“Here, There, Everywhere”

Luke 9:28-36

Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

February 11, 2024

Just yesterday I said it again. “There wasn’t a class on this in seminary.” (In this particular instance, “this” being a slow-running toilet. But there also were not classes on lots of other things like officiating a wedding, or revising bylaws, or writing grant applications, or teaching confirmation class….you get the point. Seminary is 90+ hours of necessities for being a pastor with a few electives thrown in. One of the most unique electives I took was on church architecture. Now, you might think that was focused on things like how to manage a capital campaign and a building renovation but it was, in fact, a “worship arts” elective. 

How is architecture “worship arts”? Well, when churches are built there is a lot of intentionality about what the new structure will communicate theologically. The high, sweeping lines of a Gothic cathedral communicate something very different about God than the simple, smaller scale of a Colonial New England sanctuary. 

Church architects often talk about immanence and transcendence when imagining new spaces. These two ways of understanding God’s nature have often been seen at odds. Those who experience God as immanent will say that God is a part of our everyday physical and material world. God is present here and now. We can see God right in front of us.

On the other side, we have this idea that God is transcendent. God is beyond, above, outside of our human experience. God is more than we can know or understand. God exists on another plane entirely. And those two competing ideas about God’s nature get expressed in church architecture. In fact, if you look around our sanctuary you’ll probably see some things that evoke an immanent God and others a transcendent God. I actually think our worship space is a bit of a mix. 

God’s immanence and transcendence both have a place in our tradition. Certainly, there are Biblical stories that support both understandings of the Holy. For example, just look at the flow of the liturgical year. We started back in Advent – and the stories in the lectionary are all doom and gloom and apocalyptic end-of-the-world extravaganzas. God is mystical, all-powerful, above and beyond human understanding. But then we move into the Christmas season. We sing “love came down at Christmas,” and celebrate the birth of Emmanuel – God with us – in the form of not just any human, but a very average one born in a humble setting. It is easy to see and feel the immanence of God in the story of Jesus’s birth. 

As we move through the season of Epiphany we see Jesus doing really average, ordinary things….reading scripture in the house of worship he grew up in, being baptized by his cousin, going to a wedding. But even these immanent, everyday things have a glow of the holy about them: Jesus’s scripture reading is infused with such power that people take notice, the heavens open and a mighty voice comes out of the sky when Jesus is baptized, and Jesus performs a miracle at the wedding – turning water into wine. 

It seems like you could easily paint a picture of God whichever way you’d like – here and now or above and beyond. 

And now….just before we head into Lent, we are here: Transfiguration Sunday. Jesus goes up on a mountain with three of his best friends. Mountains are amazing things, aren’t they? There’s something absolutely magical about driving out across I-70 and straining your eyes to see the Rockies off in the distance. First they look like clouds, then they start to look like hills, and finally you’re up next to them and in them. Your ears pop. You marvel at the immensity. 

Mountains are transcendent – they point our eyes up and beyond. And so we look to the mountain as Jesus and his friends scale it. Up, up, up our eyes go until we see the four of them standing there. Jesus begins to pray, and as he does, he undergoes a transformation. Or in the Greek, a metamorphosis. He is changed completely into a new being – his face looks different, his clothes are glowing. And suddenly we become aware that Elijah and Moses – the greatest of teachers and prophets – have joined them. Peter and his friends witness all of this. And as Moses and Elijah prepare to leave, Peter cries out, “Wait! This is so much fun! Let’s make three tiny houses. One for you, Jesus, and one for Elijah and Moses!” 

But it’s not to be. The moment has passed. A cloud descends and the three friends are scared. And then that voice-coming-from-the-cloud thing happens again: “This is my Son, the Beloved. Listen to him!” Suddenly, Jesus is there alone. And the disciples told no one what had happened. 

It’s a magnificently transcendent sort of moment. Just what you might expect on the top of a mountain. 

But it’s not the end of the story. Because what happens next is that they come down off the mountain. The next scene is down in the valley. 

Let’s pause for just a moment and take that journey with them. Maybe you’ve never stood on top of a mountain, but we’ve all probably been up in a high place in nature. Maybe it was the top of the radio tower hill at Konza or sitting on top of a barn or even flying on an airplane. Remember what it feels like to have that sense of spaciousness? Like everything below looks different and the world below just stretches on and on?

Now….we descend to the valley. Our feet are firmly planted back on the ground. And we are told that a great crowd has come to meet us. People pressing in on all sides. Come to see Jesus. That sense of spaciousness is totally gone. We are back in the thick of the seeming scarcity of everyday life – not enough time, not enough money, not enough food, not enough love to go around. And people are desperate. 

One of the desperate ones cries out above the noise of the crowd, “Teacher! I beg you to look at my son. He is my only child!”

Things are not feeling so transcendent anymore. This is not a mountaintop moment and it’s hard to even remember what it felt like up there in the cool, fresh air with Jesus shining and sparkling. Now there is only desperation as the child is suffering immense pain. Some of us, no doubt, avert our eyes. We wonder if there is some place we can escape. We feel powerless. 

The man continues, “I begged your followers to help me, but they could not.” 

We like to think, of course, that the disciples aren’t like us. That they were a little more clueless and always messing up. But, really, have we modern disciples fared any better with the things in our world that continue to harm children? We live in a world where children die every day of curable ailments because they cannot access health care, where children are poisoned by their own water due to the recklessness of elected officials, where children are the victims of violence, where children suffer the consequences of climate change. We have our own demons that we have not yet exorcized, don’t we?

And Jesus, after chastising his followers a bit, does what he almost always does. He heals. He takes the boy into his arms, heals him, and returns him to his father. The story ends well, despite Jesus’s followers ability to “get it.”

So God flashes on a mountain and a voice booms from heaven declaring the importance of Jesus……and God dwells among the people in the valley, bringing a healing salve to those who need it most. 

And you might be wondering: well, which is it? Is God up there or down here? Does God dwell on the mountain or in the valleys? Yes. The answer is yes. 

As we move together into the season of Lent, we have a difficult journey ahead of us. The days may be growing longer, but the work of Lent is not so easy. We are called to recommit ourselves to spiritual practices that will deepen and lengthen our connection to the Holy One. We will be asked to bear witness to the most cruel and callous behavior of humans. As we go into the season of Lent, it seems to me that we would do well to pay careful attention to the very last line in this long passage….. “But Jesus…healed the boy, and gave him back to his father. And all were astounded at the greatness, magnificence, majesty of God.”

Be astounded, friends. For we are held in love by One who is somehow both here and now and above and beyond. 

The God of mountains and valleys. Amen.