Mark 9:2-9

A week ago we had a retreat up at our camp – Camp Cazadero. It included those who have been leading our Koinonia groups and the members of our Pastoral Search Committee. It was a time to get together and reflect on what we've been hearing and what kind of planning we might be doing. At one point, our leader, Gary Bachelor, led us in an exercise that asked us to reflect on some of the strengths of our church – what keeps us here, what do we like about it, what keeps us coming back? There were a number of responses: the youth program, the friends we have here, the supportive community, our music program. Specific events were mentioned, such as Family Camp and our summer apple pie sale. Then someone said, "Worship. Worship is a strength of our church." A number of people quickly agreed.

Well, as a person who spends a lot of time thinking about worship and preparing for worship, it did my heart good to see worship go to the head of the class. I agree that so much of who and what we are as a community of faith begins with shared worship. We would not be a community without worship. But then that leads to the question of why? Why is worship so important, indeed why do you bother to get up early on Sunday, a day off, get dressed and come to worship, maybe when it's raining? It's always a small miracle to me to look out and actually see people here early on a Sunday morning. Why does it occupy so much of my thought and time?

I went to college in the turbulent sixties. I entered seminary at Pacific School of Religion in the fall of 1971. And things were still jumpin' in Berkeley then. I recall the night it was announced that the Untied States had sent troops into Cambodia. Angry demonstrations erupted in the streets of Berkeley. We had to cancel a junior high youth group meeting at First Congregational Church because tear gas was drifting down from Telegraph Avenue.

Talk about the best of times and the worst of times. On the one hand, there was war and chaos and violence. Cities burned, people took to the streets, hard hats clashed with college students, young men continued to die in a war which seemingly, nobody wanted.

On the other hand, it was the "Age of Aquarius", a time of youthful and idealistic exuberance; issues of racial and gender inequality were finally being addressed, so many people were concerned and involved, and of course, there was so much wonderful music. We aging baby boomers continue to insist to our children that we had the best music. We were so idealistic and so naive. "Time" magazine called us the "Now Generation." We thought that we could have justice, liberation, equality, and peace now. All we needed, we assumed, was to get the right person in the White House, a slightly more enlightened foreign policy, a larger portion of the budget for the war on poverty and all our work would be done.

And in the midst of this, "let's do everything now," ethos, who had time for worship, even in seminary? Even among people supposedly training for the ministry, worship was often seen as irrelevant, outdated, non-productive, in many ways a waste of time. How could dry sermons and old hymns and prayers possibly change a world? There was so much to do. Who had time to spend an hour on Sunday morning doing nothing?

One colleague writes: "As the sixties ended, fewer people came to the mass demonstrations and marches. They drifted off the streets and into the more private concerns of self-fulfillment, self-discovery, and self-enhancement. I do not think we gave up because we no longer cared. I think we gave up mostly because we no longer had the emotional or spiritual energy to act. We were just plain tired."

Why? He continues, "A friend of mine, a minister in an African-American church, foretold that it would not take long for the concern and activism of us white liberals to run out of steam. He remembered the early days of the civil rights movement in Mississippi. Busloads of high-minded, sensitive activists arrived to help in the struggle for freedom. They came to march, to risk imprisonment, and even death if necessary. But what was the first thing Martin Luther King and his cohorts did? They gathered everyone in some hot, crowded, little black Baptist church and for hours they sang and prayed and sang some more. Many of the white visitors wondered why. 'Why are we here in a church when we ought to be out on the street? What does this have to do with gaining freedom for black people?'

"'You see,' said the minister, 'We black folk had been at this thing a lot longer than you. We knew that two hundred years of evil wouldn't be eradicated in one march to Jackson. That preaching and those prayers and songs kept us going for all those years, and they would be the only thing that would keep us going. Without the power of God, without the vision of God, we wouldn't last long out in the battle."' They withdrew for worship that they might return with renewed perseverance and vision.

Precious Lord, take my hand,

Lead me on, help me stand. . .

And stand they did. They did not grow tired. They did not give up. They were in for the long haul. And their worship sustained them.

"Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them." W. H. Auden once said that it helps to be a poet if you want to be a Christian. I think he meant that, because the Christian faith often makes peculiar demands upon our conceptual abilities, it helps to be a person with a well-developed imagination to be able to receive the mystery and wonder of our faith. No where is that clearer than in our text today, the strange, almost unearthly story of the Transfiguration. What are we to make of this?

She had been away from the church for years. Then, she was back, attending worship several weeks in a row. Finally the pastor asked her, "What has brought you back, after such a long absence?"

"A feeling," she said. "A feeling of being drawn toward something, someone, a feeling of which I really wasn't aware until last Sunday."

"Last Sunday?"
 

"Yes. Last Sunday, toward the end of the service, we were all standing, as usual, and, as usual, the choir was singing, 'God Be in My Head,' and I got taken up."

"Taken up?" asked the pastor.

"Yes, like taken away. Like I lost consciousness, or maybe gained consciousness. It was as if I were alone, standing in the chapel. Just me, bathed in this soft, warm wonderful light. When I came to, the choir was finishing their singing, and I was genuinely surprised to see people standing there with me, in church. And I had to sit down to regain my composure. And I smiled because I knew. I believed."

I think of those disciples, trudging up that mountain with Jesus, no doubt wondering, "what's he going to get us into this time?" Maybe they thought they were getting away for a time of prayer and reflection; maybe they thought they were going up there just to get a better view of the world. People sometimes use mountains for that.

And you might say, that's exactly what happened, though not in the way they expected. There they are, walking alongside Jesus, who, from all appearances was a man like any man – certainly a gifted teacher.

Then, on the mountain, there is light, a cloud, a voice; he is transfigured before them. One author writes: "For one moment the tough crust of mundane reality was peeled back and they saw Jesus as the long-promised Christ, the one sent by God to save them." Like the woman in church, in that moment they were lifted up...they believed. And when they walked back down that mountain, I suspect they saw the world very differently.

I think of the story of the old farmer who traveled from the country for his first trip to the zoo. The first animal he encountered was a giraffe. For nearly an hour, he just stood and gazed upon this strange beast. He had never seen anything even remotely like it before. Finally he said, "Nope, I just don't believe it."

We are modern people in a modern age. This morning we encounter this strange story from two thousand years ago – a very pre-modern age. It can frustrate our attempts to explain it, comprehend it, grasp it. It's easier to say, "Nope, I just don't believe it."

And yet, maybe this story speaks to the poet within each of us. It invites us to see beyond – to see through – our infatuation with facts and data and empirical proof. It invites us into a reality that is thicker, much more multi-layered, than that which has been offered us by psychology, sociology, politics, or the market economy. It invites us to consider that there may be more going on in us and in our world than we moderns have been able to grasp. It invites us to peel back the tough crust of mundane reality.

Maybe the folks in the black church have always understood the transfiguration story better than we have. Of course, they worshipped before taking to the streets. For in worship they were transfigured. They were able to see a world they had not yet lived in. And that gave them the faith and strength to do all they could to bring that world into being.

Why worship? Why come here when the real world out there beckons to us with all its many temptations? Because worship makes all the difference. We need the mountaintop experience.

I've worshipped with you for almost 22 years. In that time, has our worship really done much to change the world? I suppose one could answer, not much. A six-year old child shoots and kills a six-year old child, talks break off in the middle east, AIDS ravages the African continent; death, grief, loss, continue to haunt our lives. Will our worship change the world...probably not.

But often, after worship, I find I return to an unchanged world, myself changed. I can leave the mountain top and return to the valley because, if only for a moment, I have seen the Lord, I have heard a voice, and I know I need not be afraid. My vision is expanded – is deepened – and I catch a glimpse of a world in which I have not yet lived and I know... that truly I am walking in the light of God. I can endure life in the valley because I have been to the mountain top.

But not just endure...that's not really a very good word. I think of those folks singing and praying in worship before taking to the dangerous Mississippi streets. Worship left them in a mood, not simply to endure, but to transform, to make changes. They had seen the Lord; They left the mountain top energized, empowered, transformed, transfigured, with a more expansive vision of what is going on in the world indeed what is possible in the world now that God in Christ is among us.

Energized, empowered, transformed, transfigured . . . in worship. So may it be for you and me.