Catching Glimpses

March 2, 2025March 17, 2026
by Sara Baron

“Catching Glimpses” based on Exodus 34:29-35 and Luke 9:28-36

The story of the Transfiguration is intentionally placed on this Sunday, the final Sunday before we start the season of Lent so that it can foreshadow the Easter narrative. Jesus is seen “in his glory” and Peter, James, and John get to see and hear his connection to God’s-own-self. He became bright and shiny, like lightening even, reminiscent of how Moses looked after he’d been talking to God.

Because, the texts seem to say, God is bright and shiny, so amazing and beyond-this-world that those in close contact with the Divine are changed so they don’t appear to be exactly from this world either. Holiness appears in them, and it changes how they’re seen.

In the story of Moses, the people are disconcerted by this shining, and he ends up having to wear a veil most of the time so they’re less terrified. In the story of Jesus, Peter is more delighted than freaked out, but then again maybe not because delighted people aren’t as apt to put their feet in their mouth as freaked out people are.

In any case, the culmination of the Transfiguration is God saying, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him,” yet another affirmation of the connection between God and Jesus.

There is a tendency to think of Moses and Jesus as special, some versions of official Christian doctrine focus heavily on the “uniqueness” of Jesus. I’ve always wondered about that. Clearly the life of Jesus and his teachings have had profound impact on the world and on my own life. That said, I’ve always thought of Jesus as consistent with the other messengers of the Divine – that all those sharing God’s love, God’s grace, God’s mercy, God’s compassion, God’s dreams for peace and justice are … well, on the same page, or at the very least in the same book ;).

Clearly Moses and Jesus were both profound messengers for the Divine, ones from whom major religions developed. But, just as clearly, there is wisdom in each person and in each part of creation that can also speak to the wondrous love of God.

Or, to put it in the words of the poetic anna blaedel, “All around me I see love swirling, too. Ferocious love. Liberating love. Love that leaves no one alone, and no one behind. Love that refuses siloing, and zero-sum-games of divide and conquer. Love that risks it all. Love that fights to stay open-hearted, tender, soft, here. Love that fights, to be with and for each other.”

CC0 licensed photo by Pawel Madeja from the WordPress Photo Directory: https://wordpress.org/photos/photo/148645e33f/

There is holiness all around us. Sometimes it is easy to find when sunlight illuminates the veins on a green leaf. Sometimes one finds it standing by a river or stream and watching water flow. Sometimes one finds it seeing two people hug each other. Sometimes in watching someone walk down the street bopping to music. Most often, I see God’s shiny, astounding love in the human beings I take the time to get to know. Because, heavens, people are extraordinary- creative and thoughtful, resilient and funny, loving and compassionate. Maybe not all people all the time, but most people much of the time.

OK, fine, I can hear you all thinking it. There are exceptions, yes. Some of them seem very visible right now. But I think when people attempt to snuff out the love of God within it unusually because of a deep hurt within. But go with me on most people most of the time, and ignore the exceptions for now, can you?

These days when I think of the transfiguration, it is less about the specialness of Jesus and more about the ways that reality snuck into the mundane. I think God’s shiny love exists EVERYWHERE and in EVERYONE, even if some people try to smother it in themselves. And if we were able to see with people as they really are, they’d shine like lightening too. So, too, would all of creation. Once piece of grace is the capacity to catch a glimpse of the holiness that is everywhere all around us, and every glimpse we get is a gift.

The story says God was visible in Moses and Jesus, but let me assure you, God is visible in you too.

And, because the world says otherwise, let me be very clear:

God is visible in you, beloveds who are trans and nonbinary.

God is visible in you, beloveds who are women and femmes.

God is visible in you, beloveds with beautiful shades of brown skin.

God is visible in you, beloveds who have immigrated, migrated, or become refugees.

God is visible in you, beloveds who are living in poverty.

God is visible in you, beloveds who are incarcerated.

God is visible in you, beloveds who are unhoused.

God is visible in you, beloveds who work in or for government.

God is visible in you, beloveds who are scared and overwhelmed.

God is visible in you, beloveds of God.

And in everyone else too.

God’s holy wonder is with us all, and everywhere in the world. May we be blessed with the grace-filled capacity to notice. Amen

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Untitled

February 11, 2024
by Sara Baron

“Dazzling Blackness” based on Exodus 16:15-25 and Mark 9:2-9

This week has included a delightful amount of sunlight. Which was nice because I’d almost forgotten what it was like. Several times I found myself turning my face to the sun, closing my eyes, and just savoring the wonder of warmth on my face.

