Mountaintop Stories

Mark 9:2-10

February 11, 2018

How many of you have seen or heard about that commercial that aired during last Sunday’s Super Bowl appropriating Dr. King’s words in service to the sale of pick-up trucks? The sharpest remark I’ve seen in response was the wag who tweeted out, “I’ve been to the mountaintop. I’ve looked over and seen the promised land. I may not get there with you, but if I do it’ll be in a Dodge Ram pickup truck.”

Yeah, we do have a way of domesticating our prophets and appropriating their prophecy in service to our profits.

This is, of course, nothing new under the sun. Indeed, in the funky little story of the transfiguration of Jesus the impulse is already there – literally. Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up to the mountaintop with him. They have a transformational experience. God tells them to listen to this prophet in their midst: “This is my son, the beloved; listen to him!”

And Peter suggests building a house, a domicile for the prophet and his followers. Maybe he had in mind an entire subdivision: Mountainview Villas. You see it, right? Yeah, the inclination to do domesticate the prophet is nothing new.

It shouldn’t surprise us. After all, we also tend to domestic God. Oddly enough, I think the tendency to domesticate God begins when we push God to the edges and extremes of our experience. We speak of “mountaintop experiences” as these unique revelations of the divine, as if God only resides in beautiful places unspoiled by human habitation.

Now it’s not as if we cannot or should not experience intimations of the divine in beautiful places. After all, beauty is clearly a deep and abiding value of our faith, even if we tend to give it short shrift when we list the gifts and fruit of the Spirit. We’ll talk about love and joy and peace, and knowledge and prophecy and healing, but we seldom talk about beauty. But look around you. Or, close your eyes and listen. It’s abundantly clear from the history of its art, architecture, and sacred song that the church has long understood the gift of beauty and used its many manifestations to inspire and uphold the faithful.

So, yes, keep going to the mountaintop and to the edge of the ocean and to all the other beautiful places in our world, and open your spirits there to the spirit of the divine. I do that as often as I possibly can.

But, don’t put God into a box in those places. Don’t build a little God-house in these beautiful locales and imagine that they are the only places you’ll find God in this world.

I have been to the mountaintop in some places that didn’t look at all like mountains, and which, on the surface, probably didn’t look or sound beautiful. But I have felt the presence of God most powerfully and transformatively in some of the homeliest places I’ve ever been.

Twenty-some years ago, a few weeks before Christmas, I went to the mountaintop at the bedside of a woman who died following heart surgery. Her death was unexpected, as the surgery had seemed to go well. But she coded in recovery and died. Her family – husband and two adults sons – were in shock. One of the sons, a veteran of the first Iraq war and one who probably suffered PTSD, was taking out his anger at the situation on the nurse. It was tragic, tense, and ugly, and I was the on-call student chaplain in the small room where they put you to deliver difficult news.

Angry words prompted defensive ones in a back-and-forth that probably didn’t last more than a minute but felt like forever before the nurse went back to work and I stayed with the family to hold their grief and anger for a while. Over the course of 15 minutes or so, as we waited for them to be allowed into the room with their loved one’s body, I listened as they shared stories about the woman they were just beginning to grieve. As they told stories the anger began to give way to sadness. Eventually, they were allowed to go into the room where the body lay, and they gathered around the bedside, held hands, and sang the most heart-breaking version of Silent Night that I have ever heard.

Then the angry son asked me if I could find the nurse that he’d basically cussed out a half hour earlier. I didn’t know why he wanted her, but I went to the nurses’ station, found her, and asked if she was willing to speak with him. She was, and I walked with her back to the room. The man, through his tears, said, “please forgive me.”

I have been to the mountaintop. Sometimes it looks like a surgical ICU room where someone has died.

A dozen years ago, you sent me and Tom Hull down to the Gulf Coast to help out following Katrina. Our primary task the 10 days or so when we were down there was mucking out flooded homes and preparing them for others to rebuild. Most of the houses we worked in had been under water up to their roof lines, and virtually everything in them had been destroyed.

