I look at the nature of peak experiences and what we are called to be and do afterward. I hope you find something useful here.
Transfiguration
Last Sunday in Epiphany
Transcribed from a
sermon given
By Rev. Valerie Hart
on
February 12, 2013
At St. Barnabas
Episcopal Church
How many of you have had a peak
experience, a mountaintop experience, in your life? I won’t make you raise your
hands, but I see some people nodding. Peak experience is a term that was coined
by Abraham Maslow back in the 60’s. He is a psychologist who was studying
psychological health in individuals rather than pathology. He found that many
people describe an experience in which for some period of time, usually for a
matter of minutes or less, they had a sense of oneness, and wholeness, a sense of
perfection where everything was just right. They described a deep sense of
peace and joy. Often with this experience comes a sense of unity, sometimes
purpose and sometimes a sense of being loved, but definitely a sense that that
moment, that peak experience moment was just perfect. Sometimes people have
this in nature. It could happen
when you are off in the mountains and it is just a beautiful day. I remember a
time I was in Yosemite and I was hiking by myself up the trail that leads to
Yosemite falls. I was about 1/3 of the way up. The temperature was perfect - it
wasn’t too hot, it wasn’t too cold. I had been exercising so all those endorphins
were going. I looked out and was looking down at the trees and there was a hawk
flying down below where I was standing. It was just perfect. Nothing needed to
be changed. It was a wonderful moment.
Sometimes people have a peak experience
with a sunset or at the ocean. Sometimes people have this experience with some
kind of artistic endeavor like hearing great music. I remember once feeling
like that hearing Beethoven’s ninth symphony played live. It could be through a
painting or dance.
Sometimes people have such an
experience with another person, someone they love, someone they care about like
a child or a grandchild. And of course some people experience it in church, or
on a retreat, or at Cursillo or after they have been praying. It doesn’t
matter.
You see Maslow was not trying to
be religious he was trying to be scientific so he didn’t talk about it in
religious terms, but what he described is the same thing that mystics describe
as a mountaintop experience. In all the spiritual traditions of the world,
mountains are often seen as a special place. Mountaintops represent being close
to God. The temple is described as being on the holy mountain even though there
are higher mountains around where the temple of Jerusalem is. That was the holy
mountain. The idea is that somehow being on a mountain brings us closer to God.
Moses went up the mountain to converse with God. And we hear today about the
Transfiguration where Jesus went up a mountain.
We always read the transfiguration
on this Sunday, which is the last Sunday before the beginning of Lent - the
last Sunday in Epiphany. It is a transitional time. It is a time where the
focus of our readings goes from Jesus’ ministry to his journey to Jerusalem and
to the cross. At this time of transition he goes up on the mountain; he has a
mountaintop experience. I thought it would be helpful to take that experience
apart.
It begins with Jesus inviting
Peter, John and James to join him up on the mountain. It is an invitation; it
is a gift. So they go up on the mountain with him and it is interesting that
when they get to the mountain it is said that they were weighed down with sleep
but they stayed awake. I think that is an important part of peak experiences. On
this the mountaintop the disciples stayed awake, but later, at Gethsemane, as
Jesus was praying and he had asked them to stay awake then they fell asleep and
they missed something important. So, to have a mountaintop experience you need
to be awake. Sometimes spiritual writers describe everyday life as being a kind
of asleep. Did you ever have a morning when you’ve gotten up and it gets to be
noon and you are not quite sure what happened during the morning because you
weren’t really there? Or you were driving
along and you know you went through that light but you don’t remember whether
it was green. You are kind of on automatic and you are not really awake. You
are not really paying attention to what is going on. Peak experiences always
happen when one is paying attention. You don’t have a peak experience watching
a sunset if you don’t stop to watch the sunset. Have you ever been out where
there are other people, maybe at the beach or somewhere, and there is this
gorgeous sunset going on and you stop and are amazed at how beautiful it is.
Then you look around you and everybody else is just walking around. Nobody
notices. There is this incredible beauty around them and nobody notices. But
then again I can think of more than one time when I have been driving up 101
and seen a sunset over Shell Beach and just kept driving. I didn’t pull over
and stop. We have to be awake and pay attention. Pay attention to what’s going
on.
Then we have the description of Jesus.
He is standing with Moses and Elijah. And the interpretation is that Moses and Elijah
represent the two strands of Jewish spirituality - the two ways in which Jewish
people grow closer to God. One was the law that Moses brought down from the
mountain and the other was the prophets who spoke out for social justice. They
represent two ways to serve God. The first was to follow the rules. To do your
best to follow all the Law, the rules. And the other was social justice, to do
your best to enhance everyone’s life and concern for the needy. In the middle
stands Jesus. Jesus represents love and mercy, because you see trying to find
God through the law without mercy doesn’t work because none of us can follow
all the rules perfectly all the time. If we really want to find God through the
law there has to be a sense of mercy. And if we are trying to find God through
social justice, social justice is hollow if there isn’t love and compassion, if
it isn’t coming from your heart. The conclusion, the summation of the Law and
the prophets, is represented by Christ and his love and his mercy. At least that is one of the ways it has
been interpreted.
