Luke 9: 27b: “Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God.”28 About eight days after Jesus said this, he took Peter, John and James with him and went up onto a mountain to pray. 29 As he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightning. 30 Two men, Moses and Elijah, appeared in glorious splendor, talking with Jesus. 31 They spoke about his departure, which he was about to bring to fulfillment at Jerusalem. 32 Peter and his companions were very sleepy, but when they became fully awake, they saw his glory and the two men standing with him. 33 As the men were leaving Jesus, Peter said to him, “Master, it is good for us to be here. Let us put up three shelters—one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.” (He did not know what he was saying.)34 While he was speaking, a cloud appeared and covered them, and they were afraid as they entered the cloud. 35 A voice came from the cloud, saying, “This is my Son, whom I have chosen; listen to him.” 36 When the voice had spoken, they found that Jesus was alone. The disciples kept this to themselves and did not tell anyone at that time what they had seen.37 The next day, when they came down from the mountain, a large crowd met him. 38 A man in the crowd called out, “Teacher, I beg you to look at my son, for he is my only child. 39 A spirit seizes him and he suddenly screams; it throws him into convulsions so that he foams at the mouth. It scarcely ever leaves him and is destroying him. 40 I begged your disciples to drive it out, but they could not.”41 “You unbelieving and perverse generation,” Jesus replied, “how long shall I stay with you and put up with you? Bring your son here.”42 Even while the boy was coming, the demon threw him to the ground in a convulsion. But Jesus rebuked the impure spirit, healed the boy and gave him back to his father. 43 And they were all amazed at the greatness of God.
My Smartphone went off the other night at 2AM, which I didn’t think was all that smart. It wasn’t a phone call, though. It was some complete stranger skyping me. For those of us without Skype, that’s a program for video and voice at the same time, for your phone or your computer, so we can see each other while we talk. As much as I love seeing distant family or friends while we talk, the charm of Skyping has been wearing thin lately, because of all the complete strangers trying to call me, unsolicited, and the other strangers requesting to be my contact. It’s obvious from the names and pictures that go with these calls and requests that they are solicitations for online gambling, pornography or prostitution.
If some of you are thinking, “Why didn’t you just change the settings so that only your current contacts can call you?” well, there have been no children in our home since 2009 to show me how these thingamabobs work. And, yes, I did finally find the setting that says, “Only accept calls from current contacts,” after another unsolicited skype call at 6 one morning.
Reading online, I found out that Skype scamming is a growing business. One person recounted how a pornography service he accepted got access to his passwords and started emptying his bank account. When he changed the password, they threatened to expose him on Facebook. He might have thought that, by giving in to the temptation, he was writing the story of his own life in big, bold strokes. Actually, he’d just given the pen over to some “snake in the grass,” like Adam did. What started out as pride, lust and greed soon led to slavery to shame and fear. His were temptations to what one might call, “sins of weakness.”
Hebrews 4: 15 tells us that Jesus “was tempted in every way that we are, and yet was without sin.” But when you look at Christ’s temptations in the Gospels, most of them are not toward the usual garden variety sins of weakness, like the gambling and the pornography that come looking for us online, or now by Skype. And here we’re coming to the first question in the sermon outline: What are most of the temptations of Jesus in the Gospels about? They tend to be more about what I’d call, “sins of power,” not “sins of weakness.” They were temptations meant not to exploit human weaknesses, but Jesus’ strengths. Most of them were not about stirring up vice, but about distorting and misusing virtues.
Like when the devil said, “If you are the Son of God, turn these stones into bread.” Wouldn’t making bread out of stones be a quick and effective way to end world hunger? If you have such power, wouldn’t it be irresponsible not to use it? Or don’t you care about world hunger? Or when the tempter said, “If you are the Son of God, jump down from the pinnacle of this temple and let the angels help you to land safely,” wouldn’t that convince people that he was the Messiah, and prevent a lot of suffering, conflict and doubt?
