I have an announcement to make this morning: I am climbing Mount Everest. Well not really; you see we have a Mount Everest Fitness Club at the hospital and it involves stair climbing. You have to climb enough stairs to equal the height of Mount Everest, which is roughly 29,000 feet or almost six miles up. Now six miles doesn’t sound very far, but it is when it is straight up. Now the rules say that you can’t count more than 10 flights of stairs per day (thank goodness), so you can only make 150 feet per day. I will have to climb ten sets of stairs for 240 days to reach the metaphorical top of Everest. So far, I have climbed about the height of Petit Jean– but hey, I will make it. I may plant a flag on the tenth floor of Baptist when I reach this pinnacle. Some days I have climbed 20 – 30 stairs, but I can only count ten. Of course, other days are elevator days. I climbed to the ninth floor the other day to deliver a Bible, and the family wanted prayer when I got there. I almost had to borrow the patient’s nasal cannula to get a whiff of oxygen before I could speak! Not good! But maybe the lack of oxygen does simulate Everest!

It is a fun way of encouraging people to get a little exercise during their work day. Baptist has 7,600 employees, so you would think the stairwell would be crowded as Best Buy the day after thanksgiving. But so far only a few people are doing the program. Actually, there are only five! I guess it is true that only a few ever reach the summit alive. I just hope I do.

I seriously do have a mountain climbing goal that I have told no one about; you hear it first here today. But first let me tell you how I arrived at this goal. You may or may not know that I was once an avid runner and ran as many as 30 miles per week. I was an exercise nut. When I was 40 years old I could still bench press over 180 pounds. So it was quite a surprise while on vacation at the Grand Canyon in 1995 that I woke up with pain in two finger joints. I thought that I had injured them exercising as I was so active, but that would not be the case. Two weeks later, the corresponding joints on the other hand started hurting and I knew something else was wrong. I went down to our physical therapy department to see a therapist friend and she told me to see my doctor ASAP, as something was up. To make a long story short, I was diagnosed with inflammatory Arthritis, possibly Seronegative Rheumatoid Arthritis or Psoriatic Arthritis. Within three months I could hardly walk the long walk from the Baptist parking lot to my office. I could not turn the rounded door knob to my office suite without inserting the key to gain more leverage with a better grip. I am in the business of hand holding, and it was painful. While my muscles were strong, my tendons and joints were very weak and painful. But that was then, and this is now. So fast forward to today.

I am pain free and have been mostly for several years. I am starting to jog again and am working out vigorously, and as you know have lost 50 pounds in the last year. I feel at least 10 years younger, if not more. It could be more, but I really don’t remember what it felt like more than 10 years ago!

So I have a plan. I intend to run a 5K later this year, “The Jingle Bell Run” for the Arthritis Foundation which ironically is the last 5K I ever ran in 1995 when I was summarily smitten with the aforementioned disease. But here is my second goal: I am going to climb a mountain. Now, I am not going to do any technical climbing I am not that stupid, but I am stupid enough to have a challenging climb. I have identified my mountain, and I am currently researching it and am going to train toward that goal. The stair climbing will be part of the training plan. I will have to be able to climb 100 flights of stairs and run five miles before I am close to ready. I intend to find a buddy or buddies who want to climb with me (any volunteers?), so I won’t be alone on the mountain.

My mountain is Long’s Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park. Now the North Face of Long’s Peak has only been conquered by the world’s great technical climbers– it is 3,000 feet of sheer vertical granite. But the back side of the Mountain is a different story, requiring no technical equipment or special skills. Yet it is an imposing challenge. Fifty people have died on the mountain, not all of whom were on the North Face. You must leave base camp at two or three in the morning on the Keyhole Trail. The Summit is 14,259 feet and the trek traverses subalpine and alpine climates. There are thunderstorms, rock slides, and steep grades over the eight-mile, one-way trail. It has an elevation gain of 5,000 feet. You have to cross a boulder field, and there is a stretch that is only three or four feet wide at a very imposing grade with sheer drop offs. One has to acclimate to thin air and the altitude and deal with an intense sun. Dehydration, sunburn, altitude sickness, taking care of you feet, and in my case also my blood sugar will be more than sidebars on this arduous journey. I am not sure if I will be ready by next summer (there is only a two month window for the climb) but I am going to do it, you can write it down.

