Mark 9:2-9
February 19, 2012
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Visitors who come to our church sometimes would say, “With all the hills that you need to climb in San Francisco, it’s one way to stay fit!” On Sunday mornings, I usually park my car down below Kearney and walk up on Sacramento St. to church. Besides the fact that there are usually more street parking in the financial district on Sunday mornings, I like the idea of walking up to worship. Then after a long day, it’s nice and easy to walk down the hill to my car to go home. Or is it?
Today’s text in Mark’s gospel tells us when Jesus led a few of his disciples up the mountain they had no idea what was going on.
Up on this mountain, Jesus was transfigured. It literally says that Jesus “morphed” or what we know as metamorphosis meaning a complete change. The ordinary Jesus that the disciples knew is now the extraordinary Christ. It’s like that head of Christ stained glass in that window. The Jesus we’ve flattened in stained glass art is now the transforming window through which we see God directly and through whom God’s life becomes our own.
When Peter saw Jesus’ clothes become dazzling white and then Elijah and Moses appearing with him, Peter said, “It is good that we are here.” It’s good because up on the mountain there is a stunning vision and a moment of worship. Peter wants to capture this moment of glory and make it last forever by building altars or dwellings for people to come up here again and again. It’s like every time that I have led a group to visit Israel, we would go up to Mt. Tabor the traditional site of the Transfiguration! I have gone up there again and again.
Mark said that Peter was so terrified that he didn’t know what he was saying. Then from a cloud, the voice of God said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, listen to him.” The disciples are commanded to continue to listen to Jesus.
Suddenly, there was no one except Jesus and the disciples. As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus told them to tell no one about what they have seen until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead. It was good for only a moment to be on top of that mountain, but it will be much harder when they came down. Down and off the mountain, Jesus will move toward the cross.
On the mountaintop, Peter is so eager to be with Jesus and to make this moment last forever. Will Peter be as eager when the going gets rough on another night? We know the answer to that question. Coming down the hill is harder.
Worship High
We have good worship at FCBC! I am inspired when the 9:00 praise team leads us singing a song that speaks to my heart. I am moved when the organ is thundering out notes and we sing as loud as we can to hymns written a hundred years ago but speak to us today. When the hand bells strike out a rhapsody of notes that lifts your spirits and the choirs blend together the many voices into just one sound, it’s like hearing the voice of God.
And when I am really on some Sundays, not always but enough times when my sermon is passionately and skillfully delivered and I tell a couple of stories that stir your hearts, you tell me on the way out that you are truly inspired. It is like being on that mountain and seeing for ourselves Jesus in dazzling white clothes that no one on earth could bleach them. There are those moments here on Sunday when you are blessed with a special feeling of God’s near presence, when the service seems to leave earth and soar, and you pray that this high moment of spiritual bliss will last forever. You want to stay here a little longer and you don’t want me to give the Benediction.
But that doesn’t happen, does it? Before I conclude any sermon, I end up saying, “None of these high-sounding phrases, none of this stirring emotion about Christ, none of these beautiful songs that we just sang means anything if we are unwilling to follow Jesus down the hill. The test of our worship is not the feelings but rather the discipleship.
In this season of Epiphany, we have been celebrating the light of Christ—that triumphant light shining forward into the world. But today, we change our focus with the transfiguration of Christ to focusing upon the suffering of Jesus on the cross. It’s great to have a grand epiphany on the mountain, but the test of our fidelity is can we follow Jesus on to the cross?
Coming Down to the Valley
Jesus does not allow his disciples to stay up on the mountaintop. He leads them back down into the valley. He is God’s beloved Son, as the voice proclaims, but he is also the suffering servant who is now on his way to betrayal, suffering and death. This is the last Sunday after Epiphany. This Wednesday is Ash Wednesday when we in the church confess our sins to begin 40 days of prayer and fasting and next Sunday we begin our walk with Jesus toward the cross.
Jesus has a way of taking us to the mountaintop and filling us with unspeakable joy. But Jesus also has this way of leading us toward the cross.
In Sunday worship, we praise God and lift our voices on high. But it’s not worship of God until we also connect our heavenly praise with earthly need. We sing beautiful songs and then we pass the plate and receive an offering. We praise God not only with our lips but also with our money.
In our prayers, we not only give God thanks for God’s blessings but we also honestly cry out to God with our need. We invite you to share prayer concerns and celebrations every time we come to worship and we mention them faithfully believing in the power of healing miracles and new life. It’s not worship of God until we also connect our heavenly prayers with human need.
When we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, it follows the preached word, the sermon. While you have passively and silently listened. Then we get up, we look up, we hold out our empty hands at the table. We move from being the body of Christ to being dispersed and scattered into the world and to share the love of Christ with all the people we meet. It’s not worship of God until we connect the Lord’s Table with giving to the Deacons Fund to assist urgent human problems.
I have not tried to explain this strange and wonderful story of Jesus on the mountain with his disciples because a story like this is better experienced than explained. I’ve not drawn out any practical or specific implications of this story for your everyday life. This story tells us nothing specific to do but to “listen” to Jesus.
But I know enough of the gospel to know that the test of my preaching is not the content or the emotional impact of this sermon. The test of this sermon is what you do after the sermon. It’s not whether you like what I said but is what are you going to do about it. The Christian mark of faithfulness of our Sunday worship is what you do on Monday morning in your work in the world.