And when, on the cross, Christ’s enemies jeered at him, and said, “If you are the Son of God, come down from that cross and save yourself!” wouldn’t doing that impress the Jewish leadership and even the Romans, and win them over to his side? Again, these were temptations that played to Jesus’ power, not to typical human weaknesses. Falling to them could be mistaken for wisdom, dressed up as virtue, all for ends that sound respectable, righteous, responsible, even religious. Most of the temptations of Jesus recorded in the Gospels were to sins of power, privilege, respectability and religion.
Which brings us to the second question in the sermon outline: What are the three temptations in today’s story of the Transfiguration? I think I see three. The first and most obvious temptation was to stay atop the mountain where Christ was transfigured, and where he communed with Moses and Elijah. This temptation came out of the mouth of Peter when he says, “It’s good for us to be here. Let us put up three shelters—one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.”
Hanging around to build booths to memorialize this mountaintop experience may seem like a harmless little diversion. It might even seem righteous, respectable and religious. After all, once a year the Hebrews made booths and lived in them to memorialize their Exodus out of Egypt. But God considered it such a serious and dangerous temptation that he rebuked it directly by saying, “This is my Beloved Son; Listen to him!” As in, “He told you, he must go down from here to Jerusalem, be rejected by the people, betrayed by your leaders, and killed by the Gentiles! And you must follow him! Now, just what part of that don’t you get?”
If, by contrast, they were to linger up there, I think I know how that movie ends. Next thing you know, Peter, James and John are charging admission to come see the booths and hear the story of this miraculous encounter, with tours every half hour. They’ll make plaster casts of Moses’ and Elijah’s footprints, then mass-produce replicas of them for sale. Lean the replicas up against the original plaster casts and claim that they have power to heal and attract money. Place the original casts in a shrine, wrap them in gold leaf while you’re at it. Down the hill a bit will go the gift shop and book store, and next to it, the restrooms, the restaurant and the coffee shop. Matthew, the former tax collector, can run the business end of all this, Judas can set up the website and manage the marketing. Oh, and of course, we must have the patent and the copyright on all this, because we don’t want anyone else horning in on our market. What started as a wonderful mountaintop moment, becomes a pleasant memory, then a monument, and then, spiritually speaking, a mausoleum, and then, finally, a monopoly racket. Meanwhile, people down in the valley continue to suffer poverty, leprosy and demonic oppression.
That particular temptation did not die on that mountaintop of transfiguration. Martin Luther quipped that, in his time, people made long pilgrimages and paid big bucks to venerate splinters of the true cross on which Jesus died, and that there were enough of these splinters of the cross around to build Noah’s Ark. That’s why I can’t watch most religious TV shows. If I see signs and symbols, and hear the language, of worldly power and glamor, meant to manufacture and market the feelings of success and spiritual mountaintop moments, I suspect something false and manipulative.
We Mennonites are not immune to this temptation to linger overlong on mountaintops, and build monuments to moments now past. When we were trying to start a Mennonite church in the Detroit metro area some twenty-five years ago, sadly, we soon figured out that we wouldn’t get much help from most of those who had moved into the area from Mennonite homes and majority Mennonite communities. One such person told me that she so loved her home church experience back in Indiana or Ohio that she didn’t want to help start another Mennonite church, because it just wouldn’t be the same as the one back home. Other such folks gathered with each other mostly for socializing, because of how they were related to each other, and which Mennonite college they had gone to, and not for any mission to a racially divided city.
I’m glad they had such good experiences in their home church and church college. But you can’t move forward in ministry if you stay stuck in nostalgia. Meanwhile, some Black Detroit residents were starting their own new Mennonite church on the East Side, with Anabaptist beliefs, but in Black church style. They had a Mennonite Central Committee volunteer doing after-school tutoring for at-risk inner-city kids just as soon as they had a place to meet for worship. They were laboring in the valleys of life, taking the Anabaptist movement to the streets, literally, which is also where Jesus led the three disciples, after their time on that mountaintop.
And that’s when I wonder if a second temptation kicked in: the temptation to turn around and go back to the mountaintop. Because down in the valley, out in the streets, Jesus finds the other disciples powerless to deliver a demonized boy. “You unbelieving and perverse generation,” Jesus said, “how long shall I stay with you and put up with you?”
