Oh boy, folks, you don’t know what Jesus is up to do you? You see, Jesus came proclaiming the reign of the One who was, who is, and who is to come – but you just don’t get it do you?
We find ourselves today on a mountaintop. Mountaintops are funny places to be. You remember a couple of weeks ago two people on a mountaintop in Golden, BC skiing and finding themselves in the danger zone – the edge, if you will. Somehow they were caught away from the slopes that were safe to ski on and were caught out in the middle of nowhere. In fact, when they realized they had no water, no fire, no hope they wrote in the snow SOS - the internationally recognized Morse code distress signal – only to be ignored by the powers that be. Their distress, written in the snow, was ignored just long enough for their survival to be put into jeopardy. In fact, the woman, Marie-Josée Fortin, later died once they were rescued; the man, Gilles Blackburn, is trying to figure out why the distress signal was ignored by rescue helicopters. Mountaintops are dangerous places for us.
The day before Dr. King’s assassination – April 3, 1968 – he reminded us:
“Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
Mountaintops are places where prophets deliver speeches that are dangerous to the establishment. Mountaintops are where God’s will is delivered onto the hearts of prophets. Mountaintops are the reason why prophets are executed and assassinated. Today we’re on a mountaintop and we’re listening to a prophet – the Lord Jesus Christ – the man whom we call the embodiment of our God.
Like Dr. King, our Lord Jesus Christ has been to the mountaintop; and, just as Jesus Christ had been to the mountaintop, so had his ancestral father, Moses.
Now, you know the story of Moses. He came from nothing. He was born in a time when Pharaoh had ordered all Israelite boys to be thrown into the river to die in order to control the population of the slave race – the Israelites. Moses was kept hidden for his first three months of life and then was placed in a papyrus basket coated with tar and pitch that was left among the reeds along a bank of the Nile River. Pharaoh’s daughter and her attendants found the baby and she kept him and named him Moses because, as the scripture says, she “drew him out of the water.”
This Moses, however, grew up and somewhere along the line found that he was an Israelite and he came to know God in a flaming bush while he was atop Mount Horeb – the mountain of God. Now, for some reason the bush was burning but was not consumed by the fire. Now, as strange as it may seem, a voice called from the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And the voice, after telling him he was the God of Moses’ father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob that voice went on to let Moses know what was troubling him. He said:
“I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey...
So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.” (Ex. 3:7-8, 10)
You see, mountaintops are dangerous places. God commands some risky things for us to do at the summit of the mountain. For Moses, on that day, he was expected to go to Pharaoh’s palace and command him to let the Israelites go free.
Some years later the Israelites were wandering in the desert during a 40 year sojourn back to Canaan – the Promised Land. One day the LORD summoned Moses to the top of Mount Sinai to receive what Jews will call The Ten Words and the LORD said to Moses, “Go get Aaron and don’t let anybody else up the mountain – including the priests. If they come up they will die!” Encounters with our God are not safe.
When we get to Jesus, we shouldn’t be surprised by his story. In Matthew’s Gospel there are powerful reminders of the story of Moses. First recall how Jesus ends up, with his family, escaping as refugees to Egypt; then remember that Moses and his people were refugees in Egypt – and later on wandered through the desert back to the land of Canaan. In the same way that Moses led his Israelites for 40 years through the Egyptian wilderness, so too did Jesus wander in the wilderness for 40 days at the beckoning of the Holy Spirit. Just as Moses received instruction from the LORD at the top of a mountain whose base was swept up in a fog from heaven, so too did Jesus receive instruction at the top of a mountain as he was transfigured in the presence of his disciples.
But today, folks, it is we who have gathered with Jesus atop the foothills of Galilee to be awakened by a God looking hard for some followers – some disciples. Today, we search for the presence of God amidst the darkness of the reality we are facing. The most widely conversed topic of the day is the economic recession going on; the likes of which has not been seen since the Great Depression that began in 1929 and, in some countries, lasted into the 1940s. But there are other problems we have to look right in the eye. So often we come to church thinking we have to put on a smile because we just have to be welcoming so that new people will join our church. But look around you folks. Look at the person to your right; look at the person to your left – this, as much as you might not want to admit it, is your family. I do not mean that metaphorically – I mean that literally – this is your family; this is what God calls his kingdom. You might not know what it is that is on the heart of your neighbour; you might not know the sin he or she has committed – in fact, you’re probably better off not knowing...this is your family.
It’s funny how Jesus gathers a crowd together of unlikely people and calls them God’s church; God’s family; God’s Kingdom.
Those people next to you might have come here with exceeding joy or with a desperate plea for some sort of hope or help that the God who was revealed to Moses in a burning bush would actually even acknowledge one tiny person out of almost 7 billion individual human beings alive on the planet today.
The thing is, folks, we are a people amidst the struggle, and that’s why we’ve come to the mountaintop. We knew listening to this wild speaker was risky. We knew that Herod wouldn’t be too happy if he heard that we went out to listen to the ravings of a political and religious revolutionary; but we became desperate. We were getting lost in the struggle. Our moral compasses were no longer pointing to God – but to the one who tempted this prophet in the wilderness – Satan. We were lost and needed to be found.
