Good to Be Here
M4
1 Kings 19:9-18
Ps 27
2 Peter 1:16-19(20-1)
Mk. 9:2-9
It Is Good for Us to Be Here
“Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here…” Mark 9
It is good for us to be here! It is good to be with the Stirling sisters who have missed only a handful of Sundays here over six decades (the bars they gave for Sunday School attendance would be a mile long for each of them), with Helen Connolly who has never just walked past me but has given me a hug on my best days and my worst. It is good to be with the Old Testament prophet Fritz Schneider, with our self-effacing bishop Dick Millard and Debra Ting who has the most holy smile I can imagine. It is good to be in the place where you can find the infectious laughter both of June Barlow and Patrick Brown and little Jimmy Snell.
On any given Sunday most of us here, along with a little boredom, discover a glimpse of what is holy. But every week one or two of us has the lid ripped right off, God lifts the veil and we see him face to face. This is not a slick or polished church. We make a lot of mistakes. We ring a huge bell in your ear if you are a minute late. Perhaps this makes it seem even more remarkable how often the holy overwhelms us here.
When Jesus goes up to the mountaintop to pray with his three closest friends it happens there too. Jesus is transfigured before them in a dazzling white glow. The unbearable glory and light behind everything in the universe appears. The chronology of ordinary time is broken open. Suddenly the two men who for readers of the Bible have most indisputably seen God, Elijah and Moses, appear before them. Then Jesus’ most bold friend Peter says, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” The author then speaks up to defend Peter writing, “He did not know what to say, for they were terrified.”
Most biblical interpreters seem to pretty much agree on two things about Peter. First, he betrayed his friend and teacher Jesus in the final hour. Second, that in the face of the sudden appearance of the holy, Peter couldn’t help but say something stupid. In defense of Peter, I think all of us have been guilty of talking too much when we should have let a moment speak for itself. The scholars forget that one remarkable thing about being human is that sometimes when we say, “it is good for us to be here,” we actually make the moment better. Somehow being with someone and saying, “this surf is great,” feels better than enjoying it alone. I imagine this may be true of our mountaintop experiences too.
Every year the beauty of spring in California takes me by surprise. I can’t help but remember that spring when Heidi and I fell in love. You’ve all probably heard the story too many times. Heidi was a delightfully perky college student with a yellow daisy behind her ear. I was an always over-dressed, overly-serious university administrator. I sent her love poems over the campus mail system.
But dating me never was easy. That spring I invited Heidi to walk with me from UC Irvine’s campus over the hills to her aunt’s house in Laguna Beach. It’s about ten miles as the crow flies. The problem is that we’re not crows. I had walked about a quarter of the way there myself, but there are no real trails, so I wasn’t completely sure where to go.
At the halfway point we came to a barbed wire fence. On the other side, there in the middle of nowhere, stood a mean-looking bull. Heidi doesn’t even like suspicious dogs but there was no way to go around. Our plan was to have me jump the fence in front of it and distract the animal while Heidi walked quickly behind him over to the next ridge. The bull made a few menacing gestures but we got by it.
Within an hour as the adrenaline trailed off, we reached the top of the mountain. Surrounded by acres of wildflowers and rich grasses, alone on top of the world we seemed so far above the distant desert, the suburban sprawl and the infinite blue Pacific. The air was so clear we could see snow on the mountains beyond L.A. and our whole future seemed spread out before us. We felt God blessing us and in that moment something of who we are today came into being. The holiness we experienced there will always be part of my soul. It was good for us to be there.
I know that there are places in your life where it was good to be, when God’s glory flashed before you and left you speechless. You have enriched my life by telling me about your moments of transfiguration. Many of us in such an instant have been changed forever by God. These stories become so central to how we understand ourselves, it is almost hard to realize how many others have had these mystical experiences too.
One of my favorite writers, the American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842-1910) collected dozens and dozens of mountaintop experiences in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience. He writes, “there are moments of sentimental and mystical experience… that carry an enormous sense of inner authority and illumination when they come…” James believed that scientists should not ignore these transformative experiences. He reports that even people who do not believe in God can have them.