The mountains have long been an allure for us as human beings. These majestic place markers captivate our attention, move us emotionally and have a profoundly spiritual effect on us. You cannot go to the mountains and not be jaw-droppingly inspired. It just doesn’t happen. It was seeing Long’s Peak some years ago every morning outside my cabin that has inspired me, I knew then that I wanted to climb that mountain someday.

That is why I find out Lectionary text today so fascinating. It is a mountain scene, and it is a whopper. Today is Transfiguration Sunday, and today’s scripture as the old cliché says, is the quintessential mountaintop experience. Jesus goes up the high mountain, taking the three disciples Peter, James and John with him. I can imagine them moaning about the climb wondering what the heck it was all about. And then it happened– he was suddenly changed from the inside out right in front of their very eyes; he shone brightly and out of nowhere Moses and Elijah were there as well. Where the heck did they come from, and how did anyone recognize them? I mean they didn’t have Facebook in those days, their portraits weren’t on the dollar bill and their images weren’t hanging in the local temple. Then a voice probably like James Earl Jones’ breaks the stunned silence with “this is my son whom I love, and in case you haven’t noticed, I am also pretty darn proud of him.”

Can you envision the scene? Man, for those disciples it just doesn’t get any better than this in the realm of preponderating numinous experiences – a spiritual high. So the disciples naturally wanted to bottle it and save it for later, and asked to build a place of worship for these three super heroes. They could not believe their eyes and ears. What a blessing! What a trip! What a mountain!

But in the next frame we find that it wasn’t long until the disciples were scared to death at the whole deal and were paralyzed in a prostrate mode (not to be confused with a prostate mode which is a different kind of paralysis). So Jesus pulls them up and says, lets get down from here, and we are not going to build a worship place here and you are going to keep a lid on this whole deal – got it?

This is an unusual passage of scripture in many respects, even by metaphorical standards, and it is hard to understand. It really doesn’t seem to fit in the context and it is uncharacteristically otherworldly for the ministry of the peasant from Galilee. But it is a passage that people love, so much so we have a Sunday for it every year in the Lectionary, Transfiguration Sunday– the last Sunday of the Epiphany.

And what is not to like here? It is a mountaintop experience. Here we get a clear picture of Almighty God. And we understand clearly his relationship to Jesus, the Son. So as human as the gospels are in places, this is the ultimate nonhuman passage in Matthew, save the resurrection. Now the miracles are pretty impressive, not everybody walks on water or feeds a mob with a few fish and loaves. Ditto for healing the lepers, the lame and the blind. But even on those occasions, Jesus is still a knowable imminent human being. He is Joe the carpenter’s son from down the street in Nazareth. But here something breaks through, something Wholly Other: A bigger than life, majestic, transcendent God.

I also think something else happens here, something for all us would be modern disciples as well: We all finally get the God that we want. A big, powerful, all knowing, all powerful, everywhere present God that runs the show and is in charge. A God of providence, and God of justice, a God who creates ex nihilo. A God that is Old Testament, a God that is way beyond us mortals. The first cause, the prime mover, the beginning and the end. This God is the God that we want. One who can smite his enemies with his word. One who will make every knee bow and every tongue confess, one who will vindicate us in the end and give our enemies their comeuppance.

This God is also the God we like to follow. Now before you think I am a heretic (there will be time for that later) I believe that following this God leads us to some wrong conclusions. You see, this image of God is very impersonal, and not very approachable. This image does not affect change in our lives. Yet, we chase after this God. It is the one we want. This God gives us power and credibility; this God gives us ammunition for our Holy Ghost machine guns.