The sun can feel like a gift directly from God, especially after dreary winter days, and I have realized that the delightful warmth of the sun is something I associate with the story of the transfiguration, when we’re told “And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them.” I envision Jesus shining like the sun.

Which, I think is pretty much in the text.

And I think is a gorgeous metaphor.

It is an especially gorgeous metaphor in the time it comes from, when nights were unyieldingly dark and the sun was the way things were illuminated. When it was day, people could see clearly. When it was night, they could not. Then, to have Jesus shine like the sun serves to remind people of the ways God illuminates truths that are otherwise not easily seen. Its lovely.

I think, though, that is also incomplete. If Jesus shining like the sun was one single metaphor in the midst of many, it would be an important one. But there are a LOT of metaphors about God and Jesus as the Light of the World, and all together they end up creating a mental narrative that light is good and dark is bad. Right? Which fits the whole “it is easier to see things in light” idea.

Light is only half the story. I’ve been asked a lot about day and night recently, and found myself saying, “it is dark right now because the sun is shining on the other half of the world.” Light and darkness are balanced on our planet, and focusing on just one half of that whole gets us out of balance.

The total solar eclipse is seen from Charleston, South Carolina, on August 21, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / MANDEL NGAN (Photo credit should read MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

And darkness has its own profound spiritual gifts. Darkness is the space for rest and restoration. It is also the time for un-productivity. Those things you can do in the light – the planting and sowing, knitting and weaving, cooking (or gathering manna) and cleaning up – just don’t work as well in the dark. Historically nighttime was for storytelling and song, snuggling and simply being. The demands of the day couldn’t be met a night, so night had its own softer rhythm.

Slower, more about connection and joy, a time to make sense of things that had happened, a time to consider what was coming. Time for prayer, and contemplation. Time for rest – physical and otherwise.

In this “city that lights and hauls the world,” we are at the epicenter of messing up darkness by making it possible to be productive during the night! Maybe this is why the image of Jesus shining feels incomplete to me – we are used to lots of shining and seeing the value of light, but we don’t get enough darkness.

In the book “The Dark Night of the Soul” by Thomas Moore, the metaphor of darkness is expanded and used to make space for times of grief, uncertainty, and when healing is desperately needed. Moore talks of those as times when we can’t connect to God because the ways we once understood God don’t fit how we now understand things. For him, the darkness becomes a womb, a place where development is happening without being seen, a place one stays in until one is ready to leave and able to thrive outside the womb.

Which is all to say that God is found in the darkness, and not just in the light, and I fear that modern Christian faith over focuses on the light, just like modern life does. We fight back the darkness with LED bulbs, and we miss the gifts the darkness means to give us.

I also want to take this one step further, when we associate light with God we then end up associating darkness with … not God? Maybe even with evil. In our society, which is full up to the brim with white supremacy narratives, that creates big dangers. At the time of Jesus, racism wasn’t one of the issues on the table. But today, it IS. And while light and dark aren’t the same thing as light skin and dark skin, they’re related enough that when we emphasize the goodness of light, we end up supporting the narratives of white supremacy. And when we emphasize fighting back against the powers of darkness, we end up supporting the narratives of white supremacy.

Which, clearly, isn’t what we want to do.

So I want to reimagine this story in the simplest of ways. What if Peter, James, and John get to the top of the mountain and see Jesus transfigured before them, and his clothes become dazzlingly black, such as no pigment on earth could dye them? And then the story goes on like we know it, with Elijah and Moses appearing, Peter sticking his foot in his mouth, God blessing Jesus, and Jesus requesting the whole experience stays a secret.

What happens in our imagination if the clothes are dazzling black? What happens if we see Jesus transfigured and instead of the ways that light is reflected by white, what we see is light being absorbed by black? Is it less dazzling? More? Less sacred? More? Maybe just the same, but different too.

Of the many gifts of darkness, one of them is that there aren’t shadows in darkness. Jung speaks eloquently about our shadow selves, the ones we try to hide that emerge despite out best efforts. Which, really sounds like the metaphor I’m concerned about, but I think we can glean something from it. Especially because the parts we experience as “shadows” are wonderful and important parts of ourselves that we’ve denied, but are are beloved by God. But in darkness, there are no shadows. Which I think suggests that darkness makes space for us to integrate ourselves, the self we project into the world with the self we try to hide, and to simply be as a human – imperfect but beloved by God. Darkness lets us be whole, make space for our whole self, and notices the gifts of all aspects of our beings. Darkness is a place for healing and integration! What a wonderful, and needed, gift!

