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On This Mountain
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis February 6, 2005, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Exodus 19-20, selected verses Matthew 17:1-9
Primitive cosmology once held that if ever human beings were to brush shoulders with God’s presence on earth, to catch a glimpse of God’s hind parts, the place of meeting could only be on the top of a high mountain, the place on earth raised by God to reach toward the heavens. Cathedrals proclaim as much with their vaulted ceilings and flying buttresses. So too does our everyday speech still presume this worldview, mindlessly asserting the three-storied universe of Scripture in its unholy sense of direction. “Heaven” we say and look up; or staring down at the ground beneath our feet we mutter “Hell.” These nether spaces have been emptied of God’s real presence, of course, because we know so much more now of black holes in a distant galaxy or of gravity’s deathly pull closer to home. Yet I tell you in these latter day of wars and rumors of war, of the earth quaking and the waters rising, of death’s apparent dominion and life’s brevity, that we decline the invitation to “get thee up to a high mountain” at the risk of never meeting the One who made us and in whose mysterious presence we were meant to rejoice forever. So with Moses let us first be summoned to the top of Mount Sinai amid the thunder, the lightening, and the thick smoke of God’s fiery nearness…or more likely let us listen for God’s second-hand address with the crowd that trembles at a distance. For the most part we have made sense of the tangible evidence of Moses’ encounter with God: he returned with Ten Commandments chiseled in stone. These words, we are certain, contain the substance of what we can know about God since none can see God and live. God’s law is revealed to us at the outset for the purpose of prescribing human righteousness in relation to the invisible God and our impossible neighbors. On this mountain, we say, God communicated the truth (which we have translated into a system of correct propositions to be believed) and the goodness (which has become a set of right actions to which we must aspire) for which we were made. The categories that order human life with God on this mountain appear to be, at a glance, moral and theological. Our Calvinist forbears more than most other Christians have confirmed the ultimate seriousness of the word communicated on Sinai’s height. For from the foot of this first mountain going forward, duty has trumped joy and a dour devotion has overshadowed any delight we might exhibit as God’s second children chosen. Never having caught the Israelites’ delight in the law of the Lord, we think God’s primary interest in us involves our moral rectitude and our right belief. Our fear is thus not the fear of those bowed down in awe before the living God, but the fear of those bound and determined by our better behavior not to lose that saved place at the top of God’s three-storied cosmos. But of God’s glory and our awe on this mountain and the next, we can be agnostic if not downright blind! No coalition that I know of has ever been formed to assure God’s glory be made manifest in the courts of our common life for the sake of sheer delight! Not what religion is about! Yet what if our joy at God’s terrible beauty, our pleasure in God’s majestic company, our desire to see God face to face were as much a part of God’s purpose in being known by us as God’s desire for our obedience and everlasting obeisance? Early church fathers and later reformers suggested we listen again on Sinai in order to catch a glimpse of God’s glory and beauty even as we commit to memory the commandments writ in stone. As taken as he was with humanity’s sin and fall from grace, Augustine’s prayers could not contain his joy in the presence of God’s glory: “Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new; late have I loved Thee…Thou didst send forth thy beams and shine upon me and chase away my blindness…Thou didst touch me and I have burned for Thy peace,” he prayed in poetic prose. A millennium or so later, Martin Luther made the case that on Sinai God gave Moses not “prescriptive statements of duties toward God and one’s neighbor in a world that God has created, redeemed and will make new [but rather] descriptive statements of what happens…in a world that God has made for being human in…and promises to bring to the fullness of desire, memory and hope, in a new heaven and a new earth.” So Luther speaks of the first commandment in terms of what it means to have a God, of the heart and its trusts; the second for Luther reads, “You shall not go about with the name of God as though it made no difference”; in the third he hears God’s command to “make a day of celebration holy.” There is delight running through these admonitions, delight of one who has beheld God’s glory. Similarly, Calvin