Today we’re going to talk about mountaintop spiritual experiences—and we’re also going to talk about everyday spiritual experiences, which are frankly a lot more common.
Today’s scripture is a story that I found a bit strange and irrelevant for most of my life, but more recently I’ve started to see why it is a suggested reading for worship at least once a year. It’s the story called the Transfiguration, and it comes up every year on the last Sunday before Lent begins.
In the story, three disciples, Peter, James and John, go up to a mountain with Jesus to pray. Nothing too remarkable there. But when they get up to the mountaintop, and Jesus is praying, all three of them have this extraordinary experience. It’s kind of impossible to explain, but the Bible tries. It says that: “while [Jesus] was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightning.” It’s hard to imagine what that would have been like, but the three disciples all see it, and they are so struck by it that they spend much of the rest of the story talking about how to build some kind of monument to remember this thing that has taken place.
My reaction to this story, as I said, has usually been to find the story kind of strange and irrelevant, kind of “so what?” I’ve felt that way partly because you can’t really know what happened or how, and even if you can, what’s really the use of hearing about somebody’s else’s mountaintop experience from a long time ago. Maybe those aren’t good reasons, but the story just never grabbed me. Over time, though, I’ve come to feel differently about it. That’s because of what happens next:
When the mountaintop experience comes to an end, Jesus and the disciples come back down the mountain, where they encounter something that is not only very down to earth, but would have been pretty upsetting. A crowd meets them, and out of the crowd emerges a father and son. The son has a seizure disorder of some kind; listen to the father’s desperation as he describes it: “Teacher, I beg you to look at my son; he is my only child. Suddenly a spirit seizes him, and all at once he shrieks. It convulses him until he foams at the mouth; it mauls him and will scarcely leave him. I begged your disciples to cast it out, but they could not.” A violent seizure can be a frightening thing to witness even in the modern world; in the ancient world, it carried with it the stigma of being demon possession. The father is desperate. And Jesus takes compassion on the boy and his father, calms them, heals the boy. It is the opposite of a mountaintop experience; the crowd is chaotic, Jesus is angry with the disciples for not being more helpful, but in midst of it, the father and son get exactly the kind of real world help that so many people need.
These stories, the one of prayer on the mountaintop and the need for healing down below, they are traditionally read together. The suggested reading includes both of them; biblical scholars often consider them together. The Renaissance painter Raphael created an enormous Transfiguration altarpiece that features the mountaintop and the healing story on the top and bottom of the same artwork, with Christ in the middle. And I think I know why that is: some of us, on occasion, have mountaintop experiences. But all of us have regular lives with big challenges and lots of ordinary stuff too, and in the midst of it all we are hoping along the way to get a glimpse of God.
I’ve been reading a book lately by a writer named Mirabai Starr, it’s called Ordinary Mysticism. She’s about as unorthodox as you can get, and I just love the matter of fact way she talks about everyday spirituality. She’s makes a similar point to the one I just made, she says: “For most us, mystical seeing does not happen all of the time; but for all of us, it happens some of the time.” She goes on to describe what she means by that, I’ll read a few lines: “You can start right here, in the middle of your messy life. Your beautiful, imperfect, perfect life. There is no other time, and the exact place you find yourself is the best place to enter. Despite what they might have taught you at Bible Camp or in yoga class, you are probably not on your way to some immaculate state in which you will eventually be calm or kindly enough to be worthy of a direct encounter with the divine. Set your intention to discover the jewels buried in the heart of what already is. Choose to see the face of God in the face of the bus driver and the moody teenager, in peeling a tangerine or feeding the cat. Decide. Mean it. Open your heart, and then do everything you can to keep it open…” (pp. 2,14)
What a relief. What a gift to consider that spiritual life isn’t something you need to be all fixed and figured out in order to take part in, but that you can begin right now, in the midst of your messy, regular life.
I’ll give you an example. I try not to tell a lot of stories about myself in sermons, mostly because I fear I’ll run out of good material in a hurry. But since this sermon is about finding faith in ordinary stuff, I’ll make an exception—so here goes:
Not long ago, I was out at Perfect North skiing with three of my kids. Charlie, the oldest was off on his own, and Sam, the youngest, was in a beginners’ class for an hour, and I was skiing with Teddy, his older brother. Teddy and I were making our way over to one of the big ski lifts, when he noticed that Sam was leaving the bunny hill and getting onto the chair lift for the very first time—which is a big deal. We didn’t have long that night, so I told Teddy we ought to hurry and get our runs in, but he was having none of it. “No way, Dad, we have to watch him!” So we stood there at the bottom of the hill for the next 15 minutes. We watched him ride the chair lift all the way up to the top of the hill, and we watched him ski back and forth and back and forth all the way back down his first big hill, and when he made it, his big brother was there shouting his name and cheering him on and they threw their arms around each other. And I was feeling a bit embarrassed that I had tried to hurry Teddy on to the next hill because obviously this beautiful moment was exactly where we were supposed to be.
Here’s the thing: That’s the mountaintop experience, right? And any parent of a bunch of regular, rowdy, bickering brothers will tell you that those really awesome moments do come around once in a while and stun you with the goodness of God. God was there. But if my spiritual life depends on my four regular boys having a Hallmark moment like that, I’m going to be doing a lot of spiritual waiting. And what’s even more amazing, and what we usually fail to notice, is that God was just as close to us an hour before that, when I was sitting in the tailgate of my crowded dirty car in the parking lot, trying to help the kids muscle their ski boots on. God wasn’t just on the mountaintop, God was right there at the bottom too; and God was there at every moment in between. We just have to notice. As Mirabai Starr said, we have to Decide. Mean it. Open our hearts, and do everything we can to keep them open.
I want to invite you to take a moment right now, and think about something in your life that is very ordinary, probably not something really bad, but just ordinary and maybe a little frustrating, like putting ski boots on a seven year-old. Maybe it’s a routine, like grocery shopping or folding laundry. Maybe it’s a task at work like getting through your email or filling out an expense report. What is something ordinary you do, that feels totally disconnected from God, totally distant from holiness? Now I want to invite you to think of a way you might transform that thing to a moment of closeness and connection with God. The next time you’re doing it, stop before you start, take two or three deep cleansing breaths, and then ask God to help you find the holiness in it. Maybe while you fold those socks, you give thanks for the son or the daughter that God gave you who wears them. Maybe while you make your way through the produce section, you think about the mother who feeds her migrant family by picking that fruit for you, and you pray for her wellbeing. As you return those emails, maybe you take a deep breath and a 5 second break between each one to ask God’s blessing on the person you’re emailing, even if you don’t like them that much. You get the idea, right?
Mountaintop moments are great—and they do come along here and there. But even mountaintop moments are things we have to notice in order to appreciate them, and noticing takes practice. And I suspect that more mountaintop moments come along for people who practice being with God in the ordinary times. Let’s close with a word of prayer:
God, I know, I believe, maybe I just hope, that you are with me, not just in the unusual mountaintop moments, but in the ordinary stuff too. Help me to see you. Help me to slow down in the midst of my regular life and remember that you are there. Help me remember the sacredness in other people I meet, even the ones I don’t really like or may disagree with. Help me to start right now, without having to wait for my messy life to get all worked out..because you love me already. Amen.