Last Sunday after the Epiphany: February 11, 2024
The Rev. Nat Johnson
2 Kings 2:1-12
2 Corinthians 4:3-6
Mark 9:2-9
Psalm 50:1-6
The stories we have about Elijah are some of the most exciting in the prophetic tradition of our faith. He appears abruptly on the scene during the fourth dynasty of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Elijah was a “troubler of kings,” a miracle-worker and healer, a zealous prophet sent to speak truth to power and name the severity of God’s judgment to kings who did evil in the sight of God and led the people into idolatry. He challenged the prophets of Baal to a divine duel and when their god failed to respond to their prayers and sacrifice, Elijah built his own altar and drenched it in water before calling on God to send fire upon the sacrifice. Not only did God oblige, but the fire consumed the offering, the wood, the stone and dust, and the water pooled in the trench around the altar. In a zealous fit, he ordered the prophets of the false god to be killed, provoking the wrath of the king and his wife forcing him to flee.
Twice, while he was hiding in the wilderness, Elijah was miraculously fed, once by ravens and once by an angel. During a time of drought and famine, he caused a small measure of meal and oil to keep from running out, sustaining himself and a widow’s household for three years until God sent rain. Later, he again called fire from heaven to destroy two different contingents of soldiers sent to bring him to the king. And, in his final moments, he was escorted to heaven by chariots and horses of fire. Elijah’s story is pyrotechnically spectacular; a demonstration of God’s power and might and glory. With each prophecy, with each miracle, with each healing, he bears witness to a power he shares but does not own and he proclaims the superiority of his God over the false gods of his kings.
But Elijah’s story is also a story about thresholds and transitions. It is also a demonstration of the continuity of the prophetic tradition, and the community among whom it exists, when there is a change in guard. As his ministry comes to an end, Eljah’s protégé, Elisha, bears witness to his miraculous departure. Interestingly, he doesn’t immediately pick up his mentor’s mantle. Instead, he mourns the loss of his elder. We don’t know how long he sat in mourning, looking in vain after the fiery whirlwind. Eventually, he picked up Elijah’s mantle, turned and headed back the way they had come. While the passage assigned for today’s lessons does not give us the rest of the story, Elisha goes on to demonstrate that he had indeed received the “double portion” of Elijah’s spirit. In fact, he would go on to do greater things than his predecessor, doubling the number of miracles performed in Elijah’s ministry. Elijah’s and Elisha’s stories are meant to assure us that God’s presence and power do not depart from us even when our beloved elders and mentors are no longer with us.
Our gospel reading tells us another story of crossing thresholds and transition. The story of Jesus’ transfiguration is told by Matthew, Mark, and Luke and each writer places it in the context of Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God. In each of the gospels, this larger unit functions as a pivotal moment in the writers’ narratives, the moment in Jesus’ ministry and journey in which he set his face toward Jerusalem. Peter’s confession prompted Jesus to begin teaching his disciples about the nature of his identity and the inevitable consequences of his mission and ministry. Ultimately, this would lead to his death. This revelation was a blow to the disciples’ understanding and expectations of God’s Anointed; it didn’t align with their hopes for freedom and vindication. And, as if that wasn’t enough, Jesus didn’t stop there. He went on to explain that any who would follow him must follow the same path he takes. To be a disciple is to take up one’s own cross, to learn how to lose one’s life for the sake of finding true life.
With this in the background, the gospel writers tell us that Jesus took Peter, James, and John up the mountain and there he was transfigured before them. There, in the face of the uncertainties and anxieties created by Jesus’ announcement of his looming death, the glory of God was revealed, and the disciples’ vision transformed. Though each tell it with a different slant, the gospel writers all mean to contextualize this story in who Jesus is and the implications of his identity for his life and the lives of his disciples. Jesus is affirmed the beloved of God, chosen for a particular purpose, a purpose that will ultimately lead to the cross. But the cross is not the end of Jesus’ journey. The glory revealed in the transfiguration points forward, to the glory of God revealed in Jesus’ resurrection. As we stand at this juncture in our liturgical season, we are bid to look ahead, to recall and bear in mind the mystery of Easter as we leave this Season after the Epiphany and enter into Lent.