speaks of the third use of the law as that which helps guide us toward a life lived in grateful and joyful response to God’s grace revealed in Jesus Christ. “For what would be less lovable,” he writes, “than the law if, with the importuning and threatening alone, it troubled souls through fear and distressed them through fright?” Such an understanding of Sinai summons us up the second mountain of the morning, the Mount of Transfiguration, where the light of God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ cannot be missed, where the law is perfectly fulfilled in the Son’s self-emptying love. The cell whose light literally brought me to my knees in san Marco was the cell whose fresco proclaimed God’s glory in the blinding white paint that surrounded and almost seemed to emanate from Fra Angelico’s transfiured Christ, a Christ drawn in the form of a cross. Like the disciples who necessarily shaded their eyes at the vision, my head bowed at the brightness of glory brushed across the wall. Being properly reformed so as not to mistake the image for its referent, still I confess that the sight called out of me awe, gratitude, wonder. But I was drawn to this cell as well for the sheer joy in seeing the haunting beauty—there is no other word—the beauty of Fra Angelico’s Christ. It was a beauty which could not be separated from the passion implied in the cruciform, a beauty that necessarily included suffering. “In all this,” says Karl Barth, “[God’s glory] is a glory that awakens joy, and is itself joyful.” But then surely with Augustine’s prayers in the back of his mind, Barth admits that the “the element in the idea of glory that we still lack is that of beauty…God’s beauty…[that] embraces death as well as life, fear as well as joy, what we might call the ugly as well as what we might call the beautiful It reveals itself and wills itself to be known on the road from the one to the other.” On this mountain of transfiguration, what is at stake in our seeing and hearing is not so much moral but [dare I say it?] aesthetic: the beauty in his bosom that transfigures you and me. If such beauty beheld is at least an aspect our relationship with the God who would be known by us, then what might our lives look like were they lived in joyful response? A very different metaphor presents itself, a metaphor Calvin himself is said to have suggested, a metaphor which even the dour Westminster Divines embraced when they said we were made to glorify God and enjoy God forever! “Calvin says somewhere,” writes the dying Reformed preacher John Ames to his young son in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, “that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our behavior, and the reaction of God to us might be thought of as aesthetic rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense.” So in some terrible and beautiful way, to turn the metaphor inside out, George Steiner hears in God’s response to Job’s theologically and morally laden “Why?” only aesthetic categories: “the incommensurable design and beauty of the dawn, the star at morning, the southward stretch of the hawk’s wings, the grace of the unicorn…the springs of the sea, the treasures of the snow…Behemoth and the Leviathan, monsters as mesmeric, as at home in our nightmares as are those set to roar and raven in the ‘Jurassic parks’ of our film industry. Like some ultimate Leonardo, the Deity in Job promenades us through a gallery of masterpieces, of rough sketches, of enigmatically encoded patterns, of grotesques and anatomies…God’s address comes out of an artist’s workshop…theodicy unanswered.” Hence we live on this stage embracing death as well as life, fear as well as joy, the ugly as well as the beautiful, the tragic as well as the comic. We play our part as though the whole plot depended upon it, as though the rhythm would be missed without our leap, as though our indistinguishable head drawn into the crowd completes the picture, as though our one sustained note lends balance to the entire chorus, as though no matter our part, we must be no more and no less than amateurs acting, singing, painting, dancing for the sheer love of it until we lie to die. Who was it who said God’s glory was a human being fully alive? No matter, for revealed on that mountain in the glory and joining on stage is the one human being who alone played our part, fully alive to the glory of God, even unto death upon a cross. Now he awaits our return on another mountain, a mountain where, in the words of George Steiner, “the whispers of shared ecstasy are choral.” On this mountain, the Mount of Zion, the Holy City, New Jerusalem, a feast has been prepared of rich food and aged wines. Music interrupts the silence of death, tears are wiped away, and once again all the morning stars together sing for joy. Listen, then, in these whispers of shared ecstasy for the summons of God to the mountain where together we will one day glorify God and enjoy God forever. |