Let It Shine
2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2; Luke 9:28-36
February 7, 2016
Twenty years or so ago we lived in central Kentucky. We had
moved to Lexington from Chicago, where we had lived in the city for 11 years.
We had become, in those years, comfortable urban dwellers.
One weekend during that first summer we lived in Kentucky,
we loaded up the minivan and took our two little boys out to Natural Bridge
State Park in the foothills of that side of the Appalachians.
It was a lovely summer day. We got to the park, left the van
in a shady spot in the parking lot, plopped Martin in a backpack, and headed
off onto one of the short trails through the woods. The park was not crowded,
and while we saw a few other families along the way, we had a lot quiet beauty
all to ourselves.
We still have a few photographs from that day, including one
of the boys perched on the low rail of a fence with a beautiful wooded ravine
sloping away behind them.
I hope I have described it well enough that you’ve got an
idyllic image in your mind, because it surely was that.
The weird thing was that it did not feel that way to me in
the moment. I recall vividly that off-and-on the length of that hike I was
troubled by some vague uneasiness.
I couldn’t quite put my finger on it until we got back to
the parking lot, and I realized what was bothering me: nature!
Seriously, after a decade of living in Chicago I was
perfectly at ease in the midst of a huge city day or night, but walking through
the woods on a sunny afternoon was unsettling.
This was about a decade before Richard Louv coined the
phrase “wilderness deficit disorder” in his bestselling book Last Child in the Woods, but I can
attest to the symptoms of that condition.
In the introduction to that book, Louv wrote:
Our
society is teaching young people to avoid direct experience in nature. That
lesson is delivered in schools, families, even organizations devoted to the
outdoors, and codified into the legal and regulatory structures of many of our
communities. Our institutions, urban/suburban design, and cultural attitudes
unconsciously associate nature with doom—while disassociating the outdoors from
joy and solitude. Wellmeaning public-school systems, media, and
parents are effectively scaring children straight out of the woods and
fields. [1]
I want to suggest three things:
First, we’re not just scaring kids out of the woods; we’re
scaring adults, too.
Second, the impulse is nothing new under the sun. Indeed,
the strange little story of the transfiguration of Jesus hints at it. What does
Peter do in response to the epiphany on the isolated mountaintop? He goes all
urban planner: “hey, Jesus, we could put a subdivision right here. There’s
plenty of space for three dwellings. You and Moses and Elijah can each have
your own digs. If it takes off, maybe John and James and I will build houses of
our own. We’ll call it ‘Mountaintop Villas.’ What do you think?”
I imagine Jesus gave him one of those looks, and at that
very moment God speaks: “pay attention to him; he’s special.”
Of course, Moses and Elijah were also special, and, thus,
this story that brings them together with Jesus is one to which we should pay
particular heed. In one sense, this story underscores the growing conviction in
the gospel narrative that Jesus is the fulfillment of the law – personified in
Moses – and the prophets – equally personified in Elijah.
In addition to that significant interpretive key, the
mountaintop, itself, matters. After all, the mountaintop is another key
connection. Moses went to the mountaintop to receive the law, in the form of
the two tablets with the foundation of the law in ten commandments. Elijah went
to the mountaintop to discern his call to continue his prophet mission even
though his life, itself, was under threat. Jesus, too, goes to the mountaintop
where he receives confirmation of the spirit’s presence echoing the words
spoken at his baptism, “this is my son, the beloved one.”
The mountain, throughout scripture, is always an untamed
wilderness space, beyond the control of human beings, untouched by human
architecture. It is the place that these three crucial figures in Biblical
history go not to retreat, to get away from human society, but rather to draw
strength for their respective journeys of transformation.
And this brings me to the third point: we are taught to fear
wilderness because systems of organized oppression understand the power of wild
places to inspire liberation.
Moses goes up to Sinai to draw strength for his ongoing
project of liberation, of bringing the people out from beneath the crushing
oppression of pharaoh’s empire. Elijah goes up Mt. Horeb fleeing from Ahab and
Jezebel and their imperial aspirations in order to restore his strength for the
freedom struggle. Jesus goes up the mountain to gain strength from his
ancestors for his journey to Jerusalem for the drama of liberation to be played
out there.
As theologian Ched Myers puts it, “The prophetic wilderness
experience of transcendence is not trying to escape the world […]; rather it fuels the struggle for true
justice.”[2]
That fuel is visibly manifest in the stories of the
mountaintop experiences of Moses and Jesus. Both of them are seen to “glow”
after their mystical encounters with the Holy One on the mountaintop.
Mystical mountaintop encounters are, of course, the stuff of
both poetry and mythology both before and after the writings of Judeo-Christian
scripture. When people go up to the mountaintop they have visions. That’s
obviously literally true – after all, when you get up to a high place you can
see so much further than when you are in the valley.
But that sense of limitless vision gives rise, as well, to
imaginative and mystical inspiration. Moses looked over from the mountaintop
and he saw the Promised Land. So did Dr. King.
And perhaps his example clarifies the threat that
mountaintop visions pose to keepers of an unjust status quo. And if your
mountaintop experience leaves you visibly transfigured, you will bear it as a
mark.
Last summer I went to Montreat – in the mountains of North
Carolina. Up on that high place I, too, experienced the inspiration that comes,
often, in such places. I heard Dr. King’s words – spoken at Montreat 50 years
before still echoing: “All too often in the midst of injustice,” King had told
a group of Presbyterians in 1965, “too many Christians have remained silent
behind the safe security of stained glass windows.”
Too many of us prefer the security of our built environment
– even when the building of it not only rests on a foundation of economic,
racial, and gender injustice, but also when the physical building of it
threatens creation itself.
Thus, I heard in King’s words a two-fold invitation:
First, come to the mountaintop – beyond of the security of
the everyday, out from behind our stained-glass shields – to be open to the
presence of God. Be still in that presence. Experience that wildness of Holy
Spirit. Risk an encounter with the Creator in the untamed grandeur of creation.
Be filled, inspired, lit brightly from within by the power of the divine
unshackled from the concerns of power and economy.
And then, following the way of Moses and Elijah and Jesus,
come back down and let your light shine, let it shine, let it shine. Amen.
posted by David Ensign at
12:06 PM
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