STALKING THE HOLY

November 10, 1985, 11:00 a.m. Worship Service -
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbuterian Church, Chicago

“And Peter said to Jesus, "Master, it is well we are here;
jet us make three booths... And as they were coming down
the mountain, he charged them to tell no one what they had
seen,..." ~ - Mark 9:5, 9 (RSV)

Scripture
Psalm 121
Mark 9:2-15

One of the wonderful advantages of this place is the proximity of the zoo,
just a brief walk away. I can't visit the zoo without recalling lines from
William Blake, 18th century mystic poet and artist:

“Tiger! Tiger! burning bright

In the forests of the night.

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"

of its more spectacular creatures. W. H. mw once described following Jesus
Christ in terms of seeing rare beasts and aving unique adventures. Ellen
Goodman last week even saw in the troubles of the humpback whale caught in
the Sacramento River a metaphor for the United States and Russia on the eve
of the Summit... And those wonderful tigers... Blake wrote about them:

Blake was not alone in being reminded of (eesgwonce of creation within some

"In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

(Songs of Experiences, The Tiger)

On a recent visit I made a new discovery, with equally provocative theological
significance...the Snow Leopard. One of the rarest and most beautiful of the
big cats, the Snow Leopard is at home in the High Himalayas. It's soft, pastel
coloring, quickness: and grace have made it one of the most illusive and there~
fore mysterious of the big cats. In fact, ancient Himalayan folk lore holds
that actually to see the Snow Leopard is a kind of ultimate experience of the
divine —- not unlike seeing God.

There is a wonderful book by Peter Mathiessen, The Snow Leopard, about an
expedition in the Himalayas. Mathiessen is a Zen Buddhist with a keen eye
for the mystery at the heart of things. Listen to his description of what
it is like, at 17,000 feet where the expedition had to spend the night...

~39-

"At daybreak, when I peek out at the still universe, ice fills

my nostrils. The spell of silence on this place is warning that
no man belongs here. The sherpas start down immediately; they too
seem oppressed by so much emptiness. Left alone, I am overtaken
by that northern void - no wind, no cloud, no track, no bird, only
the crystal crescents between the peaks...

I flush with feeling, moved beyond my comprehension, and once again
the warm tears freeze upon my face. These rocks and mountains, all
this matter, the snow itself, the air - the earth is ringing. All.
is moving, full-‘of power, full of light." (pp. 173-4)

Now the reason for this soliloquy on Tigers and Snow Leopards and mystical
experiences in the Himalayas our text for the day, the account of an almost
indescribable religious experience three men once had on a high mountain in
the presence of Jesus, What happened to them on that mountain, and in the
events which inmediately followed, was enormously important. It began for
them, however, at the level of a mystical, deeply revealing and moving
encounter with the holy; the kind of experience human beings have -- in
every age. There is something about the nature of things apparently that
calls human beings to a pursuit. And there is something about us that wants
to stalk the holy.

Peter Mathiessen was Looking for something. His ex-wife had died: it was
time for reflecting, reordering. His cover was a biological expedition
across the Tibetan plateau into Nepal to study the mating habits of Himalayan
Blue Sheep. But, in reality, it is a journey of the heart, a pilgrimage.
Where there are Blue Sheep, there may also be Snow Leopards.

The pursuit is intensely human and clearly theological. The illusive Snow
Leopard symbolizes what every person looks for: the perfect beauty, the

moment of truth, ecstasy and fulfillment that will make sense out of all the
ether moments of life. Mathiesson never sees a Snow Leopard: a few tracks,

a shadow darting between the rocks once, just enough to quicken the blood and
catch the breath. And because he is a Buddhist and not a Christian, the pursuit
itself produces moments of wonderful transcendence - from which we might learn
a thing or two...

“Upstream, in the inner canyon, dark silences are deepened by.
the roar of stones. Something is listening, and I listen too:
who is it that intrudes here? Who is breathing?
I look about me...who is it that spoke? Who is the ever-
present ‘I’ that is not me?" (pp. 135-6) -- (See Stalking
The Snow Leopard, Belden Lane, The Christian Century 2/84).

