First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
22 February 2004
It Is Good For Us To Be Here
Exodus 34: 29-35
2 Peter 1:16-19
Luke 9:28-36
We've heard this story many times, so we know how it goes. Jesus hauls Peter, James and John up a mountain to pray. Prayer is not their long suit, being uncommonly sleepy sorts, but in this episode they manage to resist nodding off. That will not be the case at the end of Jesus' story when he takes them to the Garden of Gethsemene. But that is later. Now, up they go. ("Up" is a symbolic direction, of course. "Up" is where the ancients believed God lives.)
As we watch the trio ascend with Jesus, our thoughts turn to another climb centuries earlier when the great Law-Giver, Moses, went up Mt. Sinai to talk to God. There was glory shining all around in that story too—lightning, thunder and clouds. When Moses came down, his face was aflame from having been exposed to the divine presence, and he was lugging those big stone tablets that eventually ended up in Judge Roy Moore's courthouse down in Alabama.
The disciples see Jesus light up with the same awesome glory. They hear God speak out of a cloud: "This is my Child. I love him. Pay attention." They are overcome with what the Bible calls aptly "fear of the Lord." Peter blurts out his desire to set up three tents on the spot to capture the experience, but the glory dissipates as fast as it gathered, Jesus gets them onto their feet, and they all trudge back down.
Now, it's hard not to be hard on Peter. Poor impulsive Peter. He never seems to get it. He wants to stay up there in radiant stupefaction forever; but, as we usually say when we read and reflect on this passage, that is an escapist, self-seeking temptation. Jesus knows better. He heads them purposefully down the mountain, back to "real life" on the ground.
Epiphanies, we say, are not meant to last. They are at best rest stops, gas for our empty tanks, carrots to keep us going through challenging lives. When the disciples have to suffer, as they one day surely will, perhaps the memory of this glorious moment will make their agony less awful.
Peter thinks that it's good for them to be up there covered in light, but (we say) it really isn't good at all, because to bask in the light is to misunderstand Jesus. The disciples have a hard enough time getting it through their skulls that Jesus is not a worldly king; if they stayed up there, surrounded by glory, they might never learn that he came to serve. Down here on the ground, suffering is everywhere. Jesus could not escape his own, but he tried hard to alleviate everybody else's. And that's what the disciples must also learn to do.
It's what we're supposed to be doing too. We should consider ourselves blessed if we get an occasional peek at glory, but we can't rest in it any more than the disciples could. We have to go down the mountain and shoulder our ministry. Glory comes after you pay your dues. Vegetables first, then desert.
Now, that is a good traditional way to read this text, and I suppose I should leave it at that and sit down. But I can't preach such a message today. Today it seems like so much finger-wagging to me—too preachy, too moralistic, and I feel a great resistance to it. Perhaps it is because I tend to write these sermons in the latter part of the week, and this week, those days were filled with death and the nearness of death. Gaylen Morgan's father died on Friday after many months of dealing with health problems. Nancy Weil's father died suddenly on the same day, from a burst aneurysm. Kevin Smith called to say that not only is his father hospitalized, but now his mother is also. And our beloved Dean Gordanier, so long triumphant in every crisis he's faced in four years of battling cancer, is now at Brigham and Women's with an infection that is threatening to end his valiant life.
And when in the midst of this life I am surrounded by death and the nearness of death, I tend to ask about ultimate things, about ends and foundations and priorities. And in my meditations this week, I have been given to understand that I cannot and must not live this one sacred life I have been given according to a faith that regards ecstasy as some sort of temptation. I won't and can't live by a gospel that turns out to be, in the end, just another taskmaster, just another voice among the many voices that remind me constantly that I have not done right enough or well enough or just plain enough enough to measure up to expectation and merit approval and reward.
Yes, of course it is plain from the text that Jesus didn't want his friends to put up those three tents. Yes, Peter was befuddled by the strange experience and "did not know what he said" when he blurted out, "It is good for us to be here." Yes, Jesus took them right back down and yes, they plunged into the hard work of healing and teaching. There's no question that engagement with the world is an essential component of discipleship, and that the suffering it brings requires of disciples courage, determination and perseverance—none of them glamorous things.
And yet I want to know why Jesus would show his friends the unutterable glory of God radiating through him and not mean for them to enjoy it. He is not a crooked retailer, baiting and switching, is he? And why should we label the disciples obtuse and ridiculous because they want to make such beauty and such glory—the very pleasure of God—last and last and last?
No, what the disciples received that day on the mountain was not a gallon of emergency gas or a quick breather for the work crew. It was a gift of mercy, pleasure and love. It was the richest and most fundamental truth about our lives, and they were meant to react to it precisely as they did. Just because it wasn't time for them to enjoy it permanently does not mean that they were wrong to want it permanently, or that by wanting it so much they somehow missed the meaning of the event.
