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A MOMENT OF RECOGNITIONMatthew 17:1-9
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Prayer: God of mountaintops and valleys, ever present even when we shut you out of our lives, take us with you now to meet Christ. Allow a vision of what life can be when we take our discipleship seriously. And then send us out to witness to all the good news that you have given us. Amen. |
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The hope was to be found in something that was not a particular event, but rather a recurring one, what he called “a moment of recognition.” |
What is it about mountaintop experiences that make us want to stay up there forever? I personally haven’t come down from last Sunday’s service…a mountaintop experience if I ever had one. For those of you who are first time worshippers or those of you who couldn’t be here, we ordained one of our own, Mary Allison Cates, to the Ministry of Word and Sacrament, where she is now the assistant chaplain at Rhodes College. We were up on top of the mountain, and my only regret is that I hadn’t bought stock in Kleenex tissues the day before. There was hardly a dry eye in the sanctuary. Roland Perdue was back in the pulpit and, oh my, what a preacher! What a prophet! What a pastor! The wide range of music, from guitars and flutes and bass and banjo (yes, banjo!), to a psalter by the choir that filled not only ears but hearts. A baptism of a child from a wonderful family. Literally scores of people coming up and laying hands on Mary Allison. And then just as I think we’re about to come down off the mountain, Ed Beasley, (Mary Allison’s father), gave the charge to the congregation, which was both an expression of deep, deep, heartfelt gratitude to you, the members of the congregation, and an invitation to those of you who have been visiting and haven’t quite decided whether or not to join. “Hang around this place,” he said, “and you just might find yourself changed.” It was a mountaintop. One of you wrote the next day saying that it was what Patti Snyder called “thin places,” those places and times when God feels exceptionally close. “The Spirit,” he said, “was palpable.” What is it about the mountaintop that moves us so? That makes us want to stay there forever? Is it just a good feeling? A warmness in our heart? Kind of like a cuddly blanket all around us? Or is it something more? Some years ago I went to a conference in which Robert Bellah was one of the speakers. Dr. Bellah is a sociologist of religion who had just come out with a seminal study on American individualism called Habits of the Heart. I had just read the book and found it both disturbing and challenging, so I was interested in what he had to say. He began by laying out some of the leading issues that face both the faith community and the world, from communication to the world economy to the ozone layer. And I knew I had to hear all of that, but that doesn’t mean I liked it. It was a dose of sociological medicine I had to take from the good doctor. Right at the very end, right as some of
us were getting fairly discouraged, he dropped a tiny ray of hope. It
wasn’t that the faith communities would begin deeper interfaith dialogue;
it wasn’t a call for an international summit of some kind. The hope
was to be found in something that was not a particular event, but rather
a recurring one, what he called “a moment of recognition.” A
moment when one sees a glimpse of the future, sees what God has in mind
for us, a particularly poignant moment which gives us hope, but also makes
new and unsettling demands upon us in the present. Nothing can happen,
Dr. Bellah said, until that moment: A moment of recognition.1 |
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Peter, sentimental fool like he is, much like us, wants
to preserve that moment of recognition, and bask in the glory of the
mountaintop.
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Matthew’s community had already begun to get discouraged. There were, even back then, wars and rumors of wars and economic and social upheaval. Life wasn’t easy for the little band of followers. Matthew knew that discipleship was not easy, and so he had just written about how Jesus said that he was going to suffer and be killed and his disciples wouldn’t hear of it.2 But then he felt it was necessary, vital, to remind his community of what, from the church’s point of view, was a significant, perhaps the significant moment of recognition. A reminder that the future belongs to God. The reign of God had begun. But rather than just being a good feeling, new and disturbing demands are made in that moment upon the disciples of Jesus Christ. We call it the Transfiguration. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all feel it is so critical in the life of that early church community that they all include the event in their gospels. As Matthew tells it, Jesus took Peter and James and John up to a high mountain. When we hear that we know that something significant is going to happen, because the mountain in scriptures is always a symbolic place of revelation. And there, Matthew writes, Jesus was “transfigured before them and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white,” all signs that God was present. And then the great figures Moses and Elijah appeared, and there it was, the voice of God, just like at Jesus’ baptism, saying “This is my son, the beloved. With him I am well-pleased. Listen to him.” This is where Peter realized that this really was a mountaintop experience,
and so he wanted to do what we all might want to do…freeze that moment
in time. “Lord, it is good for us to be here. If you wish, I will
make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”
I’ve often been fairly critical of ol’ Peter, who just doesn’t
get it. Doesn’t see what Jesus sees, that there is a sick man down
at the bottom of the mountain that needed to be healed. Peter, sentimental
fool like he is, much like us, wants to preserve that moment of recognition,
and bask in the glory of the mountaintop. |
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But maybe there’s more to Peter’s suggestion. |
