Sermon — February 19, 2023
The Rev. Greg Johnston
The writer Dave Zahl tells the story of a visit he paid to a friend of his, a priest who’d burned out terribly during his first call at a small, underfunded Episcopal church in New York City. (Don’t worry— This story is not meant to be autobiographical.) “There had been moments of joy,” Dave writes of his friend’s ministry, “but when he finally left the city, it was more of a tail-between-the-legs situation than a choice.” He wasn’t even sure he’d stay in ministry for much longer. So when Dave went out to visit his friend in his new hometown, it was with a certain amount of trepidation. Things had been hard for a long time, and a sudden change to a new environment isn’t always the solution to your problems. Sometimes it just accelerates the downward spiral.
But when they met up, Dave “noticed right off the bat how rejuvenated he seemed.” He was full of energy and excitement. He was spiritually engaged in his work. It was clear that the last few years since he’d left New York had been a kind of “mountain-top experience.” And Dave wondered about the source. Was it the growing congregation or the new building project? Was it the warmer weather? Had he discovered some kind of prayer practice that had brought him closer to God? So Dave asked him what accounted for the change. And it turned out Dave was right. His friend had had one of those mountain-top experiences with God. But not the kind Dave was expecting. “He laughed,” Dave writes, “and, without skipping a beat, [he] told me, ‘Dave, the honest truth is, I’ve gained a lot more compassion and patience for people since I realized that everyone is pretty much insane, myself included.’”[1]
There are, after all, two kinds of “mountain-top experience.”
You may have had the first kind of mountain-top experience, one like Moses had, like the one that Dave wondered if his friend had had, the kind of intense spiritual experience that probably only happens once in a lifetime, if that: that moment when you find yourself wrapped in the overwhelming presence of the living God. Perhaps God reaches out to you, with an inviting word: “Come up to me on the mountain.” (Exod. 24:12) Or perhaps you set out to go there on your own, seeking after God. But you go up on that metaphorical mountain—in worship or meditation, a group retreat or private prayer—and suddenly, the cloud wraps itself around you, and you are in the presence of the Lord, and the appearance of God’s glory is like a devouring fire, and you dwell there in rapture for forty days, or forty minutes, or forty seconds; the time really makes no difference. But you come down from that mountain and like Moses, your face is shining: you have been transformed, and your life will never be the same.
Or perhaps you may have had the second kind of mountain-top experience, an experience more like Peter’s: the sudden realization that you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about, and it’s long past time for you to shut your mouth. Peter’s up there on the mountain with his friends and spiritual companions, with Jesus and James and John, and Jesus has been transfigured before him, his face shining like the sun, his clothes dazzling white, and ancient prophets have appeared in their midst, and Peter finds himself completely fumbling the response: “Oh, Jesus, thank God we’re here! Okay, I’ll build three houses if you want: you can be here and Moses can be here and Elijah could be over here, and…” and God essentially just says, “You know what, Peter, I’m gonna stop you right there. ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!’” (Matthew 17:5) Peter has completely missed the point. In his desire to get everything right, to try to manage this whole experience and maybe even preserve it, he’s missed what’s going on. He’s taken so much time to speak that he hasn’t realized that he’s supposed to be listening. And this is one of a handful of stories that the Gospels tell to show us Peter, once again, missing the point: this most central leader of the disciples failing to understand what God is doing right in front of him, failing to understand who Jesus really is.
Moses’ time on the mountain-top is an experience of the glory and the sweetness of the presence of God. It’s an inspiration, an invitation, as the Psalmist says, to “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” (Psalm 34:8) In Peter’s mountain-top experience, the only thing you’re tasting is humble pie. If Moses’ experience is an ascent to the heights of spiritual experience, Peter’s is a descent into the depths of humility. He literally throws himself onto the ground and tastes the dust. And yet Peter doesn’t learn, or change, or grow. In just a few weeks, the same Peter who’s all too ready to praise Jesus with unnecessary words on the mountain-top will find himself at a loss for words on Good Friday as he warms himself by the fire; the very one who proclaimed Jesus as Lord at his transfiguration will deny even knowing the man as he journeys toward his crucifixion. Peter is no superhero. He’s been humbled once by the realization of his own limitations, and he will be humbled again and again.
And it was this kind of mountain-top experience that had turned Dave’s friend’s life around. It wasn’t an extraordinary spiritual experience or a profound moment of prayer that had loosened the grip of his despair or healed his burned-out soul. It was the realization that he was like Peter—just a human being trying to do his best, but “pretty much insane,” lacking the words or the courage or the wisdom to know how what to do—and so was everyone else around him. And as soon as he stopped expecting perfection from himself or anyone else, he was no longer consumed by frustration with himself and everyone else.
I don’t know which mountain-top you’re on right now, or what mountain-top experience of the past casts its shadow over the valleys through which you walk. I hope that at some point in your life you taste the sweetness of the experience of the presence of God in your life. And I hope that at some point, you learn that you are a human being, fragile and limited in scope. But I do know that Lent can be a good time to get a taste of either of these things.
In Lent, we can set aside a little extra time for prayer or for worship, for reading the Bible or taking up a new practice of meditation, for spending an extra hour a month serving the community or spending an extra day a month with family or friends. And every one of these things can lead us deeper into the cloud that’s wrapped around the presence of God. In Lent, we can take on practices that set us up to experience the goodness and the glory of God.
And in Lent we can be humbled. We can fail in our fasts. We can find ourselves just going through the motions of prayer. We can discover that forty days is a long time to do anything, let alone to spend with God on the mountain-top or being tempted in the desert. And even if you don’t do anything differently for Lent, you may find that a forty-day season of rain and mud will simply grind you down.
But there is as much wisdom to be found in our failures as there is our most joyful experiences. These two mountain-tops are part of the same range, part of the same process, part of the same journey deeper into the heart of God. And whichever experience we have—however glorious or however humbling it may be—God is there. Jesus is there, and when Jesus comes to us, he speaks to us in the same words he spoke to Peter: not with judgment or with anger or even with congratulations, but simply with the courage we need to face another day: “Get up,” he says, “and do not be afraid.” (Matt. 17:7)
[1] Dave Zahl, Low Anthropology (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2022), 71.