Pentecost 14
Reformation, Media
Larry V. Smoose
They climb up the mountain – their Lord leading the way. His words to them were still ringing in their ears – I’m going to Jerusalem. I’ll suffer. I’ll die. Peter was still stinging from Jesus’ rebuke of his emotional outburst – He couldn’t stand to think about Jesus dying – what would he do? And why was Jesus taking them up here – he didn’t usually go to a place this remote just to pray. And what was that he said after he talked about his own death – If you want to follow me, take up your cross – those who lose their life will save it? So many thoughts racing through their heads as they climbed the mountain.
We keep losing things: wives, husbands, friends, health, the dreams and securities of the past. Nothing stays the way it was. I don’t know if I have ever met an adult who is living the life he or she planned when they were young. Some are grateful for that – “Thank God life is so much better than I had hoped” – But more often, as a pastor, I meet people who are a long way from thanking God for a loss of something or someone who was cherished. In those moments they feel abandoned by something or someone they loved and needed.
A wife or husband comes home and finds a note on the kitchen table – “I’m leaving you.” An employee of twenty years walks into the boss’s office and is told he is being laid off that day. A young woman feels a lump and has to have a mastectomy and wonders if she will be able to beat the cancer.
In the course of life we expect to suffer some necessary losses. Children grow up and leave home. A new job forces us leave our home and say goodbye to family and friends. Health and mobility prevent us from living in our home of 40 years and we have to move to a retirement community or assisted living facilty. Eventually one aged spouse place the other in the arms of God. Some abandonments we can count on, but that doesn’t make them any easier or any less painful.
One of the most heroic things people do is voluntarily leave a comfortable dissatisfaction with life in order to receive the new opportunity they hope is waiting around the corner. Even though it is voluntary, it does not mean that the journey into the new life is less dramatic or without grief and fear. However it comes to you, expected or unexpected, voluntary or thrust upon you, in the midst of the moment, as you are climbing up the mountain, immersed in all of the thoughts that race through your mind, it is difficult to see loss or abandonment as the opportunity to discover new life. It may be as great a challenge as life ever presents us.
Yet, that is a central dynamic to our Christian life – confidence that God is with us even in the most difficult, most painful moments in life. The disciples had already, voluntarily, left their jobs. Those with families had been uprooted and were now wandering around Galilee on this preaching and teaching tour with Jesus. And it was great – everything they had hoped for. But now Jesus had told them that he was going to Jerusalem where he would be arrested, suffer and die. He said “those who want to save their life will lose it and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” Loss that becomes gain. That was what this trek on the mountain was all about, because while the disciples did not know it, they were climbing the Mount of Transfiguration. We might better call it the Mount of Transformation. And in the church today, we have a name for this mountain – it is called conversion.
This mountain is at the center point of the Gospel. Up to this point the disciples experienced the excitement of being with a celebrity. The crowds were cheering, miracles were being performed. But now they were turning to Jerusalem, betrayal, death, and loss. It is at this central place, where the journey moves away from some of their dreams, from more comfortable places and toward a new, unexpected life, that conversion occurs. Conversion, you see is not just a theological formula for eternal salvation. It is the discovery of God’s painful, beautiful, ongoing creativity in our lives, even in the midst of loss and pain. It was this converting activity that called a Hebrew fugitive into the liberator of Israelites, and told a prophet named Elijah to quit being scared about his future and get back into life and changed fishermen into fishers of men. Here they were, all together on this Mount of Transfiguration.
You see, the purpose of conversion is not our spiritual self-actualization but God’s mission. There is a mission attached in every biblical story of conversion. As these disciples trudge up the Mount of Transfiguration, it is not about the safe struggle between doubt and belief in our doctrines. Rather it involves the extraordinary process of creating visionary apostles out of fearful disciples. It is about remembering this moment when the events occur in Jerusalem. It describes what happens to those who stay on the road with Jesus as he takes them to a place they would rather not go and gives them a vocation that changes everything.
So here, on the mountain, they have the whole 360 degree view of their world. They can look back on the life they had left – maybe not the best, but comfortable; it was a life they knew and a place that was familiar – Let’s stay on the mountain and build some tents here. No, says Jesus, we have to look to the future, the mission continues, and will continue even after Jerusalem, we have to leave the mountain and turn back to the world that needs us.
The theological word for this choice is repentance (Metanoia in Greek) It means simply to turn – sort of like when you forget your cell phone in the morning and turn around to go back home and get it. But in the Bible, it means to turn toward the work God is doing in our lives. It means turning away from our plans and toward God’s maddening, disruptive presence and the plans God has for us.
I think it was a member of the church who emailed me a YouTube clip about the hymn Amazing Grace and when I clicked on it, I saw Whitley Phipps, the great singer with the Billy Graham crusades. I remember meeting Whitley at Greater Exodus, singing for one of the events that I was involved in with Herb Lusk. I was overwhelmed by his voice. So I was immediately interested in this clip about the great hymn, Amazing Grace.
The words, he said, were written by John Newton who had been a slave trader on the slave ships and a drunkard. His alcoholism eventually cost him his job, his family, his health – everything. Alone, abandoned, he found himself on that mountain – Jesus was there, shining like the sun, inviting him to step out and give his life to God – it changed everything for him. It was that experience of conversion that was the background of the words. In the midst of pain and loss, God still believed in him and wanted to use him.
The tune, however is listed as unknown – but Whitley Phipps said he knew its origins. It is, he says, just like the old West Africa Sorrow Chants, using the pentatonic scale that is used in all of the Black spirituals. It would have been the kind of mournful chant Newton would have heard from the belly of the ships he had sailed (Hum some of it or the Phipps clip) They were losing everything – life was not going to be easy – and yet they had a savior who would be with them even in the hold of that ship, even on this arduous journey, even in whatever life would hold for them. Only as Newton found himself at the same point in his life, could he understand the melody he had heard, only then could he appreciate the choice he was being given – those who lose their life will save it. What he thought was the valley of death in his life was actually the Mount of Transfiguration. God was giving him another chance – a new life. (Sing the words)
Do you want to be healed in the midst of life’s losses? Do you want wholeness and grace? I have a man I want you to meet – You’ll recognize him, his face is shining like the sun so that you will know you are in the presence of God,– and he wants to transform you life, assure you as you face loss and change, and invites you to follow him. Amen.