UP THE MOUNTAIN AND DOWN
First Congregational Church Evanston
February 18, 2007 (Transfiguration Sunday)
Exodus 34: 29 - 35; Luke 9: 28-43
Mountaintop Experience in Ohio
In the summer of 1974, I was working as an associate pastor in the inner city of Cincinnati. The neighborhood of our church was about 98 or 99% African American, and as a young minister I was privileged to work with an experienced Afro-American senior pastor, Rev. Richard D. Sellers.
Now, Dick Sellers was a real visionary, and sometimes he got me into unusual circumstances. He had this white friend, who was an associate pastor in an all-white suburban church in the Cleveland area – actually Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. These two guys hatched up a big project for me. I would take a group of inner city Black kids across the state of Ohio and we would all camp out in the White suburban church, do a hands-on mission project, and of course change everybody’s life in the process – well I didn’t really know that was what I was doing at the time!
To get ready for this trip, Dick and I drove to Indianapolis to a school bus lot where we bought an old bus – we paid $200 for it, if I remember right! And then, since I had grown up on a farm and had learned to drive farm trucks, I was assigned to drive the bus back to Cincinnati. (By the way, even driving one of those buses wouldn’t be legal today, unless you had a commercial driver’s license – which I didn’t.)
We got the bus home, took it to Earl Scheib and got it painted Blue probably another $100, and got it tuned and ready to go including the state inspection. Then we loaded 15 or 20 teenagers, and a few young adult chaperones into the bus and headed from one corner of Ohio to the other – about 200 miles – me driving as well as being in charge of discipline. We got there in one piece.
The kids had an amazing time. They were from the ghetto. None of them went to school with any white kids. They may have had some white teachers, and of course this white associate pastor, but they had never spent time in a suburban white church – they had never worked side by side with kids from that background. They had never been given the opportunity to sit and talk to white kids their age, or to develop the teenage crushes that a week of presence inevitably produces. It was a time of growth and change for the kids on both sides. They had a great time – truly a mountaintop experience.
And so, the night before we were to leave to go home again, even though this poor associate pastor, who was going to drive the bus home, wanted to get some sleep, the kids from the two groups were together and they seemed to be up ramming around nearly all night.
In the morning at a final devotional, I remember being inspired to compare the experience they were just completing, to the mountaintop experience that Jesus and his three disciples had on what we call the Mount of Transfiguration. This kind of experience gains tremendous meaning for us and becomes life changing.
I believe that this experience was the beginning of a new life for some of those inner city kids. These kids and their families who were all living in desperate poverty, saw another side of life. It was a vision that was given to them by their relationship to their church. And over the years the lives of at least several of these kids have flowered into something totally unexpected after the grinding poverty and hopelessness in which they were living.
As we were getting ready to leave, the kids obviously didn’t want to have to go. Like Peter on the Mount of Jesus’ Transfiguration, who suggested that they could build booths and stay up there, these kids would gladly have dragged the experience on and on. But we had to go, and it was up to me to drive the bus the 200 miles back!
The irony of it struck me almost immediately: I was the only one who could drive the bus, and we had hardly gotten on the road, when every one else fell asleep, and I had the responsibility to stay awake and drive. I think of that tendency to sleep off the life-changing moment which was true of those dozing disciples on the Mount of Transfiguration, too. The Gospel of Luke says Peter, James and John were weighed down with sleep.
Well, I stayed awake. We wended our way without incident across about 100 miles of Ohio. But when we got near Columbus, we had tire trouble. There I was with a busload of Black kids, in that rural area in 1974, they might as well have been Islamic terrorists, stopping at gas stations in the farming area near Columbus trying to get repairs. The first couple of places we stopped simply refused to work on it.
I don’t remember how we finally got someone to work on it. I remember that I had to call Dick Sellers and confer with him – from a pay phone, of course. I think we finally found someone who understood that if he repaired our bus tire we would soon be on the road, and he wouldn’t have to bother with us any more. So, he did.
And so the comedown from the mountaintop experience of interracial euphoria was re-entry into a world where a busload of Black kids stranded in rural Ohio was a source of great fear to the neighbors. The kids were surely aware of what was going on, and experienced this irony, as well. As their associate pastor and their bus driver, I didn’t have any time or energy at that moment to be holding their hands or counseling them, I just had to get the bus back on the road and get them home to Cincinnati.
