Mark 9:2-9
February 26, 2006
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
About a week ago, those of us who went on the Thailand Mission Discovery met for a reunion. We decided to cook Thai dishes. It was fantastic! We not only went to Thailand but we figure out how to cook good Thai food too!
After spending two weeks in Thailand, bonding over meals, over-sharing some personal stories, we discovered that we can get along. But when three whole weeks had lapsed since we returned, we were all anxiously looking forward to our time together at the reunion. We shared our pictures with each other and marveled at the sights that we saw. We have had a mountaintop experience and we want to relive every moment of it again. When you’ve been to the mountaintop, you want to stay there or at least return there again someday. It was good for us to be together once again.
Mountaintop
Today Jesus took three of his disciples and went high up on a mountain by themselves. We know that whenever we climb up on a mountain, something special is going to happen. Everybody, from Moses on, knows that mountains are places that you climb to get to God. Moses had to go up on a mountain to get the Ten Commandments. And on this mountain, we see the transfiguration, the veil between the present and the future, the curtain separating the human from the divine, was lifted and for a shining instant, the disciples were given a dazzling vision of who Jesus is.
There was a voice from heaven. Moses and Elijah, two prophets long dead, stood there among them, beside Jesus. The appearance of Jesus was transfigured before them and they fell on their knees in awe and worship. Peter blurted out, “Lord, it is good for us to be here!”
Our mountaintop experience in Thailand required that we traveled for many long hours across the Pacific to meet with American Baptist missionaries and children and women who need our mission support. We may think that unless we worked hard to go to Thailand, we wouldn’t have had the great trip that we did. We often say, “If there’s no pain there’s no gain.” Maybe if Moses didn’t trek up the side of Mount Sinai in the midst of dark clouds and lightning, he would never have gotten the Ten Commandments. Perhaps if Peter, James, and John didn’t climb up the mountain with Jesus, they would never have witnessed the transfiguration. As human beings, we believe that with a bit of effort or elbow grease on our part, we can get to the top of the mountain! And once we get there, we want to believe that from the result of our effort, we can shout out with pride, “It is good for us to be here!”
We know that some religions teach their followers to excel higher and higher in consciousness by doing meditation. Others teach that if you work hard in this life you will come back the next time in a better life. The emphasis we want to believe is that if we make the climb on the mountain, we will be rewarded with some magical and supernatural prize. We want to then be able to say, “Rabbi, we made this big climb with you and now we know it’s good for us to be here.”
Revealed Faith
The story of the transfiguration of Christ on the mountaintop is one of those stories that is meant for us to enjoy, wonder at and relish with delight rather than to be picked apart and meticulously interpreted so that we are satisfied in understanding it. We get a chance to witness worship on the mountaintop with Jesus and the inner circle of his disciples. But what we see in the transfiguration is that the heart of Christianity is that it’s a revealed religion.
This means that Christianity is not something that we have thought up or something we have humanly devised. It is a gift, something that comes to us, a truth shown to us rather than discovered by us. Like Peter who wanted to build three tents or dwellings one for Jesus, one for Moses and one for Elijah—something that we as humans can do to capture the moment, Jesus tells us that is not necessary. It’s a gift from God that we can get a shining instant to witness the divine.
When Jesus’ clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them any whiter, we can’t bleach our clothes whiter or to be more exact, we can’t bleach our lives clean enough to think that we are now ready to experience a shining instant to meet God. When we are close to God, it’s a gifts that comes from him—nothing that we can devise or engineer to happen according to our schedule or our timing. It’s truth shown to us rather than discovered by us. We may have thought that by our trip to Thailand that we have in some way “discovered” God’s work. God has been working in Thailand and revealing his truth to the Thai people for centuries; it wasn’t up to us to confirm that truth!
The transfiguration of Christ on the mountain is pure worship, something at the heart of our faith. We cannot fully explain it. We can only proclaim it, relish it, enjoy it, and wonder at the sheer glory of it all.
Worth-Ship
Our word, worship comes from the old Anglo-Saxon “worth-ship.” To worship means to see and to respond to the true worth of something, to recognize and to adore the value of another.
When Peter experienced Jesus’ transfiguration and the sight of Moses and Elijah, he wanted to stay up on the mountaintop as long as he could to worship God. God is worth our adoration. He wanted to build tents or dwellings that we might call shrines today. It was so beautiful—dazzling white that Peter wanted to witness some more by capturing them in the shrines.
Peter, James and John have heard about Moses and Elijah in their history books, but now they are standing right beside Jesus. They wanted to stay there to worship because everything was so beautiful.
The Scriptures speak of worshiping God “in the beauty of his holiness.” God’s holiness and righteousness are beautiful to behold. Beauty has a way of reaching out to us, seizing us, demanding our adoration. The reason why we are mesmerized by this beauty is that we often see our own lives as being ugly. The popularity of self-improvement TV shows is due to our hunger for beauty. We are plenty hungry for more beauty in our lives.
