Prepare to meet your God
Last Sunday After the Epiphany February 26, 2006
1 Kings 19:9-18; Psalm 27; 2 Peter 1:16-21; Mark 9:2-9)
I remember the first time I saw the Grand Canyon. It was on a trip west from Iowa with my family when I was 10 or 11. I’d come down with a fever on the way there, and I remember being taken to the infirmary while my parents and sister went sightseeing. I was in and out of that sort of fever half-sleep, but not uncomfortable. My folks came and picked me up for lunch when I felt better. But I was still in that dreamy kind of state when we sat in the restaurant which was right on the edge of the canyon and looked out. I remember my father, who was a geographer, explaining that the canyon was formed by the river at its bottom – slowly, slowly eroding the land away. Maybe because of the fever, maybe because of the canyon, maybe because of my father’s obvious interest, that image stuck with me.
I’ve found in it an influential image for my life, especially my spiritual life. Slow and steady can do great things: week after week going to church, day after day turning over to prayer, even when I didn’t really feel like it. Even in the dry periods, the “dark nights of the soul”, maybe especially then, so that even though I didn’t know I was making progress, from time to time a vision would emerge, a clarity, an experience that at least felt like the presence of God.
But then sometime in the past couple years I saw a National Geographic program that seem to conflict with my father’s understanding of geological processes. The thesis it presented was that most major structural change on earth came suddenly. That things would stay pretty much the same for a long time but then an earthquake or a flood or a shift in the temperature or something else would bring about rapid change. I don’t know if that explains the Grand Canyon, but it offers a spiritual metaphor of its own that fits especially well with our lessons for today. Peter and James and John had been with Jesus quite a while before the episode recounted in this story of the Transfiguration, but nothing had prepared them for this overwhelming vision. It was sudden, awesome, frightening, and transforming.
I’ve known people whose spiritual lives developed in this same way. While I was plodding along exposing my spiritual riverbed gradually, they had these conversion experiences – being suddenly lifted up and changed.
I don’t think it’s our choice. It’s a matter of temperament. It’s a question of grace. How God calls us, how God forms us, how God loves us is entirely up to God.
We just need to be ready for it – because however our experience of God comes about it’s usually not in the way that we expect.
For Elijah it wasn’t in the earthquake, or the wind or the fire -- the awesome events that so many before him had associated with God – but it was in what today’s translation calls “the sound of sheer silence, and others have called the “still small voice.”
For the disciples it wasn’t in the temple or by the Jordan River or with the crowds where Jesus taught and work his miracles, but out away from all that, on a high mountain, apart by themselves.
It’s the “rule of the left hand” that I referred to a couple of weeks ago. God hiding in the shadows of our life, not where we’re skilled, or successful, or comfortable, but where we’re not paying such close attention. In the parts of life we tend to avoid. For the intellectual in the emotions, maybe, for the artist in the mundane and everyday task. God comes in through the unguarded door. And again, we can’t do anything to help make that happen because as soon as we start anticipating it we set a guard on the door.
The most we can do is to be ready when it comes, prepare for the reception of the experience of God. And the lessons today again give us some clues to that.
The first is the cultivation of a life of faith and faithfulness. And when I use the word “faith” I rarely mean “belief” or “beliefs”, but rather a relationship with God, a centering of life on God, of which both Elijah and the disciples are examples.
Just before the episode depicted in the lesson today, Elijah engaged in a test of faith with the prophets of Baal, who were favored in the court of Ahab the king and Jezebel the Queen, and were on the ascendancy as Israel sought to fit in more with the surrounding cultures. Elijah wouldn’t conform and challenged the prophets of Baal to a test…Elijah alone against 450 prophets of Baal. Elijah won the test with the 450 prophets of Baal getting burned up by the fire of God. (You can read all about it in the 18th Chapter of 1 Kings.)
The point is that Elijah put his faith in God – in Yahweh – in spite of it not being the popular thing to do, in spite of it opening him up to rejection and ridicule, in spite of the doubtfulness of his having much “success”
The disciples as well, Peter and James and John, prior to any religious experience had left their parents and wives and children – all the responsibilities we think of as being good Christian virtues, certainly responsibilities essential to being a good Jew at that time. And they followed Jesus. Faithfulness involves ultimate concern. It has to come first. Religion can’t “fit in” to “your” life.
Whether it’s gradual or sudden we have to be in the place where grace is being offered in order to receive it.
I’ve told the story before about a friend of mine in seminary who did his field work at a church in New Jersey where they had a fund raising raffle. After the raffle he brought back a sign they’d had up and he put it on his prayer desk in the chapel. The sign said “You must be present to win.”
Faith is being present to God.
The second thing we learn from these lessons that relates to being prepared for religious experience, prepared for God to come into our lives, involves the awareness of death.
I think I said last week that Martha mentioned to me how unique Christianity seemed among world religions in that fact that every year we’re reminded of death, whereas most religions seem to center on some kind of denial of death. I suppose Christianity as well has drifted occasionally into that kind of denial with the more popularized visions of a mythical afterlife. But the cross, more particularly the crucifix, calls us back again and again to the stark reality of death.
Elijah has his religious experience when he’s running away from death. Jezebel was really angry about the prophets of Baal and she vowed to kill Elijah or be killed trying to do it. He was fleeing for his life when he heard the still small voice.
The disciples, again, as well. Just before they went up on the mountain, Jesus had been asking them “who do people say that I am?” They said Elijah or John the Baptist, or one of the prophets. But Jesus then asks them “who do you say that I am?” And Peter says, in the first expression of such faith, “you are the Christ.” But then Jesus goes on to talk about going to Jerusalem to be crucified. And when Peter resists this idea, Jesus says “get behind me, Satan.” The denial of death is a satanic temptation.
Resurrection is not immortality. Resurrection is the placement by God of the life we have lived which is bounded by birth and death, defined by birth and death, into the context of eternity that we call the Kingdom of Heaven. Death is essential to life. Death is essential for life to have meaning.
Those two things, faithful living and an awareness of death, prepared Elijah, prepared the disciples, prepare us as well, for an encounter with God, an experience of God wherever and however that happens in our lives, prepare us for epiphany, which prepares us for Lent, which prepares us for Easter.
Of course we have to know what to do with it and what not to do with it.
One of the main themes in the Gospel according to Mark is how dim-witted the disciples are, again and again. The story of the transfiguration is no exception.
Peter says, “let us make three booths” – As if you could box in God to use at your convenience.
Just past the Grand Canyon there’s Hoover Dam and Lake Mead, and the systems that divert the river to Phoenix and Las Vegas and Los Angeles. So as we use all this for our purposes the mighty Colorado River peters out in the desert and doesn’t even get to the Gulf of California any more.
Any attempt to “manipulate” religious experience will be just as futile as attempts to create it. Both sides of the process are in the hands of God. We can only wait in faith with the realization that it’s a matter of life and death.
Peter didn’t get to make his three booths.
The cloud overshadowed them and they heard the voice say, like that sound of sheer silence to Elijah, “This is my beloved Son. Listen to him.” We need to listen to him as well.
We need to pay attention as Peter says in his letter, “as a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in our hearts.”
Thanks be to God!
