All Saints by the Lake, Dorval
February 19, 2023
Thanks to the Rev’d Terry Hidichuk, Honorary Assistant, for reading this sermon on Sunday when I still had no voice!
In Minneapolis at the Young Clergy Women International conference, 2014.
One of the things about being a priest is that you go to a lot of retreats and conferences. Usually at least one of each per year just for the diocesan clergy, and then whatever extra experiences you seek out as part of your continuing education. Over the years, I’ve been to events put on by Young Clergy Women International (a group I no longer qualify for membership in); Music That Makes Community; FORMA (the Episcopal Church’s Christian Formation society); the Festival of Homiletics; and CREDO (the retreats organized by the Episcopal Church’s Pension Fund, basically as an insurance policy to keep clergy from going off the deep end from stress and costing the Pension Fund lots of money in disability payments).
Most of these events have been perfectly pleasant; some of them have been extraordinary (if you ever get the chance to do anything with Music That Makes Community, don’t ask questions, just GO). But I’ve noticed that for some reason, many retreats and conferences seem to be structured on the assumption that you come to them looking to change your life. They ask you to come up with a four-point plan for revamping all your habits, or to decide on something you’ll do differently and then mail a letter to your future self, to be opened a year from now, checking in on how it’s going. In other words, they’re expecting, or at least trying, to be a mountaintop experience, like we hear about in today’s Gospel, Matthew’s account of the Transfiguration.
I confess that, if every retreat and conference is supposed to be a life-changing mountaintop experience, then I am failing abysmally at being a retreat-and-conference-attender. I frequently pick the events that I’m going to travel to based on things that are entirely irrelevant to the actual content, like the location (is it a place I’ve never been before and would like to check off my list?) or who else is going (do I get to hang out with my friends?). (To do them justice, YCWI is well aware of this, and their conferences are basically, “Come talk shop with people you like, in a cool place with good restaurants!”)
For me, simply taking time away from my ordinary life, and having the kind of focused conversations and learning opportunities that are almost impossible to summon in the midst of the deluge of daily concerns, feels far more essential than trying to manufacture a Eureka moment after which everything will be different. I go back to my regular life reoriented and refreshed, and that’s enough.
And if we actually look at the mountaintop moments as described in today’s scriptures – both the Transfiguration, and the giving of the law to Moses on Sinai, which prefigures it – we discover that perhaps even the paradigm of the mountaintop moment isn’t quite that simple.
Moses is on the mountain for long enough to have a transformative experience – forty or forty-seven days, depending on how you read it – but what he gets from God is not the fundamental wisdom of the ages, but seven chapters of detailed instructions about exactly how many shekels of liquid myrrh to add to the anointing oil, and which of Aaron’s toes should be sprinkled with blood during the priestly ordination ceremony. And when he gets back down, he is greeted not by a grateful, rejoicing, transformed, holy people, but by the golden calf – and he breaks the tablets of the law and has to start all over again.
What about the story of Jesus being transfigured on the mountaintop in front of Peter, James, and John? Well, it is certainly a moment in which a profound truth is revealed: Jesus is the Son of God, the anointed one, the heir of Moses and Elijah; of that there can be no doubt. But the disciples hardly respond, “Thank you, Jesus! Now we have our foolproof three-point plan and our lives will never be the same!” (And, crucially, Jesus doesn’t seem to be interested in offering a foolproof three-point plan, either.)
Instead, Peter babbles something about building dwellings, and then after they hear the voice of God, they all literally fall on the ground in terror.
And when they come back down, nothing much seems to have changed; the other nine disciples have been struggling and failing to cure a boy of his epilepsy; Jesus rebukes the “faithless and perverse generation” among which he finds himself, and tells the disciples they lack faith. If this has been a mountaintop experience that changes everything, it certainly seems like everything is taking a while to change.
And I think that’s the crux of it: not that mountaintop experiences never happen, but that we shouldn’t always expect to know that they’re happening at the time; or be able to plan or force them; or that the changes would necessarily be immediate.
What do these texts actually say about what happens after the mountaintop, if it isn’t overwhelming enlightenment and effortless transformation?
Maybe, like Moses, item #1 on the to-do list is actually to write a long and mind-numbing list of policies and procedures – and then throw the whole thing out to go and deal with a bunch of people who have gotten it spectacularly wrong and are worshiping their own melted-down jewelry, before starting the whole process over from the beginning.
Maybe, like Peter, you need to grasp frantically at the possibility that the dazzling light and the voice from heaven can in fact be prolonged indefinitely, that you can stay in this moment and not have to go back to the real world.
Or maybe we’ve been getting Peter wrong all this time, and he actually understood perfectly well that this wasn’t possible. After all, Peter was a Jew who celebrated an annual festival called Sukkoth, the Feast of Booths – a holiday still observed today, in which the people build intentionally frail and impermanent dwellings and eat and pray in them for eight days, to celebrate the God who traveled with them in the wilderness, when they lived in tents.
Perhaps this was what Peter was thinking of when he offered to build dwellings for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah: not making the moment permanent, but simply marking the location of an encounter with the living God, in the tradition of his ancestors who would build an altar, worship the Lord, and then journey on. (Incidentally, the First Nations Version translation of the New Testament uses the word “tipi” where the NRSV uses “dwelling” – the lodging of the nomadic Plains peoples, rather than a more permanent word like “lodge”.)
Another cliché about the mountaintop experience is that after it, we are immediately and irresistibly seized with the need to tell everyone about it: that we can immediately articulate and summarize exactly what has happened and how it changes everything, and go out and start telling the world. This, too, Jesus explicitly forbids when he tells the disciples, “Tell no one about the vision until the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.” And I suspect that it wasn’t realistic in the first place: few experiences or insights of any significance can really be discussed or shared until they’ve had some time to be digested, assimilated into our being.
So what do we do after a mountaintop experience? I would suggest that the Transfiguration story offers a threefold pattern, of things that are so very simple and obvious that it’s easy to miss or dismiss them, both in the scripture and in our lives.
God says to the disciples, “This is my Son, the Beloved; … listen to him!”
Jesus, when they are prostrate on the ground, comes and “touche[s] them”;
And Jesus says to them, “Get up, and do not be afraid.”
Listen; touch; do not be afraid.
Listen. Don’t jump to conclusions about the experience and what it means, let alone run out and start telling everyone you know. Sit with it. Let it soak into you. Examine how it’s asking you to change – and how it isn’t. Listen some more.
Touch. Touch other humans. Be in community. Give and receive support. Let others listen and mirror back to you what you’ve heard and what you’re feeling and thinking. And, as the kids on the internet say to each other when they’ve been logged on too long, “touch grass” – don’t let the ravishing vision in your head obscure your contact with the real, actual world.
And do not be afraid. Because no matter what happens on the mountaintop, Jesus is always who he is. He is the tired, disheveled healer fed up with those around him, and he is the transfigured Son of God whose face shines like the sun. He is with us in our mountaintop moments, and in the valleys of the mundane. He is with us if our life transforms in an instant, or if we spend decades inching gradually closer to God.
Our encounters with God on the mountaintop can change everything. But it happens on God’s time, not ours. Listen to God – and each other; let God touch you – and be in community with each other; and do not be afraid.
Amen.
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