But there’s another part to this storyline that each of the gospel writers include in their telling. Jesus, James, John, and Peter return to the valley and are confronted by a helpless father begging for his son to be healed. The pairing of the mountaintop transfiguration with the despair in the valley suggests each is significant for the interpretation of the other. One common way of interpreting these two stories is to suggest that the glory mysteriously revealed on the mountaintop is equally present in the valley below. Often in this line of interpretation, the mountaintop stands metaphorically for those moments in life when we seem to be lifted out of the “common,” the “ordinary,” and the “mundane,” where the presence of God is tangibly experienced. In contrast, the valley stands metaphorically for the everyday, for the lived experience of chaos and crises in which it often feels impossible to “see” God.
There is value to reading these two episodes in such a way. If nothing else, it is a reminder on this last Sunday after the Epiphany that God came to us, and continues to come to us, in Christ, in all the circumstances of our lives. God’s glory and presence cannot be confined to the transcendent, to be experienced only by those in the “inner circle,” nor can finding God’s presence and seeing God’s glory be understood as reward for conquering the mountain. Rather, God’s glory and presence are accessible even in those valley-moments of life when all sense of stability and certainty seem to have faded away and we’re left with only a desperate plea for freedom.
On the one hand, the pairing of these two stories in our gospels suggests that those mountaintop experiences are necessary for us to be able to truly discern where God’s presence and glory are being revealed in the valley. On the other hand, this pairing also challenges our incessant attempts to keep the sacred, sacred – separate from the ordinary and the common, to keep it stationed in its own compartment of our lived experience. Like Peter, we want to remain there, where the ground is holy, and the presence of God is tangible. On the mountaintop, we are not weighed down with trying to understand the chaos and suffering of the valley. On the mountaintop, we can escape the needs and despair of our lives and the lives of those around us.
But escapism was not what Jesus was after when he led the disciples up the mountain. For the disciples, the experience of divine glory and encounter with divine presence was meant to tune their ears to, and train their eyes on, the One who’s very being emanates the radiance of God. Peter cannot make sense of what he sees – but, he recognizes something in this moment that compels awe and wonder in the depths of his heart and being, something beyond the ordinary. And, just as quickly as this recognition comes, the disciples look to see Jesus standing alone, the cloud gone, and the voice silent. The glory of God they had just experienced seemed to be left up there on the mountain and the disciples failed to see the connection between that transcendent moment and the power of the gospel for an anguished and powerless father as they descended into the valley.
In all of this, I see a tension between understanding and awe, between a vision and our capacity to articulate its meaning. It is a tension present in all of our encounters with change and here, in this story, it seems to be presented as the crux of our life of discipleship. God is not stationed on the mountaintop for the select few to seek, experience, and hoard for themselves. But neither is God absent from there. Nor is God stationed in the mundane, as if the grandeur of God’s beauty and liberating love could be contained in the ordinary alone. No, God’s glory has no boundaries. There is no mountain top or valley that can obscure the view of God’s glory as it is revealed in Jesus Christ, in the God-made-flesh who dwelt among us.
And perhaps the challenge that this passage presents to us this morning is to embrace the complexity and paradox of our life of faith and our discipleship. To stand not in fear but in boldness, not in silent stupor but in joyful awe and wonder. In her debut book, This Here is Flesh, Cole Arthur Riley, creator of Black Liturgies, writes,
“I think awe,” or wonder, “is an exercise, both a doing and a being. It is a spiritual muscle of our humanity that we can only keep from atrophying if we exercise it habitually… Awe is not a lens through which to see the world but our sole path to seeing. Any other lens is not a lens but a veil. And I’ve come to believe that our beholding – seeing the veils of this world peeled back again and again, if only for a moment – is no small form of salvation” (31). [1]
The exercise of awe is not escapism, nor is it projecting a false sense of optimism onto the difficult situations of our lives. Riley goes on to suggest that the practice of awe and wonder is the practice of beholding the beautiful through “having the presence to pay attention to the common place. It could be said that to find beauty in the ordinary is a deeper exercise than climbing to the mountaintop” (32).
Today, we stand on the threshold of multiple transitions. Like Elisha, we stand as inheritors of those who have gone before us as we continue to navigate and process their absence. Like the Jesus and the disciples, we stand at the crossroad that will take us through the valley to another mountain where Jesus will be fixed to a cross and executed. In just a little bit, we’ll gather downstairs for our annual parish meeting to reflect on the year gone by and dream of the year ahead of us. The stories we heard this morning charge us to cultivate our practice of awe and wonder. In our faithfulness to this charge, we will discover, like those who have gone before us, that God is indeed working in us through the Spirit to transform us into the same image of God’s glory, shining unrestrained through the varieties of human existence.
May God so grant us the power of that vision! Amen.
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[1] Riley, Cole Arthur. This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories that Make Us. NY: Penguin Random House, 2022.