The Rev. Frank Logue
King of Peace Episcopal Church
Kingsland, Georgia
February 3, 2008

Coming Down from the Mountain
Exodus 24:12-18, Psalm 99, 2 Peter 1:16-21 and Matthew 17:1-9

We have a group of four mountain-obsessed readings this morning. In Exodus, God tells Moses, “Come up to me on the mountain, and wait there.” Moses goes up Mount Sinai and the glory of the Lord settles over the mountain like a devouring fire.

In Psalm 99 the Psalmist sings out, “Proclaim the greatness of the Lord our God and worship him upon his holy hill.”

In the second letter of Peter, we are told of the voice from heaven saying, “This is my son, the Beloved” which the letter tells us, “We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven, while we were with him on the holy mountain.”

And finally, Deacon Jennifer just read of that holy mountain experience referred to in second Peter in which, “Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain, by themselves.”

Listening to these readings, it would seem that we have come to the wrong place. We should be sitting in a building in a pancake-flat county that hovers just above sea level. We should be shivering in the rarified air atop a mountain.

Certainly I have had those mornings and they are spectacular. At Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico, my group climbed Baldy Mountain in the dark and climbed into sleeping bags to wait on the sunrise. Within the hour, the sun hit the top of the 12,441-foot mountain. I crawled out of my goose-down cocoon to stand in the wind and watch the dawn light bathe the surrounding Sangre de Cristo mountains something like the blood red color that gave them their name.

I am sympathetic to people who say that they feel like such places are as important to them as great cathedrals or that they feel God’s presence as mightily at the beach as in church. And then there are those burned by churches and church folk who find it easier to commune with God in nature than sitting in a pew, surrounded by those they see as hypocrites.

Certainly, I have felt God powerfully present while being dwarfed by a grove of towering redwood trees in Muir Woods. I have been humbled by the force of the Chattooga River while running its rapids. I have felt the immense rush of creation through a herd of Wildebeest dotted with zebras all making their way across the Serengeti in an disorganized mix of mad dashes followed by standing around dumbly, that seemed more like a cat migration, but was all the more impressive for it. And I have been to the summit and felt God in the first rays of dawn that is the quintessential peak bagging experience.

Yes, God is present in the creation, sometimes so fully and completely that there is no building that could contain that same sense of majesty. Christians have long experienced God out in the creation. There were the hermits who lived in the desert of Egypt in the 4th and 5th centuries and they understood finding God in a barren wasteland. We are told that a philosopher came to Anthony, the great saint of the Egyptian desert hermits and asked him, “Father, how can you be so happy when you are deprived of the consolation of books?” This was a true philosopher’s dilemma, for anything worth pursuing was to be pursued in books and in the mind. Anthony replied, “My book, O philosopher, is the nature of created things and any time I want to read the words of God, the book is before me.”

I felt this same sort of awe-filled wonder of reading the words of God in creation yesterday. I was at Honey Creek. Victoria and I were working with Pastor Linda McCloud to lead a retreat. It was that final of three Journey to Wholeness retreats during this school year. This one was the retreat to prepare the participants for Lent. As I usually am at Honey Creek, I was up before the dawn and out on the bank looking out over the salt marsh separating us from Jekyll Island. The brackish creek flowed beneath me as I stood behind the chapel. The sun crested the horizon and bathed my face with that warm light, the color of fire as it first splashed across me and the Spanish-moss draped trees along the marsh’s edge.

We talk about trusting God and wonder how we can do so in a world that seems so chaotic, unpredictable, untamed. We read of theft, murder, terrorism, insurgency, not to mention foreclosures and fears of economic downturn or day we say, recession. The world can seem fearful and unpredictable and we wonder how God can we trust God who seems absent at times.

And then the sun rises again. The light bathes the land with a soft glow that grows in intensity and chases the frost off the leaves. Predictably, the sun rises, the tides turn, the seasons change. We live as unstable creatures in a universe built with such utter predictability and stability. No wonder we want to turn from the crowds of people and get off alone in nature.

But we can take that understanding of the natural world back to our lives. Someone has died. We grieve. We wonder about the resurrection. Is it true? Will we see loved ones again? Or is that just a cleverly devised myth? Then winter turns to spring and yet another little resurrection occurs as it does every year, with green shoots sprouting from brown limbs and later the caterpillars emerging from dead cocoons to stretch their wings in the sun.

But this revelation falls short in and of itself. Winter turning in to spring points to the resurrection and does so for people who have never heard of Christianity. But nature is an incomplete source of revelation. The book of nature prepares us for the revelation of God as found in Jesus Christ. The Word of God found in scripture comes to complete what the
Word of God found in nature begins.

Peter tells us in his second letter that prophecy comes by men and women moved by the Holy Spirit who spoke from God. We come to have this confirmed by the words of scripture having been found through the centuries to be an accurate description of the world. The same problems Jesus came to counter are present today. And that same message that God created you, God loves you and God wants a relationship with you still break into the revelation found in nature with the dawning of a different kind of light.

Peter writes to say that he and the other disciples were eyewitnesses to all that is said about Jesus and he goes on to tell us, “You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.”

So first listen to the story of the Gospel. Be attentive to these words which are a lamp shining in a dark place. Then through the words of scripture confirming what you have heard more dimly in the word of God in nature, a new light will dawn and the morning star will rise in your heart. This is the sort of mountaintop experience that our readings to which our readings are pointing us.

Moses went to the mountain for time apart with God. Peter, James and John went to the mountain for time apart with Jesus. The Psalmist calls us to worship God on his holy hill, which referred to the Jewish Temple on Mount Zion in Jerusalem. These mountaintop experiences were not about reading the book of nature, but about having time apart with God.

In that sense, I have been a part of more mountain top experiences in recent years at Honey Creek and here at King of Peace than I can easily count. Flat as they are, there are times when you can come and feel God’s presence and for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, you can leave this place and say, “I have been to the mountaintop.”

It may not be the big, knock you off your horse flash of light you want it to be. It can come in the still small voice of God speaking love to your heart. Or it can come in the quiet presence of God in communion, in singing the hymns and listening to the scripture. But this experience of God is no cleverly devised myth. And while time apart with God in nature is good, perhaps even vitally important, our souls also need to be fed by coming to worship with other Christians.

Not only do we get the Word of God in scripture readings and sermons, but we get a community of faith to support one another. Then from this mountaintop which is King of Peace, we can come down off the mountain with our faces shining and back into our daily lives. I know that seems like overkill. Faces shining. But there are some people in your life. Some people God puts in your path who do not know and have not experienced the love of God in their hearts. And they are hurting. They have heard too much the messages of other people who have told them they are worthless. Or that there worth is only in what they do for others. For people in those dark places, even the little light you have can be a beacon.

This is what is to animate the rest of our week. Certainly the many things we do here, like the Boy Scout program we honor today, are in response to the experience of God we have had and want to share. Through the Scouting program, we teach boys and girls to respect themselves and each other and to be reverent. This we do, because we have been to the mountaintop and seen how if God can love even me then h surely loves everyone. And then we show that love to the boys in the scout troop. And to the families we work with to build a Habitat for Humanity house. And to the child lost in the court system who needs an advocate. And to the kids in the classroom who need a teacher who understands how much God loves them. And so it goes. We come to the mountaintop. We experience God in some way small or large and then we take that experience down from the mountain.

At our best, those of us who have been to this mountaintop, come down to share love we have experienced with those who feel unlovely and we do so as the Psalmist commands when he sings, “Proclaim the greatness of the Lord our God.”

Amen.