“View from the High Country”

Mark 9:2-9

February 26, 2006

St. Paul United Methodist Church

Rev. John Fleming

This morning I would like to invite you to be a part of a couple of the mountain top experiences of my life and by doing that, invite you to visualize a few of your own. The first of these two happened long ago. So long ago, in fact, that pictures of it remind me of what it was like.

When I was a child and money for my parents was a little tighter than it is now, we vacationed in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, just a few hours drive from my hometown in West Tennessee. This happened back in the days before Gatlinburg and the town closest to it, Pigeon Forge weren’t so commercial and when outlet malls didn’t dot the landscape. I can remember staying at the Howard Johnson’s hotel, swimming in the swimming pool there, and then at least a couple of times during that week driving up into the Smoky Mountains, looking for black bears on the road, and finding the perfect spot for a picnic. I can remember can remember as my mother got lunch ready, the rest of us went down a small hill, to where the cold waters of the Little Pigeon River flowed. The Little Pigeon was not a raging river, as I recall. Just above the water were large rocks. I can remember the fear that I felt as I jumped from one to the other with either my brother or sister encouraging their little brother on.

I can remember driving up a little further in the mountain and seeing trees raise their limbs in praise toward God. I can remember stopping at that place where there was a sign. If you stood on one side of it you were in Tennessee. If you stood on the other side of it you were in North Carolina. My brother stood in one state and shook hands with my sister who was in another one. When these things happened, I had no idea that this mountaintop experience would be so important to me.

I can remember another trip to the mountains, this one many years later. It was after Susie and I were married, but before Annie Grace came along. We traveled to Breckenridge, Colorado to spend the week with Susie’s mom and her brother. Her brother worked in the village, driving skiers from ski lift to ski lift, in an old school bus. Sam worked there so that he could live there and snow board there. That spring, we flew out to see him, but mostly we were there for some time away in hopes of a mountaintop experience.

I do not mind admitting to you that I am not a big fan of skiing or snow boarding. I tried it once, on a youth retreat. I may have told you about that. At the time I had never skied, so I took lessons. My feet did not want to cooperate. Ski lessons lasted an entire day. Thirty of us started the lessons that morning. Two came back after lunch. I was one of the two. At the end of the day when I fell down what they call a bunny slope, I decided to give up.

So on this trip with Susie and her mother, now some six or seven years ago, I had no intention of skiing. I loved being up there on the mountain, with snow falling just about every day. I loved the snowmobile tour that we took where we traveled in a group of about ten snowmobiles and saw the sights of the mountains and the remnants of communities now long gone. I loved taking the tram to one of the highest parts of the mountain, where there was a place to eat, a church to ski towards (I inquired if they were in need of a pastor), and a look out point that was fabulous. From there you could see for miles and miles.

I can remember on the last day, as we were packing out bags and seeing the slopes and the mountains for what now was the last time, I thought, “I don’t want to go home. I don’t have any desire to go back to work.” Truthfully, that morning, all I really wanted to do was to stay on top of the mountain.

So when I read our scripture lesson for this morning, taken from the ninth chapter of Mark’s gospel, I understood Peter’s wanting to stay on top of what we believe was the just over nine thousand feet tall Mount Herman. This story, recorded in the first three gospels, is known as the transfiguration of Jesus; it always appears on the Sunday just before the season of Lent begins. It is there as an epiphany, a revelation of who Jesus is.

You will remember that Jesus began his ministry with his baptism, way back in Mark’s first chapter. His cousin, John, was the one doing the baptism. As Jesus came up out of the water, the heavens opened and the voice of God called out just to Jesus. God’s words to his son were these, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” The way Mark tells the story seems to say to us that no one but Jesus heard the words.

Things are different by the top they get to chapter nine and the top of Mount Herman. This time, when the voice of God booms, the words are intended for three disciples, Peter, James, and John. The voice says to them, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to Him!”

Why did they need to listen to Him? Read the eighth chapter of this gospel and you will find the answer. It is there that as they are walking along, Jesus turns to the disciples and asks what people are saying, particularly about who he is. It is Peter who speaks for the rest of them. When Jesus turns and asks who they think that he is, Peter again speaks. This time he says, “You are the Messiah.” It was a great moment, that is, until Jesus said what his messiahship would be like. He talked about suffering, being rejected, being killed, and then rising on the third day. Peter did not like that so much and when he protested, Jesus said words that I’ve said when people disagree with me, “Get thee behind me Satan!”

I can just imagine the somber mood that had settled in with the disciples. Was this what we signed on for? They must have wondered that. We thought that we were hooking up with a celebrity, a miracle worker, a savior, a man bound for glory. We did not know that all of this would involve a cross.” They must have wondered, “What happened to the glory?”

