A Reflection for the Last Sunday of
Epiphany All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC February 10, 2013Thomas E. Wilson, Rector
Jesus, Peter, James, and John went up to the Mountain to pray.
This small community of Jesus and his disciples were trying to figure out how
to respond to the news that Peter had
revealed to them that Jesus was the Messiah,
the Christ, of God. The Messiah, or the Christ to use the
Greek term, literally meant the “anointed one”, the one who God had chosen to
lead the people back to a full relationship to God.
There was a lot of difference of opinion
among the prophets about the nature of the
“anointed one”; some said that he would be a King, who
would be like a “Son of David”, a warrior King who would return the Kingdom to
a place of wealth, power and prestige. Others said that the
“anointed one” would be a
mystical figure who, through prayer or
wisdom or divine light, would connect the people directly to God
- a ‘new Moses” to bring in a perfect way of
living, and a “new Elijah” who would create a new society of justice where
social and personal ills were healed. Some saw the “anointed one”
as the one who would bring in the “last
days”, the end of the world, the final consummation where the dead would be
raised for judgment, the wicked condemned, and the righteous rewarded. There were
many other views, some wondrous and some hideous.
Jesus, Peter, James, and John go up to the mountain to pray, to listen
to God about the path they must take. While they are there,
the disciples have visions of Jesus dialoging with Moses
and Elijah, the manifestations of the law and the
prophets. While they are there, the disciples enter into the fog and mist, not
knowing which way to turn. While they are there, the disciples hear God speak
to them, telling them to listen to Jesus.
While they are there, the disciples see
Jesus all alone, as if nothing has changed, and yet all is changed, as the Desire of God and the deepest
Desire of Jesus have become one. Jesus has gone into the heart of
God, and in that heart of
love, he finds his own true desire.
As the anonymous 14th Century writer of the Cloud of Unknowing wrote, “Because it is not what you are nor
what you have been that God looks at with God’s merciful eyes, but what you
desire to be.” Which Path will Jesus take? And the answer
of course is, “Yes”.
When we were studying at St. George’s
College in Jerusalem, Pat and I took pilgrimages to the places associated
with the life of Jesus. One of those pilgrimages was to Mount Tabor which
witnesses identify as the Mount of the
Transfiguration. It was a clear day, and we enjoyed the hike up to
the Franciscan abbey church where there are two side chapels in the Bell Towers, one
for Moses and one for Elijah. Isn’t that just like the church? It stands as a
real metaphor for what is wrong with the Institutional
church, as Peter says something without thinking,
babbling away, about how they might build booths for Elijah and Moses, and the
Bible quotes him, then says “For he did not know what he was saying!”
to show that he is missing the
point. BUT the church still spends time, money and
resources to do what Jesus tried to ignore.
From the top of the Mountain we could see the
Golan Heights, over to the Sea of Galilee, down into the Valley of Jezreel where some of the many Biblical battles took
place. On that particular day, we had studied the 4th and 5th chapters of the Book of Judges
in which the Judges Deborah and Barack defeat the
Canaanite General Sisera at the foot of Mount
Tabor, and Sisera runs away to save his life.
In this grisly little story, Sisera thinks he finds refuge in the tent
of Heber the Kenite, but Heber’s wife, Jael, drives a tent peg through Sisera’s skull while he is hiding under a
rug. Deborah and Barack sing a song of the
battle, and it ends with the image of Sisera’s mother looking down the road, wondering why she doesn’t see the dust from Sisera’s chariot returning in triumph from the
battle he was so sure he would win. Any parent who has grown children out on
their own is aware of that nagging sliver of
anxiety, even when you know your baby is all grown up and the
“child” is probably just fine. The top of
the mountain is a place where you are not sure what is going to
happen in anyone’s life. It is a place where you wonder
if this song about Deborah,
Barack, and Sisera entered into the conversation between Jesus,
Elijah, Moses, and God. The Jewish Talmud
examines the revenge song and its gloating about
the pain of Sisera’s mother, the mother of the hated enemy. The
Talmud suggests that when the Shofar is sounded 100 times at the Celebration
of Rash Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, we
must stop and remember the hundred tears of
Sisera’s mother for her child. Maybe the sacred
conversation in the cloud suggests that an element of the nature of the
Messiah is to feel compassion for the family of the enemy and
to love even the enemy. When he comes down off
the Mountain, Jesus teaches that we who claim to follow
him are to love our enemy, and to show us how, he will give his life
so that all, including his enemies, might be saved.
The Mountain is a sacred place and was considered sacred by the people
who occupied this land long before Abraham first wandered into what we
now call the Holy Land. Mountains are the places where one climbs
up to the limits of earth, looking down on the places where we dwell.
While we were there on that
day, the fog and mist came rolling in across
the Mediterranean plain. It was so thick and silent that we could not see
anything anymore, and any talk just stopped as our thoughts
were driven inside the depths of our individual souls. We listened to the
silence, not knowing what was going to happen, but listening nevertheless.
I would have loved to stay there in that
holy moment of the stillness of the sacred, but we had to leave to spend the night at
a convent in the Galilee.
The top of the Mountain
is where Jesus and his inner circle have gone
to pray and to listen in the stillness about what is the best path for them in
this life where nothing is changed but all is changing. Our problem with
prayer is that we think it has to do with
the words that we say to God, and many times, like Peter, we are
babbling because we don’t know what we are saying when we are so afraid of the
cloud. I would say that if each prayer were worth one hundred
points, two would have to do with talking and 98
would have to do with listening inside
that sacred space in which we have brought the sorrow and folly of
our world as dust on our clothes. We want God to pay attention to
the dust on what we wear instead of the deeper
question of who we are created to be.
Prayer is allowing ourselves to be engulfed by the
Pillar of Cloud and washing ourselves in the cleansing mist
of the Holy Silence, being present so that we
might hear where God wants us to breathe deeply of divine
love. To pray is not about thinking but about loving
as the anonymous author of the
Cloud of Unknowing reminds us:
(F)or God can well be loved, but God cannot be thought. By love
God can be grasped and held, but by thought,
neither grasped nor held. And therefore, though it may be good at times to
think specifically of the kindness and excellence of God, and though this may
be a light and a part of contemplation, all the same, in the work of
contemplation itself, it must be cast down and covered with a cloud of
forgetting. And you must step above it stoutly but deftly, with a devout and
delightful stirring of love, and struggle to pierce that darkness above you;
and beat on that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love,
and do not give up, whatever
happens.
Jesus, Peter, James, and John went up to the Mountain to pray;
today, join them. Where is your sacred
place, where in stillness, listening in love in the
silence, you may enter the “Pillar of Cloud” out of
which God speaks?
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