Mountain Top
Mark 9:2-9
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At the outset, I think it should be said that Peter may be onto something here in this story about the strangest hike that Jesus ever took with his friends. I’m not talking about his suggestion that they start a building project right there and then at the top of that mountain- that’s admittedly pretty weird. No, what Peter is onto- at least according to Mark- is what motivates him to say something so bizarre in the first place. The only reason he says it is because he doesn’t really know what else to say. I’ll admit that I think that is a perfectly reasonable reaction to all this. One of the gifts that Peter gave the church, beyond being the first Pope and all the rest, is his unvarnished humanity. Let’s be honest, the bible can be a pretty fantastic book sometimes. And by that I don’t mean that it’s super great- although there is that. The bible can be fantastic in the way that, say, Thomas Jefferson found it fantastic; meaning at times it can sound more like some kind of fantasy world than the real world that most of us inhabit on a daily basis. Floods that cover the earth, slaves that escape through parted waters, donkeys who talk. There are places that strain credulity to the point that we might be tempted to write the whole thing off as beyond our capacity to willingly suspend our disbelief. Who can take all of this seriously? There’s a longer answer to that question, but that’s a sermon for another Sunday. For now, suffice it to say that Peter’s gift to the church is the portrait of someone we truly recognize, because he so often resembles us in all of our limitations when it comes to understanding Jesus. Jesus, we love. He is wise and loving and challenging and life-giving. And if we’re honest, he can sometimes be a little too perfect for his own good. That is in part why we love him. But Peter, well, Peter we know. If Jesus is who we hope to be more like, someday. Peter is who we are more like today. Peter makes the good news sound not just good, but real and believable precisely because he is every bit as imperfect as we are. And just like us, Peter loves Jesus, even when he has no idea what Jesus is about.
So if, in the face of a direct experience of this event on the mountain that we call the Transfiguration, Peter can think of nothing better to say about it than to suggest building three shrines, what makes us think we would have anything to add that would make any more sense of it all? And yet here we are, on the Sunday before the season of Lent begins, trying to make sense of it once again. It almost feels like whoever put the church calendar together on this was someone who delighted in making preachers squirm as they tried to explain something that by its very nature is inexplicable.
About a year and a half ago our local clergy cohort drove up to Colorado so that we could summit Mt. Elbert, the tallest peak in that state. Now there are many reasons to climb a mountain. The mountaineer George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt. Everest, famously answered, “because it’s there.” The old camp song would have us believe that the bear went over the mountain to see what he could see. Our group had put together a series of learning modules to explore breath and breathing as a way of thinking about the breath of God, the ruah elohim of Genesis. We had taken improv classes and explored the way people tend to hold their breath when they’re on stage without a script. We got scuba certified so that we could experience what it was like to breathe underwater. But that trip to Colorado was to experience what it meant to breathe at altitude, where the air gets thin and a good breath isn’t as easy to come by. The day we set out, we hit the trailhead well before sunrise. By the time we made it to the treeline, we were stopping frequently to catch our breath. Here’s the thing I learned about breath on the mountain, and in the improv classroom, and under the water. Breathing is something that is by and large pretty automatic. We do it all the time without having to think about it, which is good. Because if we ever stopped breathing we would die soon after. Of course, since it is so automatic, it’s pretty easy to take it for granted. The same could be said of God. God is as present and life-sustaining as the breath that keeps us alive, and for the most part we tend to go through our days not really thinking about that. Which is fine. Really. But when you find yourself in a position that requires you to truly pay attention to what is keeping you alive, whether the focus of your attention is the breath in your lungs or the presence of God, it has a way of changing the way you see things; changing the way you approach them.
Like us, over the coming season of Lent, Jesus is getting ready to make his way to Jerusalem. He is about to begin the long road to the cross. But before he does, he takes Peter and James and John up the mountain. Probably not just because it is there. Maybe to see what they can see. But perhaps most of all, he takes them up the mountain because what they do see there will change the way they end up seeing everything else that comes after, even if they don’t know what to say about it at the time.
