Sermon: “Coming Down the Mountain”

Text: Matthew 17:1-9

Transfiguration of the Lord (A)

February 3, 2008

Scripture introduction.  Our second text today, Matthew’s version of the story of Jesus’ transfiguration, is closely related to our first reading (Exodus 24:12-18)—the story of Moses on Mount Sinai.[1]  Listen to some comparisons:

Our first reading did not cover the entire story, but if we read the whole chapter of Exodus, we would see that Moses went up the mountain with three companions—Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu.[2]  Jesus went up the mountain of transfiguration with three companions—Peter, James, and John.  At Mount Sinai, God appeared in a fiery cloud of glory.  When Jesus was transfigured, there also was a cloud on the mountain, which Matthew describes as being “bright” even though it was a cloud.  In both stories, God speaks out of the cloud.  Both stories include the period of time “six days” or “after six days.”  Moses, when he went back up Sinai a second time to receive another set of stone tablets, returned with the skin of his face shining—so much that Aaron and the others were afraid to go near him.[3]  In a similar way, on the mountain of transfiguration Jesus’ face shone like the sun.  When Jesus was on the mountain, Moses and the prophet Elijah appeared with him and talked to him.  Coincidentally, Moses and Elijah were the two figures from the Old Testament who had spoken with God on Mount Sinai.

All of these connections suggest that Jesus is in many ways like Moses—the bringer of God’s law, the intermediary between the people and God, the leader who brings the people out of captivity and into salvation.  However, Matthew’s story shows that Jesus is more than Moses.  While the shining of Moses’ face could be blocked with a cloth, Jesus’ transfigured—literally, “metamorphosed”—body was as bright as the sun, actually shining through his garments and making them seem dazzling white.[4]  When the cloud on the mountain disappears, Jesus is still there, but Moses and Elijah are gone.  And Jesus is the one whom the divine voice identifies as God’s son, something that was never said of Moses or Elijah. 

For the ancient Christian community, the story of the Transfiguration connected Jesus to the greatest figures of the Old Testament, while at the same time it demonstrated that he far surpassed them.

Sermon.  A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that in the coming months our church’s project from the Natural Church Development process will be learning about and practicing what they call “passionate spirituality.”  Each of us will have slightly different definitions of what this means.  However, I think that all of those definitions will have something to do with experience—not just knowing about God and having the right beliefs about God, but actually experiencing the divine in our lives.  To bring it down to a trivial level, someone can tell us about ice cream, yet that is very different from experiencing the ice cream by tasting it.

Our Transfiguration text this morning has several things to teach us about spirituality.  The first is that there are those moments in our lives when we do feel the divine breaking through into our world.  As I mentioned before, some of you are probably much more spiritual than I am.  However, I have had a few moments in my life when I felt that I was on the boundary between the earthly and the heavenly.  I remember one time when our choir was singing in the cathedral in Durham, England, a building that dates back to the earliest days of Christianity in the British Isles.  We were singing William Byrd’s “Mass for Four Voices.”  As I looked out upon the few persons who were in the cathedral that day—tourists, mainly, and a few worshippers—somehow they seemed no longer tied to the twentieth century but rather had become representative of those who had been in the cathedral from the very beginning, and even of Christians before them, going all the way back to Jesus himself.  In other words, time began to merge together, and I felt unified with believers from every time and place.  I felt God’s Spirit in the music and in the building and in our choir.

One of my best friends from that choir is Greg Thomas, who lives in Nashville and directs the information technology resources of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra and the Schermerhorn Symphony Center.[5]  He and his wife, Patti, are also free-lance vocal soloists.  One of these days, I’d love to have them visit here and sing in our worship service.  Anyway, Greg gave me a book for Christmas, which I just finished last week.  The author is Oliver Sacks, and the title is Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.[6]  It’s about the unusual connections between music and the ways that our brains operate, but parts of the book also made me think about the connections between music and spirituality.  Let me read just one paragraph for you and see if you agree with me:

There is a tendency in philosophy to separate the mind, the intellectual operations, from the passions, the emotions.  This tendency moves into psychology, and thence into neuroscience.  The neuroscience of music, in particular has concentrated almost exclusively on the neural mechanisms by which we perceive pitch, tonal intervals, melody, rhythm, and so on, and, until very recently, has paid little attention to the affective aspects of appreciating music.  Yet music calls to both parts of our nature—it is essentially emotional, as it is essentially intellectual.  Often when we listen to music, we are conscious of both: we may be moved to the depths even as we appreciate the formal structure of a composition.[7]

That paragraph made me think of our experience of God, which has both an intellectual component—the things we believe about God—and an emotional component, the things we feel about God or from God.  As with music, they can happen at the same time.  I think that’s what the term “passionate spirituality” is getting at.  It’s not all about emotion; rather it’s about achieving a balance in which emotion and feeling have their rightful place.

