Coming Back Down

Mark 9:2-9
February 19, 2012
Have you ever had a project – at work or school or home – that simply consumed you for weeks or even months at a time? Something that you poured yourself into whole-heartedly? Something that got you up out of bed in the morning looking forward to the day’s work because it filled your heart and mind and soul even though it was challenging?
And then the big day arrived, and the project was completed: the writing was published, the capstone was put on the archway, the speech given, the report turned in, the conference concluded, the house built, the mountaintop scaled.
I directed a leadership program for the Council of State Governments years ago. For that program one year I arranged a conversation between Cornel West and Wendell Berry, and in advance of their time on the program I and one other colleague had lunch with the two of them at a restaurant in Lexington, Ky. That was a good day. I’d like to have pitched a tent on that mountaintop and stayed for a good long while.
But then comes the next day. You get to work and there’s an expenses document or time sheet to complete, or you get to school and there’s a vocab quiz, you wake up to a sick child, you discover there’s no coffee in the house, the bathroom sink is leaking, the car battery is dead – not major traumas, by any means, not valleys of deep despair, just life as we know it most of the time. You have been to the mountain top, but now you are back down at the level plain where most of life gets lived out moment by moment, day by day.
It is there, on the level plain, that we, in Paul’s words, work out our salvation, day by day, in fear and trembling.
The mountaintop is a lovely place, a place, often, of exquisite clarity and great vision. It’s no wonder that Peter wants to build a house and just stay there with Jesus, Moses and Elijah. But, as the author of Mark makes quite clear, Peter didn’t know what he was talking about. In fact, what he witnessed there on the mountaintop terrified him.
On one level that’s not particularly surprising, for the story of the transfiguration of Jesus operates on one level as a ghost story, so Peter’s terror is like what any of us might experience watching What Lies Beneath or Poltergeist or The Shining. Some stuff is just plain scary!
On another level, though, the story in Mark begs the question: what did these guys talk about there on the mountaintop? I’ve always wished that I’d had a tape recorder at the table with Berry and West, because mostly what I recall was this general sense of “wow, these guys are erudite!”
That experience may not be full of terror, but it can be overwhelming and leave one feeling small and inadequate. The mountaintop can be like that. You get up there at the heights, see everything from on high, maybe get inspired. You see a vision of what life can be like, and then coming back down to the level plain of everyday life can be depressing because you cannot help but take stock of the distance between what might be and what is.
It is no mere coincidence that lots of us catch colds in the days immediately following major events. Many a honeymoon story includes one party with the sniffles, immunity having surrendered after the fact to the stress of the big day.
The plain may be level, but it’s rarely smooth.
Every-day life is not Christmas or Easter. We come back down from the high of holy days because we live our lives here in the day to day.
While the strange little story of the transfiguration of Jesus tells us a little bit about the mountaintop, I find its real instruction does, in fact, concern the plain – not the valleys, mind you, but the level plain upon which most of us dwell most of the time.
You see, transfiguration may happen on the mountaintop, but transformation happens on the level plain – at least the hard work of authentic transformation. Oh, to be sure, I’ve met a few people along the way who have dramatic – and authentic – stories of sudden and life-changing conversions, but even when change comes suddenly it never really comes swiftly. That is to say, following the wisdom of 12-step programs, real changes come day-by-day.
Take, for example, the change that we long to see around marriage equality. At some point in what we hope is the not too distant future, the final legal pronouncement of change will come from on high, perhaps from state lawmakers but as likely from the Supreme Court. It will seem, in that moment of celebration, that change has come from “on high,” from the mountaintop.
But the story of the transfiguration of Jesus, read in the broader context of Mark’s gospel, teaches us otherwise.
As Ched Myers suggests in his interpretation of the story:
The Messianic revolution is not about seizing power in order to impose a new social order from the top down; it seeks to transform relationships in building the new world from the bottom up. Thus it begins with the "least." Jesus recognizes the structures of domination in personal and social as well as political existence; his way can be denied just as easily in interpersonal relationships (9:37-41) as in the courtroom.
Transformation comes on the plain, it comes from living day by day into the transformed reality we long to see made whole and complete. Thus it is with, for example, marriage equality. When Ron and James went down to the courthouse together last week to seek a marriage license they were walking along the level plain of daily life, asking for something as bureaucratically everyday as a marriage license, while, at the same time, asking for something as transformative as justice and equal treatment under the law.
When that transformation is complete it will have been the day-to-day acts of resistance, acts of compassion, acts of faith – of simply living into the reality, in this case, of marriage – that force the change; not a mandate from on high.
That’s the way change happens. It’s what happened with Jesus in Mark. Sure, the mountaintop experience was remarkable, and it brought clarity for the disciples, even if all we know of what was said on the mountain was the resounding direction, “listen to Jesus! Listen to him!”
