Jesus goes up the mountain to find God and he and those who came with him are transformed by God’s presence. We are here this morning at FDUMC because we have climbed a mountain by coming to worship so that God can speak to us, too. Our faces now shine just as the faces of Peter James and John with a radiance they previously lacked. I can see the glow around you as God draws near. Really, I can! Worship is the way we open ourselves up to an encounter with Jesus. It’s a time to draw apart from the normal hustle and bustle of our lives, to set aside the normal concerns of our days and to quiet the restless voice of our inner anxieties. Here we can find God’s presence and hear Jesus calling our name.

This is a very good thing to do because amazing things happen when you encounter God. A shiny face is the least of it. Each of us, I’ll warrant, has had some sort of mountain top experience when God reached out and touched us. I often ask people about their mountain top experiences. Everyone has one. Most have several. The stories are often about ordinary people who crashed against some catastrophe of illness, danger or death and felt the hand of God steadying them. Everyone has such a story of God’s hand on their lives: accidents narrowly avoided, death staved off, powerful experiences of love, labor in mission to others, witnessing the quiet faith of people whose lives were committed to their neighbor’s need, experiencing something of extraordinary beauty and so forth. I am always inspired by the gentle ease with which people remember and tell the stories of their close encounters with God.

This is no surprise, I suppose, because it is our discovery of God in the stuff of ordinary life that gets us up on a Sunday morning to come to church to say thanks. We found God when we were floundering around in quotidian tasks of daily living and we were changed forever. Moses went up the mountain after a lost sheep and turned aside because something unusual was happening. He didn’t know he was looking for God, but he was. He didn’t know he would find God in the burning bush, but he did. Something similar has happened to us. We now show up on a Sunday morning when most people are just getting through with their morning coffee because we turned aside to look at a burning bush and found God. You may not realize it, but your faces do in fact glow because God has touched you. I can see it. You are different from what you were and what most people still are. You have seen God and will never be the same again.

There’s a wonderful story in Robert Fulgham’s All I Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. It concerns Larry Walters, a thirty-three year-old truck driver who lives in California. It seems that one day Larry is sitting in his backyard, wishing he could fly.

There is nothing unusual about this. For as long as he can remember, he had wanted to fly. But somehow he’s never had the time or the money or the opportunity to learn. Even hang gliding is out: there’s no place suitable for it near his home.

So Larry spends many afternoons just sitting in his backyard in his ordinary old lawn chair -- the kind with the webbing and the rivets, the kind many of us used to have in our backyards.

This one particular day, however, Larry decides to do something about his desire to fly. He hooks forty-five surplus weather balloons onto his lawn chair. He puts on a parachute, attaches a six pack of beer to the chair, sets a CB radio on his lap, ties a paper bag full of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to his leg, and slings a BB gun over his shoulder. (The gun is to pop the balloons when he wants to come down.)

Larry then sits back and prepares for lift-off. He expects to rise a couple hundred feet above his neighborhood. Instead, he ascends eleven thousand feet right through the approach corridor to Los Angeles International Airport!

When asked by the press why he did it, Larry answers, "Well, you can’t just sit there." When asked if he was scared during his flight, he replies, "Yes . . . . Wonderfully so." [Robert Fulgham, All I Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (New York: Villard Books, 1988), p. 139.] Please don’t try this yourselves.

Larry Walters went up in his lawn chair as planned, yet he traveled further than he ever expected. He climbed so high that he saw the world as he never imagined he would.

Sometimes ordinary human beings do ordinary things and extraordinary experiences happen. Mary Leakey is a famous archeologist who once discovered 3.6-million-year-old footprints at Laetoli in Tanzania. This proved that ancestors of modern humans walked upright a long time ago – much longer ago than previously thought. The footprints appear to be that of three people, an adult male and female and a child. Nothing unusual there. They walked along in a relatively straight line on the volcanic ash which preserves their tracks. At one point the woman stops and turns to the side to look at something, and then continues on. It’s an ordinary movement but one rife with potential magic: humans have forever heard things, seen things, sensed things, and turned aside to see what it was. We have an insatiable curiosity to look where there seems at first little to see. When we turn aside, it sometimes leads us where we did not expect to go. Peter climbs the mountain with Jesus and arrives at a startling destination. Moses turns aside to look at a strange sight and he and the world are never the same again. We pursue a whimsical notion to fly in a lawn chair. We encounter a teacher who helps us find our voice. We do ordinary things, something districts us – and God enters our lives. In the midst of our desire to see the real behind the unreal we discover God and we are transformed, never the same again.

