Sermons

February 3, 2008

“On The Mountaintop”

Rev. Phil Blackwell

Exodus 24:12-18, Matthew 17:1-9

Moses goes up Mt. Sinai to enter into the covenant with God on behalf of the people, you know, “I will be your God, and you will be my people,” and while he is on the mountaintop he is shrouded by the cloud of glory. When he descends 40 days later people see in his face that he has been transformed.

Moses actually spends a lot of time going up and down mountains. He goes back up to receive the two stone tablets containing the Ten Commandments. And then, when he smashes those in anger over the disobedience of his people, he has to go back up Mt. Sinai and ask God for another set. This time when he comes down his face shines so brightly that the people have to divert their eyes. At the end of Moses’ life, God takes him up Mt. Nebo near Jericho and shows him the Promised Land that his people will occupy at God’s pleasure. A lot of mountaintop experiences.

We know the story of Moses. He confronts the Egyptian pharaoh, rallies the Israelites, and boldly leads the people out of slavery through the Red Sea to freedom. And how do they repay him for his courage? They complain. As they trudge through the desert to the land of milk and honey, people murmur against Moses – the food is no good, the accommodations stink, and there is contention among the tribes. Pretty soon they are despairing, “It was easier being a slave back in Egypt than it is to be free out here in this difficult world. At least back there we had plenty to eat and a place to sleep.”

Their complaints only made the journey longer. It does not take 40 years to walk from Egypt to Israel, but God was so offended by their whining, says the scripture, that God insisted a whole generation die off before the people are allowed to settle down. It is like a family today on a driving vacation, with the parents saying from the front seat, “If you children don’t quiet down back there, we’ll have to stop the car for a ‘time out.’” So, they criss-crossed the desert. Golda Meir, the woman from Milwaukee who was the leader of Israel a generation ago, laughingly complained that Moses wandered for 40 years in the Middle East and ended up in the only place that has no oil.

It was the mountaintop experiences that kept Moses going. By ascending he was able to get a perspective on things, see the final destination, and have hope for the future. But remember the last time he goes to the top of a mountain, Mt. Nebo, just before his death, God shows Moses the Promised Land but says that he will not live long enough to enter it. Imagine, wandering for 40 years with all of these malcontents, finally getting them to their destination, and then not having the satisfaction of crossing the final river with them.

That is what Martin Luther King, Jr., had in mind on the last night of his life when he preached in Memphis about being on the mountaintop. I went back and read that sermon this week. The Internet is a wondrous thing. Just google “mountaintop, Memphis, Martin Luther King, Jr.” and the sermon pops up. He was rallying support for the striking sanitation workers in that city.

He starts out by thanking his best friend in the world, Ralph Abernathy. He went on to acknowledge others; King never saw this as a one-man effort. We are in danger of forgetting that as we look back. It was a movement of millions of people, not just a single prophet running loose around the land.

I was reading the sermon in order to get to the end when he talks about going to the mountaintop, but before I got there I read something that I had forgotten. Several years before, while he was autographing books in New York City, he was stabbed in the chest by what he called “a demented black woman.” He was so near death that the report in the New York Times said that if he had sneezed, he would have died.

King tells the Memphis crowd that he received get-well cards from the President and Vice-President, the governor, and all sorts of other dignitaries. He could not recall what they said. “But,” he said, “there was one letter that . . . I’ll never forget it. It said simply, ‘Dear Dr. King: I am a ninth-grade student at the White Plains High School. While it should not matter, I would like to mention that I am a white girl. I read in the paper of your misfortune, and of your suffering. And I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died. And I’m simply writing to say that I’m so happy that you didn’t sneeze.”

And then King went on, “And I want to say tonight, I want to say that I am happy that I didn’t sneeze. Because if I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been around here in 1960, when the students all over the South started sitting-in at lunch counters.” And then he recalled the resistance of blacks in Albany, Georgia, in 1962, and Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, and the great influx of people, black and white, from all over the country into Selma.

And then he concludes, thinking of Moses on Mt. Nebo, knowing of the threats against his life that very night in Memphis, “Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And God allowed me to go up the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

On April 4th, 1968, the next day, he was assassinated.

On the mountaintop, where we see things clearly, if only for a moment. On the mountaintop, where the separation between the divine and human is so thin that we catch a glimpse of what matters most, of what is worth living for, and even dying for. On the mountaintop, where we see what we need in order to live the days of our lives back down in the valleys of everyday existence. On the mountaintop, where we imagine hope overcoming fear.