The mountaintop God is so powerful that he paralyzes us. We want to stay with this God, but we cannot. We want to pay homage to this God, but that is not what this God desires. You see, we are really no better than the disciples at this point. We are tempted by our own illusions and expectations into worshiping a God who is this big, but I contend to you this morning that this is the wrong approach. Spiritual highs are called “highs” for a reason – they don’t last, you have to keep feeding the habit as they are difficult to duplicate when we are face down on the ground. It is a visage that paralyzes us into inactivity.

I think that is why Jesus said no to the booths and got the disciples off the mountain in a hurry, because his coming and his ministry was about something else all together. Worshiping a transcendent God leaves us emotionally uninvolved in the very things that God cares for – us and people like us. Real people and real lives.

Theologian Marcus Borg points out the dangers of a transcendent God, and his views are described thusly by The Christian Century:

The God of Borg’s childhood was the God of “supernatural theism,” a belief that emphasized God’s transcendence, justice and power but left the impression that God was distant, demanding and arbitrary. Borg lists four “severe” consequences of such an image of God: believing in God was difficult, the problem of evil was acute, Christian life and faith defined as belief in a distant God was problematic, and prayer made little sense. Borg believes this was an inadequate and incomplete image of God. One experiences God as “loving spirit” rather than knowing God as monarchical judge, and appreciates the richness and diversity of the traditional metaphors for God, both female and male, anthropomorphic and nonanthropomorphic. Faith, in Borg’s preferred model, is about a living relationship rather than correct doctrine. He persuasively argues that God is not concerned with our “getting it right” but with having a living relationship with us.0

Well, I would disagree with Borg on some points, but his thoughts here make sense for it is easy to see the mountaintop God as God, and to worship him fervently, reverently– but irrelevantly. We get so hung up on this image that we miss the message of the man from Nazareth, who really shows us what the love of God is all about, and in effect shows us what God is all about.

You see the God of the transfiguration is a transcendent God, and whatever that means it means God is nothing like us. This is a God whose blinding light sharply pierces the darkest dark. The is a God whose face we cannot see, or we shall surely die. This is a God who drops hot coals on our tongues because we are unworthy. A God that only certain priest at certain times can petition for mercy on behalf of the populace. This is a God who can split the Red Sea or wipe out creation with a flood, just because he’s not happy with it. This is a God on the throne and in control, a jealous God and a God to be feared and reverenced. A God who always deals with his enemies with lighting-like judgment. I guess like it or not, this is a God who gives a prophet the power to call bears out of the woods to maul cub scouts for calling him baldy; who makes donkeys talk, and even if he likes you he might prepare a great fish to swallow you if you don’t toe-the-line. He rains on the just and unjust alike, and even his favorite people have suffered like few other peoples in history have suffered. Some even say he commands them to stone disobedient children, kill the women, children, and the cattle of their enemies. And to top it all off, maybe the worse thing yet, he won’t let you eat catfish, shrimp or Bar-B-Q! But powerful this God is, transcendent this God is, and we are unable to comprehend much about this creator God in our finitude. Yet we are still driven to scale the mountain, even when it is foolishly dangerous.

There are of course, many times when this view of God doesn’t satisfy our cravings. This is the God where I am not sure if my prayers get past the ceiling. This is the God who put the problem in the philosophical problem of evil. This is the God who always has a purpose, but who can know the mind of God, especially during a tragedy, or simply from trying to gain perspective from the wear and tear of life. This is the God that we ask hollow, haunting questions to such as why? Or why me? This is the God that seems so far away when what we really need is a shoulder to cry on. This is a God that I cannot understand, the one that gives us as much angst as he does comfort.

So it amazes me that this is the God we want. But on another level, I understand all too well why we want this God. We can keep our distance from this God, and as long as we submit to his standards, we are OK. This God does not require us to get involved with our brothers and sisters or any other created thing. This God gives us rules to follow, and this God takes care of the rest as long as we pay homage to him on Sunday morning.

And the truth is that we are always reinventing, re-engineering this God. We create God in our image. Instead of allowing ourselves to be the creature we become on some level the creator. It has been said that humanity cannot create a blade of living grass, but can create gods by the hundreds. And if this God does not exist, then it is necessary for us to create him. And we feel very proud of our handiwork. So much so, that we would violently defend it as we would anything that is ours, anything that we own. So we create God to suit our purposes, to justify our beliefs and to validate our prejudices and to expand our sense of security and to bolster our comfort zone.

But Jesus destroys the three disciple’s image of what is important here, and I think that is why this passage appears in the gospel. As they lay prostrate and paralyzed, he lifts them up and tells them that they have to get off the mountain, for that is really where God lives. They were looking in the wrong place, God was somewhere else. They would soon see it as true in the life and work of Christ. And because of it, even though they themselves would never be transfigured, they would be something more – they would be transformed.

Because Christ gets in our lives, he invades our space, he requires us to leave our comfort zone, and he wants us to get messy, and we would rather not. Jesus didn’t stay on the mountain, so why are we always trying to scale it? In the valley below, the disciples literally rewrote history with the message of love.

This personal Jesus loves us immanently. He taught us to love God with all our hearts, all our souls and all our minds and to love our neighbors as ourselves. He taught us true humility and to go the second mile. He taught us that we ought treat others as we would have them treat us. He taught us to care for the poor and oppressed, and to even love our enemies because after all, anyone can love a friend. He taught us to put the needs of people before rules and to love sacrificially.

And all of the blind eyes he opened, the deaf ears he restored, the lame he made walk, were nothing compared to the lives that he transformed. Because everyone that has been blinded by the image of the transcendent God has been given sight again by the Nazarene. When we look at him, we behold nothing less than the glory of God, full of grace and truth. This is the God that we must follow; this is the God that doesn’t require us to climb mountains, but to do something more difficult that any mountain: to walk in valleys and that is tough. But it is also life changing.

I am, as some of you know, an amateur astronomer. I own a telescope and several good books on the subject and have been gazing at the stars since I was a kid. I own a book by the most well known astronomer of our time, Carl Sagan, of PBS fame and whose catchy phrase “Billions and Billions” was spoofed by Johnny Carson where Sagan was once a regular guest. The book I own is not about astronomy however, it is about his reflections on a variety of issues including his impending death from terminal cancer. Sagan is very blunt when he says that he has scanned the heavens for years, and has never seen evidence of God anywhere out there. God is not good science, he preaches. But he did admit that there might be a first cause of the “Big Bang” and that first cause could be described as God, but not a god as we understand God. Sagan never saw the transcendent God no matter how hard he looked.

There was no deathbed conversion for Sagan. I wish there had been, for it would be a great preacher story. But what he did say in the end that the Riverside Church in New York’s constant prayers for him made a difference in his life. “How can you not appreciate the thoughts and prayers of Christians around the globe,” he suggested. He wrote about the comfort their concern brought to him.

What made a difference to Carl Sagan was that people cared and loved in a very personal way. I believe that in the end, Sagan got his best glimpse of the heavens and maybe God not through a telescope, but right here on earth.

And I believe that we do too when we are willing to stop building booths, when we are willing to start coming down the mountain, and to really follow the one called the Christ. The one in whom the transcendent God is well pleased. To do so does not lead to a transfiguration for us but leads to a transformation of our hearts and lives. And when we come off the mountain, we find that we get involved and we get messy. We find that is really where God lives anyway. This is the message that God so loved the world, and as they say the proof is in the pudding. We find something that gives life meaning one person at a time; we find a distant God is really never far away at all, he in fact lives with us. And when we learn to see God right on our street and right in our house we find something else– that we are reborn. And that my friends, is the Good News of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Thanks be to God! Amen.