The Rev. Ann R. Lougee

February 26, 2006

Mysterious Glory, Glorious Mystery

Mark 9:2-9

Gallop polls have shown that nearly a third of all Americans claim to have had what they call a religious or mystical experience. Many of us have experienced a feeling of union with all Creation or an awareness of being in the presence of the divine.

Reported mystical experiences have also taken the form of out-of-body phenomena, visions of unusual lights, and communication from divine beings, even through inanimate objects. Sometimes, of course, such a spiritual experience may turn out to be not quite what it seemed to be.

Frederick Buechner, one of my favorite theologians and authors, wrote about a time when he was sick with worry over one of his daughters’ anorexia. He was on his way back to his Vermont home from consulting a Boston specialist, and he pulled his car over into a rest stop to collect himself. There in the parking lot, Buechner spotted a customized license plate that said "TRUST."

For Buechner it was seemingly a mystical experience. A great sense of calm swept over him in that moment, and he knew he could go on.

Some time later, Buechner discovered that the license plate belonged to a trust officer in the New England Bank. But for Buechner, in his moment of need, the word "trust" came as a revelation from God.

Similar moments may occur for us, sometimes even in worship when we are caught by some snippet of a phrase, some insight, some vision, which maybe the speaker didn’t intend. Such are the ways of revelation, or else what would be the point in coming here week after week?

Years ago, I heard a wonderful preacher, the late Henry Simmons, a small, wiry man who had the enthusiastic style of many black preachers which made him fairly crackle with energy. What I remember about his sermon was that he cautioned us listeners not to spiritualize spirituality.

He said that people mistakenly think that the way to be spiritual is to be apart from real life, to be more spiritual than God. But real spirituality is a way of living with an awareness of God in the midst of the nitty gritty of life.

In today’s reading, Peter, James and John, on a mountaintop with Jesus, get a glimpse of God’s glory revealed in him. As light radiates from him; Elijah and Moses suddenly appear. A cloud covers them, and God speaks saying, "This is my beloved Son. Listen to him!"

How can we twenty-first century people relate to this story? At first glance, it might seem that this first-century story has little to say to our modern world.

Stories about Moses and Elijah are, of course, much older still! It was fifteen hundred years before the time of Jesus when Moses is said to have delivered the Hebrew slaves from Egypt and given them the ten Commandments, the founding event of Jewish history.

Through this foundation story, the Jewish people understood themselves to be in covenant with God, striving to act in accordance with God’s will as they believed it to be revealed in the commandments of the Law. Those commandments dictated how they were to respect the Mystery of God and how they were to behave toward one another.

Centuries later, Elijah and the whole line of prophets that followed him tried to keep the people faithful to the ethical basis of that covenant. These prophets spoke for God, denouncing false worship and calling people to care for those who could not care for themselves.

All of this took place hundreds of years before the time of Jesus. Yet the gospel story shows the disciples having a mystical vision of Moses and Elijah, representing the Law and the prophets, with Jesus.

With dramatic flair, the writer presents this mystical vision to validate the claim of his community that indeed it sees Jesus standing along with the Law and the prophets as a revealer of God. God was still speaking!

Peter, always the stooge in Mark's gospel, wants to prolong the moment of revealed glory, to build shelters and stay there. But the dazzled disciples can’t live real life in that moment of glory on the mountaintop.

Jesus is clear that his ministry lies in the heat and grit of the valleys, in the tensions and tribulations and griefs of ordinary life among ordinary people. The moment of glory is to prepare them for that, for real life.

Scholars have defined six characteristics of mystical experience, which can apply both to the disciples’ experience on the mountain with Jesus and to our own transcendent moments.

First, these experiences cannot be described in ordinary language, but only with the language of metaphor: "It was like..."

Second, these experiences seem to be received rather than achieved. That is, though our spiritual exercises and practices may help create the conditions for them, the experiences themselves don’t seem to be under our control.

Third, these experiences are what is called "noetic," that is, people who have them say they involve a knowing, not just strong feelings such as wonder or awe or dread or peace or joy, though they do frequently include one or more of these. People are strongly convinced after a mystical experience that they know something they didn’t know before, not just a bit of information but another reality: they have experienced a sacredness that underlies and pervades life.

Fourth, these experiences are transformative. That is, a person’s way of seeing and being is changed, and he or she is freed from conventional anxieties and inhibitions, freed to embrace radical compassion as their way of relating to the world.

Fifth, this kind of experience may change how we think about God and God’s relationship to the world. For if God can be experienced, then God must be in some sense "right here," accessible and knowable, around us and within us as well as beyond us.

The sixth and final characteristic of mystical experiences is, of course, that they are transient, they come and go. One cannot live real life in a permanent state of mystical consciousness. Our spiritual disciplines of prayer and meditation and time apart – our mountain top times, if you will -- are to prepare us for life, not to substitute for it.

So in the gospel story Jesus knows that his way leads down into the nitty gritty of real life and death. When he and Peter and Andrew and James come down from the mountain, Jesus will continue to pursue the way that leads to a cross. His companions too will be challenged to follow in that way as faithful disciples.

You may have noticed that Mark's account of the Transfiguration carefully dates it as "six days later," raising the question "later than what?" Well, it’s six days since Peter excitedly proclaimed Jesus to be the Messiah, the Christ, back in chapter 1.

But Peter’s notion of what that meant had been incomplete (remember he’s the stooge in Mark’s gospel), and he made the mistake of thinking that what lay ahead for Jesus was worldly success and honor rather than glory. He received an ear-pinning rebuke from Jesus (the famous "Get thee behind me, Satan").

Written two generations after the death of Jesus, at a time when the community of his followers was suffering hardship and persecution, the gospel is repeatedly insistent about the sacrificial nature of Jesus’ life. It is meant to be instructive for those who would follow him to glory.

In Jesus’ rebuke of Peter, the gospel makes it clear that there is nothing glamorous about the future to be expected. Glory and glamour are not the same. The story of Jesus illuminates mysterious glory and glorious Mystery.

But the reference to six days seems also to be Mark's way of linking this event with the one described in Exodus, where the cloud of God's presence covered Sinai for six days before Moses was summoned to the mountaintop. The six days, the mountain and the cloud are all symbolic reminders of that experience in which Moses received God’s law.

The gospel community, therefore, is not adrift in time by itself. This family of faith stands in continuity with the faith begun by Moses, continued by Elijah, and lived and taught by Jesus, who is, accordingly, called God’s beloved Son.

While that affirmation did not spare him from suffering and death, the gospel assures his followers that what he endured was by no means due to a lack of God’s favor. To the community suffering persecution, the assurance is that what they are suffering does not indicate lack of God’s favor either. They too are beloved children of God.