Sermons from the Pulpit

        "Come up to me on the mountain and wait," says the Lord. And Moses does. He waits alone up there for six days. I wonder how he passed the time.

        I wait with great difficulty. I have to come up with strategies to kill time. I hate it when somebody puts me on hold.

        But waiting is a fact of life, and it's an important indicator of rank. The person who waits is less important than the person for whom that person waits. Moses is less important than God, the computer user is less important than the tech support geek, the patient is less important than the doctor, and the passenger is less important than the airline. This is the way things are.

        I seem to recall a college rule. Question: if the professor is late for class, how long should the students wait before they leave? Answer: fifteen minutes for a full professor, ten minutes for an associate professor, five for an assistant professor, and if it's a teaching fellow you can leave right now. (Another question: Do you really want to go to a college where nobody sees how funny this is? But I digress.)

        If I wait, I am putting myself at the other person's disposal. I am at your disposal. Isn't that a fascinating expression? Sounds like I'm in your kitchen, standing over your sink, keeping the Insinkerator company.

        But it means I'm making myself available to you. My time and energy are yours to do with as you see fit.

        I can think of two ways I might do this. The first is grudgingly and resignedly, when I feel like I'm over a barrel. We all know what this is like, and we have all learned to live with it as necessary.

        But the other way I might do it is more interesting. I might actually volunteer. I might honestly believe that this is the best thing I can do with my time and my energy, to put myself at your disposal. I might want to do it.

        My best friend's wife died ten days ago. Tony has known me since we were 15, longer than anyone I'm not related to. He knows me much better than I usually wish to be known. We were in school together for six years, roommates for two. We went to each other's weddings, watched each other have kids and get divorced, didn't see much of each other for a while, and then saw both of ourselves start over and marry happily, more happily than we had any right to expect. We witnessed each other's religious pilgrimages, very different but similarly intense. We came to share an experiential conviction of God's amazing grace.

        I went to the memorial service yesterday. It was almost 400 miles from here. I did the whole round trip by car in one day with a lot of help from my excellent firstborn daughter, who has been gifted with a very clear sense of when it is important to just drop everything and go.

        Tony said it was OK if I didn't come, we could get together some other time, and I thought about it, but I couldn't not go. It didn't matter whether or not it was the sensible thing to do, either for him or for myself.

        Haven't there been times when you just couldn't not go? It might be interesting sometime for us to hear one another's stories about dropping everything and going. Not necessarily to a funeral or a wedding or a bedside. Not necessarily to a place that's miles away. Sometimes you have very little idea where you're going or what for, or what brought it on. Moses is tending his father-in-laws's sheep when sees the bush that burns but is not burned up and he says to himself, "I must turn aside and see this great sight." Same kind of thing.

        The essential part is that we are summoned, summoned to be present somewhere with someone, summoned into someone's presence. The summons may come from a friend or from a stranger, and the friend or the stranger may or may not be God. It seems to come from within oneself, but it does not take you away by yourself, it creates communion, not solitude.

        Come up to me on the mountain and wait there. You don't have to do anything. In fact, you won't have anything to do. It's not about doing. It's about being. Being there. At God's disposal.

        Another word for this is worship, or prayer. Throughout the Bible, wherever there's a mountaintop story, that's what it's about.

        And let's be clear: This is not some trite metaphor about life's peaks and valleys, highs and lows, joys and sorrows, special days and ordinary days — all that kind of talk focuses entirely on our own experience. My ups, my downs. It's like looking in the mirror and describing in detail what we see. It may interest us greatly, but it has nothing to do with coming into the presence of God.

        If you come into the presence of God, your focus moves beyond yourself. If your attention is on what is happening to you, you are probably not placing yourself at anyone else's disposal.

        The medical and scientific communities have been paying some attention lately to religion. Clinical studies have demonstrated that people who study the Bible, pray and go to church are less likely to have high blood pressure. Smokers who go to church live longer than smokers who don't. A sociology professor reports that "religious people have better support systems, which keep them healthier," and "the sense of meaning and kind of comfort that religious beliefs provide make them more resistant to stresses, both physical and social." "The faith factor has been demonstrated to have value."

        Is this good news for us? A recent issue of a religious journal has an editorial which gets all indignant about it and says these doctors and scientists are "treating church like a nutritional supplement or a leafy green vegetable — something to add to one's life just to be on the safe side." "As long as one takes this view of faith," it says, "one will never get started on the actual journey of faith."

        These readings raise so many questions!

        As Moses goes up the mountain, a cloud comes down onto it, God coming to meet him halfway you might say, and after he waits six days, God speaks from the cloud and calls Moses into the cloud. So is Moses meeting God, or not? Is he worshiping, or is he downloading data?

        The cloud was to protect Moses from being burned alive by the devouring fire of the glory of the Lord, wasn't it? Or was it more like that great noisemaking machine that the Wizard of Oz was hiding behind, to keep Dorothy and her friends from exposing his fraudulence?

        Peter and James and John, the inner circle of the disciples, go up on a mountain and see Jesus transfigured, shining. Is this a revelation of his identity as Savior and Christ, or is it the product of their own wishful thinking and selfish ambition?

        "Lord, it is good for us to be here," says Peter, and then he makes this bizarre offer to set up three dwellings, or tents, or tabernacles, for Moses, Elijah, and Jesus. The church has puzzled over that one for 2,000 years without figuring it out. One commentator calls it "a trivial, ludicrous outburst, typical religious talk, ill-timed and beside the point." Another says it's Peter's fumbling attempt to do something worshipful and reverent, just as when he and James and John fall to their faces on the ground a few moments later.

        And then Jesus touches them and tells them not to be afraid, and they get up and see nobody there but Jesus. Does that mean Moses and Elijah were never there, and the disciples just hallucinated the whole thing, including the shining face and the dazzling white clothes and the voice from the bright cloud? (What is a "bright cloud," anyway? Sounds like a jumbo shrimp!)

        Preachers avoid the Transfiguration story because it demands so much of us. It flat-out contradicts the therapeutic, narcissistic approach to religion that our culture dictates. It says faith and worship draw us closer to an actual hidden reality behind the appearance of things, for example the reality that Jesus is Christ. It says time is swallowed up in eternity, so Moses and Elijah and Jesus can be present together. It says in worship we get clear about where the real authority is, and we are overcome with awe, and Jesus touches us to new life, healed life, and we come back from the encounter ready to resume the way to the cross, and not afraid.

        There was once an ordination service where two preachers preached. The first one gave the new pastor all sorts of positive encouragement and told him that with his faith, his call, his talents, his training, and a little hard work, he was bound to succeed in ministry. The other one preached on the text from Hebrews, "It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God." I wonder which one he remembered better years afterwards. I wonder which one contributed more to his ability to minister. I wonder what sort of minister he became, how many of us he could have ministered to, and what sort of ministers we are. I wonder what it means when we say, "Lord, it is good for us to be here."