Jesus’ tough talk about the cross had thrown the disciples into confusion, if not utter despair, and so Jesus must have decided that they were overdue for a glimpse of glory. His actions were deliberate. He led them away from the distractions to the top of a mountain. And sure enough, up there where the view around them was spectacular, they experienced a God’s eye view of Jesus. What they saw was a radiant and dazzling Christ, and a vision of Moses and Elijah and they heard the very voice of God saying to them, again, to them, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to Him!”

It was one of those once in a lifetime experiences for the disciples. The experience was of God. It was one of those supernatural interventions that might happen to one person in a million and then only once in that person’s lifetime.

The transfiguration, how do you talk about it? Jesus did not talk about it, neither did his disciples. It makes you wonder how Mark ever found out about it. The transfiguration. I am not sure I understand it. What I do know is that it is one of those things that is totally in God’s hands, a matter of God’s timing and for sure only in God’s control. It is God breaking through the veil between Him and us in an astonishing way!

The great preacher, Barbara Brown Taylor, tells of going up on a mountain in Ireland on the last Sunday of July, the day that the Irish pay their respects to Saint Patrick by climbing a mountain that bears his name. Legend has it that Saint Patrick spend forty days up there praying for Ireland’s deliverance from the worship of pagan gods.

Barbara Brown Taylor tells that at the top of the mountain, the door between this world and the next had cracked open for a moment. Only the light was not all on the other side. She called it a thin place. She said that the light lit up this side of heaven, where a bunch of wet and tired people whose feet hurt were all walking around with faces as bright as candles.

It is no wonder that Peter, once again speaking for at least three disciples, wanted to build some houses (literally tents), one each for Moses, Elijah, and Jesus. It is no wonder that he exclaimed, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here!” Mark tells us that he said that because he was afraid. I’m not sure I buy that it was only fear that made him say that. I think that Peter caught a glimpse of the glory of God. I think that it was a spiritual high for him. I think that he wanted more than anything else to stay in that powerful moment as long as he could.

And it just seems to me that we want the same kind of thing. For us, it might not be Jesus becoming dazzling white. His doing that would scare us, too. What I think is that we want an experience of God and God’s peace and to live in that moment.

Susie, Annie Grace, and I are looking for such a place, a get away place. our own. I have a friend who knows about houses that are for sale and when she heard that we were looking for such a place, she started sending us some pictures of such places. She did that this week and so on Monday, after work, we drove up to Roland to a get away place still in Pulaski County. The house, on the internet, looked great and secluded. It looked like a quiet place. It wasn’t. We drove up there and when we saw it, we noticed that next door is a volunteer fire department. Across the street are train tracks. So it is not what we had in mind. What is it that we had in mind? We are looking for a place where the world doesn’t shout so loud, where there is no phone, a place where we can relax and a place that I can go a few times a year to plan our sermons. We are looking for a retreat where a mountaintop experience will happen time and time again. I am not sure that such a place exists. Peter may have realized that, too.

There are at least a couple of sermons in this text that we preach every year. The first is that it is good to be up there on the mountain. The second is that you have to come back down it eventually.

Henry Drummond, a great theologian once said that God didn’t make mountains for us to live on. We ascend to them, we climb up them, to the heights, to catch a broader vision of the world around us. But we don’t live there. We don’t tarry there. The streams begin in the uplands, but they descend quickly to gladden the valleys below.”

We do not read the story right after this one in the lectionary. We quickly move on to the wilderness temptations on our way to Jerusalem and the cross of Jesus. Just after the mountaintop experience, Jesus and the disciples come down and find a boy whose seizures are so bad that he can’t speak. These seizures cause him to fall down. The nine disciples who did not climb Mount Herman with Jesus cannot heal the child. Such is life in the valley. In the valley is the real world and real life. But I want to tell you that God is there as much as God is on top of mountains.

Because of where I think that I am today and because of the year that I’ve had, for just a little while this morning, I’d like to stay up on the mountain and experience God. It’s an experience that I once again desperately want to have! But you can’t just demand that they happen. What you can do is to put yourself in a position to experience it when it does.

Near the end of the sermon that I mentioned a few minutes ago, Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “There is no shortage of epiphanies in this world...we may still behold His glory, reflected all around us as we stand in the clouds.”

Let me close with a story. It may be one that I’ve told before. It is the one about a man named Gus who longed for an epiphany, a revelation from God. He lived in a cabin in the woods and he got up at 2:00 one morning because he couldn’t sleep. He started a journey. he walked up the mountain behind the cabin into the woods. He went up to the top of the mountain and saw as he was walking along a road that the sun was just beginning to touch the ridge of the mountain range opposite of him. That is when he felt a chill that started in his thighs. It went up his spine to the top of his head. Then he felt the sense of a presence. He described it with these words, “It was though an unseen, oldest, longest lost friend had come to walk the road beside me.” That was it. That is all that it was. It was not overpowering. It was empowering. It was the way that you feel empowered when a friend comes to you in a time of trouble and says, “Come and let me walk with you.” Let us pray.