James R. Gorman
There is something about the top of a mountain that tickles the religious imagination. There is something about being in a high place apart with the wind blowing in your face and the whole world laid out before you that gives you a sense of perspective.
In our scripture readings for this morning we have two of what the scientists of religion call "mountaintop" or "peak" experiences. One is the famous encounter on Mount Sinai with Moses, who hears God's call to "Come up to me on the mountain, and wait there; and I will give you the tablets of stone, with the law and the commandments." So Moses went up as he was called, and the cloud that had led the Israelites through the wilderness by day now covered the mountain itself. And the glory of the Lord settled on Mount Sinai. And Moses responds with, "Hey, this would be a great place to build a hospital!"
Well, actually, that's Peter's line in the second of the mountaintop stories.
The story of the Transfiguration is a dreamlike story that in some ways recreates the Mount Sinai event. Jesus is with his most impressionable disciples; the same ones, by the way, who fell asleep in the garden when he asked them to pray with him. Peter, and James and John, the sons of Zebedee, a.k.a. the sons of Thunder, are taken by Jesus to a "high mountain, by themselves." Or as King James version has it, "a high mountain apart." And there Jesus was transfigured before them; his face shone like the sun, his clothes became a dazzling white and suddenly there appeared to them Moses and Elijah talking with Jesus.
And PETER! Peter, who just can't keep his mouth shut, who sounds like one of those talking dolls that you can't shut off, who probably talks during movie shows. Peter just blurts out, "This is sooooo cooool!" (Or some first century Aramaic version of that. "This is just groovy"?) And then he just keeps talking. "O Lord, this is so great, you know. This is just wonderful, I must say! It's outrageous. The critics are just going to go wild over this. They've never seen anything like it. They'll flip. I can see George Lucas drooling over these special effects. Look Jesus, let's lock this thing down here. Let's see if we can't get some construction engineers in here and set up a retreat center. We could get a whole concession thing going here. We could set up some sky boxes over there, bleachers out in the back there, I think we could have some sales booths over there with, you know, little wooden camels and little plastic angel pins and maybe some holy water from the Jordan River and then ...."
Suddenly, "while he was still speaking" it says here, a bright cloud overshadows them. Just whips up and comes in and overshadows them, and a voice comes from out of the cloud and says, "This is my son, the beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!" And Peter, who was still talking through it all, goes, "Whoooaaah!" And he and James and John dive for cover, for they were, as the King James version puts it, "sore afraid." Like the shepherds on that starry night, they were sore afraid. And finally Peter shuts up and Jesus touches them, and tells them to get up and do not be afraid. (Which is also what the angels told the shepherds and Gabriel told Mary and another angel told Joseph, and it's also what Jesus told the disciples in the upper room on the day of his resurrection. Seems like we misunderstand really powerful and genuine religious events and we need to be told to be not afraid. Do not be afraid, this is the real thing, but it will not hurt you.)
And they look up at Jesus from their hiding places and see that he is alone. Moses and Elijah are gone. And here is the funny part. Jesus orders them to "tell no one about all this until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead." And even if they understood what the heck he might have meant by that, it seems to me a pretty unreasonable request.
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There have been two main scientists who have tried to study mountaintop or peak experiences. The older is the great philosopher, psychologist and educator, William James, who in his book "The Variety of Religious Experiences" attempts what might be the first real scientific study of religious experience, by asking people about their own mountaintop experiences and then putting them into categories. One such experience was narrated in this way. The writer was a man who was twenty-seven years of age:
"I have on a number of occasions felt that I had enjoyed a period of intimate communion with the divine. These meetings came unasked and unexpected, and seemed to consist merely in the temporary obliteration of the conventionalities which usually surround and cover my life.... Once it was when from the summit of a high mountain I looked over a gashed and corrugated landscape extending to a long convex of ocean that ascended to the horizon, and again from the same point when I could see nothing beneath me but a boundless expanse of white cloud, on the blown surface of which a few high peaks, including the one I was on, seemed plunging about as if they were dragging their anchors. What I felt on these occasions was a temporary loss of my own identity, accompanied by an illumination which revealed to me a deeper significance than I had been wont to attach to life."
This is the mountaintop experience in its essence. A sense that all the world is ordered and that my life somehow fits into that order, or at least I am willing to make my life fit that order in some way.
And this is the experience of John Wesley and Augustine and John Smith (of the Mormons), and Peter, James and John.
The other scientist of religious experience is the great psychologist Abraham Maslow who invented the term as it applies to these spiritually insightful moments, calling them "peak experiences." And what he noticed in his studies on this subject is that not everyone has peak experiences. Maslow writes, "I finally began to use the word "non-peaker" to describe, not the person who is unable to have peak-experiences, but rather the person who is afraid of them, who suppresses them, who denies them, who turns away from them, or who 'forgets' them."
He then divides the religious world into peakers and non-peakers--people who have, or remember that they have, these peak experiences and those who don't.
And then, Maslow writes:
"If you look closely at the internal history of most of the world religions, you will find that each one very soon tends to divide into a left-wing and a right-wing, that is, into the peakers, the mystics, the transcenders, or the privately religious people, on the one hand, and, on the other, into those who concretize the religious symbols and metaphors, who worship little pieces of wood rather than what the objects stand for, those who take verbal formulas literally, forgetting the original meaning of these words, and, perhaps most important, those who take the organization, the church, as primary and as more important than the prophet and his original revelations. These men, like many organization men who tend to rise to the top in any complex bureaucracy, tend to be non-peakers rather than peakers."
The idea here is that religious leaders have peak moments and experiences (or remember that they have them) which allows them to color outside the lines, come to new and amazing insights based on their experiences, and think of wholly new ways of being faithful.
And then there are the organizers who, like Peter, are ready to get the wooden camel concessions and the contracts for the special effects and, like Peter, build things. In the church, as in other worlds, we call this an "edifice complex." We say that the church, at its worst state of being, values buildings more than the experiences that the buildings were built to commemorate in the first place.
In the final analysis, it is not important that you have peak experiences, but rather what you do with that peak experience that matters. And what we are instructed to do with that is set for us by Jesus in all three Gospel accounts. Just before he goes up onto that mountain in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, he is reported by them to have said,
"If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the Gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?"
Otherwise all this amazing stuff makes no sense whatever on its own terms. At the end of the Gospel of Matthew we have another encounter with Jesus and the disciples. Only this time, it is a vision of the last judgment, and Jesus says that the sheep will be separated from the goats, and the sheep will be invited to inherit the kingdom of God because "I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me." And the disciples say, "Lord, when did we see you hungry and thirsty and a stranger and naked and sick and in prison?" And Jesus says, "Yea, though you have done it unto the least of these, you have done it unto me."
So, we have "Peak experiences with a purpose." This is not "new age" stuff that is there just for our own individual satisfaction. It's there for others. It's there because God has so loved the world. It is there because we've got work to do.
At Jesus' baptism we hear a voice from the cloud: "This is my son, the beloved, in whom I am well pleased."
At the transfiguration we hear, "This is my son the beloved, in whom I am well-pleased. Listen to him."
And at the last supper, just hours before his betrayal and arrest, we hear Jesus say, "This is my body, broken for you. Do this, in remembrance of me."
And now, we are his body. Do this, in remembrance of him.