(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Mountain-tops
and Valleys”, originally shared on February 12, 2026. It was the 398th
video for our YouTube
Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my
wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
Which are better places to be, on mountain-tops or in valleys? Each have their benefits, but only one has changed the world. Today, we’re going to find out which.
Football season is over. The Super Bowl championship game was played
last Sunday. Between 125 and 130 million people are said to have seen it. Do
you remember who won? Probably, but by next month I’m guessing it’s going to be
a fading memory. In six months, forgotten.
If your team won, you are probably still having a mountain-top
experience.
If your team didn’t win, well, researchers have said that the shock can
take 3 days to wear off, while the accompanying depression can take months to
go away. That’s a valley experience.
But, for many the game itself was almost irrelevant.
It was all about the half-time show for some. I myself have been
increasingly put-off, though, by the spectacle of the Super Bowl bordering on
religion (and sometimes crossing the border) including the half-time show that
was particularly crude and offensive this year, while managing at the same time
to be boring.
For others, it was about the food! Super Bowl Sunday is a “cheat day”
for people who are watching their diets. It’s a feast, a mountain-top
experience.
So, I imagine, many people awoke the next day in an emotional valley,
like the speaker in a portion of the poem “For the Time Being” about a large
family gathering after the Christmas holiday celebration, by English poet W.H.
Auden,
“There are enough
Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week —
Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,
Stayed up so late, attempted — quite unsuccessfully —
To love all of our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated our powers.”
Most people are much better at recognizing the valleys of this
life than the mountain-top experiences. And maybe that’s not so unusual.
Something truly extraordinary did take place in an event
described in the Bible as the Transfiguration of Our Lord, recorded in the
Gospel reading that will be shared in most churches all over the world this
coming Sunday, Matthew 17:1-9, but not many saw it for the mountain-top
experience that it was at the time.
Today, it’s common to describe anything we like as “awesome”.
Did some do a small favor for you? That’s awesome! How were your French
fries? They were awesome! How was the game? It was awesome!
But was it? Awesome? Was it a transcendent experience that filled you
with awe?
“Awesome” means to be filled with awe, to be extremely impressive or to
be daunting, inspiring great admiration, apprehension, or fear.
So, no, probably not.
Can we recognize “awesome” when we see it anymore? Or have we become so
focused on our own immediate sensations, on meeting our own needs and
expectations, that we can’t?
Today’s Gospel reading takes place on a literal mountain-top. It
describes an event that transcended time, in which Jesus revealed himself in
his heavenly glory to three of his disciples. It was truly awesome! And
then, as they all came off the mountain to go down to the valley, Jesus told
them not to tell anyone!
What?
Jesus took three of his first and closest
disciples to “a high mountain”, by themselves, and gave them a vision of
eternity. We see it in Matthew 17:1-9. It begins with verses 1-2,
1Six
days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led
them up a high mountain, by themselves. 2And he was
transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes
became dazzling white.
Peter had just confessed his faith in Jesus six days earlier. He had
said it out loud in front of God and everybody. It was the first time anyone
had said, in Jesus’ presence, what the others had only been thinking, “You are
the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Peter confessed that Jesus was the one
that they had been waiting 1,000 years for, and that Jesus was God.
“Six days” is also how Genesis describes God’s Creation of everything
that exists out of nothing as an act of His will. The creative hand of God is
about to be revealed again six days after the confession of St. Peter.
Jesus is transfigured before these disciples, he is revealed to them in
his heavenly glory, his face shines like the sun, and his clothes become
dazzling white. And as they were still trying to process this, he reveals who
he is in his earthly mission, in verses 3-4,
3Suddenly there
appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him. 4Then
Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will
make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”
Moses was the person through whom God gave the religious Law that
defined the life of God’s people. Elijah was the great prophet, a person
who spoke with God’s voice. Together they represented the Law and the
Prophets, aka what were then known as the Scriptures and are known
to us today as the Old Testament.
