizance to a throng of people. He spoke to them and then they moved on to a church and then another, and another, for a total of seven mass meetings that night.
King woke up the next morning to a day full of pressure. He was fluctuating rapidly between moments of deep fear and those of high inspiration. That night as Coretta slept, he got a call from an angry white man, threatening his life. He couldn’t sleep so we went to kitchen to make a pot of coffee. He’d had a lot of calls from other black people; some wanted to know about his arrest; others called to complain about the carpool.
I am going to read directly from Parting the Waters. Taylor Branch uses the word Negro because that is the language Dr. King used and was the language of the fifties and early sixties.
Branch writes, “He never knew what to expect. The sensations of the incoming images pressed in upon him—the hatred of the whites, the burdened, offended rectitude of the middle-class Negroes, the raw courage or neediness of the plain folk. He associated the Negro voices with the sea of enraptured black faces he had seen from the pulpit at the mass meetings. The pressure of the Negro callers worked against this image, as did the white caller against his memories of Crozer [his seminary in New York]. There was no idea, nor imaginable heart, large enough to satisfy all of them, or to contain them. The limitless potential of a young King free to think anything, and therefore to be anything, was constricted by the realities that paralyzed and defined him. King buried his face in his hands at the kitchen table. He admitted to himself that he was afraid, that he had nothing left, that the people would falter if they looked to him for strength. Then he said as much out loud…his doubts spilled out as a prayer, ending, ‘I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.’ As he spoke these words, the fears suddenly began to melt away. He became intensely aware of what he called an ‘inner voice’ telling him to do what he thought was right. Such simplicity worked miracles, bringing a shudder of relief and the courage to face anything. It was for King the first transcendent religious experience of his life. The moment lacked the splendor of a vision or of a voice speaking out loud…” Yet it was real and present.
Branch continues, “For King the moment awakened and confirmed his belief that the essence of religion was not a grand metaphysical idea but something personal, grounded in experience—something that opened up mysteriously beyond the predicaments of human beings …”
I was deeply moved by this account when I first read it almost twenty years ago and I am awestruck every time I reread it. God’s glory was in that kitchen as surely as it was on the mountaintop. For me this account underlines what Peter wrote, “no prophecy ever came by human will, but men and women moved by the Holy Spirit spoke by God.” We have witnessed the fruit of King’s mountain top experience.
There is a famous saying by Irenaeus, an early Church father of the 2nd century, “The Glory of God is the human being fully alive.” This quality of life comes in our own moments of meeting the living God and the following transformation; its source is in the glory and power of God. There is within each of us the possibility of such a mountain top experience, and from my personal experience it is far greater than the experience of looking down from a trail at the top of a mountain, great as that is.
It works like this: In a God-given moment that you don’t expect and can’t plan, your life opens up… and out, and you find yourself in a space that is out of time. Then in some future the glimmering of some holy light leads to a glorious place you never knew – where you can give your gifts and receive the holy gifts of others – by the Love of God, through the Grace of Christ, in the Fellowship of the Holy Spirit.
You never know. There are moments glowing with glorious possibility, of transfiguring power – for each of us, if we will just notice. You never know when. You never know where. While the glory of the Lord is everywhere, human beings need to see it somewhere in somebody in particular. May the glory of God shine forth from each one of you, so that other may see God’s love at work in the world.
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