It’s called the Overview Effect, a term that was coined by Harvard professor Frank White and described by astronaut Edgar Mitchell who flew the Apollo 14 mission. After piloting the lunar module to the surface of the moon, Mitchell was returning with his crew to the earth when he caught sight of the heavens, the sun and the moon in it’s rotation. He looked down at his own hands and understood that the molecules that made up his body, and that of his crew and their craft were all part of the same continuum. In that moment he felt profoundly connected to it all. Another astronaut has said that before going into space his favorite planet had always been Saturn. He really liked Saturn. But when he went into space his favorite planet became this planet. Or there’s Jim Lovell who on the Apollo 8 mission, which was the first to leave Earth’s orbit and go around the moon, helped frame the photograph taken from the window of their craft titled “earth rise.” Lovell was raised in a religious tradition that placed a heavy emphasis on Paradise as this ideal place. But when he was coming back from the moon and got his first glimpse of the whole earth, he felt like this is the real paradise that our species has always been searching for[1]. Sometimes that is what it takes. Sometimes it takes getting a little elevation on things, rising about the noise on the ground. We go to the mountaintop in order for God to show us what we need to see, so that when we come back down to earth we will somehow see things differently.
What Peter and James and John see is Jesus, but in a different light, a dazzling light. And not only that, they see Moses and Elijah with him. Everyone knows Moses. He looks like Charleton Heston (only not really). Moses led his people out of Egyptian slavery and to another mountain, the mountain of God. It was their first stop out of town, and Moses went up to the mountaintop to receive the law of God, the best ways for holding this people together as they set out for the land of God’s promise. Elijah is a little less familiar to folks. Elijah was a prophet. And not just any prophet, Elijah was the prophet who went toe to toe with the foreign queen Jezebel and her own prophets of the Canaanite god, Baal. No sooner did Elijah win his contest with those prophets and leave them for dead than he had to run for his own life, hoping to escape the wrath of the queen. And where did he go? Why to the mountain, of course. And not just any mountain, but the same mountain on which Moses had encountered God. There Elijah throws himself a pity party- table for one- when God tells him that God is about to pass by. There is violent wind, a terrible earthquake, and raging fire. But what Elijah discovers is that God is not in any of those catastrophic forces. Rather, he wraps his mantle around his face and steps out of his cave to encounter God in the sound of sheer silence. And once the encounter is over, he is sent back down the mountain with a renewed sense of what he has to do.
There on his own mountain, Jesus talks to Moses, who represents the Law, and to Elijah, who represents the prophets. What his friends see is their teacher keeping company with the Law and the Prophets, the tradition of God’s Word to God’s people. And what they hear confirms what they see.
They are familiar words, but the first time they are spoken in Mark’s Gospel, they are said to Jesus as he comes up out of the waters of his baptism. “You are my son, the beloved, with you I am well-pleased.” As far as Mark tells it, Jesus is the only one to hear it the first time. But there on the mountain, the voice of God speaks for these three disciples to hear, “this is my son, the beloved. Listen to him.” And now they are in on it. They are in on what God is doing, and more to the point, what God is doing through Jesus. They are seeing Jesus in a whole new light. One that will change the way they see and understand everything that will happen on the other side of the mountain.
Sometimes this is what it takes. It takes getting a little elevation, getting above things on the ground in order to see things differently. For some people that might mean literally climbing a mountain to become aware of what we all too often take for granted. Or it might just mean doing what we are doing right here, in this place. Trying to rise above the swirl of our lives in order to see it all in a new light, in light of the One we are here to worship. So that when we are sent back down, on the other side of this mountain, and we find ourselves on the road to Jerusalem, our eyes might be open to see things differently, see them as God would have us see them. With a renewed vision of the one whom we follow, ready to do what he would have us do.
[1] Reid, Guy. “Pale Blue Dot.” Audio Blog Post. The Liturgists Podcast. June 20, 2017. Web. February 11, 2018