Peter saw that the glory of God's mercy and deep pleasure rested uniquely upon Jesus. But I think that he sensed that this transfiguring light was meant in some measure also for him. The merciful pleasure that God takes in Jesus, the joy of God's goodness that glows like a million suns, is Peter's origin and destiny too, the origin and destiny of the whole creation. We were all made in ecstasy and intended for ecstasy. Glory is the permanent subtext of our lives.
Why then have we come to believe that the only permanent thing we were made for is duty, when the truth is that we were made for delight? Why do we think we were made only for purpose and production, when the truth is that we were made for pleasure? Why do we think that the church was called and gathered only for relentless hard labor in the vineyard of Christ, when the truth is that we were called and gathered for praise, thanksgiving, and freedom—for visions, for dreams, and for the royal waste of time called "worship"?
In moments when God's glory breaks through our flat world of fact and rationality; in times when God's mercy transports us to the real "real world," the one Jesus called the "kingdom," full of justice and reconciliation, forbearance and peace; in moments when the dazzle of God's love squeezes through the fissures in our denial and defenses and explodes into our lives—in those moments we are drawn inexorably to God like people who have been living sun-starved for years in caves, and we too want to pitch tents on the mountain. We too want to stay and stay and stay.
You know those moments. The flood of confusion the first time someone loves you—yes, you. The time you were forgiven when you should never have been forgiven. The day you got through the whole of it without a drink. The night your first child was born. The moment you really heard the poet's question—"What will I do with my one precious life?" The time you turned on the news and found out that that the wall was down and the tyrants were dead and people were crossing borders, singing.
Or the morning early when you went for a hike, and the cloud that had threatened rain lifted suddenly, and from the top of the mountain you saw clear to Canada, and it took your breath away; and in the strange slanting light you felt somehow held, beloved, alive, and it was like The First Morning, and you believed it was possible to be new.
Even in the midst of the hardest grief, it comes to us, this glory, in some stillness, in a face, a touch, a place, a smell. We know those moments. And we have all wanted to pitch a tent on their heights and stay and stay and stay.
It turns out that we cannot stay—the traditional interpretation of our story is correct about that. But the reason we cannot stay is not because it isn't good for us to be on the summit and desire such glory. It is in fact the supreme good. To want that glory is to desire God.
It is also true that while we await the final, full breakthrough of divine pleasure upon the world, we have much work to do. But this work is not the busyness and effort, the demand and expectation, the dread and drudgery, or the purpose and plan that we have been taught is pleasing to God. The work of people of faith is more wonder than competence, more surrender than skill, more beauty and imagination than plans and programs, more gratitude and praise than effort and exhaustion, more tryst than task.
The call to discipleship is not to save the world—that's God's job. It is rather to witness to the possibility that God is in fact saving and re-creating everything, even now. Our calling is to become increasingly alert to the places where transformation has already secretly begun, and to point them out to those who cannot see them or do not believe what they see, and who therefore languish in cynicism, sorrow and despair. The mission of the church is to testify in word and deed, by overt gesture and by secret resistance, in private and in public ("in all places, everywhere and without ceasing") that grace is even now sparking in the stubble, glory is already lighting up the mountain, and all people, strangers, kin and enemies, are even now being plucked from death, included in the sweep of mercy, and brought home to sit at the table of peace.
Our calling is to develop a capacity to see beyond common sense and ordinary sight. To see the world's suffering unflinchingly, exactly as it is, and to see God already working right there a someday resurrection. To spot the tracers of love in the bloodstained firmament and to announce them like watchers on the wall at daybreak, and by our fearless announcement bring hope to everyone who swears all hope is lost.
The calling of the church, our calling, is the hardest work there is—stubbornly to trust the unevident more than the evidence at hand. To resist the caution of the earnest, the sensible, and the balanced. To be glad that God is full of the kind of generosity that mocks our guilt-ridden, self-important social action strategies, unhinges our anxious time management techniques, and beats the heck out of our prudent long-range goals. The mission of the church is to be delighted by this odd God who (as we saw last week) pays latecomers the same wage as those who grunt all day in the sun. The gospel of Jesus Christ is all about the strange pleasure of largesse, and it is our calling not to be ashamed of this gospel.
God's will is to love the sinner, love the sinned against, empty the haughty, fill the poor, mend the brokenhearted, abide the unacceptable, bless the weak and inadequate church. And in the face of all this divine nonsense, our calling is to lose our senses too, to be like this God. It is a very hard calling, make no mistake, because it feels so much like doing nothing, and we have a terrible time shaking the notion that if we aren't doing something, than neither is God. And yet our ministry is in the end to be the fools who understand that the very best thing we can do for the world is simply to strike a fascinated pose before the alien beauty of grace.
In the late 4th century in the Syrian desert, a young monk named Lot went out from his cave to consult and older, wiser monk whose name was Joseph. Lot said to Joseph, "Abba, the best I can, I say my prayers, I fast, I meditate, and I serve my neighbor. What else is there to do?" The old man stood up and stretched his hands toward heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire, and he said, "To do? Nothing more. But you could become all flame."
All flame. It would be good, it would be very good, for us to be there.
© 2004, Mary Luti