The disciples are on the mountaintop with Jesus when he is shrouded by the cloud of God’s glory and his face shines. There is a transformation, a metamorphosis; that is what “transfiguration” means. And in that instant the disciples see the truth about Jesus, that he is the Son of God. It ratifies all that they have done so far, and more crucially, it tells them that the darkness that soon will descend upon them as they move toward Jerusalem, their Memphis, that darkness will not prevail in the end. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1:5)

When have we been to the mountaintop? These stories are no good to us if they only are about prehistoric heroes like Moses, about divine one-of-a-kind like Jesus, or saints like Martin Luther King, Jr. Somehow they have to be about us, too. When has the separation between God and us been so thin that we have caught a glimpse of what really is important? When have we experienced transformation?

That may sound outlandish to us as we come to this worship service from our rather mundane lives here on the swamp bottom of Chicago. Where are there mountaintops around here? Where is there a scenic overview of life here? Let me level the altitude a bit by offering three modest examples of what I count as mountaintop experiences in my own life. None of them is spectacular, but I tell them in order to prompt you to claim your own, those times when God really came near, when what matters most became clear, when hope took precedence over fear.

One relates to the assassination of Dr. King. In 1968 I was attending seminary in New Haven. I had enrolled with the intention of entering the ministry in order to change the world. That may sound it bit grandiose, but the stated mission of the United Methodist Church is to create disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world, the transfiguration of the world. It is just that back then, and even now, the world does not seem to want to be transformed.

On the Monday after the murder I went down to the New Haven Green at the heart of the city to attend an outdoor memorial service. There were several thousand people standing before a speaker’s platform, and it was a sad occasion. There was no comfort in the speeches given, the songs sung, the prayers offered. I turned and walked back toward the school, heartbroken and afraid of what might come of America. As I got to the northwest corner of the Green I saw a black man sitting on a park bench, and kneeling at his feet was a white man shining his shoes.

This was 1968. The black man kneeling at the white man’s feet shining his shoes was the rule of the day. But here the roles were reversed, and I thought, “Not all is lost.” In that moment I was transported to the mountaintop and saw the promised land.

Another revelatory moment of revelation of a very different sort. Advent of 1993, while I was the senior pastor up at Trinity United Methodist Church in Wilmette, we held a sing-along “Messiah.” It was directed by Robert Harris, we had soloists from Northwestern University, the chancel choir, and an orchestra. My dad and I were in the front row. Mom had died on Mother’s Day of 1993; Dad would die a few months later, on St. Patrick’s Day of 1994. Dad and I sang from this old copy of Handel’s “Messiah” printed in London. There have been changes made in the text and notation since this was printed, but that did not matter the way Dad and I sang. What mattered is that this belonged to my Great Aunt Nellie, a family heirloom.

What I remember, the mountaintop moment, came when we all stood and sang “The Hallelujah Chorus,” Dad and I, the orchestra, chorus, and a church filled with singers. Heaven, or awfully close. Mom in our minds, Dad at my side, but not for much longer, and the music. Time stood still; nothing else mattered. Life made sense, in a deep, beyond words sort-of-way.

A third “”thin” moment when the world was transformed before my very eyes. This one is so much a cliché, but even clichés have their roots in reality. Watching the sunrise over the Grand Canyon. Sally and I got up before dawn on a Sunday morning, walked from the El Tovar Hotel on the South Rim just a few hundred yards west to a place where the rim curved around to the north. There the chaplain led 30 or 40 of us in morning prayer. When the sun began to rise over the far eastern rim on a cloudless morning, we all sat in silence. The canyon changed second after second as the light and shadows leapt from rock to rock.

And then one of the men in the group started talking. He began interpreting for us what we were seeing, as if a sunrise over the Grand Canyon needed explanation. “I just want to thank God for such a pretty sight. And I just think we all should praise his glorious name. And I just want to say . . .” And I just wanted to say, “Be quiet! Do not talk when God is speaking!” It was like the disciples wanting to build shrines on the mountain to commemorate the moment, and God saying, “Be still! Listen to my Son, not yourself!” There on the South Rim of the canyon the world was being transformed before our very eyes; all we had to do to be transfigured ourselves was put our fingers in our ears to shut out the babble.

Come to the mountaintop, that is the invitation of the Transfiguration. God has things to show us, to put into perspective, a promised land to offer. Let us keep our eyes open, not out of fear of what might be lurking in the shadows, but out of hope of seeing the light of a new world dawning. Amen.

Philip L, Blackwell
The Chicago Temple
February 3, 2008