Exodus 34:29-35
Luke 9:28-43a
SERMON “Up On the Mountain”
In the First Book of Kings in the Tanakh, or maybe “One” Kings to our wicked wanna-be king, we find the story of an ancient wicked king, Ahab, his foreign queen, Jezebel, and his antagonist, the prophet Elijah.
It is a bit of a saga, with twists and turns, and ends with dogs licking up the blood from the chariot in which Ahab died.
But there is a moment, early in the story, when there still seems to be a chance of redemption for the king, a chance that he might turn out okay.
His wife has brought to Israel with her a retinue of priests dedicated to the god Baal. This offends Elijah, who insists on exclusive worship of Yahweh. As you do.
Elijah challenges the priests of Baal to a sacrificial showdown, calling fire from the sky, and when he wins, orders the mass murder of the remaining opposition. As you do.
After this, the offending worship having been temporarily purged from the kingdom, Elijah has Ahab go up on the mountain to break his fast. This points back to another story.
During the Exodus from slavery in Egypt, Moses serves as an intermediary between Yahweh and the Abrahamic people. It too is quite a saga.
Having negotiated a treaty with God, a covenant in theological terms, Moses and Aaron take seventy elders up on to the mountain, where they ritually eat and drink to seal their new covenant with God. Ahab eating and drinking on the mountain mimics this covenant-making.
In today’s gospel reading, we are once again on a mountain, this time with Jesus and three of his disciples. This, however, is no picnic. As Jesus is praying, he begins to shine, then Moses and Elijah suddenly appear. Again, we are pointing back to an earlier incident. When Moses comes down from initially negotiating the covenant between Yahweh and the descendants of Jacob, his face also shines, as we read from Exodus.
Many pastors will preach this morning about the theophany, the encounter with God, the voice coming from the cloud. Some will want to wrestle with the pericope or story that follows, the healing of the epileptic boy and the words of Jesus condemning his “perverse generation.” And let me tell you, that is tempting given the perversion that passes as fundamentalist Christianity today. But instead, I want to talk about connections.
The authors of the gospels, turning oral tradition into written accounts, understood Jesus as being in continuity with Moses and Elijah. To be sure, surpassing Moses and Elijah, but that is another sermon altogether, on what theologians call Christology.
Story builds on story, for humans are constantly in the act of making meaning of our world, or choosing to allow others to make meaning for us. And let me assure you that it is far better that you make your own meaning than that you let oligarchs or Madison Avenue do it for you.
We live our story, are everyday authors. How we connect our story to others stories can empower us, can lead us to our better selves, but it can also destroy us and others.
Now, there are three options when it comes to Moses and Elijah with Jesus on the mountain. Either (one) it really happened, and if you know me, you know I’m agnostic on these things, or (two) something in an actual experience and the oral re-telling of that experience made followers believe it happened, or (three) it was a crass fabrication.
We are never going to know unless we dig up a note from some ancient troll saying “LOLZ. I just convinced those dumb Jesus freaks that Moses was on the mountain.”
Notice that King David is not on the mountain. For all the effort to cast Jesus as an eternal king fulfilling the Davidic promise, it is two fugitives who appear with Jesus, Moses the Murderer who returns from exile to lead a rebellion in Egypt, and Elijah who has to flee after ordering the murder of the priests of Baal. These are men who trouble authority, not men who were authorities.
Also notice what I just did there. I flipped Moses and Elijah on their biblical heads. You’re supposed to hear that Moses murdering the Egyptian overseer was part of God’s plan, that Yahweh is a god who demands the slaughter of those who follow a competing religion. And on this last Sunday before Lent, we are already pointed toward Golgotha and the dominant interpretation of the crucifixion, that it is the will of a violent deity who holds a grudge from generation to generation.
I don’t believe in that god. That god is not good. But the story of the God who sides with the oppressed, the god who is immense love and creativity, the one I actually worship, is also there. Which story will you tell?
We know how disruptive it can be when we go back and explore stories, flip them on their head, look from another perspective, for story is connected to story is how we make meaning.
The rage at “The 1619 Project,” the New York Times re-telling of America’s story, was to be expected. I know this more than most, for not only was I raised with the white Supremacist version of United States history, I was raised in the South in a family with deep Confederate roots, so that I was also raised within the story of “the Lost Cause,” the myth of a war over state’s rights and noble generals who agonized over slavery but fought for liberty.
I had peeled away that myth long before Nikole Hannah-Jones led the Times team in marking the 400th anniversary of enslaved humans of African descent in the Americas. Not slaves, which are objects, but people who were enslaved.
But my journey was not done, for the stories we tell matter. That is why, for example, I have not only abandoned the Southern Expression, the War Between the States, but also rarely use the term Civil War anymore, preferring to name it for what it was, the Enslaver’s Rebellion of 1861.
Hannah Arendt, ethnically Jewish, secular and progressive, helped re-frame much of the story of Nazi Germany, forcing us to look honestly at what she deemed the “banality of evil,” the way every day people embraced totalitarianism and became authors of both the war and the Shoah, known to us as the Holocaust.
Historians have long understood the complicity of Christians, both Protestant and Roman Catholic, in the evil that took place, despite continuing attempts by the Holy See in Rome to obfuscate and the attempt of American totalitarians to claim the Rev. Dr. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a leader in the anti-Nazi Christian resistance, as theirs.
Which brings us back to story, for Christian antisemitism grew out of a story that claimed Yahweh rejected the Jews after the Jews rejected Yahweh, that pitted the first Jesus followers against the Jews, which is all as real as Haitians eating pets in Ohio, which is to say completely untrue.
The early Christians were Jews, part of the religious and cultural matrix of pre-rabbinic Judaism. And here we are, back in our story, on a mountain, and it is two Jews who are there with Jesus the Jew from Nazareth, all three humans who caused good trouble, who aggravated the powerful. God is not only with the oppressed. God is with the subversive.
And here is Peter, a good guy but so often a foil for Jesus in the gospels, and he wants to institutionalize the experience, build tents, but that is not God’s plan, for the moment passes, and there is a boy with epilepsy that needs healing.
This year we will celebrate the 150th anniversary of this structure, the 50th anniversary of our magnificent organ, and that is part of our story, Holy Mystery expressed in music, the intentional creation of community space that would serve beyond the congregation. But so too is the criminal resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act, the audacity of a woman in the pulpit in the early 20th century, the decision to not just accept members of the LGBTQIA+ community, but to extend an extravagant welcome to that community, so often victimized by Christianity.
Check your stories. Are they stories of justice, kindness, and humility? Or of scapegoating, cruelty, and hubris?
May we live in good stories today, and better stories tomorrow. Amen.
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer
Let us pray.
Blessed Jesus,
tradition tell us you were a carpenter like Joseph,
and while we do not know
we appreciate that you surrounded yourself
with working folk,
the poor,
and even the privileged,
forming diverse community.
We pray this morning for federal workers
and service members
losing jobs where they served our nation
and beyond our borders,
tending to our national parks,
inspecting food,
delivering vaccines in Sub-Saharan Africa.
We recognize the arbitrary firings and closures
for what they are
deadly terrorism
and state capture,
and understand that real lives are being destroyed,
that some will die of hunger,
some of disease,
and some of despair.
You saw despair
and preached possibility,
so we pray as you taught us, saying:
Our Father who art in heaven…