One time Jesus took Peter, James and John up onto a mountain. It, too, was
an interlude in the midst of a chaotic life, teaching, healing, nurturing
disciples and simply coping with the increasingly urgent crowds that were
now turning up wherever he went. When they set out to tell about this inci-
dent, a generation or so later, they had trouble — understandable trouble -

-3-

conveying what had happened. They used the word “transfiguration" which is
how we still know the incident, even though the word "transfigure" has almost
no contemporary content. The incident is in all three Gospels, in essentially
the same form. Matthew describes Jesus' face shining; Elijah and Moses appear,
the disciples fall down in fear. Mark simply says he was “transfigured," his
garments were "glistening white," and lets us fill in the rest with our own
imagination. Whatever occurred, and I don't think we can know, three friends
of Jesus shared a mysterious experience with him on a mountaintop... They
never forgot it. It was forever helpful to them. There is no way, using

the inadequate tools of language to recreate it, although Peter Mathiessen's
allusion to that "other presence" in the white stillness of the high Himalayas
helped me more than anything else I have read.

Human beings have always experienced a sense of God the Creator in the majesty
and incredible mystery of creation. To contemplate the expanding universe,
the moment of creation before which there was nothing and which leaves both
science and theology in speechless reverence has been - for many —- a deeply
theological experience. In art and music, human beings have been drawn into
the deeper significance of the ordinary in a way which, for many, has been
profoundly religious. And in moments of extraordinary power, in personal

and often indescribably intense religious experience, human beings have known
God,

The definitive academic work on the subject, required reading in all the semi-
naries, is a book by Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy. Otto traced the experience
down through history. People have always known what he calls the “nysterium
tremendum".., "the hushed, trembling, speechless humility of the creature in

the presence of...that which is a mystery inexpressible..." (p.13)

Literature is full of it. Emerson wrote about "the wise silence, the universal
beauty to which every part and particle is equally related, the external one."
Melville described “that profound silence, that only voice of God."

There is more of it in literature, frankly, than there is in the Bible. . The
Bible is not ordinarily very mysterious. There aren't many abstractions, and
it is surely not the secret code of an escteric cult. Mostly the Bible is
about life: commerce, war, sex, children, sickness, death, birth. The Bible
nowhere argues for the existence of God nor does it spend much time dealing
with private religious experience.

But there are a few exceptions and I conclude that they are important ~- both
the fact that they are in the Bible, and that there are only a few of them.
They happen on mountains mostly: Mt. Sinai, for instance: Mr. Horeb and
Hermon, the Mount of Olives and a hill called Calvery. And, of course, this
special place, this high mountain of the transfiguration.

I am intrigued by the fact that about the time we begin really to dig into
the mysterious experiential phenomenon called transfiguration the text itself
pulls us abruptly away. I conclude that there is intentionality and wisdom in
that. There is also some wonderful, almost painfully familiar, humanness.
Peter, who can be counted on fer his humanity, is so overwhelmed by this
wonderful rich and mysterious experience he suggests that they might went to
institutionalize it... "Let's build three booths, Jesus. One for Moses, one

~4-

for Elijah, and one for you." Let's capture the magic. The cynic in me sees

in that suggestion of Peter's a hint of what has happened too frequently in
the history of religion... Three monuments, suitably inscribed... "On this
spot in the Year of our Lord 30, Elijah, Moses and Jesus, etc., etc.” Or
perhaps a church should be built on the spot and people can visit annually
and light candles. A little landscaping and soft, indirect lighting would
be nice, and a snack bar, souvenir shop. That's unfair to Peter, of course.
But humanity does have a persistant propensity for marketing the holy, from
healing water from the Jordon River, to prayer hankies from Texas, to Second
City's now infamous "Plastic Jesus on the Dashboard..."

Peter meant only to celebrate and remember a moment of exquisite truth, a won-
derful moment in time when he knew who he was and what his life was about.

I can't fault him for that. Who among us doesn't act like that? But I am
intrigued by the simple fact that Jesus didn't even acknowledge Peter's sugges—
tion, but allowed it to hang there in mid-air on the mountaintop. Instead
Jesus leads them down, telling them as they descend that what they experienced
up there was for them and not for the marketplace. "Tell no one," he said.
And when they arrived at the bottom of the mountain they immediately waded
back into the crowd of people and resumed healing and helping and teaching.
That entire sequence, what it says and what it doesn't say, is fascinating,
instructive, and a particular word of the Lord for us.

There is plenty of room in Christianity for the high and mysterious experience
of the holy. Sometimes we're not sure of that, nor comfortable with it. We

are rationalists and we are inclined to believe that if you cannot see, touch,
weigh and measure it, it isn't real. The poet, Rainer Maria Rilke observed

"the experiences that are called 'visions', the whole so-called 'spirit-world'...
have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which

we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God."

