Food for the Journey
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
When our children were little we would go up to visit Barry’s parents in upstate New York during the summer, and we’d stay for a week. There was plenty of time to go to various state parks and to visit Cooperstown and Clinton. And we’d often take in the Fourth of July fireworks on the Colgate campus in Hamilton. Barry always took his bike and took a few rides on the rolling hills near his parents’ home.
One thing I remember quite clearly was that each year, when it was time to return home, Barry’s mom would load us down with food that we could have on our trip. Each one of us would receive a huge sandwich, stuffed with meats and cheeses, and always some nice lettuce and tomato on the side. There would be enough fruit sent along so that each of us could have several pieces over the 5 hours it took to cover the distance. And of course there would be a package of cookies and plentiful drinks with paper cups and a ton of napkins.
It was seen as an extension of good hospitality, I think: sending a nice big picnic with your guests so that they wouldn’t get hungry on the way home and have to stop somewhere for high-priced and not-too-good road food. It was food for the journey.
Today we read two accounts of God providing food for the journey for his people. And food in abundance.
In the first story Moses is summoned by God to a “summit meeting” on Mount Sinai. There he’s given the tablets of the law by God—what we distill as the Ten Commandments. And he is there in the presence of God, in darkness and cloud and fire, in the presence of pure divinity, for forty days and forty nights. Now, what we don’t have in today’s reading is an account of the effects of that all that contact with God. We read in the Book of Exodus that when Moses went back down the mountain to his people, his face shone—light radiated out of it. His appearance was so frightening that he had to wear a veil over his face to keep the light from being visible and freaking out his fellow Israelites.
If you look at old artwork of Moses with the tablets, sometimes you see what look like big, bright horns coming out of his head. That’s merely the artists’ attempts to portray the rays of glory that shone out from him.
One very important side effect of Moses’ encounter with divinity and his resultant glowing face / was that the people remembered these things. Their memory became a kind of fortification for them. It was food for their journey, which was to be very long and very arduous before they reached their goal, the Promised Land. This brush with divinity made an indelible memory for them, an assurance that God loved them and was leading them, even through such a frustrating and protracted journey. And they drew on their memories in times of discouragement and frustration.
And our second story today is similar, but also different. We have Jesus ascending the Mount of Transfiguration, which some say is Mount Tabor, in the southern part of Galilee. He takes his 3 closest followers, Peter, James, and John, along with him. And suddenly he was transfigured—light shone out from him and his face glowed from within (just like what happened to Moses) and even his clothes became dazzling white. And this time, to surpass the experience of Moses, we have the voice of the Father ringing out and heard by the three men, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” So here we have the irrefutable experience of Jesus revealed in his divinity. It’s a memory for them to hang onto in the difficult journey to Jerusalem and to death.
And the three disciples fall to the ground, but Jesus himself touches them—God touches them—and tells them to get up—with that old standby piece of divine advice, “do not be afraid.”
This experience was food for their journey. It was, as one author says, “the epiphany of epiphanies,” the showing forth of divinity in the face of Jesus Christ. It became memory for these three men and for their community as they continued to tell the story. We see in the Second Letter of Peter this memory being invoked again.
It was a very important experience for Peter, James, and John, one that helped them and the later Church to figure out that Jesus was fully divine but also fully human. The memory of this incident helped some Church Fathers to put the pieces together about the nature of the Trinity at an even later time. And one hopes it helped them through the more immediate wrenching chaos of Jesus’ last days.
But it wasn’t a guarantee that the faith of Jesus’ followers would always be strong. Peter still betrayed Jesus at the home of the high priest, and the disciples deserted Jesus as he hung on the cross—all except for his mother and for the “Beloved Disciple.” Even though we see divinity peeking through in our lives sometimes, even then we still may wrestle with doubt or feel like we’re losing hold of God.
We too are on a long journey, like the Israelites in the wilderness, like the disciples and Jesus moving toward Jerusalem for judgment and for death. Our lives are full of unknown dangers and darkness, as well as yet-undiscovered joys and delights. (Thank God.) We need food for our journey, too.
And we certainly receive such food from reading the stories of the Bible such as the two we have today and from internalizing them and making them our own, in a sense. But we also sometimes experience directly an inbreaking of divinity into our midst. We too may experience now and then “the mystical in the midst of the mundane, the awesome amid the ordinary, the breathtaking amid the boring.” [Allen C. McSween, Jr., in Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volume I, page 437].
Just last Sunday at our Vestry lunch with Bishop Ian one of our Vestry members recounted one such incident when the Divine broke into her life in an unmistakable way, bringing sustenance and encouragement. Another person shared the same kind of experience yesterday at our Vestry Retreat.
Many people have known times when it seemed as if the veil between heaven and earth grew very thin and they could feel the activity of God very clearly.
All these kinds of experiences are important because they give us a shot in the arm, a deep encouragement to keep on our course in life, a kind of food for our journey. They are meant to be shared with other people when the time is right.
So think about this and over lunch today—or over the next week sometime—engage a spouse or a friend in conversation by asking them to share any experience of how they were reminded that God is active and loving. Buoy each other up with encouragement for the road that lies ahead. We all need it.
Mountaintop experiences are given / in order to be given again.
Amen.
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