And what did he say, what did he command? Simply this: love one another.
Nothing in the world has more transformative power than love, for love is not sentimentality it is power. As Cornel West put it, “tenderness is what love feels like in private; justice is what love looks like in public.” Love is the power by which authentic transformation happens.
Such transformation happened in Mark back down in the day-to-day. Indeed, when Jesus and his friends come back down he heals a sick boy in a profound transformation made possible, Jesus says, through prayer.
What, after all, is prayer other than that day-by-day conversation with God by which we are transformed? Sometimes we pray with words, sometimes with our feet, sometimes simply by going to the courthouse and seeking what already rightfully belongs to us. The work we do, day by day, right here on the level plain of life, can be our most profound prayer. As Wendell Berry put it, “Work done in gratitude, Kindly, and well, is prayer.”
Our life together as church is transformed day by day in the same manner.
We are, as you know by now, in the midst of a season of intentional vision-casting and focusing. As we’ve noted, it takes a bit of prayerful research to do this part of transformation well. For example, we asked the local high school GSA what they needed that we might provide, and we wound up hosting a dance. It could agitate the neighbors, I suppose. We asked PoFEV what they needed that we might provide, and Ron and James wound up at the courthouse. Read the comments on the Arlnow article about that and you’ll know it has agitated some folks. We’ve asked A-SPAN what they need, and now we serve meals to the homeless, and you’d be surprised at how that simple gesture agitates some folks.
We have noted often over the past several months that we are committed to creating a more vibrant congregation here. I don’t know why it took me so long, but I finally looked up the word vibrant to see what its roots are.
It comes from the Latin vibrāre to agitate – that’s who we are and what we do. We agitate, faithfully, through our prayerful lives, day-by-day, right here on the level plain, trusting in the steadfast presence of God, following the way of Jesus, working to transform that which needs transforming in our own lives, and in all the circles of concern that touch and shape our lives.
So may we go forth from this time of worship to live vibrant and faithful lives, full of the tenderness of love in our personal lives and the justice of that same love in our public lives. Amen.

Run the Race

1 Corinthians 9:24-27
February 12, 2012
“Do you know,” Paul asks, “that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize?”
“Do you know,” I ask, “that I have run in a number of races but that, if the prize is for finishing first, I have never received the prize?” Try as I may, I have never yet and likely never will run in such a way as to win.
I went, as I often do, on a run seeking a sermon last week. That’s the only prize I ever get. It was Wednesday – that particularly nasty afternoon of cold rain. I knew what kind of day it was by the look on the face of a suitably bundled woman I passed in Shirlington who was quite clearly thinking, “what an idiot,” when I ran by.
I didn’t disagree. In fact, it was cold and my right hip was not at all happy to join the rest of my body out there. For some reason, that joint was out of sorts and seemed far more interested in a rest than a run. But I kept at it because, as a few of you have heard and now all of you will know, back in December Clark Chesser and I concocted a crazy agreement to run a half marathon together in April so getting in the miles right now is important.
In fact, as I ran through a bit of rain and a bit of pain last week I was thinking about the race that is before us, the idea of it, the preparation for it, the gifts for it.
And, no, I do not mean the 13.1 miles that Clark and I will try to run together. I mean the race that is the life of faith, and, in particular, this section of the race that is right here, right now, and right before us.
The life of faith is certainly not a half-marathon. It’s a full-out, long journey – far more of an ultramarathon than a half. Marathoners I’ve spoken with talk about their races in stages. They don’t start with the intention of running 26.2 miles in a single bound; they start with the intention of taking the first step, running the first hundred meters, the first half mile, finding their rhythm, running the first mile, then the second, then the third, and so on.
We’re at a particular point in our journey together as we live into the visioning process we’ve committed to on the way to becoming the more vibrant congregation we want to be, and we believe God is calling us to be.
Both our individual journeys of faith and our shared journey unfold in stages, in steps along the way. As individuals we experience life and faith differently at different points in our lives, just as a runner experiences the race differently at different points along the route.
We have most of the stages of life represented in this room on any given Sunday. We have toddlers and other young children who experience life with awe and wonder at the mystery of things that we grownups either take completely for granted or don’t even notice. I remember doing a “walk-about” sermon with the children in one of the other congregations I served. We went to the back of that sanctuary and I asked them to look in as if they were walking in for worship and tell me what they noticed. I figured that it would be the cross, which dominated that particular space visually, especially from the point of view I invited the kids to experience. I’ll never forget one little boy whispering to me that what he noticed was “the red light.” I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about, and it took a good bit of back and forth before he finally got me to notice the small red light that indicated that one of the lighting or heating or security systems was functioning. I’d walked into that space dozens and dozens of times, and never noticed the light at all. At different stages of life, different things will be important to us and we’ll bring different gifts to those stages.
