Now about eight days after these sayings Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.
Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him. Just as they were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, “Master, it is good for us to be here let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah”—not knowing what he said. While he was saying this, a cloud came and overshadowed them and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my Son, my Beloved listen to him!” When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.
Have you ever had what you might think of as a mountain top experience? A time when you felt you could feel Gods presence – when you felt euphoria, yes, but also the discomfort that comes with transformation? Where were you? What was it like? What did you do when you came down from the mountain?
Every summer when I was in middle and high school I went to the mountaintop for a week. The mountaintop was in north-central Ohio, and it was called Camp Mowana. For one week every summer, I bathed in the love of God. For one week every summer, I felt deeply loved for who I am, able to be my true self with all of the contradictions and confusion and intensity and change that comes with being a teenager. There, I had the best friends in the world. Friends with whom I could talk about God, sing about God, do silly skits about God. God was in the people around me and through them God showed me how to love as God loves and what the kingdom of God looks like. I experienced God as love in a true and visceral way.
We would cry during candlelight worship the last night at camp. We would cry as we left one another and the place we loved so deeply. I would return to the world in which I was the only Christian among my friends, the world in which I was weird and made fun of for my body. When someone asks me that question, if you could stay in one period of your life, it would be any of the weeks as a teen at Camp Mowana. My time on the mountain top transformed me. Learning about this God that is love, experiencing a place where I could be loved exactly as I was has driven most of my life. I received my call to ordained ministry the summer between 8th and 9th grade as I was dancing to the Indigo Girls song “Galileo” on the basketball court near the cabins during a middle school dance. One of my counselors looked at me singing along and said, “You’re going to be a counselor here one day.” What I heard in that was I was going to be a pastor. I can’t explain it, but God frequently does not make immediate sense.
Learning about a God that is love and loves everyone and living in a community where that is the driving ethos fed my belief that God in Christ is a God that wants the poor fed and housed, the imprisoned and oppressed liberated. I came down from that mountain and, as best as a teenager could, I practiced love. I dove into my faith, reading scholarly theology starting at about 14 (yes, I was a weird kid). Now, were I truly able to stay there after my week, I would come to a point when everyone else had left. I would come to a point when there was no food, no heat in the buildings. My transformation would have meant little, as I would have been alone, hungry, and cold near a tiny waterfall in Mansfield, Ohio. We aren’t meant to stay on the mountaintop. But it is so tempting. Especially in this day and age.
When we get those fleeting experiences of the numinous – whether it is at camp or in the woods or at a concert or in worship – the drive to stay in the is especially strong as the world outside can feel to threatening and chaotic. Did you know that some worship music is written and performed specifically to give someone that feeling of the numinous? That there are ways to write and engineer music to affect your brain in such a way that you get a bit of a high? (we can’t do that here, we don’t have a sound engineer, fear not) But the thing about encounters with God, as both the story of Moses and the transfiguration tell us, is that they are not without discomfort.
The presence of God transformed Moses in such a way that people were afraid of him, causing Moses to cover his face on and off. Peter, James, and John loved being on the mountain until God spoke, then they were *terrified.* They stopped all that “let’s stay up here” talk. Transformation, as we all know, is uncomfortable.
When I was a kid going to camp, all of the love around me forced me to confront the ways in which I was not being loving. All of the different people around me forced me to confront my prejudices. The way I was loved forced me to confront the ways in which I did not love myself. The different ideas and opinions made me deal with the fact that maybe I wasn’t right (super hard for a know-it-all who spends her spare time reading existential Lutheran theology).
Our time together each week is supposed to be at least a mini mountaintop experience. In theory, our worship connects us with God, self, one another, and if we look out of those windows, maybe even creation. By that I don’t mean necessarily a euphoric experience (that’s a whole lot of pressure), but maybe we can experience moments of being deeply and truly loved for who we are and where we are right now by God and the people sitting around us. Maybe we can have a few moments of losing ourselves in the music or in the stories being told. This love, these moments of connection, of understanding, of losing ourselves, change us. Eucharist changes us. Then we go out into the world to love as we have been loved, to love as God loves.
Is that what we experience in this place? When we come here do we feel loved beyond all understanding by God and by our neighbor? Do we feel challenged? Are we, maybe, a little transformed? If not, why not? Worship is something we all do together, so is it because we are, like my mom, balancing our checkbook or making a grocery list during the sermon? Are we fully participating, or are we waiting for something to happen to us? Are we silently judging the people around us? Are we creating a mountaintop upon which people experience God revealed in such a way that we want to stay? Or are we sitting here, checking our watches, waiting to get back out into the real world.
The disciples had the amazing opportunity to see Jesus transfigured, standing there with Moses and Elijah. They got to actually hear the voice of God come out of the clouds and say this is my son, with whom I am well pleased.
We come here and we see Jesus in the face of everyone around us, hear God’s word in scripture and revealed in music and the stories we tell. We get come God with some skin on in the presence of those around us. When we get the privilege of the mountaintop, when we are nourished and loved, we come back down the mountain to shine forth with that love, to show our transformation and tell people where that glow comes from, why we are so full of love. And that testimony, that shining, that display of love to all, is what brings people to ask us if they can join us on the mountaintop. Because they see the transformation in our hearts and minds and they want it too.
I want this place, this time, to be a mini mountaintop. I want us to feel deeply loved for who we are, for how we are, for all we bring here, to be transformed by that love, to be transformed by Jesus’ call to love our neighbor, and to take that out in the world. Let’s go to the mountaintop together. Let’s bask in God’s love. Then let us go down to show others what God’s love can do. Will you join me?
