H. Michael Brewer
Crescent Springs Presbyterian Church
February 18, 2007 – Transfiguration
BREATHING LESSONS
II Corinthians 3:12 - 4:2
Luke 9:28-43
In today’s story from the Gospel of Luke, Jesus and his inner circle hike up to the top of a mountain to get
away from the crowds and to pray for a while. While Jesus is in prayer—and the disciples are struggling to
stay awake—the Lord is transfigured. That is, the inward glory of Christ is revealed to the eyes of Peter,
James, and John. Moses and Elijah appear, the living symbols of Old Testament Law and Prophecy. They
converse with Jesus, and then a voice from heaven proclaims,” This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!”
This is the original mountaintop experience! But when the group comes down from the mountain, what is
waiting for them? A little boy is in the grip of a demon that has tormented him for years. The father has brought
the boy to the disciples for healing, but they can’t do a thing. Jesus is clearly disappointed in their failure. “You
faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you and bear with you?” Then Jesus casts
out the demon and saves the little boy.
Here’s one take on that story.
How in the world can Jesus take a week-end getaway in the mountains while there are people suffering in
the valley? This has always been the problem with the church! We are more interested in praying and singing
hymns and getting a spiritual buzz than we are in helping the hurting and healing the broken.
Look at Peter! He’s up on the mountain with Jesus, and what does he say? “O Lord, just give us the word
and we’ll build some little houses for you and Moses and Elijah.” Why does he want to build houses? So they
can all stay up on the mountain, basking in the glow, and they won’t ever have to descend to the real world,
the dirty world, the needy world.
What the church needs is less prayer and more mission! Less time kneeling on the mountaintop and
more time walking the streets of the city! Less time staring into the shining face of Jesus and more time
gazing into the wretched faces of the lost and lonely.
That’s one take on this story. And not a bad one, I think. The church needs to be warned about the danger
of growing too inward and losing sight of our calling to minister to the world in the name of Jesus Christ. The
Old Testament prophets tell us repeatedly that the service of God in worship is empty without the service of
God in the world. Fair enough! That is a message I have preached myself, and I do not regret doing so.
But allow me to flesh out the message, to add an extra point to the sermon. Back to the demon-
possessed boy. We all agree that he needs to be healed. Who could pass by such misery and not be
touched? Someone needs to save this boy, to make him whole. Why is it that the disciples can’t do anything
for this boy?
“Oh, well, they’re just disciples. It takes the touch of Jesus to cast out a demon.”
Wrong! Why is Jesus so disappointed with his friends and their failure? Jesus clearly expected them to be
able to help this boy. And they do try, but they fail. Why?
Matthew, Mark, and Luke all record different details as they tell this story. Mark says that after Jesus has
healed the boy, the disciples take him aside and they ask him, “Why couldn’t we cast out this demon?” Jesus
says to them, “This kind can only be cast out through prayer and fasting.”
Well, well… Jesus seems to be saying to the disciples that they have no power to help this suffering child
because they have neglected their spiritual disciplines, their inward preparations. Apparently, the disciples
cannot be of much help on the city streets because they have not yet spent enough time on the mountain
basking in the presence of God.
The church must reach out into the world. No question about it. But if we neglect our prayers and fasting,
our spiritual disciplines, our time spent consciously in the presence of God, then we will have nothing to offer
the world.
The body of Christ is a living thing, and as such it must breathe. The church must inhale, must invite the
Holy Spirit to fill us through worship and sacrament and Scripture and prayer, confession and praise,
celebration and lament. And the church must exhale, offering the breath of the Spirit to a world in need of
resuscitation. Inhale and exhale.
The church has a heartbeat, a living rhythm of work and rest, work and rest. Working in God’s creation,
and resting in God’s Spirit. The working is made possible by the resting, and the resting finds its completion
in the working. Some of you can testify to the problems that arise when the heart works too hard or rests too
much. The body of Christ has a heartbeat.
Have you ever been on a seesaw with someone who weighed a lot more than you or a lot less? It’s not
much fun either way. If you’re the lightweight, you spend most of your time in the air, you barely get to kick off.
Maybe your partner shoves you into the air and keeps you there, just dangling. If you’re the heavyweight, you
have to do all the work and the upswing is always too brief and gravity keeps dragging you back down to the
ground.
At its best, the Christian life is a holy seesaw, a carefully balanced seesaw that alternates between
reaching up to God and putting our feet down on the earth, resting and working, lifting and being lifted.
Most of us have a preference. Some of us are always eager to be doing something, to help somebody, to
make the world better. Some of us are more inclined to seek silence and solitude, to lift one another in prayer,
to cultivate our inward awareness of God.
Which is why God has given us to each other in the church: to learn from one another, to stretch and
prompt each other, to make sure that the heart of the church is beating evenly and the lungs are breathing
regularly, to make sure the seesaw remains in motion.
This Wednesday we begin the season of Lent, a six week journey to Easter, a time to take our spiritual
pulse, to make sure we’re not short of breath or out of balance. Lent reminds us of the importance of looking
inward, just as Easter and Pentecost remind us to reach outward.
I commend to you the practices that the church has cherished for many centuries: prayer—both private
and communal—attention to the voice of God in Scripture, renewal and rededication in the Lord’s Supper,
giving and seeking forgiveness, service to the needy, and of course fasting, whatever form that may take for
you.
But remember we do these things, not in order to garner heavenly brownie points. We are not saved by
our good works. God is not impressed by how often we come to the Lord’s Table or how often we have read
through the Bible.
We do these things—these spiritual disciplines, these mountaintop visits—as a means of opening
ourselves to God, making room for God, who is our only salvation.
We do these things to help us hear God more clearly and love God more purely.
We do these things for God’s own sake, so that God may receive from us the praise and loyalty that are
God’s due.
And paradoxically, we do these things for the sake of the world—for the sake of the poor and the hurting,
the hungry and the homeless, the broken and the downtrodden—so that God may use these disciplines as a
training that prepares and equips us to serve the sisters and the brothers of Christ in the world.
After all, it would be a shame to build a house on the mountaintop with Christ, and to never come down to
help those folks in the valley.
It would also be a shame to meet a child down in the valley, a child who is wrestling with a demon, and to
find that we have no help to give because we have forgotten our way to the mountaintop.
Come, join me in the season of Lent. In all the seasons of the Lord, seek the balance. Catch the rhythm.
Have fun on the seesaw.
Soli Deo Gloria!