The homeowners we met were still in shock in those early days just after the storm. They moved among the piles of their ruined belongs like soldiers stragglers home from a battle.

But one afternoon we were helping a guy muck out his house, pitching items out a back window to be sorted through to see what might be salvageable. The back room had been his music room. It had a keyboard, drum set, and several guitars. All of it had been under water, and there was still water draining across the floor. I opened a case and found an acoustic guitar. I could see through the sound hole an inch or two of water. I turned it over to let the water drain out, and then handed the instrument to its owner. He strummed it a couple of times, and it made the most discordant noise. Then he started riffing a ridiculous song about the flooded guitar blues, and the four or five of us mucking that part of the house were in hysterics.

I have been to the mountaintop. Sometimes it looks like the aftermath of a great storm. It sounds like a ruined guitar and gales of laughter.

About five years ago we were distributing bag meals with the Arlington Street Peoples Assistance Network in a park in Rosslyn. One of the men in the line had a beat up old guitar slung across his back, and after he finished eating his soup and sandwich he took out the guitar and began to play. I love guitars, so I went over to listen. We struck up a conversation, and one thought led to another and then another, and pretty soon I have invited him to join us for worship some Sunday. He actually did, a couple of times, and even played his guitar here one Sunday morning.

I have been to the mountaintop. Sometimes it looks like a line of hungry street people.

Last summer I was down at Camp Hanover, where I’ve found mountaintops there along the tidewater plains. On the last night of camp, after the closing campfire, I was sitting with the Pathfinders, the oldest campers – high school juniors and seniors. We had been sharing gratitudes – you know, name something you are grateful for from this week of camp. We had just finished when one of the boys said, “I want to share something else.”

So he began thanking me for supporting him, and he told a story of a time four years earlier, when he’d been an awkward, somewhat overweight, 13-year-old boy trying to learn how to vault into a canoe from in the water. If you’ve ever done that, you know how challenging it is for even a graceful, athletic child. He couldn’t do it, try as he might. I really didn’t remember any of this, but he thanked me for sticking with him through a long, hard afternoon on the lake. By the time he finished sharing this, there was not a dry eye in our circle of teenagers and young adults and me.

I have been to the mountaintop. And sometimes it looks like an awkward middle schooler learning how to fail.

The mountaintop, you see, is not some place of isolated beauty where you want to stay forever and ever, where you want to build a house to shelter yourself from life’s storms, where you want to be safe and sound and alone with God.

In my experience, the mountaintop is where you can see the present clearly in all its mix of beauty and ugliness, in its joy and its sorrow, in its pleasures and its pain, in its struggle and confusion. And the mountaintop is where we can catch a glimpse of what the future might be like if we can figure out how to extend healing from our own broken places, find joy even in the midst of our deepest challenges, share gifts from our poverty, and give thanks from the bottom of our broken hearts.

Wednesday evening we begin the journey of Lent. A few minutes ago we sang Tom and Dan’s amazing chorus – we are the people who have walked in the darkness, we’ve seen a great light, we’ve seen a great light. This is true. But I’ve noticed, over the years, that sometimes the mountaintop is dark, and it is still stunningly beautiful, powerful, and transformative in the darkness. During our Ash Wednesday worship we will lay claim to the promise that God is not only a light that shines in the darkness, but also the One who dwells in the deep darkness itself.

Sometimes the gospel is veiled, and sometimes the gospel is, itself, the veil. For the same God who said, “let light shine out of the darkness,” also created the darkness, and it is good.

Sometimes our mountaintop stories are shrouded. It’s hard to sell trucks with that message, but it remains good news to those who are willing to climb difficult mountains in hope and expectation of meeting God even where the way is rough and rocky. I have been to those mountaintops, and I have seen the face of God. Come and see. Amen.