Sermon Archive #2 (I'm not preaching again until September, so I'll post a few more from the archives between now and then).

This is from Last Epiphany 2006, Transfiguration Sunday.

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Readings: 2 Kings 2:1-12, Psalm 50:1-6, 2 Corinthians 4:3-6, Mark 9:2-9

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Twice daily, at the dawn and at the dusk – in the twilight where colors seem somehow more vibrant and the air around you seems to shimmer with a living energy – these are known in the Celtic tradition as Thin Places… where the boundary between the human world and the spiritual or faerie world is at it's thinnest. This idea is also applied to particularly holy places such as mountain tops, meadows in the middle of thick woods, quiet pools of undisturbed water, and glens or open valleys amidst the hills. It is particularly in such places at the twilight hour when legends tell of hapless travelers hearing the music of the faerie folk and being lured into the depths of the forest or hills – finding themselves quite lost and typically subject to the mischief of leprechauns or other myriad faerie-creatures out of Scottish and Irish legend.

Celtic Christianity similarly recognized these thin places… where one could feel the presence of the divine so strongly that one could almost reach out and touch the face of God...

We have several names for these experiences in our own culture: Epiphanies, Visions of the Divine, and perhaps most appropriate to today's readings, Mountaintop experiences.

Whatever we might call them, these are the experiences in our lives that in a single instant can change us forever. Those rare moments when something within us touches on the profound, unexplainable truth of God or we find ourselves suddenly and unexplainably in the presence of the divine.

Many of you have heard me talk about Happening before, it's a spiritual retreat for high school students that is planned and led by teens who have themselves already attended the retreat. For most it is a powerful and unforgettable experience, and for many, it is also life-changing. I went to my happening in the spring of 1992 as a headstrong senior in high-school. I had just started going to church again after five years of searching for my own path in the world. The Christian community that youth group offered was great, but the God of my childhood had become too distant to satisfy my spiritual needs. Happening changed everything.

It became for me a thin place where I found myself in the presence of a very close, very personal God. I came to experience God and God's amazing love for me for the first time that weekend, and I came away from the experience changed forever.

Today's Old Testament and Gospel readings are both stories of this nature. Elijah and Elisha cross that thin boundary between the physical and the spiritual world when they pass through the parted Jordan. Within his very presence, Elisha sees Elijah taken up into heaven in the whirlwind. As we know from the verses immediately following today's readings, Elisha is indeed changed forever as he takes Elijah's place as Israel's most powerful prophet.

But the quintessential mountain top experience is illustrated in today's gospel where Jesus is transfigured before his disciples on the anonymous mountaintop. We can almost feel the air become electrified as Christ becomes dazzling white and Moses and Elijah appeared to consult with him. If there could have been any doubt about who Jesus was before this incident, there could certainly be none now. The disciples, finding themselves suddenly and unexplainably in the presence of the divine are appropriately terrified by the experience.

As important as both of these stories are, and as powerful as they are in describing just how indescribable a brush with the divine can be, what is even more important is what happens just after each experience. After tearing his garment in two, Elisha takes up Elijah's mantle and carries on in his stead.

Thankfully we get a more human response from Peter, but ultimately with the same conclusion. Peter doesn't get it. As in so many stories in the gospels, Peter is first to step forward with his characteristically short-sighted human response. In today's story, he has just experienced a defining mountaintop experience with Jesus' transfiguration. In the midst of this thin place, in the presence of the divine, he voices his very human desire to stay in that moment. 'Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.' In essence, Peter voices the desire in each of us to stay on the mountaintop, to stay in that thin place where one has never felt so alive as in that single instant.

Of course, the moment must pass. Just as twilight grows into day or descends into night, the thin places are fleeting moments. As we pass through the ecstasy of the encounter we may, as Peter, James, and John did, find ourselves changed in ways that will be with us forever, but ultimately we have to decide what to do with these moments as we return to the plains and valleys of our ordinary lives.