But maybe there’s more to Peter’s suggestion. Tom Long has written that Peter’s idea of building booths was itself a recognition that he was face-to-face with the future. You see, the Jewish Feast of Booths had come to mean not only a remembrance of the days when God dwelled with the people in tents in the wilderness, but also a looking forward to the day when God and… people of all nations would again ‘tabernacle’ together. Peter looked at the shining appearance of the glorified Jesus in the company of Moses and Elijah, and he assumed that this long-expected day had finally come. The future had arrived.” “But,” Dr. Long concludes, “Peter was mistaken. The future had been seen, but it had not yet fully come….There was still ahead….disputes to be settled, rejections to be faced, burdens to be borne, suffering to be endured, and a cross to be carried. The future had been seen, and now it shaped the present with urgent responsibility.”3 A moment of recognition, when one sees a glimpse of the future, is particularly poignant because it can change people. Remember what Ed Beasley said last week: “Hang around this place, and you just might find yourself changed.” Sometimes the change is immediate. But more often than not, its gradual,
like it was for Peter. They go back down the mountain and Jesus heals
an epileptic, and he keeps on teaching his followers, teaching, teaching
them about discipleship, and they don’t get it. After Jesus is arrested
it is Peter, the one and same Peter who was so moved there up on the mountain,
who cowered in fear and denied Jesus three times. |
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And they went down the mountain, not being able to absorb it all, but all the while knowing that they could no longer live as they once had. |
But then it was Peter who in the midst of all the craziness of Pentecost, with people coming together from all over the world and speaking different languages yet understanding each other, and the authorities were saying they were drunk, it was Peter who had the courage to stand up and say “No. They’re not drunk. This is what God was talking about years ago when Joel said the Spirit of God would come upon all the people, and the young would see visions and the old would dream dreams.” And it was Peter, who just a little bit later would get embroiled in the first major controversy of the early church, can the “pure” Jews eat with the “impure” Gentiles, and can they eat “impure” food, it was Peter who sat down with Cornelius, a Gentile, and said “I truly understand that God shows no impartiality.” That didn’t happen right away, but after the Transfiguration, Peter hung around Jesus and he was changed. It all began with that moment of recognition. I had such a moment this past Tuesday night. The session was meeting, and sometimes session meetings can be hum-drum, going about the business or busy-ness of the church. But Tuesday was different. We were trying to discern God’s will about something that had come up. And the session prayed. And listened to each other. And respected each other, and actually had the audacity to believe that the Holy Spirit was present in what we were doing. People might have been of different minds, but they were of one heart. And some talked about how God had changed them here at Idlewild, whether they were baptized here, or had only been here a few years. But that didn’t just make for a warm feeling. They were possessed by the future and were utterly convinced that this church would continue to be under God’s care, and so the present was shaped with urgent responsibility. That’s what happened to those disciples on the mountaintop. They saw into the future, and what they saw was that this transfigured Jesus was …and is… the Lord of all time4. They couldn’t begin to take it all in, as we can’t. There was too much mystery for them, as there is for us. They were fearful, as we often are. But remember how this story ended? Jesus touched them…he touched them with the same healing touch that changed the epileptic later, and said “Get up, and do not be afraid.” And they went down the mountain, not being able to absorb it all, but
all the while knowing that they could no longer live as they once had. |
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Then you will realize that there is a tomorrow in which Jesus will be Lord of all, in which God will be in control, and you just might live differently in light of that moment. |
So we’re on our way down the mountain.
It’s a pretty quick descent. On Wednesday we’ll gather here
and remind each other of our own mortality with the remembrance that God
made us from dust, and to dust we shall return and thus be reminded of
our over-whelming need of the redemptive and life-giving grace of God.
And then we’re going to pack up the “alleluias” and store
them until Easter. We’re going to journey with Jesus all the way
to Jerusalem, and we’ll see that sometimes that road is rocky. Lent
reminds us that all of life is not lived up on the mountaintop, that our
faith is more than gathering around a campfire singing “KumBaYah”
but also “O Sacred Head Now Wounded.” Our faith is a journey
of highs and lows, ups and downs, conflicts, confusion, and even death. Many of you have heard me talk of Shirley Guthrie before. A wonderful gift from God to the Presbyterian Church, and perhaps the finest theologian of our church in the past half-century. He died of cancer several months ago, and in a recent article, Erskine Clarke, one of his colleagues at Columbia Theological Seminary, wrote of the time he accompanied Shirley and his wife Vivian to the oncologist, where he received word that the chemotherapy would have to stop. It was time for home hospice care. When Erskine asked if he should leave the room, Shirley said no, that would come later. “I am not afraid to die,” Shirley said. God gives us our life, and when our time comes to die, we give our life back to God. In life and in death we belong to God.” 5 Whatever that moment of recognition is for you, claim it. Then you will realize that there is a tomorrow in which Jesus will be Lord of all, in which God will be in control, and you just might live differently in light of that moment. You will face the fear, even in the valley, because you have gotten a glimpse of glory. |
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(1) This was at a conference
at Columbia Theological Seminary around 1988. I was reminded of this in
the notes that Ted Wardlaw took at apparently a similar lecture that Dr.
Bellah gave at another venue. It was Ted who suggested the relationship
between this theme and the Transfiguration in a sermon at Central Presbyterian
Church in Atlanta on Feb. 10, 2002.(return) |
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