Mark 9:2-9

Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.

As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.

Some years ago Chilton Knudsen, the Bishop of Maine, told a story about a month-long mission trip she and another priest of the Diocese, my friend Larry Estey, made to Haiti. Neither had ever been to that country before, by far the poorest and least-developed country in the western hemisphere, but both were excited about the prospect of initiating a relationship with the Episcopal Diocese there in that the need was so great for help of any kind.

Chilton and Larry landed one Sunday in Port au Prince, the dusty, crowded and violent capitol city of Haiti, where for the first ten days they met with the Bishop of Haiti and toured the many schools and medical clinics run by the Diocese there. They found the conditions horrifying, the people inspiring and the experience exhausting.

And so they decided early, early one Wednesday morning to get away from the noise and danger and, yes, ugliness of Port au Prince and to take a trip up into the mountains that overlooked the city. They decided with the help of a driver to take a road up a mountain and to hike the rest of the way themselves to an overlook. Once there, what they saw was something quite different from the grimy, noisy streets of Port-au-Prince. It was, as both later recounted, a view in which the city was quite transformed—beautiful, serene, the little buildings of the city glistening in the early morning sun. It was an astonishing contrast to how they had perceived the city before.

And so Chilton, excited, turned to Larry and said, “Get the camera. We have to get a picture of this. We have to take a picture of what the city looks like from up here. We have to get a picture of this.” As she told it, what she was hungering for was some way of extending and memorializing that moment, of preserving the experience of being on a mountaintop and seeing the beauty of something fraught with difficulty and brokenness, of staying there a little while longer, well, maybe finding a way to stay there a lot longer, in that life down the mountain was so hard, so disheartening, so overwhelming.

James and John and Peter go up to a mountaintop with their friend and teacher Jesus. Only a little while before Jesus has said some disturbing things to them about the path he will follow. It will involve a journey to the city of Jerusalem, he tells them, and his own violent death. With this still in their minds, he leads them to the top of a mountain.

Once there, Mark tells us, Jesus is transfigured before them, his clothes a dazzling white. Moses and Elijah, the twin representatives of all that is Holy in their Jewish tradition also appear before them with Jesus. Confused and terrified, Peter suggests that they make three little dwelling places for each of them. Before he has a chance to go any further, a voice from a cloud proclaims that Jesus is the Son, the Beloved, the one whom they should listen to. With this, Moses and Elijah disappear and Jesus is left standing alone before them.

And so somehow the story of the transfiguration is about the mountaintop, where we glimpse the beauty and glory that, through God, lives in the created world, and its connection to life down the mountain, life that falls short of the beauty, glory and justice we long for.  The story of the transfiguration is about the connection between the world of the mountaintop and life as it’s really lived down the mountain.

And, of course, this story of the transfiguration is also about Peter’s and our own desire to try both to contain and hold onto the beauty and glory glimpsed in the mountaintop experience, to take a picture of it, as it were, perhaps as a way to hold onto the moment and to avoid life down the mountain for just a little while longer.

But as the story suggests, the beauty and glory and justice that has come into being through God in Christ cannot be contained or experienced apart from life down the mountain. In Christ the two are finally and indissolubly connected. Life down the mountain is where God’s beauty and glory and justice have finally come to dwell—not as static achieved realities but as a part of God’s own dynamic process, a process in which we participate that is always on the road into Jerusalem or on the road back to Port au Prince.

And so, it isn’t surprising, then, that one writer should say of the transfiguration on the mountain top: “The mountain journey is about becoming more aligned with God’s presence and purposes in our lives. … The goal is not the glamour of iridescent light, but Christ-shaped encounters with others. The journey is not about getting out of this world or out of ourselves into some more glamorous place—but about getting as deeply into this world as God, in Christ, has.”

And so where are you being invited to get more deeply into the world, as deep as Christ himself has? Into what Jerusalem or Port-au-Prince are you being asked to bear God’s beauty and glory and justice? What mountain top are you being asked to walk down to do this?  I could, of course, ask the very same thing of us as a parish.

Last week my car again had something wrong with it—the “check engine” light came on again and for a few days I once again learned what it was to be without a car in Seattle.  One of the things it meant is that I had to walk down the hill—down the mountaintop, so to speak, to work for those days, which also meant that I had to walk by the front of the church to get to the parking lot and to my office.

Well, there on the front porch of the church was the familiar green blanket pulled up over a sleeping figure on top of cardboard boxes. As I walked by, I thought to myself: “OK, Melissa, you have to talk to him. You have to tell him that he can’t sleep here anymore-which is what I did. I went over to where I figured his head was and said, “:Hello, excuse me!” at which point the man under the covers pulled back the green blanket and looked up at me, squinting in the daylight.

“You can’t sleep here anymore,” I told him.

“Then what am I going to do?” he replied.

What followed was an exchange about shelters and why he was not in one, back and forth about how long he had been on the street and how he came to be there (mental illness, not alcohol, he explained), what he had come up with in terms of where he slept when (our porch during the weekdays and Saturdays, in front of another place on Sundays), and finally promises to keep the area clean.

Finally we introduced ourselves: “I’m Melissa,” I said. “I’m the priest here.” “I’m George” he said. And with that, he pulled his very much unwashed hand out from under his blanket and extended it towards me. I looked down at my own gloved hand. And after taking my glove off, I took his hand in mine. He broke into what we used to call a killer smile—one of those that had the quality of the sun coming out on a cloudy day.

And for me, just for a moment, our little porch was transfigured, not because his problems as a homeless man or our issues or the city’s issues related to the homeless had been solved but because God’s transfiguring spirit had for a moment made itself visible through a simple human connection in life lived off the mountaintop, life lived at the foot of the Hill.

“This is my Son, the Beloved. Listen to him.” Surely this at least is a part of our listening: each of us and all of us together extending our ungloved hands toward an unwashed world that lives off the mountaintop. Surely this at least is a part of our listening.

Sources Cited or Consulted

Robert C. Morris, “Riding the Wild Mountain Ox,” in Weavings

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