The rationalist in each of us wants to attribute religious ecstasy to indiges-—
tion, or an overly vivid imagination, or chemical intoxication. The text
suggests that we can look again at those peak experiences, be grateful for
them, allow ourselves to trust them even. And just as we get into that, just
as we are about to institutionalize our private experiences, just as we are
getting out the hammer and nails, and assembling the lumber to build the booths,
the text abruptly directs our attention to the valley, and the people in the
valley. Stalking the Holy, that is to say is a project for both places,

Moses, I- am certain, could have stayed forever on the summit of Sinai, having
an extended chat with Jehovah, tucking under his arm absolute ethical certainty
in the form of two stone tablets. But down in the valley, the people are having
a party, they’ve built a golden calf. The genius of the Bible-and the religion
that grows out of it, is that it has to do with both places. It is the rhythm
of that wonderful Psalm we read together: "I lift up my eyes to the hills"

and the Lord who then offers help - also, dramatically, is the Lord of. our
coming and going, our daily living.

The fact is that most of us stalk the holy more in fantasy than in reality.
We're tco busy earning a living to look for the Snow Leopard. We observe
wistfuliy, those fortunate few, our acquaintances who have seen the light and
whose lives seem so full of meaning, at least as they tell it to us. We sneak
a longing glance at the electronic church and in our heart of hearts secretly

~5- . x.

wonder why we don't feel what all those folk on television seem to be feeling,
We fantasize about some wonderful day when we too will glimpse the Snow Leopard,
will see clearly and know who we are and have no doubt at all about who God is
and what he wants of us,

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the simple but radical assertion that the holy God,
the divine mystery, the "mysterium tremendum" is not confined to the top of the
mountain, but is involved in the mundane humanness at the bottom.

That is the Good News because we spend most of our time there. It is so good
that we miss it much of the time, and must hear it in strange places and unusual
voices. John Updike, in Beck is Back, has Beck, a Jewish author, trying to

live with a new wife in a neighborhood of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants in
Ossining, New York. Listen to Beck reflecting on his new friends:

"...many of Bea's crowd went to church, much as they faithfully
played tennis and attended rallies to keep out developers. Yet
their God, for all his colorful history and spangled attributes,
lay above the earth like a whisper of icy cirrus...whereas the
irrepressible Jewish God, the riddle of joking Rabbies, playing
his practical jokes upon Job and Abraham and leading his chosen
into millenia of mire without sco much as the promise of an after-
life, this God - nevertheless entered into the datly grind and
kibitzed at all their transactions." (p. 117)

The Christian Gospel is about a God who inhabits the high and lofty places, and
also the lowly and humble and ordinary places. It is about a God of silent
mountains where we find ourselves occasionally, and busy city streets where we
find ourselves every day, the offices and kitchens, the operating rooms and class
rooms and court rooms. It is about a God to whom the starry heavens bear glorious
witness, and whose entrance to human history was not really a magnificent theo-
phany but a routine birth.

The Christian life, therefore, is here, in this glorious place, in this wonderful
experience of corporate celebration and it is no less here, tomorrow evening

when a volunteer tutor will sit across the table from a youngster and teach

that child how to read a sentence. The God of the Bible is worshipped in gorgeous
anthem and in the love songs we sing to each other: in the stately beauty of the
Sacrament and when, in love, we have soup and sandwiches together. God is adored
in the mountain top of intent baptism ~ and when someone cradles an abused baby

at Cook County Hospital.

The good news of the Gospel is that we can trust our high and holy experiences,
and that we can invest in, and trust and learn from and see God in the wonderful
matrix of humanness in which we do our living.

The God revealed in Jesus Christ will be there for us in the rare, icy stiliness
of the mountain, but he will also "kibitz at all our transactions."

We will continue to stalk the holy, I suppose, each in our own way. The Gospel
of Jesus Christ is the delightful news that if you can't take two months and
look for the Snow Leopard in the high Himalayas, you can find one ten minutes
north of here, in the zoo. Amen.

-~6- =.

Lord of life, we are grateful for those moments of clarity you give to us.
We thank you for experiences so personal and real and intense that we have
not told anyone about them. We thank you, Lord of all, for mystery and
majesty beyond our comprehension; for light in darkness, for occasional
experiences of your goodness.

God of compassion, we here and now thank you for your involvement with us,
where we are most of the time. We praise you for your loving presence in
the midst of the valley, for your healing power which we have felt, for your
reconciling love which on occasion we have been privileged to convey.

Lord God, for all you are and for your presence with us, we honor you, and
praise you and love you; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. .