When I first traveled through the Pacific Northwest in college, I was stunned by the mountains. Growing up, the Poconos in PA were all the mountains I knew, beautiful sloping things covered in forest, where I spent my summers in the shade at my grandparents’ retirement home, watching the deer and birds from their back porch in the woods. But the west coast mountains? Totally, strikingly, different. On rainy days they could have just been distant clouds, but when the mountains were out, they were bold, sharp, giants, visible for miles, used to navigate the points of the compass when we got lost. As the Alleghennys of Pennsylvania had become comfortable old sleepy friends, the west coast mountains were stern, imposing, living and sometimes active things, still in formation, still with all of their rough edges. To build a house on a Pennsylvania mountain meant a beautiful, rustic view. To build a house on Mount St Helens... the whole landscape of the valley was reshaped when that mountain exploded northward in an eruption no one could have predicted, and gardens across the state and beyond still have inches of ash just below their surface, remnants of a history no one can recreate or return to. The landscape is still rebuilding itself, renewing and resurrecting in a beautiful new way.
So when we have these two stories this morning about mountain-top experiences, even though I have also seen in person the mountain Moses climbed, I can not help but think of how I want those childhood summers of Pennsylvania to return, but how an experience of God can also transform us as completely and totally as an eruption like that of St Helens.
Have you ever had a mountaintop experience that changed the way you walk through life? A bit of clarity - or terror - that completely altered your experience of the day-to-day? Not everybody gets one of those moments. Not everybody who has had one has wanted one. And unless you count the final passage into life eternal as a mountaintop, nobody gets to stay there.
Jesus did a lot of teaching from mountains. Great armies built their fortresses on top of mountains. High places are good for communication, for security, for cell phone towers... When people are asked where heaven is, most point to the sky, and what’s closer to the sky than a mountain? Or an airplane, but in the days before airplanes and spaceships, the closest thing to heaven was a mountain, so mountains were where people made special trips to meet with God. Sometimes those trips ended well, with prayers answered and plentiful harvest, and sometimes those trips ended badly, with gods getting jealous and competing for followers. It seemed everybody’s gods could be accessed from the mountains.
But none of the other gods came down the mountains like Jesus did. Sure, there were messages sent with servants down the mountain. Moses came down the mountain with ten commandments straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were. And he did so after a pretty scary thunderstorm that the people thought might have killed him. But forty days of one-on-one time with God, and when the man himself who was there comes down with direct communication, with verbatim here’s-what-God-expects of us, which is what we keep asking for, we still don’t get it right. After generations of prophets, yelling at us to get our act together already, to take care of the poor and feed the hungry and welcome the stranger, when God finally does come down the mountain, we might expect an angry parental figure, the sort who hollers down the stairs “don’t make me come down there!”
But when God comes down the mountain, it is unlike anything expected of the gods. When God comes down the mountain, it is messy for sure, but it is just as messy for God as it is for us. Because at the bottom of the mountain are some pretty rocky roads, some serious wilderness territory, and who in their right mind would voluntarily go through the struggle if they could take easy street and ride above it? Who would walk with us through the mess when God could certainly get away with throttling us all and just starting over?
Who is this God we are following through the next 40 days of Lent? Who it is we’re giving up chocolate for, or coming to extra mid-week worship for, or having fish on Fridays for? Who is it we’ve been worshiping all Epiphany, story by story, week by week? Who is it we’ll return to this Lent to learn from and experience life and struggle with? The disciples heard the voice of God from a blindingly-white cloud on a mountain, in the sort of holy place where heaven comes dangerously close to earth, and even they didn’t seem to grasp who their Rabbi was, what it meant that the voice of God thundered out of the cloud and told them to listen to Jesus. How could they have understood if they scattered when Jesus was arrested, saving their own skin while their Rabbi was flogged.
And all of that reflection on this bright and shining day when the church celebrates the holy divinity of Jesus. We are about to climb back down the mountain into the shadow and mess of daily life, and we are given here a picture of Jesus which is so holy and bright and beyond our expectations of humankind that it must be a revelation of God. And this revelation of God, thunderous and terrifying, reshapes the wilderness like the St Helens explosion over thirty years ago. Valleys are raised and mountains are brought low, the earth turns inside out and it is devastating at first. But not only does the earth turn inside out, heaven also has turned itself inside out, spilling over on that mountaintop where Moses and Elijah appear to talk with Jesus. Heaven has turned inside out like St Helens, with a rupture too big to leave us and this world unscathed, even if it looks on the ground like nothing has changed.
With Jesus Christ on the earth, up on the mountain with the bright shining clouds, we get a picture of majesty that would terrify anyone. But God does not stay up on the mountain in the bright shining clouds. When we are terrified, when the disciples find their faces on the ground in fear, Jesus touches them, touches us, and calls us to rise. When the power and glory of God, the potential for judgment, the uncontrollable nature of life, scare us senseless and leave us speechless, Jesus in the flesh does just what Riley does every time we share the peace here. Jesus touches us. Simple. Basic. Comfort and connection and, in that, also some piece of new creation which wasn’t there before.
Jesus touches the disciples and says ‘do not be afraid.’ God steps down out of the clouds and walks with us down off the mountain, into our shadows, into our day-to-day, because God is not above living with us, God is about living with us. In the mess, with the sick kids and the snow days and the propane shortages and the job insecurities. Yes, God is holy, yes, Jesus is all glorious and powerful, yes the Spirit blows in ways we cannot begin to comprehend, but God does not kick us down the mountain to see what we can do on our own while God sits in heaven and knits another scarf. God raises us up from our fear and walks down the mountain with us, into all of the less-than-glamorous bits of life that we would rather not talk about.
We are entering Lent this week, entering the shadow of ash left by a St Helens-esque eruption. And on Wednesday we will smear our foreheads with ash, the basic carbon element that unites all matter, from the center of the earth to the farthest star. We will remember how earth breaks open underneath us in death, and how heaven breaks open upon us in resurrection life. Most of all, we will name God in our midst, in that ash, in our lives and in our deaths and in each and every resurrection. Because the God of the mountains is also God in the valleys, God of lush forests is also God in the wilderness, God of majesty and terrifying glory is also God among us, saying to us, ‘do not be afraid. Get up, let us walk together.’
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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