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After Light
by the Rev. Rich Smith
February 3, 2008
Matthew 17:1-9
I want to begin this morning with some”straight talk”
about my fascination with Hillary and the quest to be first. I
actually met Hillary, quite by chance, back in 1993, when I was
attending a conference in Toronto and discovered that Hillary was
giving a talk nearby, and so I went, and listened and was enthralled
and afterward went up and shook his hand. Yes, I said “his”, for
it was the hand of Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to successfully
climb Mt. Everest. Who did you think I meant?
He told again the story of how in 1953, he and
Tenzing Norgay, his Sherpa guide, stood arm in arm on the summit of the
world’s highest mountain, took a few pictures, and after only fifteen
minutes, began their descent into a world where their lives would be
forever changed. But what really impressed me was that
Edmund Hillary had not come simply to relive his exploits of so many
years before; it was to call attention to his continuing work on behalf
of the people of Nepal. He died just a month ago – as his recent
obituary put it, “Hillary never forgot the small mountainous country
that propelled him to worldwide fame. He revisited Nepal constantly
over the next 54 years. Without fanfare and without compensation,
Hillary spent decades pouring energy and resources from his own
fund-raising efforts into Nepal through the Himalayan Trust he founded
in 1962, (and through which he) funded and helped build hospitals,
health clinics, airfields and schools. He raised funds for higher
education for Sherpa families, and helped set up reforestation programs
in the impoverished country....” As Time Magazine wrote, in
naming Hillary and Norgay among the one hundred “most important people
of the 20th century:” “... the two of them rose above celebrity to
stand up for the unluckier third of humanity, who generally cannot
spare the time or energy, let alone the money, to mess around in
mountains.”
If you take nothing else from the sermon today, let
it be this: It’s what you do when you come down from the mountain that
counts! It’s what you do after you’ve seen the light,
beheld the vision, experienced the grandeur, that matters!
That’s the lesson for me in our scripture reading
for today, Transfiguration Sunday. It’s a story told every year,
on the last Sunday of the Epiphany season, a season in which Jesus has
been progressively revealed to the world – by the star of Bethlehem, at
his baptism, in his teaching, in his working of miracles, and now, on
the top of the mountain, in a cloud and blinding light, he is seen by
his most trusted disciples in a new way, revealed once again as God’s
chosen one. He is transfigured before them, meaning that his
appearance is changed, his face glows with light bright as the
sun. Whether this could have been captured on film is doubtful,
but we’ve all had the experience of seeing people whose faces seem to
positively glow – the father coming out of the delivery room with the
news, “It’s a girl!”; that girl as she takes her first step; when she
scores the winning goal of the soccer match; when she turns to walk
back down the aisle with her new life partner; when she watches her own
child graduate; when she gets the promotion; or even when she is about
to breathe her last, a glow I have seen on the faces of the dying as
they catch a glimpse of another light altogether and for an instant,
reflect it back.... You cannot capture that glow, that light on
film, but you’ve seen it. It’s unmistakably there.
Peter and James and John saw that in Jesus.
And if that wasn’t enough, they also witnessed him
in the cloud speaking with Moses and Elijah, two heroes of the faith,
representing the law and the prophets – Moses the law-giver, Elijah,
the first of the classic prophets. Interestingly in Jewish lore
both were believed to have escaped death, having been transported at
the end of their earthly lives directly to heaven on a chariot,
swinging low, comin’ for to carry them home! And now they’re
back, conferring with Jesus, giving their blessing. It’s kind of
like if today, someone like a Kennedy were to appear and offer his
blessing to someone. “He’s the one! Listen to him!”
It’s that momentous!
And with that ringing endorsement of Moses and
Elijah, comes the voice from heaven to seal the deal – This is my son,
the beloved, listen to him! And so the disciples really ought to
get the message. But as usual, they don’t quite get it.
They listen, but don’t really hear. Peter jumps up and offers to
build three shelters, one for Jesus, one for Moses, one for Elijah, so
that they can stay on the mountain, preserve the moment, continue to
bask in the transfigured light. And who can blame him?
Isn’t it natural to want to hang on to the moment of glory?
Listen to another vision from a later time, from
Black Elk Speaks: “Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them
all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And
while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more
than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all
things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live
together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people
was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as
starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter
all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was
holy.” Isn’t that a moment, a vision, you would want to
preserve, a mountaintop you’d want to camp out on?
We are hearing some magnificent music today.
There are many transcendent moments, when the melodies and the chords
and the beat all come together and transport us to another place,
another glimpse of glory, as the jazz transforms ordinary tunes into
extraordinary music, and maybe we don’t just hear the music in a new
way, we even understand life in a new way. There are some musical
moments you wish could go on forever. We want to savor them, they
way you might savor a great meal, or a kiss, or a belly laugh.
But such is not to be. The notes die down, the
vision fades, the moment passes. As I often say, we are given
glimpses of glory on mountain tops so that we may learn to watch for it
down below. We meet the sacred and the holy in this place where
we worship, so that we may learn to recognize it in the world where we
work. We feel the love of God here so that we may share it
there. In other words, it’s what happens when you leave the
mountaintop that counts. It’s what happens after light that
matters. As the song says, we’ve “just a little while to stay
here.”
All the commentaries, written by learned scholars
and theologians, point out that the real glory of Jesus will be seen,
not triumphant on the mountain, but down below, in his suffering, and
in the suffering of the world, as God transforms that suffering through
love. And, if you read a little father in the text, the next
thing that happens is, on the way down the mountain they do encounter
human suffering. A man comes to him, kneels before him and pleads,
“Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is an epileptic and he suffers
terribly.” Jesus rebukes the demon, which was believed then to be
the cause of such afflictions, it leaves him and the boy is healed.
What happens back in the valley, after the
mountaintop experience, is what matters in the long run. It’s
what happens when you leave this place that counts, for “when the
service is over, the service begins.” It is seeing the whole
world in transfigured light, hearing words in transfigured sound,
seeing the face of Christ in the faces of the lost and lonely and left
behind.
Maybe it’s because of my volunteer work at the Marie
Reed Learning Center with Everybody Wins that I have been drawn to the
experience of writer Jonathan Kozol. Kozol had his mountaintop
experience not on a mountain, but in the South Bronx, discovering
the transfigured face of Christ in the faces of some of the poorest
children in America, kids living under conditions of grossly inferior
health care and savagely unequal education. In his book, Ordinary
Resurrections, he tells of the after-school program at St. Ann's
Episcopal Church and reveals how the school's inner-city students
reawakened his dormant faith.
"Like many overeducated people," writes Kozol, "I
have tended for many years to pretend that I had a detached, ironical
attitude about religion. This is a typical pretense of many people who
imagine themselves to be sophisticated. ... So when I met these
children at St. Ann's, they gave me back something that had been stolen
from me. It was the first time I felt I could give in to those
religious feelings that had been there all along."
And to Kozol's credit, he maintains this experience
by continuing to work with these children, to write about their
struggles and to speak on their behalf. He takes the
transfiguring vision of the mountaintop and uses it to transform the
world below. I’m no Kozol, but I do what I can, and when I
walk into the library at Marie Reed on Wednesday at noon, and see
Josue’s face, I could swear it’s glowing, and maybe mine is, too!
As one writer put it, “We spend too much time
cursing the profane, mundane and secular nature of our world. We spend
too little time transforming the secular into the sacred, the mundane
into the momentous.”
Peter, James, and John had their bright, shining
moment with Jesus, and we too, like Edmund Hillary, like Black Elk,
like Jonathon Kozol, have our mountaintop experiences, glimpses
of glory that while they may hint at a mysterious future, offer a new
vision for the present. In the meantime, while we trust in that
future, we do live in the ordinary present, with its extraordinary
moments and experiences. Each time we turn from those moments of
brilliance, we turn back to the work, the ministry, that awaits us,
after the light. And so just as Jesus and the disciples
head down the mountain, to touch people in need, and set out to
Jerusalem, so we are invited to join them on the way.
.
Last updated Wednesday, Februrary 29, 2008
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