What if the dazzling black of Jesus’s clothes that is awe inspiring like catching a glimpse of the cosmos itself, was also an experience of profound love where Peter, James, and John realized that they were loved as they were – all parts of themselves, even the ones that they struggled to love or were ashamed of? What if the reason Peter offers to build a monument is because it is so utterly amazing to find out that God can love the whole of you, even when you struggle to do so yourself? What if the dazzling blackness is being wrapped in the story that you are already loved, just as you are, without hesitation, and without an expectation that it takes producing enough to be enough? What if our humanity is found in the meaning-making of darkness instead of in the production of light?

What if the dazzling blackness is another form of manna in the desert – a way of God taking care of the things the people need? And what if it is meant to be shared with abundance because there is plenty – of manna, of love, of darkness?

What if all we have to do to experience it is to turn out the lights?

Amen

February 11, 2024

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
Pronouns: she/her/hers
http://fumcschenectady.org/
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

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“Mountaintop Views” based on Exodus 24:12-18 and Matthew 17:1-9

February 23, 2020
by Sara Baron

When
I was 13 I read the Chronicles of Narnia. They were good, not my
favorites, but easily kept my attention to finish all the books.
However, it was not until MANY years later that I learned that the
books were written as intentional Christian metaphors, and I was
floored. Nothing, at all, in the books had felt like Christianity to
me. I didn’t go back to reread them, but I did get peer pressured
into seeing some of the movies, at which point I was able to see
both: 1. How the story could have been written and understood as
Christian and – at the same time – 2. How I entirely missed it.

(The
key really being that I was raised in a Christianity that centered on
“Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me” while
those narratives are inherently violent.)

It is
a little bit embarrassing though, to have missed the entire point.
However, I just didn’t see it. I couldn’t. There is a deep truth to
the fact that we can’t see things that we don’t have the context to
make sense of. The Chronicles of Narnia didn’t look to me the way
Christianity looked. Now, there are 2.3 Billion Christians in the
world, and I don’t think it is reasonable to assume we all understand
our faith in the same way. Sometimes it is a little bit startling to
realize just how wide Christianity is and how often it contains its
own opposites.

At
the same time, that’s sort of the beauty of it all. People from an
incredibly wide range of worldviews, life experiences, and
backgrounds are all able to find meaning in our tradition because it
is quite adaptable to variation.

The
scriptures this week have led me to thinking a lot about perspective,
as they both have to do with changing perspectives. Mountaintops
themselves are places where people see things differently. Some part
of that has to do with the effort expended to get to the top, and
another part has to do with seeing things from a different angle.
From the top of the mountain, it is easier to see the forest than the
individual trees. It is also easier to understand how various parts
of the landscape related to each other.

Additionally,
both of these stories have transformational experiences occur at the
tops of those mountains. Moses has been called up the mountain by
God, and leaves behind the people he is leading in order to follow
God’s instructions. As Moses ascends, a cloud descends. For the
people left behind, that may have created a sense of mystery or
distance from Moses on the mountain, or perhaps anxiety for his well
being.

But
for Moses, alone on the mountain in the midst of a dense fog, for 6
days without further instruction, that was likely INTENSE, like a 6
day silent retreat with visual sensory deprivation. When I had a 6
hour drive home from college in the days before cell phones, the time
alone with myself was enough to be disconcerting and clarifying. 6
days alone on a mountain in deep fog would be plenty of time for
reflection – to say the least. There are many people who can’t
handle 30 seconds of silence – for good reason. Probably most
people in our society get squirmy well before 30 awake minutes
without distractions. But 6 days!!! Yet, the people I know who
have gone 6 days or more away from distractions all describe it as
holy and perspective changing, although not usually easy.

The
six days are a passing note in the story, but my goodness I think
they matter. On the seventh day, God calls Moses and the cloud
dissipates to reveal the “glory of God” which was so intense the
people at the bottom of the mountain could see it. After 6 days of
dense fog, that also must have been a new and different sort of
intense. AND THEN, Moses enters the cloud WITH God and they spend 40
days and 40 nights together.

This
is one of the stories of Moses receiving the 10 Commandments, and it
seems to emphasize the holiness and uniqueness of the experience.
Moses got A LOT of time with the Divine – way more than his
preparatory 6 days.

