BACK TO REALITY John M. Buchanan
Mark 9:2-15, Exodus 32:15-24 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
September 4, 1977 Columbus, Ohio

The story is told of an affluent businessman who emerged from his office
building one day feeling on top of the world, only to encounter a disheveled, un-
shaven, poorly clothed vagrant, The businessman was touched with compassion and
in a grand gesture of generosity pulled out his wallet, handed the fellow two
dollars and said, "Don't despair,'' The very next day he encountered the man again
at the same spot, But as he approached the man waved a fistful of money at him and
said, "Here's your sixteen dollars." "What are you doing?" protested the gentleman,
And he replied, "You told me to put two dollars on 'Don't Despair’ in the fourth
race, and it hit eight to one."

Sometimes life does that to us. We feel as if we are expressing true
compassion and charity and the reality of results is rather dismal. We conceive
grandly in the abstract and are jolted rudely back to reality by the ambiguous
complexities of life. We are better parents as we contemplate the task of parent-
ing than we are in the heat of a family conflict, We are more eloquent in the car
before the meeting than during the actual speech we will make. Beyond our best
laid schemes life is never quite as precise and clear as we have assumed ~ and the
rude and sometimes painful jolt can be quite healthy,

I had an experience myself this summer which was illustrative, One of the
advantages of spending time in Princeton is the proximity and accessibility of New
York City. On the weekend of the Summer Institute of Theology several of us took
the bus to New York to see a few plays, We stayed in a modest hotel but on Sunday
morning were invited by some others to breakfast at The Barclay. It was a bright,
cool morning, breakfast at The Barclay was elegant, the lobby filled with elegant,
bright people, The food was good, the conversation stimulating. From there we
all walked to Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, to sit in that elegant sanctuary,
hear elegant music, and an elegant sermon and to see more elegant people, After-
ward it was time to return to Princeton and there is no way to walk from Fifth
Avenue Presbyterian Church to the Port Authority Bus Terminal without transgressing
8th Avenue and 42nd Street. There, in the mest vivid contrast, was another
reality...every conceivable kind of pornographic literature in shop after shop,
the sidewalks filled with swaggering young men clutching wine bottles, prostitutes
plying their trade, drunks passed out against the buildings. It may have been the
healthiest thing that happened to us: we were certainly dragged, albeit reluctantly,
down from the lofty and rarified atmosphere of breakfast at The Barclay and the
Gospel on 5th Avenue to the reality of life as a lot of people live it.

There is some of that, of course, in our annual return from vacation,
which is why I have chosen to preach this sermon on Labor Day weekend. For nearly
three months many of us have been coming and going, our responsibilities lessened,
our burdens lishtened, And even those who have not been coming and going have
enjoyed a softer, slower, less intense way of living. Coming back from vacation,
I have learned, is more than the number of miles from the ocean to Columbus. It
is a long journey emotionally and spiritually, as well as vhysically, but - we
need now to come back to reality: to the frantic pace at which business is done
and life is lived in our community. We shouldn't be blamed, really, if we regret
the return and resist the come-down.

oe

No one in history ever had a more rude awakening nor painful come-down
than Moses, Let's think about his experience. The earliest theological awareness
in antiquity attributed a mystical, divine quality to heights ~ mountain tops -
the heavens. When people go up onto a mountain they are likely to meet God. And
one of the richest stories of this genre in all literature is found in the Old
Testament Book of Exodus. After the initial journey away from Egypt the children
of Israel, with Moses as their leader, came to the wilderness of Sinai. At the
mountain of that name God summoned Moses to come up for a meeting, And for twelve
Chapters in the Book of Exodus the mountain top meeting between God and His man
Moses continues: the covenant is affirmed and the terms spelled out - the Ten
Commandments and all the laws which would govern the new nation God was fashionins
out of the twelve tribes camped below, For forty days and forty nights Moses’ was
on the mountain with God, In terms of his own personal pilgrimage of faith, this
was the pinnacle. He was a murderer, remember, and a very reluctant liberator,
But now, on Mt, Sinai, he knew at last the good and gracious purposes of God and
he was certain that the bold adventure out of Egypt into the wilderness would
result in the establishing of God's holy nation.

At the bottom of the mountain, however, events were not nearly so lofty
and inspiring. Moses wasn't gone long when the people asked Aaron to make some
gods to worship and lead them through the wilderness, Aaron complied and built a
golden calf, and after a liturgical nod in the direction of Moses! God, the people
dove into what appears to be a fertility celebration: drinking, dancing, singing.

Meanwhile, Moses began the trek down, heart aflame with God's purposes,
carrying the tablets of stone. When he saw and heard what had happened he broke
the tablets, burned the golden calf, ground it into powder, scattered it on water
and made the people drink it for good measure, It was quite a come~down: obviously
the reality of the valley was not nearly as pleasant, inspiring or edifying as
what transpired on the mountain,

Moses, however, needed the mountain experience. So do we, It is good to
put distance between the daily round and self and use the interlude for reflection
and renewal, We need the re-creation of recreation: the vocation of vacation: the
occasional period alone on top of a mountain with self and God, We need the hish
moment of gorgeous music, the deep experience of worship when the elusive truth
allows itself to be held for a moment, Halford Luckock advised: "Trust your high
moments" and cited the good lines from Eunice Tietjens:

"But I shall go down from this airy place,
this swift, white, peace, this stinging exultation,
And time will close about me
and my soul stir to the rhythm of the daily round,
Yet having known, life will not press so close,
and always I shall feel time ravel thin about me,
For once I stood
In the white windy presence of eternity."
(Profiles from China in Interpreter's Bible
Vol. 7, p.776)

o Fs

In our New Testament Lesson this morning Jesus took His three most depend-
able friends, Peter, James and John, up onto a mountain. Something happened there
which defies analysis and description, The Gospel account uses the word
"transfiguration" from a Greek word which is also the root of metamorphosis. What
it means is that Peter, James and John saw Jesus as He really was: saw Him clearly
for who He was. Before - they weren't sure. Afterward they would continue to
experience confusion and doubt, But for that moment - that "swift white stinging
exultation" they knew that this carpenter Rabbi was the Christ, God's Messiah.

