February 3, 2008 , Last Sunday after Epiphany, All Souls' Episcopal Church

The Ecstasy and the Agony
Matthew 17: 1 – 7

In our Gospel story today of the Transfiguration, it seems that Peter was wrong! Peter is such an interesting person. On the one hand, Peter seemed so human and real and level-headed and he usually reacted to things in ways that are understandable for most of us. On the other hand, Peter was very emotional and, at times, either irrelevant, off the wall, or, in today’s story, just plain wrong. One thing about Peter, he could never be classified as dull. We will talk about Peter in a few moments, but first let’s talk about what happened

The Gospel story of the Transfiguration and Christ’s subsequent actions give us a wonderful lesson and example of what true Christian discipleship really is. Let’s review what happened. The appearance of Jesus’ countenance was altered, and His raiment became dazzling white and iridescent; His face glowed. For a moment the eternal face of the Son of God was seen in the countenance of the carpenter from Nazareth. And behold two men talked with Him, Moses and Elijah, who  spoke of His departure, which He was to accomplish at Jerusalem. Now Peter and those who were with Him were heavy with sleep and when they awaken to observe His Glory they saw the two men who stood with Him. As the men were departing from Him, Peter said to Jesus, “It is well that we are here; let us make three tabernacles, one for you and one for Moses and Elijah. And as he said this, a cloud overshadowed them; and they were afraid as they entered the cloud. And a voice came out of the clouds, saying, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased, hear ye him”.. And when the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone……….  And they kept silence and told no one in those days anything of what they had seen.

After all of this drama, Jesus and His disciples came down from the mountain. Peter’s suggestion to build 3 tabernacles …..to set up camp… was totally ignored. Peter was wrong. They did not build permanent shrines on the mountain. In fact, they promptly left the mountain and began healing and preaching and teaching again.

Irving Stone wrote a perceptive biographical novel entitled The Agony and the Ecstacy. It was about the Italian Renaissance sculptor, painter, statesman and poet, Michelangelo. He was the most famous artist of the Italian Renaissance, and, of course, one of the greatest artists of all time.

 The phrase, “the agony and the ecstacy” is more than just the title for the book. The words more accurately compose Irving Stone’s “epitaph” for Michelangelo expressing the artist’s restless sensitivity and his dramatic creativity. As a citizen, Michelangelo knew the agony of living in a period of history which was seeing the breakdown of long accepted  medieval patterns of  life and culture. As an artist, he also knew the agony of laboriously bending over cold rough-hewn marble, as he sought with hammer and chisel to give it a quality of life……… But Michelangelo also knew the ecstacy of seeing new worlds being born in the wake of the renaissance, and the ecstacy of seeing personality emerge from the stone at the stroke of his tools. From times of great agony he moved to moments of thrilling ecstacy.

Now, looking at our Transfiguration drama, I would like to reverse the word order of Mr. Stone’s book. Rather than considering the “agony and the ecstacy”, I invite you to ponder the “ecstacy and the agony” because this phrase is an accurate description of the pivotal spiritual experience which Jesus shared with his disciples. It is also a clarifying diagnosis and perscription of life together in the church……this church……..and how it should be. It is a perceptive summary as I said earlier of what is involved in Christian Discipleship.

On the Mount of Transfiguration, Jesus and His disciples shared a glorious experience. Suddenly, Jesus was seen, not as a man from Nazareth, but as the Eternal Son of God. The vestiges of his earthly trappings wore thin, and the disciples saw Him for who he really was. Briefly, His eternal radiance shone forth. For a moment, heaven and earth came very near.

In the light of His approaching death, Jesus and His disciples needed this special moment. Indeed, if we think about it, all men and women share this need for moments of vision and inspiration in whatever their tasks may be. However, the vision can be so glorious that we want to remain with it forever. Peter, as we heard wanted to build three booths and abide there. In essence, he saying, “Let’s stop the movie. This is so good, lets make it not go away”

Implicit in every vision, you see, is the danger of getting life pegged at a certain point. Psychologists call this “fixating”. We would possess life and hang on tightly. As the Broadway musical said many years ago, “Stop the world; I want to get off.” Peter wanted to cast out the anchor at the very time when the real voyage for them was to begin.

