Transfiguration - The Last Sunday of Epiphany C

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 while 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 being 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 seen as a special places. Mountaintops represent being close to God. The temple in Israel was described as being on the holy mountain even though there are higher mountains around where the temple of Jerusalem is located. Yet it was on 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. Today we hear 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. 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 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 on automatic. 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, 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. 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. 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 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 believe that Jesus never changed. It was the disciples who changed. 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. 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 let’s build some little booths, lets build some structures so we can stay here. If any of you have had one those mountaintop experiences you know 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 each individual word because we don’t know for sure what the original words where 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. They came down from 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 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. Any description doesn’t feel adequate. 

So the disciples 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 got 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, 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 of 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 ways 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 are 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? 

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.

Last Sunday of Epiphany Year A

The psychologist Abraham Maslow studied what he called 'peak experiences.' We might call them mountaintop experiences. In this sermon I explore how understanding peak experiences informs our understanding of the Transfiguration.

Last Sunday of Epiphany Year A

Transcribed from a sermon given on

March 6, 2011

At St Barnabas Episcopal Church

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

In 1964 a psychologist named Abraham Maslow wrote a book in which he wrote about what he called ‘peak experiences’. These were experiences in which life is transformed for a moment or a short period of time. Experiences of a sense of peace and joy and unity. Experiences in which colors are brighter and sounds clearer. Experiences that change peoples lives. He called them peak experiences, but they could be called religious experiences, or mystic experiences or mountain top experiences.

As they researched this they discovered that almost everyone has had this kind of experience. Some moment, some time, in which everything is clarified, when there was a sense of unity, a sense of oneness - a mountaintop experience. I bet that almost every one of you sitting here has had at least one such experience in your life.

The other thing they found about those who had had such an experience is that almost no one had ever told anyone else, not even their religious leaders or their spouses. Because after such an experience there was a sense in which we are not sure I want to share it.

The readings today describe two archetypal mountaintop experiences. In the Gospel we hear about the transfiguration. And in the Old Testament reading describes Moses going up on the mountain with God for forty days.

Jesus takes time away from the other disciples and goes up on a mountain with three of his closest disciples, Peter, John and James. While they are up there something happens. Something profound happens. Jesus is transformed.

 One of the ways that these mountain top experiences have sometimes been describes is that because we are caught in the material world, because of our attachments, because of the anxiety and concerns and worries that we have, we can’t see the truth of what the universe, what existence, is really about. It is said that there is a profound difference between what we see every day and reality, that there is a background something beyond our perception. It is as if we walk around like we have a hand over our eyes, or a veil over our eyes, and we just can’t see.

A peak experience is walking around with a hand over your eyes, or a veil over your eyes so it is always dark. Or you are wearing really dark sunglasses, and then all of a sudden they are taken off for a moment. Suddenly you see the truth of what is out there. You get a glimpse of a reality that is beyond anything that we can imagine. We get a glimpse of the spiritual presence that underlies all of creation, and then the veil comes back down. We get those momentary times when we see something else. When we see something beyond.

Now these can happen when you are deep in a spiritual program or you go off on retreat or you are fasting and praying. They can also happen when you are driving down the highway and suddenly you see the sun and the rays and the reflection on the water or whatever it is and it is so profound that it is more beautiful then anything you ever imagined.

Sometimes it happens when you are listening to a truly great piece of music. I still remember one time when I heard Beethoven’s Ninth performed live and there was a moment that was just transcendent.

Such mountaintop experiences come in all types and forms. They are a gift. And most of you, I’m sure have experienced that. And that experience that might be part of why you have any interest in coming to church, because you have had an experience that has told you that there is something more. You might not understand what that something more is. You may not be ready to identify it or agree to any creed or certainty of the nature of it, but you have experienced that there is something more. That is the mountaintop experience.

Now like the disciples, when we have those mountain top experiences we have a tendency to want to hold on to them. We go back to that spot in nature where we had that mountaintop experience, and it is just not the same. We listen to the piece of music that transformed us, and it is nice, but it is not the same. We go back for another retreat, and maybe it happens and maybe it doesn’t because these mountaintop experiences are gifts of grace. We can’t control them; we can only appreciate them. Like Peter we want to build a house around them. We want to hold on to it. We want to take a picture of it. We want to record the music; we want to somehow stay there. But the thing about mountaintop experiences is that you can’t live on the mountaintop. You have to come back down into the valley. We are not allowed to stay there.