This
story is cleaned up to fit into a good, faithful telling, but there
is an incredible core to it. As Addison Wright once pointed out, the
faith traditions in the Ancient Near East at this time were all god
and goddess centric. That is, people sacrificed at Temples or
engaged in behaviors meant to please the gods, with the goal of
gaining favors from the gods. Favors like fertility for people and
and flocks, rain for the fields, etc. Thus faith, worship, and
offerings were largely transactional. Wright believes that something
entirely new emerged in the Sinai desert, and that something new is
the core of this story.

That
something new was the concept of a God who cared how people treated
EACH OTHER rather than simply being interested in
self-aggrandizement. That is, the faith traditions of the area
really saw gods and goddesses as being like powerful people –
selfish, greedy, and needing to be manipulated into helping out. But
somehow, a small group of desert wanderers came to understand a God
(possibly singular, more likely this started as a primary or tribal
god for them) whose PRIMARY CONCERN was moral behavior. And that’s
the story of the rest of the Bible, right? The people try to claim
that they’re all about God and God keeps on responding, “then take
care of the vulnerable among you and build a just society. THAT is
what I want.”

This
new idea of a God interested in moral human behavior and a just
society is the core message lurking under this cleaned up version
about Moses, a mountain, a fog, a fire, and a lot of waiting. It is
impossible to tell where the original story lies and where it has
been adapted, but the core is powerful and the current version is
powerful and they’re both worthy of consideration.

The
mountaintop experience being such a powerful part of the Jewish
story, it makes a lot of sense that the Gospel writer Matthew tells
the Transfiguration story as another mountaintop story. In this
case, rather than a dense fog, it is as if a fog has been lifted and
the disciples are finally able to see clearly.

From
the Gospel writer’s perspective, people were confused into thinking
that Jesus was just another teacher/healer, but on the mountaintop
they saw just how holy and special he really was. The experience of
being close to God on the mountaintop is repeated, with God’s own
voice speaking. “This is my child, the beloved, with whom I am
well pleased.” It doesn’t get much better than that! Yet those are
the words that whisper through the ages, being shared time and time
again, because those are the words that God speaks to each of us.
“This is my child, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
Imagining being on mountaintop seeing God’s delight in Jesus reminds
us of why we continue to work in the world as the Body of Christ.

The
perspective change on the mountaintop is interesting. In these
stories, new insights are gleaned, ones that change lives. I’ve been
thinking about when those perspective shifts can happen for the rest
of us. Climbing mountains remains a good option 😉 but what are
others? Some of the most common in the church are mission trips, or
participating in new-to-you ministries of the church. Anytime we
meet and engage with people who are different from us, we gain
valuable perspective. And, the more we listen to people, the more we
learn. Sometimes I think perspective shifts are just direct gifts
from God. Other times they come after long term spiritual practice
or prayer. Some require those 6 days of silence in dense fog (or
variations thereof). Julia Cameron in “The Artists Way” says the
way not to get stuck is to write 3 pages of longhand every day and
have a date with yourself to do something new every week. Her
particular goal is to keep creative juices flowing, but it turns out
those are related, aren’t they?

One
other intersecting piece comes to mind. When our anxiety is UP, we
tend to see the world more in black and white. So, rather than
developing increasing capacities to see many perspectives in the
world, we will tend to pick one and STICK WITH IT AT ALL COSTS. The
challenge is, that for most of us today, anxiety is high. Of course,
the current power structure (of any time and place) benefits from
the increased anxiety that leads people to either/or thinking and
doubling down into opposing camps. It maintains the status quo. The
status quo is generally the compromise between two opposing camps,
right? But what is really great for people are win-win situations,
which require creative thinking, the capacity to see multiple
perspectives, and openness to new ideas.

Now,
it turns out we can’t spend our whole lives on mountaintops, and we
all exist within some parameters of perspective that we can’t just
will our ways out of. Furthermore, we LITERALLY can’t see things we
aren’t expecting to see, which makes it SUPER hard to break out of
our perspective when it is… in fact…. wrong.

My
favorite idea from John Wesley is this, “Sometimes each of us are
wrong. Clearly, if we knew when we are wrong, we would correct
ourselves and not be wrong. So, sometimes when others disagree with
us, it is actually a sign that we are currently wrong. Since we
don’t know which times those are, we should approach all
disagreements with humility.”