Then Jesus becomes bright,
shining, glowing. His clothes are glowing. His body is glowing. He is
profoundly beautiful. We heard in the first reading how when Moses came down
from the mountain after being with God he glowed. He glowed so much that it
terrified the people and he had to put a veil over his face. Here we have Jesus
glowing.
It is called transfiguration as if
Jesus changed, but I’ve always believed that Jesus never changed. It was the
disciples who changed because if Jesus really was who we say he is than he
glowed all the time. But he put a veil over himself. He disguised himself because
he couldn’t walk around the streets as a human and interact with people if he
had glowed like that all the time. In some of the Eastern traditions they talk
about God and the universe as being covered by a thousand veils and when we
have an experience of God it means that one of the veils has been pulled back.
We see a little more clearly. I think the transfiguration was like that. Up on
that mountain Christ pulled back one of the veils. The disciples could see just
a hint of who he really was. I think that is what peak experiences are too.
When for a moment the veil is pulled back from our eyes and we get a hint, we
get a momentary glimpse of what the universe really is. We see that the
universe really is perfect and beautiful and filled with love and joy.
Now of course what Peter does, and
I love Peter, is that he says lets build some little booths, lets build some
structures so we can stay here. If any of you have had those mountaintop experiences
you want to stay there. The peak experience feels really good. You don’t want
to come down from that. You go off on retreat, you go to Cursillo, you go to a
men’s retreat, you go to something like that and it is so wonderful that the
last thing you want to do is go home. You want to stay there. But unfortunately
you can’t live on the mountaintop. We are not allowed to live there.
At that point a cloud comes over,
and the cloud represents the presence of God, as it does in the Old Testament.
A cloud appears, God is present, and God says, “This is my son, my chosen,
listen to him.” Now it is interesting that in Luke the voice of God says “my
chosen” but in this same story in Matthew and Mark God says “my beloved.” In
fact in the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible there is a little
footnote next to the word chosen and it says other texts say beloved. What that
means is that other ancient Greek texts that they have found instead of saying
chosen say beloved. The people who translated the New Revised Standard Version
decided, of the two options, to use chosen because you must remember that these
early manuscripts were copied by hand. You can imagine some copyist who has
just finished doing Mark and Matthew and knows the scriptures really well is
copying this manuscript and it says ‘my chosen’. He may think that that’s not
right, it’s ‘my beloved’. You can imagine the person changing my chosen to my
beloved. You can’t imagine someone reading beloved and changing it to chosen,
so the New Revised Standard Version decided that the chosen must have been the
original. This is an example of why we can’t take the Bible literally word by
word because we don’t know for sure what the original words when they were
written down. We just have a whole bunch of copies that sometimes don’t agree.
But chosen or beloved are very
similar in the sense that it says there is a unique relationship with God. To be
God’s chosen is similar to being God’s beloved. This is a part of those peak experiences,
those mountaintop experiences, because very often in the midst of that
experience there is a sense of being loved, of mattering, of being special,
special in God’s eyes as a parent, loved in God’s eyes as a parent. And to know
and experience that love of God is a transformative thing.
The next thing it is that they
said nothing to anyone for a while. The scripture indicates that they didn’t
say anything until the resurrection. The came down form this incredible
experience and didn’t tell anybody.
It is interesting that in the 60’s
when they were doing research on peak experiences they found out that almost 80
percent of people they talked to had had some kind of peak experience but only
20 percent of them had ever told anyone about it. It is hard to tell people
about those experiences. They are precious to us. We don’t want someone making
fun of us, or saying it didn’t happen, or saying that we are crazy. And it is
so hard to put those kinds of experiences into words. When we describe those
experiences somehow description doesn’t feel adequate.
So they come down from the
mountain and the next day they are back to work. You don’t get to stay on the
mountain. The next day it is back to work. There is a crowd, they want things
from Jesus and Jesus is healing people. Back to the way it was. That is what
happens with peak experiences. That’s what happens when you are on the
mountaintop. You’ve tot to come back down to the valley. The mountaintop is a
time of refreshment and renewal. It is a promise of what it is like to be with
God, a hint, a gift, of an opening or a pulling away of the veil. But ultimately
it is about coming back down to the valley and getting back to work. You are
left with the question what do you do after you have come down from the
mountain?
This Lent I’m using this to focus
my Lenten studies and probably my preaching. I would like invite you to
consider doing the same. Lent begins on Wednesday by the way. It is kind of
early this year. Ash Wednesday is coming up in just a couple of days. Usually
during lent we focus on repentance and repentance involve two things, it means
acknowledging the was we haven’t been living the way we would like to live and
the other half of that is the turning around and living the life that you want
to lead, that you know you should be leading. Usually during Lent we have a lot of emphasis on the “I’m
sorry “ and “Please forgive me” part, but this lent I invite you to think about
the “Okay, then what?” question. You’ve been forgiven for the stuff from the
past and loved by God so now what? Now what do I do with that How do I respond to this? What is
God calling me to do and be now as a forgiven sinner, a beloved child, as one
who is chosen?
Also we are having the annual
meeting after the service today and it is a wonderful thing for us to gather
together and think about what are we called to do and be as a community. How
are we to be living our lives here down on the plain after we’ve had those
mountaintop experiences? So I invite you all to ask that question and see where
it leads you. To explore what it is that God is calling you to do and be today.
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