But think about the biblical story. Jesus and his three trusted disciples went down the mountain, and were thrust immediately into the struggle – a poor man whose son was suffering from epilepsy had tried to get Jesus’ disciples to heal the boy. But they could not. The man was desperate, and probably spoke in panic to Jesus, because his disciples had not been able to do anything. Jesus was irritated, and so he answered “You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you and bear with you? (vs. 41)” Coming down from the mountaintop experience is not an easy transition.
Transfiguration Sunday!
I’ll bet hardly any of you thought of this day as Transfiguration Sunday – and perhaps for some of you, it is not. Transfiguration Sunday and the event in Jesus’s life that it recalls is not a high point of our church year or of our lives.
In some Christian traditions – notably the Eastern Orthodox – Transfiguration Sunday is a very high day in the year. It comes as the last great blast of the Advent-Christmas-Epiphany cycle. First there is the expectation for the Messiah – Advent. Then Christ’s birth – Christmas. Then, Christ’s presentation to the World as Messiah – Epiphany.
Finally, Transfiguration is a culminating glorification of Jesus the Christ. It, also, acts as a bridge to the somber period of Lent which will begin this week. In Lent we soberly remember Christ’s suffering and death, which culminates with another very high day – Resurrection Sunday (Easter Day).
Theophany
The experience of the transfiguration is a theophany. It is an experience of God’s glory and presence. Experiencing God changes everyone involved! Jesus went up onto the mountain to pray to commune with God as Moses had done centuries earlier. While speaking and listening to God in prayer, Jesus is changed. The writers day his face is changed. His clothes became dazzling white! There is a blinding brightness associated with the presence of God – a physical representation of the Glory of God.
The two historical figures that Jesus communed with on that mountain were, Moses and Elijah. They were talking about Jesus’ departure – in Greek it is exodos. This is not Israel’s Exodus from Egypt, when God wrought salvation for the Israelite slaves! This is a new Exodus is Jesus’ death (departure) but it is also considered Jesus’ triumph in which Jesus would bring God’s Salvation to the world. While Peter, James and John are bedazzled, trying to figure what to make of all of this, the voice of God comes, that theophanic sound says: “This is my Son, my Chosen, listen to him!”
How to Respond to the Glory of God?
After experiencing the glory of God, the three disciples didn’t know what to say or do, and so they kept silent for a while! How do you share a mountaintop experience? You don’t want it to end.
As a child, did you ever come home after a week at summer camp? Maybe it was a time you saw God, or maybe it was just tremendously exciting. You were so excited! You had changed! You had seen things in a new way! But no one wanted to be bothered! They still had their same problems and their same life! They were so busy.
The transfiguration experience – seeing the glory of God – changed the disciples but they were not able to express it right away! Your own life-changing experiences may take some time to share with others! And sometimes it seems we can never fully get others to understand those experiences.
Conclusion
It was the vision of God’s glory which Moses saw! It was the heavenly glory of God that Jesus and his disciples saw. Jesus talked with Moses and Elijah. It was the glory of God that sustained them in the trials. It gave Jesus the strength to have the victory over the grave.
Where will you experience the the wondrous glory of God? Will it be with others in your congregation? In a prayer circle? In a Bible study or a book group? Perhaps it will be in the meditation on the experiences of others — the disciples in the scripture — other historical figures. You and I may see Christ transfigured before us. We may see the glory of God!
How will you share that experience with others? How will you share it with the church? People are worried about budgets or proper attire or the forms of worship. How will you share with them the powerful experience you had of seeing God?
Trust the glory of God that presents itself to you — and don’t be surprised if you can’t share it with everyone else — at least not right away. But don’t cease to offer praise be to God.
I’m going to read a poem written several years ago by a seminary intern I was supervising. Susan Schaefer’s poem about the transfiguration, is from Simon Peter’s point of view:
I heard God speak behind a massive cloud;
He silenced me, though I spoke from my heart.
His voice was deep and powerful and loud;
I fell face down and wished I could depart.
Fear not! I heard while trembling to the ground;
Jesus touched me then and said be not afraid!
I looked up, awed, though my heart still did pound.
I saw Jesus, my Lord; my fear was allayed.
Get up! Jesus said. Did you not hear God’s Word?
“This is my Son, with whom I am well pleased?”
God changed me, Jesus, so that you’d know I’m Lord.
Listen to me! Upon my words you’ll feed.
As we walked down the hill, Jesus said to me,
Peter, you are God’s child; in you God is well pleased.
Amen.
Last Updated: Wednesday, February 6, 2008