For individuals and societies, change is a fundamental law of life. The absence of change, adaptation, movement, development can only result in a emptiness. This is equally true in the realm of the spiritual. It was good for the disciples to experience the Transfiguration…..the ecstacy.  It was not good for them to try to prolong it. Christianity is more than a “feel good” mountain-top religion. We must move on in the light of these experiences to new depths of understanding.  After the next day,  Jesus led them down from the mountain. He cast out demons and healed an epileptic boy…..He got immersed in the problems of the world…… the agony!  Jesus said, in effect, “we can not stay here. The battle is neither won or lost at the place of vision. The men of vision must go down from the mountain into the valley where the people are. Jesus did not hesitate, nor should we. In the valley, we find anxious, sweaty, frustrated men and women fighting for their very lives against the demons and evils and temptations  which would overwhelm them.

Yes, there is a great deal of difference between being a visionary and being a disciple. The visionary rises to the heights, but seldom rolls up his sleeves and returns to responsible work. The disciple grasps new heights and then works to implement them into practice.

Sometimes the church has tended to be better at giving visions than in wrestling with demons. Christians, at times, tend to be long on inspiration and devotions, but short in coming to grips with hard core reality. Quite possibly it’s the fact that the latter can be a dirty and demanding task And it may be, in some cases, that we just don’t want to assume responsibility. We echo the trite old adage, “Let George do it. I don’t want to get involved.” We’ll just sit on our mount of inspiration and not be vulnerable. You know, it is actually possible to play it so safe in life that we actually lose the game. Life passes us by. Have you heard the limerick that was placed as an epitaph on the old maid’s gravestone?

“Here lies the bones of Nancy Jones,
for her life had no terrors;
She lived an old maid,
she died an old maid,
No hits, no runs, no errors”

 Let us not let life pass us by. We must realize that the purpose of life is not so much to be happy, but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you lived at all.

 So now it is our high privilege and strategic responsibility in our time of life to come down from the mountain trailing clouds of glory seeking to make a difference, to go out these doors and wrestle with the demons or the demonic which possess men in our generation. Today it may not be an epileptic boy, but it is a society trying to be great, but still languishing too much from the boredom and indifference of many of its citizens, not realizing that those who say, “they couldn’t care less”, need to learn to care more. In some ways, it is an hedonistic generation seemingly crazed with lust of all kinds, knowing much about sex and little about love. It can be a grasping crowd too frequently driven by greed, more anxious to acquire status symbols for themselves that to give stature to another. It is, at times, a weak people, who too easily surrender their individually by identifying with the “herd” running with the pack when they are actually very uncomfortable with what the pack is doing.

 This is the demonic possession and distortion with which we must wrestle as you and I descend into the valley. There is so much work to be done. The work is not ours to finish all by ourselves, of course, but neither are we free to take no part of it. Our task is to live receptively "the time being", the present, which as W.H. Auden has said, “is, in a sense, the most trying time of all”

 So, this morning, as we come to the altar and meet the Son of God in worship and Communion….the ecstacy….., we must afterwards be prepared to meet the agony….the problems, the temptations of the world as we move on. And yes, the agony…..the problems….the temptations will come all right, don’t worry; probably in a form that we do not expect, life is like that.

 In the meantime, in faith…..in faith that God’s Grace will sustain us,  there are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair, people to feed, appointments to keep, and irregular verbs to be learned. “The time being” to redeem from insignificance.

 God doesn’t want men and women on the mountain who are not willing to go to the valley.

 God doesn’t need men and women in the valley, who have not been on the mountain.

 God wants all of us to live in the valley with the mountain in their hearts. This is the ecstasy and the agony of Christian Discipleship.

 “In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost”