"You Can Take It With You"
February 18, 2007: Last Sunday After Epiphany, Mardi Gras Sunday, Year C
The Rev. John MacIver Gage, senior minister
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.unitedchurchonthegreen.org

Scripture:
Luke 9:28-36
Now about eight days after [that, after Jesus had foretold his death and resurrection and had invited his disciples to take up their own crosses and follow him], Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly they saw two persons, Moses and Elijah, talking to Jesus They appeared in glory and were speaking of Jesus' departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw Jesus' glory and the two who stood with him. Just as they were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, "Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah," not knowing what he said. While he was saying this, a cloud came and overshadowed them; and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, "This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!" When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.

Sermon:
So after a long, hard day of disabusing the disciples of their preconceived notions of God, the messiah, and the kingdom...again... Jesus retreats to the hills above Galilee to spend the afternoon in prayerful reflection. He selects a handful of the faithful, Peter, James, and John, to go with him, but true to form, the Three Stooges can't seem to keep up with Jesus, even when he's standing still. While he's off a little ways away pouring out his soul to God, it's a trial for them even to stay awake.

First, there's the usual idle chit-chat around the circle—you know, catching up on the latest gossip from home, who's marrying who, who's having a baby—but after a little while that begins to peter out, pardon the pun. An awkward, angular silence grows up in the spaces in between. Then, out of nowhere comes a round of Samaritan jokes—"Hey, how many Samaritans does it take to change a chariot wheel...?"—and the laughter and the rhythm of it carries them along for a while, but it doesn't last. Soon they're sunk in silence once more, this one smoother, deeper. They sit in the shade of a stray olive tree and let the chittering of the cicadas wash over them in waves. Their eyelids droop and flutter and begin to fall. Just before he nods off altogether, Peter manages to lift his sleepy head once more to look for Jesus. Where was he again? Up the slope, past that tree, kneeling there in the grass...?

What Peter sees brings him awake instantly, at all once, eyes wide and every nerve jangling like bells on a line. There's Jesus, the same Jesus, only not the same. His clothes, once rough and rude, are bright white, dazzling, not clean but pure. And his face...! Shining now, like burnished gold, and more than that, changed somehow, altered from within... or, rather, not altered but freed. Something has been let loose within him, something that was there all the time, just under the surface, invisible to the naked eye. And on either side of him, two figures. In a flash, Peter knows. This is Moses, and that is Elijah, the heart of the faith, the Law and the Prophets, with Jesus-who-is-more-than-Jesus between them, conversing easily like three old friends in the market.

Without even realizing he says the words aloud, Peter announces, "This... this is glory." James and John, awake now beside him with mouths agape, simply nod, dumbstruck. This is glory, there's no doubt. This is real, somehow more real than the trees or the grass or the mountain on which they stand. This is the rich heart of things, beating and alive and beautiful and scary, revealed here on this mountaintop as, for just a moment, the universe pulls aside the curtain to give them a glimpse. And this... this is Jesus, plugged in and switched on, and our boys just bask in the reflected glow. Time stands still.

Until it doesn't, until finally, fifteen minutes of an eternity later, Jesus' other companions rise and bid him goodbye and make ready to leave, to go wherever glory goes. And Peter's heart breaks at the thought of losing them, losing all this. No! You can't go! You can't leave us here! The spell is broken. Grief drives him to his feet and forward, dragging James and John with him. "Master—Masters—wait! Don't go! It's good we're here with you. We can help. We'll build three booths, three tents, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah, and that way you'll never have to leave. We can live here, just the six of us, on this hillside, forever, and... and..."

And while the words are still on his lips, a cloud passes over the sun and the curtain falls. When the cloud passes, Elijah and Moses are gone without a trace. Not even the grass is bent to show they'd ever been there at all. Instead Jesus, just Jesus, is standing there, blinking, as the last rays of afternoon sun drain away from his perfectly normal face—the same face they've seen day in and day out for the past several months, the same sweaty, dusty face. Only an echo of what was remains rolling around inside Peter's head, "This is My Son, My Only-Begotten, My Chosen One; listen to him!" until even that is gone, too soon swallowed up once more in the cicada's ceaseless drone. Peter and James and John follow Jesus back down the mountain in silence.