I want to give an example of what James means. He quotes a Swiss person who wrote the following on a hiking trip. “I was in perfect health… I can best describe the condition I was in by calling it a state of equilibrium. When all at once I experienced a feeling of being raised above myself, I felt the presence of God – I tell of the thing just as I was conscious of it – as if his goodness and his power were penetrating me altogether. The throb of emotion was so violent that I could barely tell the boys to pass on and not wait for me. I then sat down on a stone, unable to stand any longer, and my eyes overflowed with tears. I thanked God that in the course of my life he had taught me to know him, that he sustained my life… I felt his reply.”
The Bible reports on this experience too. The prophet Elijah was running for his life and hiding out from the king’s army in a cave. God didn’t appear to him in the wind, the earthquake or the fire but in a sound of sheer silence. Like Elijah God has called to you. Like Elijah God has a purpose for you and it will probably be clearest in the moments when he seems most near to you.
Christianity involves more than the joy that we experience when God comes to us on the mountaintop. Today is the last Sunday of Epiphany. This Wednesday we enter the holy season of Lent. Six weeks later on the last Sunday of Lent we read a story very much like the one we have today. Jesus goes off again with Peter, James and John to pray in Gethsemane on the night he is arrested. He says, “I am deeply grieved” and asks them to stay awake with him, but they cannot. These two stories share in common the prayer, the holy mystery of God’s actions, the scared friends at a loss for what to say.
These two stories are like bookends which contain Lent. We as Christians live both out of these stories and between them. We know the enlightening joy of being transfigured by God and the darkness of Gethsemane. This week I stayed with a friend during an examination after doctors discovered that she had cancer. I learned that a man I love will have to have surgery a fifth time because all the other efforts to cure him have failed. I talked with a couple I know going through the wasteland of divorce.
I know that darkness has touched you this week too. Maybe you feel lonely or vulnerable or you worry about the future. Perhaps you feel betrayed or see no way to be reconciled to someone who you are supposed to love. We are all well-acquainted with darkness.
This is hard to explain but our relation to the darkness is part of what defines us as Christians. Other religions and philosophies of life seem mostly to avoid the darkness. Their gods seem distant and pure, uninvolved or oblivious to the pain of the world. But this is not the way of the Christ. Jesus chooses to be betrayed and humiliated. He chooses to suffer terrible pain all for the sake of love. In fact, as Christians we believe that there is something about this world that can only be cured by the self-sacrifice of God.
The Gospel of John frequently describes the crucifixion of Jesus as his glorification. For us Jesus transforms the darkness of failure and suffering and despair. The light of his transfiguration and our own transformation always remind us that the darkness will not overcome us. But his example does not just transform our experience of death and suffering.
Through him we experience the light in a new way too. Those mountaintop experiences when we have seen God face to face become more than just a comfort to us. They provide us with the peace and confidence to take the risks and make the sacrifices demanded by love.
By now everyone has probably heard the old preacher’s story about the abbot of an Egyptian monastery. A visitor asks him, “Do you believe in miracles?” The monk pauses and replies, “It depends on what you mean by a miracle. Some people say it is a miracle when God does what the people want him to do. We say it is a miracle when the people do what God wants them to do.”
In conclusion, I pray that you will have a holy Lent, that you will visit the mountaintop and create the space in your life that will make it possible to hear God’s call to you. I pray that you will discover within yourself the glory and joy of transfiguration along with the power that love’s sacrifices demand. I am grateful that we share each other’s company in our travels as we pass through the valleys of darkness and the mountaintops of clear light. I feel thankful that Jesus is our guide. Like Heidi and I on top of Signal Hill we get a glimpse of the future of God’s kingdom when we gather together. It is good for us to be here!
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, Being The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-1902 in Writings 1902-1910 (NY: Library of America, 1987), 23.
Ibid., 68.