Those are not the words of a temper-tantrum, by the way. Having just talked with Moses, those are carefully chosen words from their history, as if to say, “Moses was forty days on the mountaintop and I was only gone for two. Are you thinking already that God has abandoned you? Are you already preparing to make your own golden calf to worship?” He had also just met with the prophet Elijah, and his rebuke sounds like something out of Hosea or Jeremiah.
Maybe I’m reading this into the text, but I wonder if, when facing his disciples’ powerlessness and faithlessness, Peter’s idea of staying atop the mountain, to build the booths and tend them, didn’t suddenly sound very appealing. In the face of fear, disappointment and exasperation, our instincts tend toward fight or flight, to lash out or skip out, to punch back or peel out, and hightail it back to a place of safety, simplicity and security. Like in the Billy Ray Cyrus song about the fear and frustrations of a fast-paced, big city life, “Back to Tennessee:”
Great big towns, so full of users
Make a million, still a loser
Some may bet on you to win
Most hope you won’t
Livin’ wild, ain’t no mercy being free
When it brings you to your knees
Can’t keep lying
I’ve seen the road now
I know just what I need
To find my way back to Tennessee.”
Good thing he wasn’t from Wyoming, or he wouldn’t find anything to rhyme with that. But the desire to flee trouble and struggle and go back to security and simplicity is common to all of us.
If Jesus had gone back up to build a Mountaintop Memorial Chapel, it might have looked to all the world like a very righteous, respectable and religious choice. But Jesus resisted what must have been the second temptation. Instead, he faced up to the fear and the frustration, leaned into the complicated situation, and engaged ever more deeply and strongly with his faltering, failing disciples, and the whole mess of human need and weakness.
The third temptation may be even more of a stretch. Maybe I’m just reading it into the text. But I can see myself falling for it. Because I have. And for what seemed like the best of reasons at the time. It was the temptation to not go up to the Mount of Transfiguration in the first place. Not to take time out from ministry and the misery of the world to seek renewal and refreshment. I can hear the tempter asking, “What right have the servants of God to go indulge themselves in a mountaintop moment of refreshment when they’ve left the other nine disciples down there in the valley to deal with all those needy, desperate, hungry, hurting people? How many people will not get healed, helped or made whole and holy while they’re up there enjoying the company of Moses and Elijah, along with the view? How irresponsible is that?”
For such righteous, respectable, responsible and religious ways of thinking, people in ministry, public service, social services, medicine and education can give up and drop out after they get burned out, worn out, miserable, making other people around them miserable, after becoming angry, angsty, edgy crusaders against the very people they are called to love and to serve. Or they may fall into some terrible scandal, doing the very things they preached and crusaded so actively against, because righteous resentment so easily leads to rebellion. And all because they fell to the original temptation, when the first snake in the grass told us: “You shall be like God…” You shall be like God by being inexhaustible, independent, indispensable, and incapable of saying No, of recognizing your boundaries, respecting your limits, and your need for rest and renewal, getting out of the valleys from time to time to get a mountaintop perspective, and so letting God be God, so that God can write the story of our lives. And it looked so righteous, respectable, responsible and religious at the time. But it was a sin of power, the hijacking of virtue, thus making it a vice.
So, what then does this passage call us to do? Four things, briefly (I know there are five letters, but let’s stick with four): First, be wise to the temptations that come with the mountaintop moments of life, to the subtle sins of power, not just to the most obvious sins of weakness. Beware of, be wise to, the sins that exploit our strengths and virtues, and not just our frailties and vices, the sins that look and sound righteous, responsible, even religious, especially, when religion and righteousness are motivated by the desire to justify ourselves, to compare ourselves with others, and so prove ourselves superior to them. There are conservative and traditional ways of doing that, as well as liberal and progressive ways. If the tempter cannot lead us into debauchery and decadence, then he is just as happy to make us condemning, resentful or frantic with overwork. So, first of all, beware and be wise to the temptations to sins of power and propriety.