Most of us wait all our lives for an experience like that. And so Peter,
overwhelmed, beside himself, suggested that they build three booths, He wanted,
that is to say, to prolong the experience: to capture and nail it down, or at the
very least, to memorialize it by way of a permanent monument, His faith had not
come easily; he was a passionatc,impetuous, very human disciple. When, finally, he
kmew the truth, be didn't want to let go: more academically, he wanted this ex-
perience to be the norm, the criterion of all reality.

It's terribly significant, I think, that Jesus did not even acknowledge
Peter's suggestion. Instead He icd them down from the mountain and waiting for
them there was an argument, a nasty, name calling spat between some pompous
religious official and His own disciples, the reason being their inability to heal
a young boy with epilepsy, - From the abstract to the concrete - the sacred
vision to the secular world - mountain to valley - back to reality!

It doesn't take much of a preacher to sense God's word in that, It is
almost painfully obvious, Jesus leads His disciples down, He may on occasion have
a meeting on the mountain, but it's immediately back to reality. It's a hard
lesson to learn, Like Peter, we'd prefer to stay up there, to build a monument
to that, to define all of life in terms of that,

Our culture, for instance, has spawned a cult of instant gratification, a
philosophy which no one acknowledges overtly, but which is inferred in practically
every commercial which flashes on the television screen. The message is simple
and eloquent and immensely appealing and totally untrue. It is that the good life
is the life of things - goods - the shining goal of all human aspirations ;that it
may be lived by all the people, all the time. If you have money you can "put it
where your mouth is", purchase the proper tooth-paste and become instantly
irresistible: or you can choose the right brand of wine and induce your date to
stay overnight; or you can turn your marriage into domestic bliss with the proper
coffee: you can carn admiring stares from every man with panty hose that don't sag,
dresses that are sleek, hair that is tinted: you can transform your modest apart-
ment into a castle with new furniture, elevate your esteem in your neighbor's eyes
with a new car and nail it all down permanently with life insurance in case you
aren't in the picture, And as if on cue, at the very moment you protest that you
can't afford ail that, you are gently assured that the yoke is easy, the burden
light and that - after ail - you deserve it,

The trouble is that people believe it, not only people who can afford to
believe but people who cannot. And so they buy the car and furniture and all the
other promises of instant gratification and find themselves in a bondage every bit
as real as the days of the company store, We are understandably nervous when the
lights go out in New York and thousands of people simply help themselves, Law

~ &e-

and order types think they know the remedy, May I suggest that at least part of
the reason for this frightening behavior may be discovered if you watch television
for one entire evening through the eyes of a ghetto tenement resident? May I
suggest that the looter is simply a believer in the philosophy of instant gratifi-
cation and no amount of law enforcement will alter the situation until the whole
culture takes the long, arduous trip back to reality.

The Church, too, would prefer to stay on the mountain, avay from the
ambiguities of life, It’s far easier to believe here than out there: it's far
easier to recite our trust in Jcsus Christ as Lord in the safety of a creed than
in the complexity of community life. Peter's temptation to build a monument on
the Mount of Transfiguration has been expressed every time the institutional church
turns a deaf ear to the cry of human need, or dresses itself elegantly and turns its
eyes from the naked poor all about it, Jesus led His disciples down from the
mountain and a church which intends to be faithful to Him must never forget that.

We need our high and holy moments of truth, We need the experiences of joy and
inspiration and fulfillment. And we need to acknowledge the temptation that was
Peter's, The Church of Jesus Christ is called to follow Him down - out of the
booths it has built and into the valley of human need and political controversy:
out of its monuments to the past and into this community wrenched with the agony of
establishing justice and equality and compassion for all people. Our Lord does not
acknowledge our desire to stay up and away from it all. He calls us back to reality.
He also promises that He will stand with us in our valleys, That is the good and
terribly relevant news, He will meet us here - but also in our low and flat plains:
in our crises - our grief - our anxiety. He leads disciples down - but He also
comes down to stand with us in our need,

it is a particular characteristic of our time, I believe, that religion
which puts its roots in the soil of the mountain is immensely popular, We are
inundated with testimony from the mountain: personal conversion experiences are the
norm: churches which cultivate them, orchestrate them and celebrate them are grow-
ing. Churches which openly acknovledge the Christ who leads into the valley are
rather notoriously in trouble,

But the Lord we would follow spent His whole life coming down. God, we
dare to believe, sent Him down, all the way down to a humble manger, to a life
lived among us fully, on down to a wretched conclusion and death on a cross.

God's reality is the world of people and issues and problems and controversy.
Jesus led Peter, James and John down from that glorious experience on the mountain
because He wanted their faith right in the middle of that arguing crowd - and
because there was a sick little boy who needed Him,

So, you and I, are called to follow. We need, and we shall have, our
clear, shining moments of truth, But our salvation - our wholeness and health
and ultimate joy will be found in the life of serving and helping and healing:
down in the valley, in the world. Jesus Christ precedes us. He is there already,
He bids us follow, Amen,

We give thanks, our Father, for those moments when we have seen clearly
and known the truth of your love, Give us courage and faith to leave them
behind and follow, every day, our Lord Jesus Christ.

Amen,