Maybe this is why you come to worship in the first place. I know that this is the reason why church sanctuaries are the most sacred places in a church. You can’t eat in them. You should not run around in them. We don’t play ball in here. Like the tents or shrines Peter wanted to build, it is beautiful here because we believe it’s a place where we may get close to God. When our lives six days a week can look pretty ugly, we are hungry for something beautiful. We want to say every Sunday, “It’s good for us to be here.”
Jesus’ transfiguration on the mountain occurs in the middle of a rather humdrum narrative of events down in the valley. Down in the valley, on the plain, Jesus has delivered a sermon. It was his most famous sermon, but no one in the congregation that day, so far as we know, saw anything. Nobody shouted. To be sure, there have been healings, and other miracles, but nothing spectacular broke into the normal, nothing extraordinary cracked open the ordinary. And for a shining moment, the disciples see, the disciples believe. Lord, it is good for us to be here!
Maybe another reason why we come to worship is that our lives are dulled by the ordinariness of everyday. Day in day out, down in the valley where everything happens, we have become anesthetized to the routine of chores and tasks that we haven’t experienced the closeness of God for a long time. So we come into this gathering, into this high place of praise hoping that the veil will be pulled back, the curtain will be lifted up and for a shining moment you will be able to see the world as it really is.
As a pastor, I often make people feel guilty just by my presence. I can’t count the number of times when my airplane seatmate after finding out that I was a pastor would say, “I don’t go to church, but I do try to do right and to live a good life, to help people when I can, and isn’t that after all, what the Christian faith is mostly about?”
If I hadn’t been on a plane, and if I were really committed to this man’s intellectual development, I would have told him what I tell you now, “No, you poor, simple, secular soul, that is not what the Christian faith is all about. The Christian faith is about more, so much more than our little deeds. It’s about worship, awe, wonder. Before it is anything we do, the Christian faith is about everything God does, a gift, self-giving, revelation.
To reduce our faith to some list of moral things to do, to boil down this uncontainable fire to essentially ethical things to do, is to demean it. Try putting up some tents to contain Jesus, Moses and Elijah. Try bleaching your clothes dazzling white as Jesus clothes were. Try reducing your faith to just a few simple dos and don’ts and we would have lost sight of who God is and his beautiful holiness is.
Come Down the Mountain
At the end, Jesus and his disciples came down the mountain. They came back down to the valley and the plains where people live and work. We can miss God in our everyday life if we think that we can only see God on the mountaintop.
According to Matthew 25, we pass God by everyday, transfigured both in our innermost selves and in all those we encounter on our journey. God is transfigured not simply on the mountain but as the suffering victim; God is the one who is hungry, despised, cast out; the fool, the alien, the immigrant, the beggar. God is the one who needs our care and our assistance. God is the family torn by addiction, anger, divorce and despair. God is in the millions of our brothers and sisters whose slow journey is starvation. God is the abused and ostracized young women at the New Life Center and the HIV-infected children at the House of Love in Thailand. We encounter God not through our concepts but through our hearts. We discover God who is really God where God appears least likely to be found. Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me. (Mt. 25:40)
It is a great gift to see the divine on a high mountain, as Peter, James and John witnessed, but not if we miss God everywhere else.
On the last night of his life, April 3, 1968, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke these words in Memphis, Tennessee:
“Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead.
But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I
don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And
He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen
the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing anyone. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
Dr. King having been to the valleys and plains of this world where there were great suffering and evil was given the revelation to climb up to the mountaintop and looked over to see what the promised land looks like. God is indeed everywhere including people who find themselves discriminated and restricted to only the valleys and plains of our society. We can see God transfigured not only on the mountain but in the suffering of his people.
Lent
This Wednesday is called Ash Wednesday, the beginning of 40 days of Lent before Easter. We are invited to come face to face with God as God reveals himself to us in the world. We are invited to let go of our need for busy work and to let go of thinking that we need to make the effort, to climb the mountain, to bleach our clothes whiter, to build tents and shrines. We are invited only to see the face of God by living each day that is filled with transfigurations all around us.
When our lives are so ugly, we come to worship God for God is worthy of our adoration. We come to worship because God’s holiness is beautiful and when we place our lives in God, nothing can be more beautiful than that.
If we can stop thinking that we can earn God’s grace and mercy, we may see, in the shadow of the cross, the glory of the coming of the Lord. Christianity is not a religion that we created or discovered. God so loved the world that God came down from the heavenly mountaintop in the person of Jesus Christ so that we may know him and receive his forgiveness for our sins. We didn’t do anything to deserve this. We didn’t just come up with this ourselves. We didn’t earn this revelation by being good—for surely we all fall short of God’s plan for us.
We cannot fully explain it. We can only proclaim it, enjoy it, and wonder at the sheer glory of it all. And when we do, we would turn to Jesus and say, “Rabbi God, it is good for us to be here.” It is good for us to see God face to face.
Let us pray.
Mysterious, wonderful, uncontainable God, you come to us in all of your transforming glory, whether we want you or not. You reveal yourself to us, sometimes in unlikely places, even down here in the valleys and plains where we live. We pray that we do not walk away from encounters with you and invite you to warm our hearts and open our mouths to worship you. We praise you and bend our knee before your glory. Amen.