I came back from Happening a changed person, but I quickly realized that the rest of the world had gone on as though nothing had happened, as though my experience had no impact on anything in the wider world. As does everyone who encounters the divine in these kinds of moments, I had to choose between allowing "real life" to quell the ecstatic joy and hope I felt coming out of that weekend, or do something that radically changed what "real life" meant to me… something that subverted the "reality" of normal life and challenged myself and those around me to redefine normal.

It was coming through this experience that reawakened in me the calling I had felt to serve God as a minister when I was five years old. Coming out of this life-changing experience, I responded by changing my life and rededicated myself to pursuing my childhood dream through my then newly reclaimed young adult dream of becoming a priest in the Episcopal Church.

Although each of us will have a different response to our mountain top experiences, it becomes clear that it isn't enough for us to simply be changed inwardly and strive to stay on the mountain top… these are the experiences that sustain us as we return to the valleys and plains, these are the experiences that we are to take back to "normal life" – and in so doing, to subvert normality and bring that spark of the divine back into normal existence with us.

In so many ways, Jesus life and ministry was about doing just this… Jesus tells us that to become great we must become the servants of all, he demonstrates that the coming of the kingdom of God is not a return of the Davidic throne, but a spiritual kingdom where to take his seat on the throne he must be crucified. He teaches us that true victory lies in doing Gods will and seeking first the kingdom of God rather than to be found by swords and conquest; and he ultimately offers himself up to the roman authorities, to suffering and death, and subverts death itself in the process of his resurrection and glorification on Easter morning.

The Transfiguration is the mountain top experience that we bring with us into the valley of Lent. This is the foretaste of the glory of Easter morning, when the ultimate mountain top experience becomes the lasting glory that cannot be quenched by the physical world. When the barrier that separates the spiritual and the physical world is shattered and the kingdom of God draws all of us within.

In our own lives, the mountaintops seem to be few and far in between. Like Peter we long to stay on the mountain tops, especially when we're in the global valleys of disastrous landslides and political coups in the Philippines, trapped coal miners in Mexico, threats of civil war and seemingly endless US involvement in Iraq after the Golden Mosque bombing this past Wednesday, and religious riots in Nigeria in the wake of global Muslim outrage at the political cartoon depicting Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. But just as Peter wasn't meant to build dwellings on the mountain top, we too are called to carry the hope and exhilaration of our own mountain top experiences back to those in sore need of a little light in this present world of fear, anxiety, and despair.

As in the case of today's Gospel story, we may sometimes need time to reflect on our experiences before we can make enough sense of them to share them with others, but it is never too soon or too late to let the excitement and profound joy of having come close to God shine through us. Paul, himself is a living example of a life changed by encountering God on the road to Damascus, and he reminds us today in 2nd Corinthians that it is Christ that we proclaim when we let the light of our encounters with the divine shine through us.

I leave you with a final story:

On a dark Sunday morning in dense fog, I stumbled as I strove to see the ground not more than a half-foot in front of me – my flashlight impotent against the wall of mist and darkness surrounding me. I climbed interminably, following the familiar footsteps up the side of Mt. Dumyat in Stirling Scotland more by route than by any sensory input. As the twilight grew around me, I found myself in that amazing brilliance of color and living, electrified air that signaled that I had found myself in a classic thin place. From above me I could hear a distant music, familiar and yet ethereal – drawing me up through the fog to its source. I struggled toward it, moving perhaps more quickly than my eyes should have allowed and finally emerged at the top of the mountain to find myself rising above the world itself, shrouded below me in the dense foggy mist of the pre-dawn morning. I moved toward the music and joined the throng just moments before the Sun crested the far horizon, bathing us all in a brilliant and indescribable light. We held a sunrise Easter service there on that mountaintop, and although the season is a bit off, this is the closest I've been to experiencing what Peter James and John experienced in our Gospel story today. How I too would have loved to have stayed on that mountaintop forever!

May we each find the courage and the will to bring the profound light of our encounters with God into the dark reality of our ordinary lives, and may God continue to sustain us as we climb together toward our next mountaintops. Amen.