For this comparison I am indebted to the more articulate Rowan Williams, “Sermon at Canterbury Cathedral, March 2, 2003. http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermons_speeches/2003/030302.html
1 Kings 19:9-18
Ps 27
2 Peter 1:16-19(20-1)
Mk. 9:2-9
It Is Good for Us to Be Here
“Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here…” Mark 9
It is good for us to be here! It is good to be with the Stirling sisters who have missed only a handful of Sundays here over six decades (the bars they gave for Sunday School attendance would be a mile long for each of them), with Helen Connolly who has never just walked past me but has given me a hug on my best days and my worst. It is good to be with the Old Testament prophet Fritz Schneider, with our self-effacing bishop Dick Millard and Debra Ting who has the most holy smile I can imagine. It is good to be in the place where you can find the infectious laughter both of June Barlow and Patrick Brown and little Jimmy Snell.
On any given Sunday most of us here, along with a little boredom, discover a glimpse of what is holy. But every week one or two of us has the lid ripped right off, God lifts the veil and we see him face to face. This is not a slick or polished church. We make a lot of mistakes. We ring a huge bell in your ear if you are a minute late. Perhaps this makes it seem even more remarkable how often the holy overwhelms us here.
When Jesus goes up to the mountaintop to pray with his three closest friends it happens there too. Jesus is transfigured before them in a dazzling white glow. The unbearable glory and light behind everything in the universe appears. The chronology of ordinary time is broken open. Suddenly the two men who for readers of the Bible have most indisputably seen God, Elijah and Moses, appear before them. Then Jesus’ most bold friend Peter says, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” The author then speaks up to defend Peter writing, “He did not know what to say, for they were terrified.”
Most biblical interpreters seem to pretty much agree on two things about Peter. First, he betrayed his friend and teacher Jesus in the final hour. Second, that in the face of the sudden appearance of the holy, Peter couldn’t help but say something stupid. In defense of Peter, I think all of us have been guilty of talking too much when we should have let a moment speak for itself. The scholars forget that one remarkable thing about being human is that sometimes when we say, “it is good for us to be here,” we actually make the moment better. Somehow being with someone and saying, “this surf is great,” feels better than enjoying it alone. I imagine this may be true of our mountaintop experiences too.
Every year the beauty of spring in California takes me by surprise. I can’t help but remember that spring when Heidi and I fell in love. You’ve all probably heard the story too many times. Heidi was a delightfully perky college student with a yellow daisy behind her ear. I was an always over-dressed, overly-serious university administrator. I sent her love poems over the campus mail system.
But dating me never was easy. That spring I invited Heidi to walk with me from UC Irvine’s campus over the hills to her aunt’s house in Laguna Beach. It’s about ten miles as the crow flies. The problem is that we’re not crows. I had walked about a quarter of the way there myself, but there are no real trails, so I wasn’t completely sure where to go.
At the halfway point we came to a barbed wire fence. On the other side, there in the middle of nowhere, stood a mean-looking bull. Heidi doesn’t even like suspicious dogs but there was no way to go around. Our plan was to have me jump the fence in front of it and distract the animal while Heidi walked quickly behind him over to the next ridge. The bull made a few menacing gestures but we got by it.
Within an hour as the adrenaline trailed off, we reached the top of the mountain. Surrounded by acres of wildflowers and rich grasses, alone on top of the world we seemed so far above the distant desert, the suburban sprawl and the infinite blue Pacific. The air was so clear we could see snow on the mountains beyond L.A. and our whole future seemed spread out before us. We felt God blessing us and in that moment something of who we are today came into being. The holiness we experienced there will always be part of my soul. It was good for us to be there.
I know that there are places in your life where it was good to be, when God’s glory flashed before you and left you speechless. You have enriched my life by telling me about your moments of transfiguration. Many of us in such an instant have been changed forever by God. These stories become so central to how we understand ourselves, it is almost hard to realize how many others have had these mystical experiences too.
One of my favorite writers, the American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842-1910) collected dozens and dozens of mountaintop experiences in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience. He writes, “there are moments of sentimental and mystical experience… that carry an enormous sense of inner authority and illumination when they come…” James believed that scientists should not ignore these transformative experiences. He reports that even people who do not believe in God can have them.