Anyone who's ever had a "mountaintop experience" can sympathize with Peter in his desire to hold on to his. It doesn't even have to be as grand as all that. Perhaps you can remember a place—the Grand Canyon, the rolling ocean, the silent woods—someplace that took your breath away yet also filled you up to overflowing, all at the same time. Or perhaps it wasn't a natural environment but something else. Maybe it was a movie or a play or an evening shared with friends around the dinner table, maybe it was the birth of your child or making love to your beloved that whisked you away to that mountaintop where you could see, finally really see reflected in that place, those relationships, that face, the same and yet not the same, the glory of God: the deep truth, the real life, the glory of the living God, shining from within.

And then the moment passes. Like Peter, we may try to hold on to it, we may try to grab it with both hands and will it to stay, but still it slips away. The curtain falls, the color drains away. The sense of connection falters and then breaks down altogether. The music fades, leaving us with pale echoes only, and even those are soon lost to us altogether amid the incoming rush of the workaday world with its thousand daily indignities. With heavy hearts we head back down the mountain again, back down toward the valley of the shadow, if not of death, than at least of life-less, where we spend most our lives. And like Peter, we grieve as we go. We mourn the loss of that moment in the sun. We mourn the glory of the life that was and was ours, if only for a moment.

Now, imagine: what if, instead of losing just a moment, you lost your whole life, the whole constellation of moments that make up your life? What if everything you ever knew or loved or trusted, what if that entire archipelago of grace through which you came to glimpse the glory of God was washed away forever, and you were left there amidst the wreckage and the mud, utterly alone? What if you were swept away, miles away, only to wash up, sputtering and spitting, on some distant, alien shore, no clothes, no house, no friends, no help, no help? Imagine the life-less lives of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children displaced from their homes along the Gulf Coast by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Imagine the City of New Orleans, once a raucous, wonderful messy mountaintop Mardi Gras experience all its own, down there in its bowl below sea-level—imagine it turned upside-down and every bit of life poured out completely. Imagine Central Congregational Church of New Orleans, a historic congregation like our own, with the same sort of simply glorious legacy of mini-mountaintops, of births and baptisms, weddings and funerals—imagine all that, all those glory days, gone.

What then are we to say about these things? What can we say, in the face of so much overwhelming loss of life and loss of liveliness? What can we do for our sisters and brothers there but weep with them, and when even tears fail us, sit with them in silence and surround their grief, their pain with our prayers. And when they ask for it, and not before, we can offer them our help. We can continue to share generously out of our abundance: our abundance of money, as we've done in the past, as we're doing again this morning; of the physical materials needed; and of our support and influence as policy is developed to shape the future. We can continue to work with them to rebuild, or to build anew, or even to move on to new and different lives. That's simple. That much is clear.

But what of the inner lives destroyed or altered beyond all recognition? What of hope? In the wake of such personal and public devastation, of such total loss, is a life lived in the shadows, out of the sun, the best anyone can hope for? Are there more mountaintops in store, or is it all downhill from here? Like Peter and James and John coming down from their high in this morning's scripture, should we all just keep our heads down and trudge on in Stoic silence? But what of glory, of the life that really is life? Is it gone forever, never to return?

Our answer is the same answer the disciples received, the same answer the psalmist found so many centuries ago: Yea, even though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we need not fear anything, for our glory goes with us. For our glory is from God, and in Jesus we come to know just how much our God is with us. Not only on the mountaintop where all is sweetness and light, but down in the valley, too, where the going gets a whole lot rougher, and even, at the end, up on the cross. In Jesus, we learn that what happens on the mountaintop does not stay on the mountaintop. The setting may not be the same, it may look different in different light—a whole lot different, in fact—but that face, the face of God turned toward the world in love—that face remains the same. Through it all, through all the mud and the blood and the broken hearts, the glory of God shines through. The light of love breaks forth. The grace of God sings, and so we may sing, too.