Sunday and Monday
The physicist Neils Bohr, the father of Quantum mechanics, once said that the first inkling he had about the nature of the universe came when he was a child gazing into a fish pond at his family home. For hours on end, he would lie beside the pond, watching the fish swimming in the water. One day he realized that the fish he was watching did not know that they were being watched.
The fish were unaware of any reality outside the pond. Sunlight streaming in from the outside was, to the fish, simply an inner illumination contained within the pond. Even when it rained, the fish saw this not as an event from the outside but only as ripples and splashes enclosed in their environment. Bohr wondered if humans were like the fish in this regard, being acted on in multiple dimensions of reality but aware of only our limited frame of reference.
What if Sunday worship were the chance to lie down beside life’s pond and to realize that what often looks and sounds on any given Monday like events contained within the pond are actually interventions from another realm? What if Sunday allowed us to get up on Monday morning and to see and hear what is hidden from Monday-only eyes and ears, that God is present and at work in every corner of life?
I think that you already have this new perspective of seeing God’s presence in every corner of life by being here. Why are you here at church and not sleeping in? Why are you here when it’s a long weekend, the Bay Bridge is closed, and there’s hardly any parking because of the YMCA Annual Run? Why do you believe in Jesus and following Jesus and doing things like forgiving people who have hurt you? Why do you willingly share what little is yours with the poor? Why do you put God and others first and yourself last? Why on earth do you do that?
After you have come to worship on Sunday and you return to your communities and workplaces on Monday, you have come down from the mountaintop and that’s when it gets harder. You are able to see that there’re interventions from another realm. You believe and you see that God is indeed real and Christ is among us.
What we do on Monday is to take the time to explain things to our friends about the God we know in Jesus Christ; to help them see what you have seen. As we have been changed and transformed we want our friends to be changed too.
Lots of our friends and neighbors and co-workers cannot see what we see. They may think that the greatest thing in February is the Super Bowl party. They may be blinded with the accumulation of things and the chasing after the “good life” that they simply cannot see what we see. Helping them to see what we have seen will lead them to a fulfilled life that is more satisfying and beautiful and saving.
Jesus was always inviting people to “come and see.” We need to say things like: “Hey, I thought I’d give you a call because I’ve missed you at church lately. How are you doing? How about you and me grab lunch after church this Sunday to catch up?”
Or: “I know life has been tough for you lately. How about coming with me to church this Sunday? I know that that would be a blessing—and it just might be the start of something wonderful that God wants to do with you. If you need a ride, I’d be glad to come by.”
Or: “Welcome to our neighborhood! I know you are still getting unpacked, but I would like to invite you to worship. I think you’d enjoy meeting my church family. God is doing some wonderful things through our congregation that I think would be a blessing for you. We have a fellowship group meeting this Saturday when you can meet some new friends. I hope you’ll come with me.”
If the Jesus we believe in is who he says he is, introducing people to him should be something we want to do. If you believe that Jesus is the life of God, the love of God who is right here, right now and the peace for our hearts and the joy of our lives, then we have a story to tell and good news to share. Because we have been on the mountaintop and we have seen God’s glory shown in Jesus Christ, Jesus leads us down off the mountain and back into our valley communities to begin the harder work of sharing good news with others. For us, this is the cross that we bear.
Crosses loom before us. Jesus clearly promised all of us that there was a cross for each of us. Nothing that we do here in worship protects us from bearing the cross. Yet often the glory that we witness here in worship, the experience if even for a few fleeting moments of being in the shining presence of Christ gives us the strength to endure the crosses that following Jesus entails.
Ups and Downs of Discipleship
A pastor tells a story of a church member who was facing the horribly difficult task of forgiving a person who had deeply, most unjustly wronged her. He was her ex-husband. She did not want to forgive him, resented and hated him with all her being, but her hatred for him and for what he had done to her and her family was ruining her life.
The pastor met with her and counseled her. He prayed with her for the power to forgive and to go on with her life, but she just couldn’t. The pastor had great sympathy for her because he knew that if he were her, he probably couldn’t bring himself to forgive either.
Then one Sunday she emerged from church just beaming. The pastor could see on her face that she had just had a wonderful experience of worship.
She said to the pastor, as he stood at the church door, “I can do it! That last hymn has given me everything I needed, to do what God wants me to do.”
A hymn enables someone to forgive her worst enemy? I think in that moment an epiphany enabled someone to take up her cross and to follow Jesus into Lent.
Jesus’ disciples cannot stay on the mount of transfiguration. If they would worship Jesus, they must follow Jesus down the mountain and back in the valleys of life. And so must we. But coming down the hill will be much harder than just staying on top. And because of the gift of high transfiguring moments of worship in the name of Jesus Christ, we can.
Let us pray.
Almighty God, we give thanks that we can come to you in prayer and in praise and you can come to us. We give thanks that when scripture is read and proclaimed we actually can hear your voice speaking to us. We praise you for your eagerness to show us your glory, to manifest your presence, to let your light shine into our darkness.
We are therefore bold to ask that you give us the gift of courage to follow you from worship into the world, to take up our cross and walk with you to your cross. In the coming 40 days of Lent, strengthen us with your glorious presence that, having caught a glimpse of your glory, we might be transfigured into your faithful disciples. Amen.