Living With It

Sermon: Living With It Luke 9:28-36
Transfiguration Sunday, 2.18.07 Year B

God invites us to climb mountains.

Moses climbed the Mount Sinai to hear the word of the Lord. Today’s lectionary reading is for the second time he went up – you remember from the movie what happened the first time he came down, with the golden calf and all that. He smashed the tablets and did damage control and then had to go back up to get another copy of the commandments. He spent 40 days (which means “a long time.”) It was such a powerful time for him his face glowed for the rest of his life. He had to wear a veil whenever he walked around.

Jesus climbed the mountain with his close friends Peter, James and John, and had this incredible encounter with God we heard about today. Moses and Elijah showed up and talked with Jesus, and the glory of God covered them all and God spoke to them.

We are also invited to that time of deep, intense relationship with God, the mountaintop experience, the time away. We send our kids to camp, to UMYS, we go on retreat, we go on vacation, to concerts, we spend time in prayer or devotion, we go to worship.

Climbing a mountain involves some dedication on our part, time away, stressing our muscles, carrying what we need to the top. We have to be intentional about going to the mountain. It is a beautiful place – the air is thinner, the light shines differently, the beauty is stark.

But we don’t live on the mountain. We have to come back down.

Peter wanted to build some dwelling so they could stay in that beautiful moment with Moses and Elijah and Jesus. He didn’t want to come back down. He knew it wouldn’t be easy.

The transition can be rough. When Moses came down he had to lead the people of Israel, people who couldn’t even look at him anymore. When the disciples came down Jesus invited them to do a healing that they botched. You’d expect after hearing the voice of God they could have pulled it off, but they didn’t. It was a rough re-entry.

They say astronauts have a hard time re-entering civilian life. After being on the moon, flying in space, coming to ground and returning to earth is difficult. One week they are walking in space, the next they are walking the garbage out. Newspapers speculate Astronaut Nowak’s recent trouble is related to the difficulty of that transition.

We know how hard it is to return after vacation, or retreat, or after an incredible celebration like a wedding. We know what it feels like to come home after camp, after a youth trip, after a fabulous worship experience or concert. But we don’t live on the mountain. We have to come down. We have to come home.

And then we have to learn to live with whatever we saw on the mountain.

We have to live with it. We have to incorporate this experience into our lives. We don’t just go back to the way things were because we have been changed. Something happened to us.

And while we can’t stay on the mountain, we can take whatever experience we had with us.

So Moses remembered being in God’s presence, and someone wrote the story down for everyone to know.

When Jesus neared the cross, certainly he remembered those moments in the light and glory. Peter, James and John remembered it too, and someone wrote it down. Surely it was a comfort to them in the days after the crucifixion, and after the resurrection. They carried it with them, that sense of who Jesus was.

Martin Luther King Jr. preached on April 3, 1968 about not knowing if he would see the promised land of racial equality, but he said he had seen the glory of God. He was shot the next day – hopefully he carried his sense of God’s connection with him in those moments. Those who followed him remembered those words, and they mattered to them.

Spiritual teachers tell that in meditation, seeing the glory of God – the light, the glow, however it comes – is not the point. It’s the way we carry the presence of God around with us in the mundane, everyday moments of our lives that matters. Those moments of connection are incredible, and we strive to have those in worship and spiritual growth opportunities in church. But it’s the way we carry that knowledge or that experience, through the rest of our lives that makes a life of faith.

The transfiguration, the mountain, doesn’t reveal anything to us that wasn’t already there. We just see it in a new light. That new seeing is what we need to take with us. God’s glory isn’t a once in a lifetime thing; it is around us every moment. We just don’t see it every moment. To live with it means to remember that God is with us, always, everywhere; that the mountain is never far away.

(For my benediction I sang Sara Thomsen’s song: “May the long time sun shine upon you, all love surround you. May the pure pure light that’s within you guide your way home.”)