We have older members who bring the gift of experience, having seen so much of the life of this congregation, and of life in general and so carrying a deep memory and the wisdom of those years. And, obviously, we have lots of folks at most every stage of life in between from young adults just starting out in careers, young parents just starting the great adventure of family, early middle-aged folks living into the fullness of their several callings and the gifts they bear into those callings, older middle-aged folks perhaps living for the first time into the comfort of their own skin, slightly older folks whose professional lives are coming toward conclusions and they begin again the next stage of sorting out call and gift, opportunity and responsibility.
None of this comes as any great surprise, and, on the one hand, may seem incredibly obvious. On the other hand, though, it’s worth pausing to consider what an incredible gift we receive in a multigenerational community when we do, in fact, pause to name and receive and use that gift in all the ways it is offered.
Toward that end, we are going to use the season of Lent this year as time of intentional reflection on the gifts that come with various stages of life and on the callings that come with various stages as well, all in the context of reflecting together on some of the deep needs in the communities that each of us participate in from family, to neighborhood, to school, to work, to congregation, to commonwealth.
Obviously, at first blush and probably well beyond, that’s a pretty complicated matrix, and we’ll come at it in several ways in the weeks ahead tapping as many resources as we can to deepen our understanding and to sharpen our focus during this season of vision casting and clarifying.
Toward that end, this morning I thought it might be helpful to consider some important work on stages of faith. In much the same way that developmental theorists have described stages of life, various theologians have described stages of faith. James Fowler, in the early 80s, was among the first to study this in depth and detail.
Fowler, who taught at the Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, described stages of faith in much the same way that Jean Piaget described developmental stages, beginning with the mix of fantasy and reality that marks the faith of young children. As we get a bit older, Fowler observed, most of us begin to understand the world a bit more logically – most of us – but we still tend to understand faith stories quite literally.
As teenagers, most of us adopt some all-encompassing belief system and place authority for those beliefs in either individuals who hold them – sometimes parents, sometimes teachers, sometimes religious leaders – or in a group that shares them. At the same time, at that point, we don’t tend to recognize that we are inside a belief system at all, rather we take it “on faith” that our system is, in fact, an accurate description of reality itself. As you might guess from that description, this is a stage of faith in which many people remain throughout their lives.
On the other hand, lots of folks, especially as young adults, move beyond the faith box of adolescence, and often reject the former faith, sometimes altogether and sometimes for good.
In midlife, though, many of us begin to realize that what we once perceived as black-and-white is really quite grey – whether in our belief or in our unbelief we find the world is full of mystery and paradox. We discover that, as Einstein observed, not everything that counts can be counted and that, in fact, some of what counts most cannot be counted at all. At that stage, sacred stories and symbols become important again, but this time around without being stuck in literalism or within the frame of theological orthodoxies. This stage of fairly mature faith is the end of the line for most of us. But not for all.
Fowler named his final stage of faith development “universalizing faith,” and said that few of us ever actually get to that point. He described it, interestingly enough, way more as a pattern of living than as what we might more typically call a belief system, and as a way of life marked fully by service to others without fear or anxiety and based on a deep conviction in the truth of the universal values of love, justice and compassion.
In other words, a lot like the life of the Jesus of the gospels.
It is a life of running with perseverance the race that is set before us, as the author of the book of Hebrews put it. In that same section of Hebrews we’re also reminded that as we run we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses. I understand that cloud to include the saints of the church triumphant who have gone before us and charted a way, and also the saints who run this race alongside us as the church militant – you and me.
That brings us right back where we started: the church – this church, running the race that is set before us and, at this particular stage of the race, taking stock, casting a vision for the path ahead, inviting others to join us, assessing our own gifts – how are we doing, what do we need in order to run better and stronger, is It time to get some new running shoes? Can we see, up ahead, signposts pointing toward a shared universalizing experience of the life of faith, a compelling vision that shapes our lives?
We noted at our congregational meeting last month that the visioning process would include some research, and we named together several groups of likely research targets. This morning, as we gather for coffee and goodies downstairs, you’ll notice a bunch of sheets of paper hanging around the room with names of some of the organizations or institutions we’d like to gather some information from.
I encourage you to do two things as you sip your coffee and talk with friends: write down suggestions for questions we ought to ask or for the kind of input and information we ought to seek; and put your name down on one sheet indicating your willingness to contact the group named on the sheet.
We’re researching so that we do not, as Paul admonished, “run aimlessly,” but, rather run with purpose and direction toward the prize. The prize, as I think Paul understood, is the life that Jesus points us toward: life abundant, life fully realized and fully lived at each and every stage of the race.
So, rather than a final “amen,” I’ll just say, “on your marks, get set … go!”