I want to give an example of what James means. He quotes a Swiss person who wrote the following on a hiking trip. “I was in perfect health… I can best describe the condition I was in by calling it a state of equilibrium. When all at once I experienced a feeling of being raised above myself, I felt the presence of God – I tell of the thing just as I was conscious of it – as if his goodness and his power were penetrating me altogether. The throb of emotion was so violent that I could barely tell the boys to pass on and not wait for me. I then sat down on a stone, unable to stand any longer, and my eyes overflowed with tears. I thanked God that in the course of my life he had taught me to know him, that he sustained my life… I felt his reply.”
The Bible reports on this experience too. The prophet Elijah was running for his life and hiding out from the king’s army in a cave. God didn’t appear to him in the wind, the earthquake or the fire but in a sound of sheer silence. Like Elijah God has called to you. Like Elijah God has a purpose for you and it will probably be clearest in the moments when he seems most near to you.
Christianity involves more than the joy that we experience when God comes to us on the mountaintop. Today is the last Sunday of Epiphany. This Wednesday we enter the holy season of Lent. Six weeks later on the last Sunday of Lent we read a story very much like the one we have today. Jesus goes off again with Peter, James and John to pray in Gethsemane on the night he is arrested. He says, “I am deeply grieved” and asks them to stay awake with him, but they cannot. These two stories share in common the prayer, the holy mystery of God’s actions, the scared friends at a loss for what to say.
These two stories are like bookends which contain Lent. We as Christians live both out of these stories and between them. We know the enlightening joy of being transfigured by God and the darkness of Gethsemane. This week I stayed with a friend during an examination after doctors discovered that she had cancer. I learned that a man I love will have to have surgery a fifth time because all the other efforts to cure him have failed. I talked with a couple I know going through the wasteland of divorce.
I know that darkness has touched you this week too. Maybe you feel lonely or vulnerable or you worry about the future. Perhaps you feel betrayed or see no way to be reconciled to someone who you are supposed to love. We are all well-acquainted with darkness.
This is hard to explain but our relation to the darkness is part of what defines us as Christians. Other religions and philosophies of life seem mostly to avoid the darkness. Their gods seem distant and pure, uninvolved or oblivious to the pain of the world. But this is not the way of the Christ. Jesus chooses to be betrayed and humiliated. He chooses to suffer terrible pain all for the sake of love. In fact, as Christians we believe that there is something about this world that can only be cured by the self-sacrifice of God.
The Gospel of John frequently describes the crucifixion of Jesus as his glorification. For us Jesus transforms the darkness of failure and suffering and despair. The light of his transfiguration and our own transformation always remind us that the darkness will not overcome us. But his example does not just transform our experience of death and suffering.
Through him we experience the light in a new way too. Those mountaintop experiences when we have seen God face to face become more than just a comfort to us. They provide us with the peace and confidence to take the risks and make the sacrifices demanded by love.
By now everyone has probably heard the old preacher’s story about the abbot of an Egyptian monastery. A visitor asks him, “Do you believe in miracles?” The monk pauses and replies, “It depends on what you mean by a miracle. Some people say it is a miracle when God does what the people want him to do. We say it is a miracle when the people do what God wants them to do.”
In conclusion, I pray that you will have a holy Lent, that you will visit the mountaintop and create the space in your life that will make it possible to hear God’s call to you. I pray that you will discover within yourself the glory and joy of transfiguration along with the power that love’s sacrifices demand. I am grateful that we share each other’s company in our travels as we pass through the valleys of darkness and the mountaintops of clear light. I feel thankful that Jesus is our guide. Like Heidi and I on top of Signal Hill we get a glimpse of the future of God’s kingdom when we gather together. It is good for us to be here!
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, Being The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-1902 in Writings 1902-1910 (NY: Library of America, 1987), 23.
Ibid., 68.
For this comparison I am indebted to the more articulate Rowan Williams, “Sermon at Canterbury Cathedral, March 2, 2003. http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermons_speeches/2003/030302.html
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