Climb

Sermon: Feast of the Transfiguration
Exodus 34:29-35 • Psalm 99 • 2 Peter 1:13-21 • Luke 9:28-36

Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

It is such a joy to be back in this place after a year away. The last time I stood in this pulpit, I had come to church from an empty apartment, all packed up to move to Boston for divinity school. It’s been a great adventure for my wife, Heather, and for me, but it sure feels good to be home.

Our new home on the East Coast, we share with a housemate. She is clean, quiet, mellow, with only one flaw: She loves to start big, serious conversations right as I’m trying to go to bed.

I’m walking to the bathroom, holding my toothbrush: “Catherine, I picked up more dish soap. And how do you know if you’re on the right career path?”

I’m getting a glass of water at 1:00 AM: “Catherine, I’m out of town this weekend. And how do you know when it’s time to have kids?”

And every time, I rub my bleary eyes and say the same thing: “I don’t know, but I think when the time comes, the answer will present itself.”

The Transfiguration answers the question the apostles must have been asking: How do we know if all this is true?

How do we know if you’re really God? How do we know if it was worth giving up everything we had to follow you?

I know I asked that question last summer. I believe in God: I do. And I want to follow Jesus: I do. And even though my faith in the church has taken some serious hits over the years, my faith in Christ has stayed strong.

But still, I wondered: How do I know if quitting my job and uprooting my family and leaving my friends and putting my cats on an airplane – horrible – is worth the risk?

The Feast of the Transfiguration is the answer presenting itself.

Peter and James and John were the lucky ones. They got to see Jesus transfigured: his face shining, and his clothes dazzling white. They heard the voice of God from the cloud, telling them all their greatest hopes and fears were true.

And they saw Moses and Elijah and they saw Christ in his glory and you better believe that after that they were never the same.

And that is what I want in my life of faith.

I want it so badly that sometimes I skip right over the prologue.

They had that transcendent experience on a mountaintop.

But to get there, they had to climb a mountain.

And here in the land of glaciers and mountaintops, we know that is no easy thing.

If you’ve ever climbed a mountain, you know: No matter how badly you want to reach the top, the climb only feels good for the first ten minutes. After that, your throat burns and your legs ache. You feel like you can’t get enough air. You look at the dark clouds rolling in above you and long for the safety of level ground.

And this is what it looks like to climb toward transfiguration.

If we want to see God in our own lives, if, like Moses, we want our own faces to shine, we have to start climbing that mountain.

And each one of us will have a different path, but nobody gets an easy way up. Part of the journey comes in those late-night moments of asking:

How do I know that this is worth the effort?
How do I know that God hears my prayers?
How do I know that God is even real?

And these are normal. And these are real. And these are part of the climb.

The author Patrick Califia tells us, “The true worth of our character is not determined by whether we have the ability to experience transcendent moments of insight or union with divinity. Rather, it is determined by whether we can remember the things that we are told during those moments and live them out during the long stretches of ordinary time when we are cut off from such inspiration.”

But we know the mountaintop is there, even in the moments when we can’t see it. We know that if we wait and we watch and we pray, if we commit ourselves to the climb, the answer will present itself.
And so we remember the Transfiguration, right in the middle of this long stretch of ordinary time.

This is my prayer for all of us: That we are brave enough to ask the hard questions, knowing the answers will come; that we remember the mountaintop, even in the middle of the climb.

Amen.

by Cat Healy Canapary 8/11/13