Peter, who we already know is often the impulsive one, seems to be still
trying to figure out what this all means. He proposes that the three disciples
build a housing development there, three dwellings, one for Moses and for
Elijah and for Jesus. He wants to keep them there. He wants to preserve the
moment.
Then, before Jesus cans respond, we see the meaning of the
Transfiguration in verses 5-8,
5While he was still
speaking, suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice
said, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to
him!” 6When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground
and were overcome by fear. 7But Jesus came and touched them,
saying, “Get up and do not be afraid.” 8And when they looked
up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone.
The disciples knew their Bible, and they knew that people don’t enter
into the divine presence of God and live. So, the disciples fall down, overcome
by fear. And what does Jesus say? “Get up and do not be afraid.” Jesus is fully
human being and fully God. When they are in the presence of Jesus, they
are in the presence of God, yet Jesus calms their fear.
It’s been said that the words “don’t be afraid” or “do not be afraid” or
“fear not”, or something like them appear 366 times in the Bible, one for every
day of the year plus one if there’s a leap year. 😊 I haven’t counted them. 😊, but
if that’s true, there’s one for every day of the year. And I do know that God
can be counted on.
The disciples were having a mountain-top experience. They had
been told that Jesus was going to suffer and die in the previous chapter, in Matthew
16:21. Now they were being given the big picture so that they could see
what it all meant. That’s what mountain-top experiences do.
The traditional site for the Transfiguration
is Mt. Tabor, about 9 miles from Nazareth. It’s not much of a mountain, but it
stands out on the plain near Nazareth. I climbed it when I was a student during
a semester abroad in college and it’s no big deal. I climbed it in the rain,
though, and when I got to the top, the Greek Orthodox monastery there was not
taking in tourists. So, I climbed down in the rain. I did not have a mountain-top
experience.
The three disciples did have a mountain-top experience,
but they couldn’t stay on the mountain-top either. Mountain-tops give us a long
view, a grand vision, the big picture, but we can’t live there. Nothing grows
on mountain tops. Valleys are where the soil is fertile, where things
grow and transform. And Jesus and the three disciples came down from the
mountain top to walk the path that led to the cross. They walked from the
greatest mountain-top to the deepest valley where Jesus gave his
life for the transformation into eternal life for all who believe and are
baptized, giving us victory over sin, death, and all the forces that defy God.
Have you been watching the Winter Olympics?
The athletes have had to struggle to be where they are, many since
childhood. Some have endured great personal tragedies, injuries and set-backs,
even deaths of those close to them, yet they endured.
Maybe you saw on the news a couple of years ago that a study of 1,000
people, a pretty good sample, showed that 40% overall, with 60% of men and 20%
of women, believed that they were in good enough shape to compete in an Olympic
event. Were they all thinking of Curling? Maybe they meant that they could finish
an Olympic event. Maybe they were not aware that the Olympics have qualifying
standards? Or maybe the study was just a test to identify the delusional. 😊
The ancient Olympic Games began in 776 B.C. and ended in 393 A.D. They
were a big deal and Olympic sports would have been familiar to Paul.
Athletes didn’t compete for medals, but for a crown of olive or laurel
tree leaves. That’s where our expression for “honors” as “laurels” comes from.
Paul refers to Olympic sports more than once in the New Testament, but
I’d just like to highlight one, 1 Corinthians 9:24-27:
24 Do you not know
that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize? Run in
such a way that you may win it. 25 Athletes
exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable wreath,
but we an imperishable one. 26 So I do not run
aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air; 27 but
I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself
should not be disqualified.
Notice that Paul didn’t describe athletic events from the point of view
of a spectator, but as a participant.
It’s like what happens when we
worship. We enter into the presence of God. We confess our sins and repent of
them, the valleys of our lives.
We are assured of God’s
forgiveness. It’s a mountain-top experience. We hear the Word of God,
confess our faith.
We’re reconciled with God and
with each other and we receive the Sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion, we
pray, we are blessed, and we are sent into the world to share the Good News of
Jesus Christ that we ourselves have first received!
Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher and theologian, once reflected
on people who go to a worship service and sit there as spectators, as at a
movie or a play. They expect to get something. But that’s consumerism, not
worship.
The question to ask, Kierkegaard said, when worship is over is not,
“What did I get out of that?” but “How did I do?”
We live and work like an Olympic athlete in response to what God has
given us at the cross: an imperishable crown of forgiveness of sins, and life
and salvation.
How can we respond to the mountain-top of God’s presence in the Word of
God and the Sacraments of Holy Communion and Holy Baptism?
The disciples wanted to build temporary
dwellings. The best memorial to God’s saving work, though, is the lives we live
in response to the transformational gifts of God, from the inside out.
And then Jesus makes a very strange request. No. He gives them an order,
in verse 9,
9As they were
coming down the mountain, Jesus ordered them, “Tell no one about the vision
until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.”
Not only does Jesus not want to let the
disciples stay on the mountain top, not only does He not want them to bask in
God’s affirmation, Jesus does not want the disciples to tell anyone about what
had to be the greatest experience in their lives!
Why? Why not have them tell everyone about
this experience. Wouldn’t it validate who Jesus was. Wouldn’t it make his path
easier? And theirs?
No, that’s not how faith works.
Jesus did lots of miracles, and he had
thousands of followers when he was providing free food and medical care. But
when that all stopped His “church growth” graph dropped to zero.
I think that Jesus didn’t want people to
believe in Him for the show. I think that He wanted people to receive the gift
of faith in Him because of what He had done, the love that he was about to show
by giving his life on the cross for the redemption of the world, validated by
taking his life back again and rising from the dead.
I think that He wanted people to see that
the only life that lasts is the life that comes from God for the sake of the
world.
This coming Saturday, February 14th,
is the Valentine’s Day holiday, a shortened form of St. Valentine’s Day,
a holy day.
Our culture has long abandoned it as a
religious celebration. Today, it celebrates romance. There is some basis
for that too, though, in the Christian origin of the “holy day”.
We have no record of a single historic
figure called St. Valentine, but several Christian martyrs named Valentine or
Valentinus have similar life and death stories that have combined to provide
common ground ever since the late 300’s.
Those elements include doing secret weddings
for Roman soldiers and their fiancés when the Roman empire thought that single
men made better soldiers and forbade marriage, imprisonment in a nobleman’s
home and the healing of his daughter resulting in the whole household
converting to Christianity, being sent to prison as a result and sending the
girl a letter saying that he had no regrets which he signed, “Your Valentine”,
and being tortured and then decapitated on February 14th.
Red, the color of St. Valentine’s Day, is
the liturgical color for martyrs.
It is a martyr’s holiday for a saint who
healed and loved selflessly, and it was so until the English poet Geoffrey
Chaucer connected it with romantic love in the late 1300’s. And that’s how most
people in our culture celebrate it today.
Christians celebrate it as an expression of
selfless love, as seen most clearly for us on the cross, a love that is no
longer a secret. It is a love so strong that we can’t keep it to ourselves.
I read a story once about a preacher who had
delivered a sermon on the struggle of serving God in the world in the army of
the Lord.
Afterward, a man came out of the worship
space to shake the preacher’s hand and said, “I too have served here for many
years in the army of the Lord.”
The preacher said, “Really? I don’t remember
seeing you at worship before, or in any of our community activities or
ministries.”
The man leaned forward and whispered, “I’m
in the secret service.”
Don’t be that guy.
There is no secret for us to keep.
We live on the “after” side of “until after
the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.”
We live because of what God has done to
reconcile us to God’s self.
We live mostly in the valleys of life where
we are called, equipped, and sent to serve, where things change and grow and
are transformed.
What was once a secret we now proclaim to
the people we know and to the world that we do not know but that God does.
We live on the other side of the
Resurrection.
Jesus has been raised from the dead and
because He lives, we shall live also.
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