Finding Glory: Upward, Inward, Outward – sermon on Feb. 21, 2016
Luke 9: 28-36 Jesus took Peter, John, and James up on a mountain to pray. And as he was praying, the appearance of his face was transformed, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly, two men, Moses and Elijah, appeared and began talking with Jesus. 31 They were glorious to see. And they were speaking about his exodus from this world, which was about to be fulfilled in Jerusalem.
Peter and the others had fallen asleep. When they woke up, they saw Jesus’ glory and the two men standing with him. As Moses and Elijah were starting to leave, Peter, not even knowing what he was saying, blurted out, “Master, it’s wonderful for us to be here! Let’s make three shelters as memorials – one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” But even as he was saying this, a cloud overshadowed them, and terror gripped them as the cloud covered them.
Then a voice from the cloud said, “This is my Son, my Chosen One. Listen to him.” When the voice finished, Jesus was there alone. They didn’t tell anyone at that time what they had seen.
Sermon: Finding Glory – Upward, Inward, Outward
(the bulk of this sermon is taken from a blog post by Rev. Dr. Mary Luti)
Perhaps you’ve heard this story before, and some sermons on it too. I’ve heard them, read them, probably preached something like this. Jesus hauls Peter, James, and John up a mountain to pray. God issue a commandment in this story too—“Listen to him.” It’s an amazing scene. The disciples are overcome with what the Bible calls “the fear of the Lord.” Then Peter blurts out his desire to set up three tents there to capture the experience. He wants to stay. But the glory dissipates as fast as it gathered, and Jesus doesn’t linger. He gets the disciples off their face and onto their feet, and they all trudge back down the mountain, back to “real life.”
And we feel sorry for poor, impulsive, clueless Peter. His desire to stay up there, indulging in radiant stupefaction, is an escapist, self-seeking temptation. Jesus knows better. Mountaintop epiphanies, it seems, are not meant to last. They are at best rest stops, gas for empty tanks, carrots to keep us going through challenging lives. When the disciples have to suffer, as they one day surely will, maybe the memory of this glorious moment will warm them and make their agony less awful. But you misunderstand Jesus if you think the point of following him is to bask in his light.
The disciples have a hard enough time grasping the odd sort of Lord and King Jesus is; if they stay up there they might never learn that he came to serve. Down 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 disciples must also learn to do. 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 is fine, but only after you pay your dues. Peas first, then cake.
Now, that is a good way to interpret this text, and it can be a necessary corrective to “bliss ninnies” who think the best way to be religious is to gaze at your navel. Visions and voices are all well and good, but only if they don’t render you indifferent to the needs of your neighbor.
The only problem with this way of reading the story is that it can moralize the Christian life almost to death. Faith becomes a series of shoulds and oughts, and it starts to seem like the message is that worship or prayer is all well and good, but none of that has any value in and of itself unless we are also getting our prayerfully clasped hands dirty in the trenches of active mission. In my justice-loving, outreach-focused zeal, I may be missing something important. Does it become all about holy productivity – loving God not directly but by loving and serving others? Are pastors afraid that if we don’t constantly beat the drum of sending people out to serve and give and witness that you all will slide into a fog of contemplative rapture, never to be seen or heard from again? I wonder if the truth is that things are exactly the opposite; that it’s easier to get people on the lunch prep line than down on their knees. Would most people even know what we’re talking about if I preach about the dangers of being awestruck with divine beauty.
What a shame if we fall into the trap of living by a gospel that turns out to be, in the end, just another taskmaster, just another voice among the many voices that remind us all constantly that we have not done right enough or well enough or just plain enough enough to measure up to expectation and merit approval and reward. What a shame if we take texts like this one and turn them into so much finger-wagging.
Yes, 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. But we should also 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. And why should we label Peter obtuse and ridiculous because he wants to make such beauty and such glory – the very pleasure of God – last and last and last? 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. They were given a glimpse of the richest and most fundamental truth about our lives, and they were meant to react to it precisely in the way they did, with awe. Just because it wasn’t time for them to enjoy it permanently doesn’t 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. The story’s main point is clarifying the identity of Jesus, and it does so in part through the awe-struck wonder this revelation causes in the disciples. But Peter must also haves sensed that this transfiguring light was in some measure also about him. About us all. And for us all. The merciful pleasure God takes in Jesus, the joy of God’s goodness that glows like a million suns, is Peter’s origin and destiny too. It is the origin and destiny of the whole creation. We were all made in ecstasy and intended for ecstasy. Glory, and its lovely twin, Joy, is the permanent subtext of our lives.
Why does preaching so often seem to say that the only permanent thing we were made for is duty, when the truth is that we were made for delight? Why do we imply that people were made only for purpose and production, when the truth is that we were made for pleasure? Why do we help people 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’ we call ‘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 cracks in our 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.
We 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 or a pill. 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. 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 those 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, 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.
The call to discipleship is not to save the world: that’s God’s job. It is rather to witness in word, deed, and in awed silence to the fact 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 and tell the truth about what we see 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 private and in public 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 therefore also 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. And this means we must learn to pray and to pray contemplatively, to re-calibrate the eyes of the heart by gazing on God. It means we must open ourselves to fire.
The calling of the church, our calling, is the hardest work there is – stubbornly to trust the un-evident 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, 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 pays latecomers the same wage as those who grunt all day in the sun. 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.
You might close your eyes and count your blessings, or open them to watch the clouds. It could be a spiritual practice to put away the to-do list, to waste time, to play with the cat. Moments of glory will come. You might find them at a mountaintop, or you might find them in your living room. You might even find them here in this church.
Rev. Luti finishes with this story: In the late 4th century in the Syrian desert, a young monk went out from his cave to consult and older, wiser monk. He said, “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 older 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. May it be so.
