A Glimpse of Glory

Cathlin Baker

“A Glimpse of Glory”

The Rev. Cathlin Baker

February 14, 2010

Exodus 34:29-35; Luke 9:28-36 (37-43)

In both of today’s texts, we hear of the stunning glory and brightness of God.  And in both stories, God is not just felt, God also speaks.  God comes down from above, from some place beyond, and it appears that being on a mountaintop makes it easier to make contact with the Divine. This is a transcendent God that they have encountered. If we are awake, we too can encounter the transcendent God. Probably not in such biblical proportions as to receive the Ten Commandments or become first hand witnesses to the divinity of Christ, but we may have an encounter that wakes us up to God’s presence. And both texts ask us to consider when and how we encounter God and what we make of such encounters.

I wonder if you have stories from literal mountaintops when you glimpsed the glory of God, where you encountered a thin place where the divine and natural worlds meet. When I asked myself this question, I thought of three different stories right away.

I thought of a hike I took with my friend’s father about 50 miles west of Abiquiu, NM. We hiked for four hours trying to reach a certain peak, with a certain view, where we were to scatter his wife’s ashes and have our own private memorial ceremony. My bed and breakfast host had sent me off with little bouquets of marigold flowers and rosemary sprigs along with a full belly. It was an interesting off-trail journey – a 34-year-old female minister and a 67-year-old physicist from Los Alamos. We had never met before, and he barely spoke a word, but he knew exactly where we were going.  I had a tough time catching up to him. At 6’6” he moved effortlessly up the cliffs. Periodically, I would have to step on to his knee and then his shoulder in order to get a grip on the cliff in front of me. We encountered cave dwellings, and arrowheads and crystals dropped by ancient medicine men. When we reached our destination, we scattered the ashes and said our parting prayers. This stoic man, sat quietly, and shed just one tear. And we returned down the mountain as silently and carefully as we ascended.

I thought of a hike with my brother in the White Mountains. We were both in our mid-twenties. It was a turning point time where it would be rare if we ever vacationed with our parents again. Little did we know, it would be the last family vacation we would have with my mother still alive. My brother and I were just so happy to be together. We scampered up the mountain picking blueberries all the way up and all the way back down. In that moment, we were our parent’s children, we were brother and sister, and we were grown up friends all at the same time. We could see all the way back to our childhood and all the way forward to the future. We knew it was a sacred moment.

I thought of a trek in the Himalayas. Again, I scampered up a mountain, strong from a summer of living in Vermont and hiking regularly. I was on a Sivaite pilgrimage with a group from Colgate University and I had hiked so quickly that I arrived at the campsite early. I scurried up to a ridge to get a better view of where I was. I was on top of the world, with great craggy mountains all around me. Tall, spiky evergreens dotted the landscape. I was overcome with the glory of God. The next day, though, I came down with altitude sickness and was sent all the way back down the mountain. I spent a whole week recovering on a houseboat moored on a lake, listening to gunfire cracking in Srinigar, Kashmir for Hindu-Muslim violence had broken out again.

Now I grew up with a father who was always seeking a religious experience, looking for the transcendent, trying to escape the real world.  I was raised to be a person open to thin places, open to the divine. I too am awed by the mountaintop experience. But I also resonate strongly with today’s text for what happens after the mountaintop experience. And it appears that the succession of these two texts is significant, for these stories are side by side in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. It is when they get down from the mountain, that Jesus encounters the father desperate for his son to be exorcised of a demon. This is a shrieking and violent demon, and the disciples have been unable to expel it. But Jesus heals the boy. And the message to me is, God is also present here and now, in the dirty, messy, everyday world of the diseased, the impoverished, the deranged and the depressed.

And so while I love a mountaintop experience, I am not my father’s daughter when it comes to the horrors of this world. I am not looking to escape. For I have met God in the valley of the shadow of death. I have met God among families living in abandoned houses, in lines of hungry people waiting for a soup kitchen to open, and at the bedside of children awaiting heart transplant surgery. Thomas Merton once wrote, “We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time.” Certainly, I have appreciated my mountaintop experiences and try to stay awake to when I might be standing in a thin place. But mostly I try to cultivate an expectation of God’s presence in the everydayness of my life.

Kate Huey, who reflects on the lectionary texts for our denomination, writes, “Where is god? All the earth – all creation, broken yet beautiful, is full of the presence of God. We don’t have to climb a mountain to find God, although we might have to turn off our cell phones, our computers, and our television sets long enough to notice.  Like our ancestor Jacob said, ‘God is in this place, and I wasn’t aware of it.’”

And this is what is unique to the Christian faith – Jesus is both divine and human, he reflects both the transcendent and immanent God. Peter, James, and John have learned this on their mountaintop. They know they are being called to follow and that to Jerusalem they must go. The gospels tell us that they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen. They knew not how the journey to Jerusalem would unfold, but they knew now that Jesus’ death was certain. Perhaps by not speaking of it, they thought it would not happen. Or perhaps in not speaking of it, they would be more awake to the events to come. In silence, they would be more able to hear God. After all, God had commanded them, “Listen to him!”

Lent is before us, my friends, so let us enter into this time quietly, reverently, and  awake, ready to see God’s presence all around us, and to hear Jesus’ word for us. We need not go only to the mountaintop, for the holiness, because the glory is all around us -- in ourselves, in our communities, in our world, in our neighbors, in our suffering, and in our joy. Amen.