Mark 9: 2-9 Elevation and Grounding
No church is perfect…yet. All churches have strengths and weaknesses. I want to share with you this morning one of City Centre’s greatest weaknesses. It might not be our only one, but it is a big one. It is our elevator. It must be one of the oldest elevators in Canada. I think it got made as a roll out of the first elevators invented. Unlike most other elevators, it moves up and down but one floor. But it breaks constantly. I see the elevator repair man more than I do most of my congregants. He cannot name a single part that hasn’t been replaced in that thing.
Elevators are expensive. A new one will blow our budget. And yet they are important. Accessibility is part of a church’s witness. Nobody should be excluded because they cannot climb stairs. We even have an adult disabled group during the week and since our food project they gather upstairs. One woman, ,Jasmine, is wheelchair bound. She can walk but only with great difficulty. When the elevator is broken, she needs to shift up stair by stair on her bum. We might want to start praying for an elevator miracle…
I know people in their nineties that are still able to climb stairs quite well, even in our own congregation. Most of us can do without elevators and some of us will even benefit if we aren’t allowed to ever take an elevator. But don’t you sometimes feel if the elevator of your spiritual life is broken? I mean we all need to be elevated to a spiritual perspective on life and on what is going on in the world. We have all experienced such elevation. Especially when you first come to Christ, you experience it, and it is wonderfully freeing.
To many people their church or religion is to them an elevator. Something that must help them to go higher and gain the right perspective. Stagnation is the onset of death, so we all want to be on the move towards a higher plane, a better understanding, and a richer life. And sometimes it feels like your elevator broke. Like you are barely better off emotionally – and perspective wise than people who aren’t Christians.
Mark 9 tells the story of three disciples being elevated. They receive an elevated understanding of history and how Gods plan has been rolling out throughout. That is represented by their engagement with Moses, Elijah and Jesus and their conversation. They get an elevated view of Christ’s glory, almost a sneak preview of what we read about in the book of Revelation: Christ on the throne shining brightly and above all. They witness in a spectacular way that Jesus has so much more than any human being can offer.
Wouldn’t it be great, if we can get that right now? If we during this tumultuous and strange time in history can be elevated to an understanding of what is going on and how it all fits into God’s plans? Wouldn’t it be great if Jesus could in the midst of all this uncertainty and turmoil, shine brightly in his glory before us?
Yes and no. Let us see what this story can teach us about elevation and broken elevators…
Elevation begins as interruption and effort
Have you ever noticed that with the exception of very small children, people never go on about how great the elevator ride was? Most people dread going into an elevator. When they have to, they stare at the lights as if staring at them is able to speed up the elevator. The only motivation to get into an elevator is if you have a particularly good reason to be at the place it takes you. Nobody rides elevators for fun.
So, this passage tells us that Jesus took only a few disciples with him after a long week and that he took them high up a mountain. Let us just pause for a moment and realize just how disruptive this was. They lived in community with the others with assigned duties and rhythms. Mountains were indeed considered places of revelation. Moses got the law on a mountain and died on one with a view of the promised land. But mountains to most were also dangerous places. Places where you can get tired and run out of food and water. Places you can get attacked in easily. As special an experience the transfiguration on the mountain was to them, it is safe to say that the exhausting elevator journey to there was not fun at all.
Paul claims to be swept up to the “third heaven”. These disciples and most of us do not get rocketed to elevating experiences quickly. Even Paul’s sweeping was preceded by much suffering. See invitations to such experiences doesn’t feel like wedding invitations. It feels like somebody inviting you to take an elevator ride to somewhere unknown. It feels disruptive, senseless, and weird. Even when you accept the invitation, it is a strenuous exercise wrapped in uncertainty about whether it is all worth it.
So here is the dilemma. You cannot say no to interruptions and exertion and say yes for elevations from God. The one goes with the other. An openness to be interrupted and stretched is Christian elevation 101. Openness to being interrupted by God, is not to be confused with being unfocused and easily distracted by anybody. That is laziness. But to be interrupted by things that are important to God. To work hard at mastering something that will help you serve people, is utterly worth it.
I recently started out taking a bicycle mechanics course. All my life I rode bikes and loved them but always left the technical aspects to others. This has cost sometimes them and sometimes myself dearly. So I decided it was time to stretch myself. Being able to service a bike and help others seemed to be like a destination worth it. The road to that destination is so much harder than I thought. I am confronted with how little I know and how bad I am with the same hands that can type sermons so quick. That is hard! It takes more time, money and energy than I thought it would. But even on my worst evenings driving back from Abbotsford tired late at night, I have this peace that this is exactly what I needed right now in my life. Strange as it might sound, this bicycle mechanics field pulls me, a full time pastor closer to God and other people.
I bet there would be many stories like mine among us. Never close yourself up to be interrupted or taught by Jesus. Be like Jim Newman is what I am trying to say, I guess.
Elevation is suitable for perspective, not residency
What Peter and friends got on that mountain was perspective. It must have been awesome to be let into this conversation that sheds light on God’s plans in history and how it now unfolds in Jesus. When we read that Peter wanted to erect huts, we assume he wanted to build something symbolic and memorial. But huts, even the ones the Jews built during their festivals were built so that actual people could reside in them. Peter wanting to build huts is not only Peter wanting not to forget the experience, it is Peter not wanting it to end. It is Peter wanting to stay put in the ecstatic and not wanting to return to the mundane valleys of human struggle down below. That was part of what made his response a fearful one. He had a fear that it would pass.
But he wasn’t allowed to build it. God the Father took over the show and afterwards Jesus lead them down the mountain into the valleys again. See, God is a mystery. What I mean when I say that, is that God and Jesus cannot be contained. Their actions do not always fit our normal day to day categories. Therefore, we should be open to encounter God through mystical experiences. Things our minds cannot rationally explain. But some Christians get all hung up on this and their walk with God become one big hunt for the next spiritual high. A search for escaping the pain and responsibilities of everyday life. It is as if those people missed that Jesus took the disciples down again and also that these kind of experiences were few and far in between. Jesus’s mission and his work for us lies in the valleys of ordinary lives and human pain and suffering.
When the disciples found themselves in the depths of a human need. 5000 people needing something to eat they put this to Jesus. In a way he basically told them: “Don’t just stand there, do something’ because he told them: “You, give them something to eat”. On the mountaintop, it is like he told Peter the exact opposite: “Just stand there, don’t do anything”. Let me act, just take in my glory as I do what you cannot do.
You and I, we need both. And God will bless us with both. Mystical things we cannot plan and control. Things that happen at just the right time. That knowing beyond all knowing that God sometimes gives you. But then also experiences where we do not feel his supernatural power at all. Where we feel He leaves it all up to us.
Our church suddenly has exciting options to develop our property and attend to needs in our community in a way that will also benefit us. I am amazed. It has nothing to do with us but rather with the faithfulness off those that has come before us. It’s timing couldn’t be better. It feels like a gift from God. Pure grace. Like God is saying; “Just stand there and don’t do anything”. And yet as we continue along, I also realize that there are aspects to this process that is going to feel like it is all up to us. Like God is saying: “Don’t just stand there, do something!”. Negotiate shrewdly. Plan well. Network. Think. Execute.
Jesus goes down with you
But you know what the best part is? Even though Jesus was more visible and beautiful on the mountain. He was right there with and no less present with the disciples in the valleys than He was on the mountaintop. We sometimes notice it and sometimes find it hard to, but Jesus is always with us. It was after all one of his last promises to the disciples when he went back.
All other deities wait on a very high mountaintop for you to reach them. Jesus is the only one that travels with you up the mountain. He is the only one that went down into the valleys of pain, suffering and death to reach us and take us further. Jesus and the community He placed us in, has become to us the elevator that makes accessible that which would otherwise have been unattainable to people lost in their sins like us.
Close
On April 1st 1989 the funeral of the Empress of Austria took place from the St. Stephen Cathedral in Vienna. A huge precession lead up to the church door. But part of the ceremony involved that when the procession reach the church door, they find the church door shut closed. A man then walked up to the door and knocked three times with his walking stick. “Who should we let in?” the friars replied from within. The man then proceeded to read all the empress Titles at the time of her death. It’s quite lengthy. Do you want to hear them? He said:
“Emperor of Austria, Apostolic Queen of Hungary, Queen of Bohemia, Queen of Dalmatia, Queen of Croatia, Queen of Slavonia, Queen of Galicia and Lodomeria, Queen of Illyria, Queen of Jerusalem, ArchDuchess of Austria, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, Grand Duchess of Kraków, Duchess of Lorraine, Duchess of Styria, Duchess of Carinthia, Duchess of Carniola, Duchess of Bukovina, Grand Princess of Transylvania, Margrave of Moravia, Duchess of Upper and Lower Silesia, Duchess of Modena, Duchess of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla, Duchess of Auschwitz and Zator, Duchess of Teschen, Duchess of Friaul, Duchess of Ragusa, Duchess of Zara, Princessly Countess of Habsburg, Princessly Countess of Tyrol, Princessly Countess of Kyburg, Princessly Countess of Gorizia and Gradisca, Princess of Trent, Princess of Brixen, Margrave of Upper and Lower Lusatia, Margrave in Istria, Countess of Hohenems, Countess of Feldkirch, Countess of Bregenz, Countess of Sonnenberg, Lady of Trieste,Lady of Cattaro, Lady on the Windic March, Grand Voivode of the Voivodeship of Serbia. “
We do not know her, the friars replied. He then again knocked and read a more abbreviated version of it. Again the friars replied that they do not know her. A third time the man knocked but this time upon the question of whom they should let in he replied:
“Our sister Zita, a poor sinner”
The doors opened and the friars came out to carry the casket of Empress Zita inside.
You know what makes this story beautiful? That it is also our story. Not our achievements, titles or number of admirers will guarantee us entrance onto the mountaintop from where Jesus reigns. We cannot elevate ourselves. We are let in because Jesus descended into the lowly valleys of our broken and sinful existence.
You are welcome poor sinner!
Amen