What
would have happened if Moses came back down the mountain with a new
conception of the Divine and people said, “naw, that doesn’t sound
right?” Where would we be today? Where would the world be?

Transfiguration
Sunday is the final Sunday before Lent. It foreshadows for us the
perspective shift of Easter, and by giving us a foretaste of it,
gives us the motivation to engage in reflection for Lent to prepare
ourselves for Easter. It turns out that Lent is also meant to give
us a perspective change. It slows us down, offers us time to think,
and reflect, and consider.

There
are a lot of ways to expand our worldviews, to glean a better
understanding of what is going on all around us. None of them are
perfect, and our capacities to see and understand will be limited,
but thanks be to God, we can grow and become. May we take the view
from the mountaintop and let it change us from the inside out. Amen

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
Pronouns: she/her/hers
http://fumcschenectady.org/
 https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

February 23, 2020

Sermons

“Regrounding”based on 1 Kings 19: 11-16 and Mark 9:2-9

February 11, 2018February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

“Domination systems are humanly contrived legal, social, political, economic, military, and religious systems deliberately designed and built to create and maintain power by a few at the top over the many below them. They exist to perpetuate the power of dominators over those dominated, explain why it is necessary, and to transfer wealth from workers up the ladder to the few obscenely wealthy persons at the top of the pyramid. Domination systems of various types have existed since the beginning of recorded history,”¹ although not all human systems have been domination systems.

God works in the world to disrupt systems of domination and oppression, to build cooperation and connection, to bring justice and wholeness. This is both God’s long-term work, and true in the eternal now, and God does it without dominating us or requiring us to get on board. As people of faith, we seek to work with God in the the world to disrupt systems of domination and oppression, to build cooperation and connection, to bring justice and wholeness. In short, we fundamentally believe that all people matter, and we work to make the world better for all people, not just for the people at the top, and not just for ourselves.

We get together in worship to center ourselves in beauty and wonder, to connect to the Divine and to each other, and to find meaning and direction to take into the rest of our lives. We center worship around readings from the Bible that have been helping people figure out how to do this work for many, many years.

The problem is that the very same texts that we gather around for clues of how God is at work disrupting domination systems have regularly been appropriated BY the domination systems TO dominate. So, we bring our whole selves to these conversations: our bodies to check when things seem wrong on a gut level, our brains to engage in critical thinking, and our spirits who yearn for justice as deeply as God does to see if God’s justice is found in the stories. We seek to be sure that we are working with God, not with systems of domination. There are no guarantees that we’ll get this right, but we try anyway.

With our critical thinking in tact, we might be tempted to disregard the story of the Transfiguration. After all, it doesn’t fit into how the world works as we know it. That is a sensible critique, but not a holistically reasonable one. The stories in the Bible are meant to help us find meaning and learn of God, but that doesn’t indicate that the best way to make meaning from them is to assume they’re objectively true and historically accurate. Instead, it means that we look carefully at their symbolism and metaphors, taking those seriously as part of how meaning is made from them.

That’s a wordy way of saying that I’m not particularly interested in the question, “did the transfiguration happen?” but I’m VERY interested in the questions, “What was the writer of the Gospel of Mark trying to communicate to us with this story?” and, “What meanings can be drawn from this story that still hold relevance for us today?”

Mark is telling a story with deep ties to the stories of his (Jewish) faith, building meaning on top of meaning. Elijah has already been connoted in the Gospel. John the Baptist was set up as a “new” (or returned?) Elijah making way for Jesus. The arrival on the mountaintop of Moses and Elijah symbolizes “the law and the prophets” as well as the two most significant prophets of old. I also think it is interesting that the two are Moses and Elijah and not Moses and David. The Jewish people had expected a Messiah who was a king, a king in the line of David, but the early Christians use symbolism of the prophets who called for justice to explain Jesus, NOT the symbolism of power over people!

Ched Meyers of the distinguished Mark commentary, Binding the Strong Man, wrote, “each of the two great prophets represent those who, like the disciples at this moment, beheld Yahweh’s epiphany on a mountain at crucial periods of discouragement in their mission.”²

To be specific, Meyers is connecting the journey that Jesus and the disciples took up the mountain to the one that Elijah had taken in the story we read today, and the one that Moses took to get the 10 commandments.

A refresher on those stories is in order. Elijah was a northern prophet called by YHWH during the reign of King Ahab (who may be most famous for being married to Queen Jezebel, whose reputation is distinctly undeserved). There was great fighting between the prophets of YHWH and the prophets of other gods at that time, and the palace was not in support of the prophets of YHWH. After a particularly intense defeat of the other prophets, Elijah fled the wrath of the palace. He was exhausted, overwhelmed, and feeling defeated. The story says God took care of him on his journey, and he came to rest in a cave on a mountain in the desert. Then comes our reading today – Elijah coming out of the cave to experience the Divine and God not being in the terrible displays of power and destruction but rather in the silence.

After the time to go away, the time to be cared for, the time to rest and recuperate, and the time to experience a connection to God again, Elijah was sent back down the mountain to continue the work to which he’d been called. He also was sent to find his own replacement, since his work would outlive him.

The story of Moses coming down a mountain with the 10 commandments is well known; it is an image seen regularly and a story alluded to often. Yet, we often forget what happens when Moses gets to the bottom! It turns out he was up on the mountain for a LONG time. The people left behind had gotten scared, and they started looking for reassurance, which took the form of creating out of a statute of a calf out of gold as a new “god” to worship.

The story says that when Moses got to the bottom of the mountain after his intense and powerful experience with God and saw the actions of the people he got so mad that he threw the 10 commandments down and broke them! Eventually Moses went BACK up the mountain to get a new copy of the commandments.

After the time of connection with God, a time of visioning a new kind of society without domination, and soaking in the hope of it all; and after seeing the fear of the people and how hard it was for them to trust in God; and then after climbing the mountain to start again, Moses finally came back down the mountain and was heard by the people. His ministry continued, starting with communicating with the people what he’d heard on the mountain. The 10 commandments would be part of the legacy of the work of the people that would outlive Moses.

Meyers is suggesting that those mountaintop experiences of God were not just life-giving moments in the lives of the prophets. They came in the midst of great struggles and discouragements, and those are part of the meaning intended by Mark. Mark puts this story in the midst of the major transition in his book. In Mark 1-8 we hear of Jesus’ ministry, primarily in Galilee. Then, at the end of Mark 8, we hear for the first time that Jesus’ death is coming. Immediately following is this story of the transfiguration. Then, soon after this story is a reiteration of the teaching that Jesus is going to be killed.

Jesus’ ministry started in Mark with a blessing from God. After his baptism, the story reads “And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased,‘” (Mark 1:11). This transition to the next era of his ministry, the march to his death, starts with a blessing that sounds very similar, “Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” (Mark 9:7). The primary difference seems to be that an instruction for the disciples is included in this blessing. Those disciples are the ones who will continue Jesus’ ministry after his death.

While it is easy to see the glory of the transfiguration as a foreshadowing of Jesus’ resurrection (which it is), it also looks like the transfiguration is a step on the way to the cross. Now, you don’t often hear me say “the way to the cross,” but this week I found someone who put words to what I mean by that, and since I can share his words, I can feel OK saying “the way to the cross.” In this way, we see how Jesus’ death on the cross served to break the domination system, and did so with the tools of the kindom. These words come from Rodney J. Hunter:

“It is important, however, when speaking of the way of the cross, to be clear about what it does not mean. It does not mean that we should seek or regard suffering as a spiritual good in itself or as inherently saving and redemptive – as centuries of misguided Christian theology and piety have often maintained. Jesus did not die because his suffering as such could purge the world of sin and evil. He died because the powers of evil sought to destroy his witness to nonviolent love, justice, and truth. His passion revealed, not only the ‘evilness of evil’ – its intrinsic, deadly violence – but the transforming power of divine love, a powerful, assertive love that does not dominate and defeat evil so much as challenge, expose, and seek to transform it. Such love alone ultimately carries the day; it alone is truly redemptive and saving.

Christians are therefore not called to exhibit a passive love that simply tries to be good and avoid evil. Nor is the way of the cross a private beating of personal woes for the sake of Jesus. It is rather a vigorous, assertive pursuit of social and personal righteousness through a love that refuses to play the world’s power game of domination, exploitation, greed and deception.”³

This gospel moment of transfiguration blesses Jesus for the work he will do to reveal the evil of the domination system AND to prepare the disciples for the next steps of their work to learn how to live that passionate love that will transform the domination system itself.

After that time up on the mountaintop, to see clearly the wonder of God’s work in the world, to understand the depth of the call Jesus had to follow, the disciples were sent back down the mountain. They were sent down to keep on learning, to see healing, to build connections, to struggle with the domination system, to be witnesses to death, and to find the strength to go on anyway.

The transfiguration story certainly foreshadows the rest of Mark, it also foreshadows life as a follower of Jesus for all time. May we keep learning its lessons. May we be instruments that continue Jesus’ ministry. Amen

1Jim Jordal, “What is a Domination System” found on 2/10/2017 athttp://www.windsofjustice.org/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=356 written on March 14, 2013.

2Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man (Orbis Books: Maryknoll, NY, 1988, 2008), page 250.

3Rodney J. Hunter, Pastoral Reflections on Mark 9:2-9 in Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 1 edited by David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor (Louisville and London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008) 454.

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Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

Sermons

“The Value of Mountaintops” based on Exodus 34:29-34 and Luke…

February 8, 2016February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

The story of the Transfiguration, as the Gospel lesson is called, comes up every year the Sunday before Ash Wednesday. Conveniently, it is found in each of the synoptic Gospels, so there is a different version for every year. Basically, I’m saying that this is the 10^th year in a row that I’ve preached on this story, and I’m sort of amazed that there are new things to notice in it.

The first thing came from this line, “Just as [Moses and Elijah] were leaving Jesus, Peter said to Jesus “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah” – not knowing what he said.” It is easy to assume that this is just another story of Peter being an idiot, because if you pay attention to the Gospels that’s a major theme. I’ve suggested that in the past, and talked about how human it is to want to hold on to a moment and memorialize it in physical space. I’ve talked about Peter talking because he is anxious, and not even listening to himself, because he doesn’t know what else to do.

Another possibility occurred to me this week. I thought to ask, “where is the mountaintop” and while the particular mountain isn’t definitive, the answer is that it is somewhere in Galilee. That answer is enough. One of the major theological splits between the Southern Kingdom (Judah) and the Northern Kingdom (Israel) was over the correct place to worship YHWH. The Temple was in the South, and the Southerners claimed that the Temple had special significance as a worship center. They dismissed the Northerners as “just worshiping in high places” as if that was heathen.

In fact, the Northerners often DID worship in high places. They built altars and worship spaces on mountaintops and (you’d hope) had pretty great worship experiences there. There really is something profound about being on a mountaintop and the closeness to God experienced there. Perhaps it is the view. Perhaps it is the starkness. Perhaps it is the journey required to get there. Perhaps it is the wind, and the clouds, and the experience of exposure. Perhaps it is the oxygen deprivation. (Really, the mountains in Israel are like the medium sized Catskill mountains. It wasn’t oxygen deprivation.) In any case, the people in the North had been settling up worship sites on mountains for many centuries, while the people in the South had decried it as heresy.

Galilee (in the North), in the time of Jesus, was resettled by Judeans (Southern) who were reclaiming it as a Jewish space. It may be that Peter’s seemingly simple/idiotic ramblings reflected a pretty serious cultural clash in the region they were in. The Gospel of John presents Jesus talking to the Samaritan woman by the well and claiming that God can be worshiped ANYWHERE. The Synoptics don’t have that story. The Gospel of John was written well after the fall of the Temple, while the Synoptic were written in the more immediate aftermath of the fall. I think Peter MAY have been expressing a natural human tendency to want to build a space to give thanks to God on that mountaintop. And I think it may have been heard as heresy!! In fact, I think the story may truncate there because the early Jesus followers weren’t quite sure what do to with the heresy.

Of course, the Northerners weren’t the only ones to have mountaintop experiences. The Hebrew Bible reading tells of Moses coming back down off the mountain where he’d been “conversing with God” and he was so strongly transformed by it that he had a freaky glow to him. There IS something about mountaintops. Sometimes the people who go up them come back quite a bit different.

The second thing that emerged from the gospel reading today came from a colleague in my lectionary group who said, “Hey, isn’t the voice of God literally in the feminine?” I had no idea, but I looked it up and it is! “Voice of God” in Hebrew is bat(h) kol which is literally “daughter of a voice.” Apparently, no matter how wonderful Morgan Freedman is at “playing God,” his voice is all wrong! I’ve been at so many plays and skits and movies where God’s voice has been presumed to be a bass, and yet the words “voice of God” connotes the feminine.

It was at that point that I realized that even in the lesson Gospel I’d always heard the voice of God as male. How is it different if it really is just “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!“ without assuming that me saying it is a little bit wrong? Similarly, how different is it to consider that Moses might have been up the mountain for 40 days hearing a feminine voice telling him all sorts of wisdom and giving guidance?