Maybe the analogy with music doesn’t work with you.  Not everyone is powerfully affected by music; although from your comments about your favorite hymns in worship, I suspect that many of you are.  Others of you will have different ways of understanding the same experience of the divine in your life.  It may be art or poetry or food or walking outdoors or golf—something in your life that gives you joy can be a bridge for you to the spiritual world. 

And that spiritual world does have some powerful experiences.  Surely Peter, James, and John never forgot the experience of being with Jesus on the mountaintop.  (We can only wonder whether the light they saw radiating from his body was a foretaste of the spiritual body that Jesus had after his resurrection and that we will have one day.)  They had actually seen the ancient heroes Moses and Elijah talking to Jesus.  And they had heard the voice of God.  It was terrible and wonderful at the same time.  Clearly, Peter was affected.  He wanted the moment to last forever.  “Lord,” he said, “it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three dwellings [or tents] here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”  In other words, this is great!  I’ve never felt more connected in my spiritual life, Jesus.  Let’s just stay here.  I know that you insisted just last week that you had to go to Jerusalem and suffer and die, but let’s just stay here.

When we have these so-called “mountain-top” experiences in our spiritual lives, times when we, like Peter, feel amazingly connected to God, it is only natural that we, too, will want to stay in that experience, to live in it, to never let it go.  But the reality of our lives is that these moments do not last.  We receive glimpses of God’s kingdom, but the curtain never stays open for long.  As the old hymn says, “we walk by faith, and not by sight.”  When Peter, James, and John looked up from the ground where they had fallen in fear, Moses and Elijah were gone.  The voice of God was no longer ringing in their ears.  And, although the scripture does not actually say this, I think we can safely infer that Jesus was no longer shining.  The moment was over.  It was real, it was powerful, but it was over.   Jesus must have said something like, “OK boys, it’s time to go.  Let’s head back down the mountain.”

That’s why I called this sermon, “Going Down the Mountain”—because although we may have mountain-top experiences, most of our life is lived off the mountain, down in the valley.  Let us not miss the point, however, that this, too, is an aspect of our spirituality.  When God’s voice affirmed that Jesus was God’s son and that God loved him, God could have stopped there without in any way diminishing the transfiguration event.  But do you remember what God added?  God said, “Listen to him.”  In the Jewish culture of Jesus’ day, “listening” and “hearing” also implied “obeying.”[8]  God’s voice told the disciples that they were to obey Jesus, to live according to his teachings.

Thus, how we live our daily lives is also an aspect of our spirituality.  We don’t always know when the spiritual seeds are growing.  In the 1500s Saint John of the Cross wrote of what he called the “Dark Night of the Soul,”[9] those times in our lives when it feels like we are making no connection with God, when we do not hear the voice of God, and when we cannot see God’s hand in the workings of the world.  John argued that these times when God seemed most distant were often the times of our greatest spiritual growth.  The spiritual seeds, which had been covered with earth, were growing and developing and putting down deep roots.  Not yet, but eventually, they would sprout into the open air and blossom and flourish.

If you ever have gone hiking across the vast and trackless moors of England and Wales, you know how easy it is to lose your sense of direction.  The skies are often overcast or—even worse—densely foggy; so the sun is not visible as a marker for finding your way on the ups and downs of those rolling hills.  Through the centuries many persons who set out to cross those moors on a sunny day have felt the weather suddenly change and seen the sun grow dim and disappear into the gloom.  After a few hours they begin to wander aimlessly and, unless rescued, have died of exposure in the damp and windy cold of night.  For this reason, the trails across the moors are marked with piles of stones.  These markers are placed in such a way that, even in a fog, we do not lose sight of the pile we have just passed until we can see the next marker ahead.  In bad weather, we travel across the moor from marker to marker.

In the same way, in our spiritual lives we travel from high point to high point.  We cannot stay at the high points, the markers, because that would end our journey.  But while we are on the journey, if we begin to lose our way, we can look back and reconfirm our direction.  Between the markers, the times when God may seem distant, we continue on our journey through the valley by doing the things that Jesus taught.  (“This is my son; obey him.”).  We do them even when we do not feel a connection.  And the amazing truth is that by doing them the connection returns, the next marker comes into view.  This happens on a small scale every week as we come to church and worship and feel renewed, then leave to go out into the world as disciples.  We return after six days hoping to see another marker.

Memory of the spiritual experiences we have had in the past can guide us powerfully in our daily lives.  Jesus knew this, and that is why he gave us the Lord’s Supper as a sacrament—a time when we not only hear the gospel but also taste and feel it.  And each time we do, each thirty days, it becomes for us a marker on our spiritual journey.  We look back, and remember him, and then we can move forward.