Finding Heart
Exodus 34:29-35; Luke 9:28-36

February 22, 2004

You probably never thought about this before, but allow me to let you in on an occupational hazard. When you are the only minister or priest in an extended family, and your family gathers for one of those reunions, guess who is always asked to say the prayer no one else wants to give? Moreover, guess who gets to listen to someone else’s religious experience - whether you want to or not?

The last time I was back for one of those family gatherings was my nephew’s wedding. It was one of those wonderfully hot summer evenings at a great reception hall looking out onto the downtown skyline across the harbour. Here she came, my older cousin Julia - someone who I always thought tried too hard - and she had a story she knew I wanted to hear. Julia had for the last decade or so come down with a bad case of religion, and I think she thought she could infect me.

Julia had developed cancer and she went through some unpleasant therapies, but it apparently wasn’t having any affect. A new round was being prescribed, but she didn’t really want to go through with it. She prayed a lot for a miracle, and then one day she heard a still small voice, “Julia, get an xray.” Maybe it was an MRI, but something like that, and after looking around her house for someone talking to her, she did go to the doctor and got an xray. It showed her completely clear of cancer. As far as I know, Julia is still around.

Her face beamed and I knew I was supposed to say something religious in response. “That’s wonderful!” is all I could think of. That is, all I could think of saying out loud, for in my mind I was saying, “OK, now what?”

Do not get me wrong: I am not denying or putting down her experience or her healing. I have seen stranger things happen and, let me be clear, I have no better explanation than anyone else. The problem was that Julia didn’t seem to believe she had to do anything else. She had this experience and no one was going to take it away from her. And she was going to share it with everyone with a vengeance and enjoy it. Maybe she thought she deserved a medal, that this was the peak experience of her life.

One should not underestimate the difficulty of being a disciple of Jesus, especially one of the original disciples. Jesus was wandering all over the region and Holy Land, getting up and going hither and yon seemingly on a whim. Did you ever see a map of Jesus’ wanderings in the Gospel of Mark? Criss-crossing and double crossing all over the place with no pattern or sense to his routes. He was never really going anywhere except on the way to someplace else.

One of the places he did like to go was up mountains to escape the pressures of the crowds. Trudging up another mountain must have tired out Jesus’ disciples or gotten them into really good shape. Again it was up the mountain, but with no warning this time it was way different.

Only three were allowed to make the trip - Peter, James, and John. They were praying and Jesus really changed, light glaring off his face, probably in the same way Moses had come down from Mount Sinai with a face so bright he had to put a mask on to protect everyone else from the divine glare. That wasn’t all, for now the three men saw Jesus conversing with Moses himself and Elijah to boot. Talk about a mountain top, peak experience. In the end, no wonder they didn’t want to tell anybody else about it - everyone would think they were crazy.

The thought running through any sane person’s head when you are on the mountain top with a couple of legends consulting with your teacher about what he is about to do is: how do I make this last? Peter had a great idea: let me set up some tents and we’ll all just live up here, forever if you like. With a booming voice, God broke up that thought, and told them all that Jesus was worth listening to. Then it stopped. Things went back to normal and they all walked down the mountain to the ordinary world to resume their humdrum pursuit of truth, justice, and the godly way.

The experience of the presence of God is a marvelous thing and I would love to have more of it. I haven’t had a lot of it, to be frank, and to be even franker, I’m suspicious of most people who say they have had a lot of encounters with God. Human beings innately find it really hard to sustain an encounter with God for more than a moment. Some try to make up for it by holding on to God and squeezing the divinity out of the divine. What’s left is barely human. Mostly I have to trudge along without peak experiences in my back pocket, with no spiritual performance enhancers to ease the way. It’s not that the knowledge and love of God does not inform my direction and encourage me to continue faithfully. But I can’t stay in a tent on the mountain top forever.

One part of the United Church forerunners was the Puritans or Congregationalists of colonial America. The definition of being a Puritan is always having that suspicious feeling that somewhere, someone is having fun. Basically, the Puritans were evangelicals by today’s standards. In the 1630-1660’s they would admit to membership in their churches only those who could have their born again experiences certified as authentic by the minister. So what? If you were not a member of the church, you could not take communion, and you could not own property or vote.

That all seemed to work well for the first generation of pioneers, but then the children of the second generation starting having children who needed to be baptized and that created a theological problem. Many of the second generation had not been born again, yet were still nice people and upstanding citizens. They were often deeply spiritual, but they had not been to the mountain top. In order to baptize their children the church in New England developed the “halfway covenant” that allowed these children to be baptized as long as their grandparents were born again members and their parents were without moral reproach.

Solomon Stoddard, the pastor of the First Church of Christ in Northampton, Massachusetts, a position he held for 60 years, found this quietly unacceptable. Communion was treated as the banquet on the mountain top for the spiritually elite. Sometime in the late 1670’s he brought the dinner down from the mountain. He admitted anyone known to be without reproach to the Lord’s Table because he understood the meal to be a “saving ordinance.” You didn’t have to be saved to accept the bread and wine; eating in fact changed you and moved you further along the way towards fulfillment and salvation, slouching towards Bethlehem.

Today is the end of Epiphany, the real end of the peak experience of Christmas. Lent begins on Wednesday and it’s 40 days in the wilderness for us. We gather around the Table not as a high point of our spiritual life - you can’t eat forever - but as a stop along the pilgrim’s way to gather bread for the journey. God appears along the road, not to tease or taunt us, but to encourage and strengthen us to keep walking on the level places. Reports of God sightings do enable us to live more fully as human beings.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan