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"Platform Parties"
Mark 9:2-13
I Kings 18:20-39
A Sermon preached by The Rev. Douglas M. Donley
February 10, 2002
University Baptist Church
Minneapolis, MN
The opening ceremonies have come and gone and we will look forward to seeing many medallists on the platforms in the Olympics. Last night we watched some of the figure skating. It was especially endearing to see our young cherubs twirling and jumping and knocking into each other as they imitated the skaters on the tube. Like every televised Olympics, we will see the exuberance of the winners, and close-ups of the full eyes of those left out of the medal ceremonies. We’ll see the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. We are truly in awe of the athletic specimens who can compete and complete that hard work. And when we hear our own national anthem, we feel like we have succeeded along with them. A wash of pride flows over us. We join the party on the platform. Over and over again, we will see images of those platform parties. They will be etched into our memories.
Life is good on the medal platforms. There is no gray area. We want to capture that moment, when all is right with the world. It taps a deep need for hope and a desire for success. When many of us don’t get the chance to win at anything, we want to vicariously experience the thrill of victory through our medallists.
We are an unforgiving society when it comes to those who have been on the platform. We want to remember them as the victors. We want them to stay the best. But when one falls from grace, we somehow feel betrayed.
Pete Rose, the all-time hits leader in Baseball has been banned from the sport for gambling.
Iron Mike Tyson is evil incarnate because of his hunger for wife-beating and ear cartilage.
The fact that Oksana Baul got caught driving drunk made the headlines a number of years ago.
Dare we even talk about Tonya Harding?
How about Reggie White and his homophobic comments?
Nasty Ty Cobb or party animal Babe Ruth.
We love our heroes and sheroes on the medal stands, but not so much when they fail, when they become human, or at least more than on dimensional.
Life is not lived on those platforms parties. It is lived in the valleys that separate one mountain from another. Finding fulfillment in the midst of the valleys is what makes life meaningful. It’s what we call in theological terms the incarnation, where God inhabits our lives: the peaks and the valleys, and calls us forward to live lives of faith. But there is something about those mountains, those parties on the platforms that lure us.
In today’s scripture, Peter, James and John accompany Jesus on a trip up Mount Tabor and saw an amazing event. All of a sudden the gold, silver and bronze medallists of the faith stood before them awash in bright light. Jesus, Moses and Elijah. Peter, James and John, we can imagine, felt the pride. They knew it would be wonderful to preserve the moment. Peter made the suggestion to create booths for each of them. "Let’s set this up as a shrine. All people can gain inspiration from this awards platform of the faith that I will make." If he could just preserve that moment, he could feel better about himself and his faith.
Peter wanted Jesus to stay up on the mountain. "It’s easier for me to praise you up there Jesus. Up on your holy hill. Up on your medal platform. Where you transcend all of the world. Where the only relationship we need with you is vertical."
I can relate to Peter a lot. I’m kind of impulsive, like he was. My faith doesn’t always stay on the same path. I want to fix things when I see something wrong. I want people to see what I have seen. I want to preserve the mountaintop experiences. I might just have gone and offered to build a whole temple around this experience. In fact, there is such a thing on Mount Tabor in the Holy Land. It’s called, you guessed it, the Church of the Transfiguration. Peter, under the guise of praising God was really praising himself by trying to keep the moment for himself. But Jesus was not interested in praise. Jesus was interested in justice, mercy and transformation. Jesus was and is interested in our becoming disciples.
God’s voice from the cloud said to Peter: "This is my beloved son"—the same words that came at his baptism. But added are the following words, "listen to him." A few verses before, Jesus had rebuked Peter because he couldn’t deal with the fact that Jesus was going to be persecuted for being, doing and spreading the Good News. Peter didn’t like the fact that Jesus told him he was going to be thrown in prison, tortured, executed and on the third day rise again. Peter didn’t sign up for that part. He signed up for the platform party. But God said, "listen to him. The life of faith is more than the platform parties."
Next, on the way down from the mountain, the disciples wonder what the resurrection means. They argue about whether Elijah has come or not. Their ears were not ready to listen to the voice of the son of God. The rest of Mark’s gospel recounts the steady distancing of the disciples from Jesus, culminating in their falling asleep, betraying, denying and doubting of Jesus. It’s so much easier on the medal platform. Can’t the platform party continue forever?
But medal platforms aren’t that great. They are only a frozen moment.
We are engaged in risky business as we try to create altars. It is risky business because building an altar freezes an event, a moment in time. And if we are not careful altars can even become a hindrance to our ministry. That’s one of the reasons we change our altars here week after week.
Consider Elijah’s platform party. The story about Elijah on Mount Carmel has to do with power and worship gone awry. Now first a little history and context. To understand the Bible and the often disturbing portrayal of God, you need to remember that the concept of God was a work in progress and the depiction of God changed and developed over the centuries, often in direct proportion to the difficulties people seeking God were experiencing.
The worship of Baal alongside the worship of YHWH was all tangled up with the marriage of the Israelite King Ahab to the Canaanite Queen Jezebel. Baal was the god of fertility, the god of life the god of the Canaanite people. YHWH was the God of the Exodus, the liberation of the Israelite people and recently the God of the conquest of the Canaanite people. The marriage of Jezebel and Ahab might have been the last best hope for peace. But peace was not on the minds of Ahab and Jezebel. It was not on the mind of arrogant Elijah, either.
Let’s look just for a moment at the interfaith dialogue modeled in this scripture. It’s kind of "I’m the best forget the rest" mentality. But it was more than that. It was a question of who was God, YHWH or Baal. Remember that Elijah means, "YHWH is God." All most of us know of the religion of Baal is that it was a bad religion. Of course, this cannot be the whole story. Luckily in 1929 archeology unearthed Ugaritic tablets which for the first time gave us an insider’s look at Canaanite religion.
The religion called Baal actually had six different gods. Four were male and two were female. The male gods were El, the father God who resided on a mountain in the North; Baal, the god of life, rain and fertility; Yam, the god of sea and chaos; and Mot the god of death. It was believed that Baal, Yam and Mot vied with each other for power on earth. The female deities were Asherah, also known as the lady of the sea who was the mother of all the deities and the wife of El. She is often associated with Baal, fertility and sacred prostitution. Anat is the daughter of Asherah and both the wife and sister of Baal. She is warlike, a deity of war and peace. She is also associated with earthquakes. Remember how Elijah felt an earthquake but God was not in the earthquake?
"My God is better than your god".
The mythology goes that Yam wanted to build a house as a status symbol for himself. He even gets permission from daddy El, but jealous Baal wants the house for himself. Yam and Baal fight and Baal wins. The god of life beats out the god of chaos. Baal and Mot fight and Mot, the god of death kills Baal. Baal is taken to the underworld while Mot, death, rules the world. Do you notice the parallels between this and the prophecy of John in Revelation? Anat, Baal’s wife goes after Baal and she plants his pieces in the earth and Baal is revived. This is both a fertility and a resurrection motif. The ancient pre-Christian fertility festival of Easter is closely associated with fertility and new life.
The Hebrew people came a long and had another god who also was the god of life. Elijah played out the ancient fights between the different gods on mount Carmel. It is interesting to note by the way, that one of the prefixes often associated with the God of Israel in the Hebrew Bible is El. The northern and southern kingdoms of Israel and Judah split because the northerners wanted to continue to worship El, the God they knew the best on the high places of the north. The other group wanted to worship YHWH and only in the Temple of Jerusalem, a southern high place. Are you beginning to get the idea that this is complex? It is no accident that mount Carmel is a high mountain in the north, very near Mt. Tabor.
Tom Robbins has a wonderful novel called Skinny Legs and All which calls the Biblical demonization of Jezebel as an imperialist slam against the Canaanite people. He uses historical material that says that Phoenician, Canaanite and other gods were worshipped not only on the northern high places, but in the Temple alongside YHWH with no problem for centuries. It was only when the people felt threatened by outside forces that they purged the temple of the interfaith icons and established Temple purity. Jezebel, Robbins argues, was a strong and powerful woman who was punished and demonized for being just that.
I find it interesting that when the going gets tough, interfaith dialogue goes out the window and people tend to retreat into the cocoons of their own narrow religions. I am glad that in the wake of September 11th there has been a much more active interest in learning about another’s religious beliefs and heritage.
Elijah saw that his "victory" was short-lived. For after he had killed all of the prophets of Baal on Mt. Carmel and put down everyone else by saying "I, only I am left", he had to run for his life. Being hotly pursued by Ahab and Jezebel, he hid in a cave far away from the mountain of his conquest. There he searched for God, but he didn’t find God. There was a strong wind, and earthquake and even fire. Elijah looked in all of these so-called acts of God, but he did not find God there. He thought for sure he was lost until he stopped. He let his mind stop racing. He stopped talking. He stopped running. He stopped. Did he change? I like to think he did. At least he began to look for God in someplace other than in a big glorious violent triumph. And it was in that valley, holed up in a cave in fear for his life that Elijah heard a new kind of revelation after his war-like actions were completed and didn’t give him what he wanted. It was the presence of God in the silence. The still small voice.
We need that, don’t we? We need that still small voice. We need to be quiet enough and awake enough to hear it. To experience it. Peter, James and John saw a transfigured Jesus, but they almost missed the import of the moment because they wanted to capture it and freeze it by building a medal platform and having a party.
What they needed to do was find a way to praise God on the other side of the mountain. That’s where the real work of faith begins.
Think of the other Biblical characters who had mountaintop experiences.
Noah set his ark down on Mount Ararat and could see everything before him, but he had to leave the ark and descend the mountain in order to start a new world.
Barefoot Moses spoke to God from a burning bush on mount Sinai, but he needed to descend the mountain to lead the people out of slavery in Egypt.
Shining-faced Moses ascended that mountain again and received the 10 commandments, but he had to come down off the mountain to deliver the message of God’s law to the people.
Old man Moses went to the mountain and saw the promised land, but had to come down the mountain to send Joshua into the land.
The real work begins on the other side of the mountain.
It’s so easy to praise God on the mountaintop, at the platform parties. But praise takes on a different meaning in the valleys. Ask brother Job from the ash heap. Ask Jonah from the belly of the whale. Ask Jesus from the cross. Ask Paul and Silas in the prison. Ask anyone mourning the loss of a loved one or struggling with depression.
Yesterday was the Cooper Book convention of Shaped Note singers. People from 20 states traveled to Minnesota to sing this loud, raucus, alarming and fulfilling music. One person was talking about how wonderful it would be to live in the south with all of these great singers. Another said, well I’m not sure I’d like that. It’s kinda like marriage. You don’t spend all of your time in bed. What he meant by that was that there are those mountaintop experiences like singing on Sundays or Tuesdays, like eating great food and reunions. But then there is life in the rural south. There is poverty. There is restrictive theology. There is life in the valley. Again, he romanticized the mountaintop and ignored the valley.
I was hiking with friends a number of years ago and we when got up to the top of a mount Cardigan in New Hampshire after four hours of hiking, it was covered in fog. And we were so looking forward to the view, too. So as we trudged back down the mountain, we saw things we might not have seen. All along the trail was moss made fluorescent in the damp fog. We saw wildflowers bursting forth. We couldn’t see the top of the mountain in the distance, so we had to look at what was close-up. We saw new beauty. We saw new revelation that God is as much in the valley and the side of the mountain, if not more so than on the mountaintops.
But there is another platform I have not spoken about yet. It’s the one in Manhattan at the site of the World Trade Center. Where once pilgrims had flocked to the obnservation platform at the top of the world on that twin shrine of technol;ogy, success, engineering and seeming world dominance, they now flock to the platform dwarfed by other buidlings and before a gaping hole of death and destruction. And there on that platform, people weep, people remember, people connect with strangers and hold each other up. And through it all, on that valley platform, people experience God is a new and profound way. They reprioritize their lives. They are transformed. They realize how precious and fragile the gift of life truly is.
Sisters and brothers, may we pause to see God not only on the mountaintops; not only at the platform parties where the winners are glorified, but also in the valleys where God is as close as a still small voice; as close as wildflowers in the spring and even ice on a lake in a Minnesota winter; as close as a sister or brother in need. It’s what we call the incarnation. It is God with us. And that experience of knowing that God is with us in the peaks and the valleys may transform and even transfigure our entire lives.
May your faith be sustained and may you seek God out even more in the hills and in the valleys of this life. For the real rewards are not found at the parties on the platform. They are found in the relationship with God and with another person.
God said from the platform party: "This is my beloved son. Listen to him." Come off the mountain and embrace a life of discipleship. Change yourself and you might even be able to change the world. Amen.