But secondly, be wise to the temptations that come in the valleys of life, as well. For we spend more of our lives in the emotional and spiritual valleys than we do on the mountaintops. We most readily fall to temptation not in the presence of pleasure, but in numbness. It is not exuberance that trips us up as much as indifference. There are temptations that come with power and plenty, but just as hard to recognize and resist are the ones that come whenever we are stressed, struggling and too serious for too long. I know that by saying this, a few of our grandparents might roll over in their graves, but I would rather see friends gathered around a deck of playing cards (as long as no money is changing hands) than someone who is bored and resentful alone with a computer. Christian tradition calls the temptations of dryness and indifference, “the devil of the noonday sun.” Learn to recognize and resist the temptations of dryness, fatigue and indifference, in the valleys of life, as well.
But thirdly, when it comes to temptation, don’t just resist: remember and return. Because, human wisdom and human willpower alone are no match for the wiles of the tempter. The only thing that will overcome our desires for evil is an even greater desire for God and for goodness. Only a hunger for the holy will drive out our cravings for all that is corrupt. So, remember the truth of what you have seen and heard on the mountaintop moments of life, when you tasted and saw that the Lord is good, and reaffirm it as often as necessary. Hold on to it, especially whenever the tempter tries to discount it, or take it away. For these wonderful mountaintop moments are not given so as to take us away from the labors of life in the valleys of endless human need, they are meant to strengthen and sustain us for them.
Just before Jesus took the three disciples up to the mountaintop of Transfiguration, he said, “There are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Kingdom of God.” And no, there are no 2,000 year-old people in Palestine still waiting around for the Lord’s return. Those words were fulfilled in what happened next on the mountaintop: they saw something of the Kingdom of God in its fullness in Christ’s transfiguration. They also saw something of the Kingdom of God in the valley: in the deliverance of the demonized boy. God and his kingdom were equally present and powerful in both the mountaintop and the valley. It was only harder to see and to sense God’s presence in the valley. But that didn’t make God absent. Remember then the truth that God is present to us and active in whatever condition of life, whether we are enjoying a mountaintop season of triumph, or a long, dark valley of testing and trial.
Peter himself remembered and referred to the transfiguration in his second letter to his disciples. Evidently, that memory sustained him through tough times of persecution and difficult, dangerous missionary work. For there on that mountaintop, not only did they see afresh and anew who Jesus was, they saw who they were in him. In the transfigured Jesus they saw both their identity—and ours– as God’s beloved children, and their destiny—and ours– as joint-heirs with Jesus of his glory.
Whatever we glimpsed of the glory and grandeur of God at, say, Drift Creek Camp, don’t discount it or deny it in the daily grind of life in this valley. That favorite hymn, or that favorite musician, whose words describe so well your fears and your hopes toward God and life, play again, sing again, whenever the darkness and drudgery of life and labor seem to mock those mountaintop moments. That devotional author whose thoughts and whose prayers seem to usher you to heaven when your own spirit is too stiff and too cold to rise up and walk, don’t be ashamed to go back to him or her for help as needed. Even though we can’t re-engineer and repeat that shiver up the spine, or the catch in the throat or the strangely heart-warming sense of the assurance of God’s love for us that first caught our attention, we can still remind ourselves of the truths we heard and saw in those moments, whenever the struggles and losses of life seem to mock them.
So don’t just resist temptation. Remember, cherish and cling to what we have seen and heard in our mountaintop moments, for they are the truth about God and about ourselves.
Fourthly, make time and space in our lives for mountaintop moments. Though we cannot engineer, nor guarantee on a schedule any moments of spiritual renewal and refreshment, we can make ourselves available to God’s renewing, restoring power, like whenever we take time for prayer and Bible study, or whenever we gather here on a Sunday morning. That’s why the Commandment says to keep the Sabbath, so that we present ourselves to God in worship on a regular basis. So keep a rhythm of rest, reflection and recreation going, in order to place ourselves in the mountaintop paths of God’s renewing, sustaining grace.
In conclusion, let’s be wise to the temptations to the sins of power, which can look so responsible, even religious, as well as to the temptations to the sins of weakness, especially those that come in the valleys and trenches of life’s constant struggles. Recognize and Resist them, yes, but also remember the truths you saw and heard in the mountaintop moments of life. Hold on to them, and renew our acquaintances with them, because those glimpses we get in church, in the Bible, in nature, and in experience, of God’s glory, and ours, show us the end of the wonderful story that God is writing in our lives.