Remember, my friends, how he began preaching in those foothills – he sat as he taught us – he surprised us by his comments:
· Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted
· Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth
· Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they will be filled
· Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of justice, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven
We had all thought that God only wanted the people who had it all together in his Kingdom, but when we heard this Jesus preach we heard the complete opposite. He seemed to be saying that those of us who are facing hardship; those of us whose lives are flying apart; those of us who are struggling to make ends meet; those of us facing the loss of our jobs are exactly what Jesus is calling his kingdom. But his sermon to us lost souls wasn’t complete until he looked at our weary and tired bodies and said:
Folks, you may be the scum of society – you may only be peasants – but you are salt – don’t ever lose your flavour because I can’t put you to work because unsalty salt isn’t good for anything.
Folks, when I see the hope stir up in your hearts I can see nothing but light. You are the light of the world – a city built on a hill cannot be hid. People don’t hide their lit candles under bowls. So, when God’s hope has welled up inside of you let it shine for the nations to see – let it shine for your neighbours to see.
A young man was washing dishes in a soup kitchen and a preacher walked into the place. He saw the teenager at work and was baffled. He walked up to the boy and said to him, “What’s a kid like you washing dishes in a place like this for? You must love working with the homeless. But for what reason are you here?”
The kid replied, “Aaahhh...pastor, I don’t want to be here any more than you want to be here. I don’t like the people who come to this place. Have you ever met the homeless folks who frequent this place? Some of them are downright crazy – there’s a reason why they’re homeless – nobody wants to take them in.
“Well,” says the pastors, “Why are you here then?”
“Hey preacher boy,” he says, “I’m here for the same reason you’re here...Jesus put me here!”
This seventeen year-old boy had been called by Jesus to be light in a dark, dark world. As Matthew’s Gospel says it:
The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned.
This young man had been living in the shadow of the wings of the God of Jesus Christ. This kid had been to the mountaintop and had seen the Promised Land even though it didn’t look like what most of us would expect a Promised Land to look like. His Promised Land was where a bunch of crazy homeless people could share dinner, tell each other crude jokes, and have a middle class, disturbed teenager wash their dishes and clean up after them. Welcome to the Kingdom of God.
You see, folks, Jesus just loves to die for sinners; for outcasts; for people living on the margins of society; but he also loves to die for those people living in the struggle of everyday life. Jesus looks at us and sees something miraculous that God has created and is relentlessly attempting to invite back into his Kingdom. This is what Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is about; a troubling kingdom for a troubled people – a kingdom for the underdogs.
Philip Yancey in his book The Jesus I Never Knew put it this way:
Underdog. I wince even as I write the word, especially in connection with Jesus. It’s a crude word, probably derived from dogfighting and applied over time to predictable losers and victims of injustice. Yet, as I read the birth stories about Jesus I cannot help but conclude that though the world may be tilted toward the rich and powerful, God is tilted toward the underdog. “He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty,” said Mary in her Magnificat hymn.
Consider the story of Harriet Tubman. She lived during the 19th century and has always been, along with Terry Fox, one of my heroes. She escaped from slavery in Maryland in September of 1849 and made the journey along the Underground Railroad. She was assisted along this informal route by free blacks, abolitionists, and Christian activists – mostly Quakers. They say that Tubman’s journey began in Caroline County, Maryland, along the banks of the Choptank River travelling northeast, through Delaware and across the Mason-Dixon Line that meant freedom from the South and, more importantly, freedom from slavery. This journey that she took was only 150 km, but the journey was all on foot, and mostly done at night – which means the trip could’ve taken from as little as 5 days to as many as 3 weeks.
Reflecting on the journey years later Tubman wrote:
When I found I had crossed that [Mason-Dixon] line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven.
Tubman’s claim to fame is that she brought almost 100 slaves to freedom along the Underground Railroad, by travelling that same route 13 times – which means she put down around slightly less than 4000 km on those aching feet of hers. This regular old black woman was also considered a military genius as she spied on behalf of the northern Union forces during the American Civil War. And just think, she spent a good chunk of her life just a stone’s throw away in St. Catharines.
One of my favourite stories about Tubman is this one.
Harriet Tubman used to carry a revolver, and it seems that she wasn’t afraid to use that revolver. You wouldn’t want to cross Harriet Tubman. In fact, she was so focused on bringing people to freedom that she was committed to this ideal, “with Harriet Tubman there is no turning back!” Well, it just happens that during one of Tubman’s expeditions morale sank to below the knees and one man insisted that he was gonna go back to the plantation they’d come from. Harriet wasn’t too amused by this man’s declaration so she stormed over to where he was, pulled out the revolver, and pressed it against his face. But Tubman wasn’t an impolite woman at all; although she was quite persuasive. All she had to do was to say to this man:
You seem to have two choices here sir. You go on or die.
When the group arrived in Canada a few days later, the man was still with them.
Tubman was working for a God who is going out of his way to help us find salvation. I think in the church we often over-think our faith and we think we’re just not deep enough to know this God we worship. But if you’re a deep person, this God will attempt to meet you there. If you’re a shallow person, this God will attempt to meet you there. If you’re somewhere in the middle, this God will attempt to meet you there. I think that’s what the beatitudes are about – God telling us about the place he meets us. In Christian theology when God gets back the very things that belong to God they call it Heaven. This is a glimpse of the underdogs that God wants. This is Jesus’ anti-establishment sermon from the mountaintop – perhaps one of the reasons why he was executed. Governments aren’t comforted by Jesus’ good news – it destabilizes everything. But that is the Heaven that Jesus is summoning from among our ranks. Amen.
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