I heard of a man who was sitting at the breakfast table one morning, minding his own business, reading the newspaper, when his wife breezes in and gives him a light peck on the cheek and says, “I bet you don’t know what day this is.”  And this husband looks his wife right in the eye, and lies, and says, “I do too know what day this is,” and goes back to reading the newspaper.  And so on his way to work that day he’s trying to think now what day is this?  He has occasionally forgotten Valentine’s Day or her birthday or their anniversary, but he’s pretty sure it’s not one of those days.  But he can’t think what day it is.  So he decides he’d better not take any chances.  He makes reservations for dinner at a fancy restaurant, and buys a box of candy and a dozen roses and a bottle of her favorite perfume.  He walks through the door that evening with all these things in his hands and yells, “Surprise!”  And his wife says, “Oh sweetheart.  Thank you.  This is the best Groundhog’s Day I’ve ever had.” 

Yes, it was Groundhog’s Day yesterday.  I don’t know whether Phil saw his shadow or not, and I always forget which one means there are six more weeks of winter.  But there are these, shall we say, minor holidays throughout the year.  We don’t get out of school or work, but they are sort of holidays.  In the church calendar, we have those kinds of days too, not the biggies, not Christmas or Easter, so they’re easy to forget about, we don’t highlight them every year.  But they are days that are part of our church year, they have a significance in the life of the church, or in the life of Jesus. 

We have one of those days today, it’s called the “Transfiguration of Our Lord”.  Peter, James and John go up on this high mountain with Jesus, and Jesus is transfigured right before their eyes.  Something supernatural happens, otherworldly.  Jesus is transformed, “his face shone like the sun, and his clothes were dazzling white,” and in a sense these three disciples are transformed, too.  But what strikes me here is that the first thing they think of to do after this transcendent experience, the first thing they think of to do is to build these three dwellings or booths, one for Jesus, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.  Most scholars don’t think these booths have anything to do with the Festival of Booths, the Jewish autumn festival to celebrate the harvest.  It seems as though what they are proposing is to build some monument to remember this moment, something material and solid that they can touch and feel and come back to later on to look at.  It sounds harmless enough, I suppose, and yet it shows that they’ve missed the point really, the focus had been on God and Jesus, the focus had been on this mysterious, ineffable, otherworldly presence of God in their lives, and they’ve turned that around so that now the focus is on them, it’s on what they can build, what they can do as the result of this experience. 

I heard about this little boy, three years old or so, who was in church with his mother, and after church the two of them were still in the sanctuary for a few moments.  There were also these two men who were still in the back of the sanctuary after the service talking to each other.  Well the mother was trying to get her 3-year-old to settle down and go home, but he wanted to run around the sanctuary, and finally he got away from her and ran up to the front of the church, and somehow managed to get a chair over behind the pulpit, so he could stand up in the pulpit.  And then he sees his mother standing over there, and so he waves and calls out to her, “Hey, Mom, Mom, look at me, look at me, look at me!”  And one of the men in the back of the sanctuary says to the other man, “I think I’ve heard this sermon before.” 

Now I know what some of you are thinking, you’re thinking you have heard that sermon before, and recently, in the last seven months or so, since the new preacher got here.  But it’s not just us preachers, it’s we all of us who so often want the focus to be on us.  How often do we take something transcendent, something centered on God, and turn it around until the focus is back on us?  God is trying to tell us something.  He’s trying to show us something, lead us somewhere, and then we try to tell God what to do, force God to see things and do things our way. 

Harold Kushner, the rabbi who wrote “When Bad Things Happen to Good People”, in another book, describes this young man who was a pre-med student at a major university.  Because he’d done so well in school, his parents gave him a trip to the Far East for his summer vacation.  Well he had a wonderful time, but he fell under the influence of this guru who told him that he was poisoning his soul with a success-oriented way of life.  His whole life was about competition, this guru said, getting better grades than his friends, getting into a great medical school, being competitive and successful with his whole life and soul.  “Give it up,” this guru said, “and come and join us in my ashram where there is an atmosphere of love and caring for each other.”  Well this was compelling stuff apparently to this young man, so that’s what he did.  He called his parents from Tokyo and told them he would not be coming home.  He was dropping out of school to live in an ashram. 

Six months later, his parents got a letter from their son, this young man, that said, “Dear Mom and Dad, I know you weren’t happy with the decision I made last summer, but I want to tell you how happy it has made me.  For the first time in my life, I am at peace.  Here there is no competing, no hustling, no trying to get ahead of anyone else.  Here we are all equal, and we all share.  This way of life is so much in harmony with the inner essence of my soul that in only six months I’ve become the number two disciple in the entire ashram, and I think I can be number one by June!” 

Do you see the irony here, and in our own lives?  We have those transcendent moments.  Peter, James and John went up on this high mountain with Jesus.  Moses went up on the mountain to receive the Ten Commandments.  In the Bible, a mountain always signifies this place that’s perched between heaven and earth, this place where we can speak with God, we can listen for the voice of God.  We have those transcendent moments, those times when we experience God.  It may be on a high mountain.  Or it may be in church, at worship, we certainly do find ourselves transformed by the music and other things here at Christ Church, don’t we?  Or it may be while we’re at prayer, or while we’re meditating on the Bible.  We may experience God through the presence, the touch, the compassion, of another person.  I find God sometimes in poetry.  “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting, the Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, hath had elsewhere it’s setting, and cometh from afar.  Not in utter nakedness, and not in entire forgetfulness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come, from God, who is our home.”  That was Wordsworth.  Isn’t that a great name for a poet, Wordsworth? 

We have these moments of transcendence, these otherworldly moments, these experiences of God.  The question is: what do we do with this experience of God?  Do we turn these moments around so that we try to create for ourselves a God who we can control and manipulate, a God who will give us what we want?  We all do this.  God, if you’ll do this for me, I’ll go to church more often, I’ll give more, I’ll be a better Christian.  Or is it okay to let God be God, to let God be mysterious, not someone we’re always trying to figure out, to allow him to lead us and direct us even though we’re not always sure just exactly where he’s taking us.  And this can be a little scary at times.  The problem with God is that he’s mysterious, he’s always up to something. 

In ancient Rome, the emperors would return from their conquests in distant lands, and they would parade in triumph through the streets of Rome.  They would ride in their chariots, with the vast wealth they had acquired carted on wagons before them, and the slaves they had made of other nations walking in subservience behind.  It was as if they were declared for one day to be a god.  But always one of the servants would be riding in the chariot too, and every so often he would whisper in the ear of the emperor, “Remember, O king, that thou art mortal.”  Remember that thou art mortal.  We need to live perhaps with this image in our minds, that we are mortal, that we are dependent on God.  But I heard an interesting variation on this.  Someone else said that perhaps we need to live too with this image, of someone, God perhaps, whispering in our ear, “Remember O man, remember O woman, that thou art immortal.”  Remember that thou art immortal.  Remember that you are a child of God, destined for glory, a glory that God has in store for you, not any pretense of glory that you may think you can create for yourself. 

Annie Dillard, the writer who grew up here in Pittsburgh, describes the life of the writer this way.  She says, “Every morning you climb several flights of stairs, enter your study, open the French doors, and slide your desk and chair out into the middle of the air.  And the desk and chair you’re sitting in float thirty feet above the ground.”  It’s an interesting picture, isn’t it?.  What she’s saying, I think, is this, that the writer is suspended somewhere between earth and sky, between fact and imagination, between perspiration and inspiration, between this material world and the invisible plains of heaven.  This is the space that a writer inhabits to create his or her work of art.  And I would suggest that the same is true for you and me, that this is the space we inhabit.  There is an earthiness about us, to be sure, but there is etherealness, too.  We are not earthbound merely, we are heaven bound as well. 

One final image that expresses this:  I heard of this old rabbi who had two little medallions he carried with him at all times.  He carried one medallion in his right pocket, and the other in his left, and he would periodically take one out and read it, depending on the circumstances.  One medallion said, “I am but dust and ashes.”  But the other medallion said, “For my sake the whole world was created.” 

How to live a significant life, that’s the theme for today.  I think that we find our ultimate significance, not in ourselves, but in God, not in what we can do or build or create, but in what God can do in us and through us.  And so amidst all the things of this world that clamor for our attention, including our own egos and our own sense of self-importance, amidst all these things, listen for that voice that speaks to us of the highest and loveliest and purest and truest and best that the human heart can imagine.  Listen for that voice that speaks to us of what is even beyond our imagining, of what can only be planted deep there by God.