Now, of course, I’m NOT suggesting that God has a gender, and I’m NOT suggesting that God really speaks like a human and therefore I’m certainly NOT suggesting that God speaks like a girl or woman. I am suggesting that projecting a masculine tone onto God’s voice is inaccurate to Hebrew, and that should keep us all on our toes.

Today is “Camp Sunday,” specially designed to try to get everyone excited about camp and the great things that happen there. It is more toned down than last year because… well, you can’t go big every year. So really, this means that the songs are camp favorites and I get to talk about camp. It has turned out to be remarkably helpful that it is also transfiguration Sunday, as the mountaintop experience of God thing is basically what I’m talking about.

Now, camp is definitely for kids, but it isn’t JUST for kids. As a church, we put down a deposit for the weekend BEFORE Labor Day at Sky Lake for an All Church Retreat with Sabine O’Hara. That’s an experience designed for all ages. All of the Upper New York Camps are also retreat centers, and that’s a great gift for anyone needing to get away. Yet, they started as camps, and that’s important too. For some of you, this is a subtle invitation to consider volunteer counseling. For some of you, this is a mostly irrelevant set of (hopefully uplifting stories). For some of you, this is the motivation you’ve been needing to talk to a kid in your life about camp. But best of all, for some of you, this is an invitation to get yourself to CAMP.

I’ve been thinking this week about what camp was like for me as a camper. At first, it was scary. Simply being away in an unknown environment was overwhelming. Luckily, the first time I went to camp, my pastor’s wife was my counselor and one of my church friends was my cabin mate. My brother and his best friend from church were also at camp, and that made for an easy transition. After that first year, I didn’t care who was there, because I’d realized that at camp I was welcome and liked for who I was.

That may not sound like much, but it was to me. I was a really socially awkward kid, and I got picked on a lot at school. I hadn’t experienced social success in my life until I went to camp. Being in the naturally supportive environment, with an emphasis on cooperation and fun, I was able to thrive and make real connections. I was included, and a part of the group, friends with my cabin mates and family group. I “fit.”

The experience of being welcome, included, and connected changed the way I saw myself, maybe a bit like Moses looking different to others when he came down the mountain. I began to believe it was possible that I could be likable, and that was amazing!

Of course, the way that it all happens at camp is sort of mysterious. Having done 61 weeks at Sky Lake, I still don’t quite know how it works. The components don’t seem like they should be able to add up to the whole. There are meals, some of them cooked over a campfire. There are songs, some of them about God. There is time to swim and boat, to hike and do crafts. There is Bible Study, and there are games. There is usually a dance and often a talent show. Ice cream is usually made, tie die is created, and personal hygiene is occasionally cared for. There is a lot of silliness: water ballet, mud hikes, wacky outfits, kumbaya marathons, belly flop contests (ow!), exceptionally loud praying, and/or ridiculous songs. There is a lot of sacredness: fog on the water, the call of birds, quiet stillness, deep friendships, cooperation and support, laughter, tears, healing, worship, and nature. And somehow, each and every week ends up being a mountaintop experience.

Sometimes I get curious about it. How does it ALWAYS work? What are the component parts that make it work? Why does it work just as well when it is cold and raining as when it is warm and beautiful or miserably hot? Why is it just as great with all ages and ability levels? Why is it always the same and always different?

Why does Christian camping share God’s love so well?? Why are people able to be so much more authentic and supportive at camp than anywhere else? Why is it OK to be who you are at camp when it isn’t at home? How does it WORK? It is a mystery, but it always works. Not every camper (or counselor) has a good week every week, but every week amazing and beautiful things happen and people leave transformed. Camp isn’t for everyone – or so I hear – but for many people it is the most loving (and fun!) place they’ll ever go.

Ever since I first went to camp I’ve been trying to figure out how to make the world more like camp. Eventually I learned the language for kin-dom of God and realized that it IS the world as camp (yet somehow with less bugs for those who need less bugs to have a good time). Mountaintops are very important – both physically and metaphorically – because they help us gain a vision of what IS and what can be. Sometimes the descent is rough and the transition back into “real life” is challenging, but the lessons learned on a mountain can change a whole life, and sometimes a whole society (Moses) or the whole world (the disciples). May it ever be so. Amen

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Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
http://fumcschenectady.org/
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

February 7, 2016