In the church we have a church year, a cycle, that begins at Advent when we anticipate the coming of the Messiah, then we have the season of Christmas when we celebrate the incarnation, currently we are in the season of Epiphany in which Jesus is making himself known to the world. Then we move into the season of lent, and then the season of Easter and then after Pentecost we have that long green season that is sometimes called ordinary time, that represents life after Pentecost. Today is the last Sunday before Lent, the last Sunday of Epiphany. It is the last Sunday in which we sing Alleluia at church, so we have lots of alleluias in the music, because we put the alleluias aside during Lent. And every year on the last Sunday before the beginning of Lent we read about the transfiguration. It is always there on the last Sunday.

In the story in the Gospels Jesus takes the disciples aside and has this magnificent experience just before heading to Jerusalem. Before that time, he was a Rabbi and an amazing healer. And then for those three chosen disciples, he took the veil down for a moment. He let them see a glimpse of who he really was and is.

Now in the story of Moses encountering God the people did not want to go up the mountain with Moses because they were afraid of seeing God face to face. There is this sense that if you saw God face to face you would die. Moses went up and spent those forty days on that mountain and when he came back his face shone so brightly that the people couldn’t stand to see it, so he walked around with a veil over his face.

Now imagine if Jesus truly was who we say he is. If he truly was the manifestation of God on earth. If he let himself be fully seen it would have been very difficult to be around. The light would have been so bright it would hurt your eyes. It would frighten you. People would feel they were going to die. So he veiled himself so he looked like a normal human being, but up on that mountain, for that short period of time, he let the disciples see a glimpse of who he was. It is a gift he gave to those disciples perhaps to help them with what he knew was ahead. You see the gift of a mountain top experience is that when we go back down in the valley and things get difficult, when we feel alone and we don’t have any sense of God’s presence, when we begin to question and begin to wonder, when we struggle in so many different ways we can remember. We can remember that experience that told us beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is something more to life than just the everyday struggles for existence. It helps us through those dark times, those times of doubt and question. I imagine that this time on the mountain with Jesus must have helped Peter, John and James as they risked their lives, as they were afraid for their own safety, as they watched Jesus die.

So we remember the transfiguration before we start Lent. Lent is a time for us to go down into the valley, to look at things, to reflect, to take some time as we prepare ourselves for Easter

In the service for Ash Wednesday the celebrant reads “I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy word.”

So there are three things to do during Lent. It is more than just not eating chocolate. Lent is about self reflection, acknowledging our short comings, and asking for repentance. It is about giving something up, about fasting and about prayer. But I’d encourage you that if you are going to fast whether it is by not eating chocolate or not going and having you half and half vanilla, decaf, whatever it is, that in addition to what you give up, whatever money you would have spent on that, give it away. If you spent $2.50 a day on coffee, put that away and after forty days you are going to have $100 dollars and you can give to some charity. And I invite you that if you are going to give something up that you also take something on.

In the invitation to a holy lent it talks about study and reading scripture. I invite you to take on some kind of spiritual discipline, whether it be a prayer time, or it be reading scripture, or perhaps if you have never done the Day by Day program you can do that.

I also invite you to think of it as being part of a community. This is a time when the church traditionally prepared people for baptism, so I invite you to also be part of a community. We have several different programs going on this year. We are going to be having every Wednesday night the Stations of the Cross so you can come and reflect and meditate on that. We are going to be having on Thursday evenings a soup supper followed by an education program, where we are going to explore the nature of forgiveness in terms of different cultures and religions.

(At this point the recording of the sermon ended.)

Transfiguration, Last Sunday in Epiphany C

The story of the transfiguration describes a mountain top experience for the disciples. The question for them and for all of us is, "What do we do now that we are back down on the plain?"

Transfiguration

Last Sunday in Epiphany

Transcribed from a sermon given

By Rev. Valerie Hart on

February 12, 2013

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church
Luke 9:28-43a

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 located. Yet it  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. 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 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. 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 believe 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 each individual 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. They 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 any 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 got 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, 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 of 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 ways 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.