Now, this isn't something I made up just for this morning's sermon. It's a lesson countless generations of faithful persons before us have learned the hard way, in the trials and errors of history. Think of the exiles of Israel, cut off from homes and kindred, dispirited, deported to the land of their captors, sitting by the canal waters of Babylon and wondering aloud:

By the rivers of Babylon— there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there we hung up our harps.
For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, "Sing us one of the songs of Zion!"
How could we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land? (Psalm 137:1-4)

But even in that moment, of all moments, so far in time and space and experience from the mountain of God's delight, holy Zion of Jerusalem, they sang it. In the midst of the struggle and the pain, they found they power to sing.

Think of the millions of Africans, ripped from their homes and forced to endure the unendurable in the deadly Middle Passage across the Atlantic and new life-less lives as chattel slaves in this country. Think of them, separated from all they once held dear by thousands of empty ocean miles, trapped in a world they never made, unable to understand or be understood. But there, even there, since they could not come to the mountaintop, the mountaintop came to them. They received a new hope and a new glory that, against all odds—certainly against the will of their masters!—strengthened them for the struggle toward freedom.

Walk together children
Don' you get weary
Walk together children
Don't you get weary
Oh, walk together children
Don't you get weary
There's a great camp meeting in the promised land.

Their God, their glory, was with them, and so they sang. They sang.

And so it has happened over and over again down through history, whenever people of faith have come down from the mountaintops to face the injustice and oppression of the workaday world, they have met the challenge by asserting their life, their glory in song. Can you imagine the Protestant Reformation without "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God"? Think of the songs of the civil rights movement—"We Shall Overcome" and "Oh, Freedom" and "I Shall Not Be Moved." Or the songs of protest during the Vietnam War. Or the songs of Soweto under apartheid in South Africa, the sound of freedom, of life, of glory. Or even the theme songs of gay liberation. What could be more glorious, more full of life, than a club full of people who have been systematically cut off from their families, their homes, their human dignity and respect, singing, at the top of their lungs, sure that because We Are Family, I Will Survive?

And the song goes on, even now for New Orleans. One of the glories of NOLA has always been her music, and that music has traveled with her scattered children all over this country. They have brought the sounds of their mountaintop with them to their new homes in Texas and Arkansas and Missouri and California and Maine, of call places. And in a testament to the power of life to overcome and to assert itself in the face of a death, the music continues to bubble up from the Mississippi mud there along the levies. Musicians like the great Allen Toussaint, continue to lift their voices on behalf of their brothers and sisters and their city and their hope. Toussaint has retooled his 1970 classic, "Yes We Can Can," for just this purpose, and it seems more appropriate, more glorious and more hopeful, than ever:

This Mardi Gras Sunday morning, sure, we're going to eat some pancakes and raise some money to send down to Central Congregational Church. But we're also here to focus our attention on their song and look for their glory, not just in a fond memory of the once-graceful streets of the French Quarter, but down in the shadowed alleys across the nation where refugees from New Orleans still struggle today not just to live, but to live abundantly, to live the life that is life. There is glory there, for God is there, struggling alongside them. We are called to hallow their pain and support their hope, to add our voices to theirs. For their song is our song, their glory our glory. In their faces, so different and yet so similar to our own, we see the glory of our God, the glory who became flesh and lived among us, glory as of the only-begotten of God, full of grace and truth, from whose fullness we have all received, grace upon grace (John 1:14, 16 paraphrase).

Friends, thanks to the glory of the constant, faithful presence of God-with-us, we need not mourn as those who have no hope, for that glory goes with us everywhere—down from the mountains, out into the world, up to the cross, even down to death, and beyond. So brothers and sisters, Laissez les bons temps rouler once more! Let the good times roll! In thanksgiving to the glory of God which goes with us, let us sing:

A---men.
A---men.
A--men, A-men, A-men.