Most of all, I suspect, we are seeking something that is real, something true, something important and something meaningful in the quotidian stuff of life. Fred Craddock is credited with the story of the greyhound who suddenly quit racing, right in the middle of a promising career. “Why did you quit?” Craddock asked the greyhound, lounging in his kennel, rather than training with the other dogs at the track. “Did you start losing your races? “No,” said the dog. “I used to win just about all the time.” “Well, weren’t they paying you enough?” “No, the rewards were pretty impressive,” the dog responded. “Then, why did you quit?” “Well, you see, I discovered that the rabbit wasn’t real.”

I suppose that I entered the ministry because I wanted to chase real rabbits. And because my experiences of the holy happen often in worship, I became a minster so I could be as close to worship as possible. I feel God move in the midst of a hymn, a prayer, a sermon (even one that I’m preaching, believe it or not), the sharing of joys and concerns, even the announcements can reveal God at work in our lives. What a great job I have chasing real rabbits! You, of course, are not the rabbits I chase. You are the greyhounds who also have made a decision to chase real rabbits, or you wouldn’t be here.

All people would prefer to chase real rabbits. We are eager for mystical, spiritual experiences of true significance. We really want to have those mountain top experiences. Encountering Jesus, however, is always a mountaintop experience but it involves a lot more than a light hearted, hey, how are you? Meeting Jesus leads to some serious commitments to change our ways. In fact the disciples with Jesus on the mountain encountered Jesus in a new and profound way which frightened them to death. Why? Because it dawns on them that Jesus really meant it when he said, "I will suffer and be killed. And if you want to follow me then you must take up your own cross and follow me."

Sure, we want an experience of the divine, but do we always really know what we are really getting ourselves into? The fear that is felt so often among Jesus' followers in the New Testament is not just any old fear. It is the fear that occurs when we come face-to-face with the God whose name is Jesus. When we sense his particular demands upon us, when we see clearly the narrow way to which he beckons us we have good reason to be afraid.

False gods offer no fear. But our God, the God who comes to us in Jesus Christ beckons us to follow him on a fearful perilous journey.

Why are more people not here in church this morning? You know the standard reasons. People come and say they don’t like old fashioned music. They can't sing those old hymns. Who listens to a pipe organ anymore? We are old fashioned. Our worship is out of date. Some, of course, say just the opposite, that we are selling out to new fangled styles in music and worship. Or they say that they find church "unfriendly." People want a church which is comfortable and familiar.

Or they find the Bible impossible to comprehend or believe. They don't understand that Christian discipleship sometimes takes a long time, a lifetime of discipline, of training and formation.

Today I would like to suggest that lots of people avoid church, not because they misunderstand what we are about, but they understand all too well. Church is about God. Church is about the possibility of a threatening, life-changing encounter with the Risen Christ. Church is about seeing God's way and will in our world - a way so very different from our ways - and then having to say "yes" or "no" to walking that way. Church is about making a life altering commitment to something other than ourselves.

That scares a lot of people to death. Yet you are the ones gathered here who, having encountered Jesus, aren’t scared of a life lived in service to God. Well, maybe you are just a little scared, but you have overcome that fear to appear here this morning. Jesus has appeared to you in all of his radiant glory. He has reassured you, told you to rise and follow him, and promised to be with you every step of the way, no matter what the journey holds. And you followed.

So this story of the Transfiguration of Jesus before his disciples on the mountaintop, which at first seemed so strange and mystical, is really a story about you and me. We have chased a real rabbit up the mountain and had an experience with the living God of nowhere and everywhere. The experience frightened us at first because it leads to the death of what is familiar and comfortable in our lives– the death of all that is false, shallow and meaningless. But we embrace that death with certain knowledge that it leads to a new life lived in the transforming presence of God. Amen.

Prayer of Intercession

Lord Jesus Christ, shine your transforming light into the darkness of this world. Bring peace to the nations at war, food to the hungry, shelter to the many without homes, and comfort to those who grieve. Lord in your mercy,

Hear our prayer.

May your transforming light bring healing to the many who are ill. We pray for the sick and hospitalized. We remember the many who live in nursing homes. We pray for those who regularly undergo medical treatments of radiation or chemotherapy. We pray for those who are ill in mind and in spirit and in need of care but stubbornly resist. Lord in your mercy,

Hear our prayer.

With your transforming light touch the many relationships that are broken - between husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters. Restore friendships with patience and forgiveness. Lord in your mercy,

Hear our Prayer.

Amen.

Transforming God, you have changed our lives and called us to come from the mountain into the streets with Jesus. We make this offering to serve Christ's mission of bringing the good news of your enduring love and forgiveness. Amen