On January 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy was sworn in as the 35th president of the United States. It was a bright cold day in Washington, D.C., with a promising blue sky stretching to eternity. My uncle Ray was there. He was thirty years old, a newspaper reporter from southwest Minnesota who made his way to the nation’s Capital to report the story. He wore overshoes and stood in the snow and cold.
Uncle Ray wrote about the experience, years later. “Golly, it was good,” he recalled. He was thrilled to be there to see the young president, but he also appreciated the old poet: Robert Frost was there, and had composed a new poem for the occasion. My uncle sensed among the excited crowd the feeling that all was well, that the bright future beckoned. Young President Kennedy represented so much. He wore no hat on his head, and his vigorous youth shone bright. He was eleven years younger than I am now.
I love my uncle, and I would love to have been there myself. I admit I am fond of mountaintop civic moments. Maybe in this cynical age you would say I’m a sucker for them. In the mountaintop story we hear today, Saint Peter comes in for criticism as a sucker like me, and once again I can relate to that flawed but enthusiastic disciple. Let’s build booths, Peter says, or tents, to house and contain this mountaintop moment. But as we heard, he did not know what he was saying.
The moment passes, and as we move down the mountain, even the memory is diminished by what happens next. Saving my uncle’s take on a notable historical event – I believe him: golly, I’m sure it was good – JFK’s inauguration hasn’t aged that well. Robert Frost, blinded by the blazing winter sun, wasn’t able to read the poem he composed for the occasion, so he recited from memory another of his poems, called “The Gift Outright.” Frost was a good poet, but “The Gift Outright” is not a good poem. It is an ode to Manifest Destiny, that long discredited, toxic idea that, on this continent, white people from northern Europe matter most.
And of course the young president would come to grief, and leave his nation with the wretched, wrenching legacy of a misbegotten war in southeast Asia. Even my uncle, so full of hope that bright noonday, would face the hard realities of life down the mountain. He went on to be an accomplished, even celebrated newspaper editor, but like many of us he struggled in a changing industry that became increasingly hostile to older workers, to elders who remember the mountaintops of the past.
The nation had a lot to celebrate in 1961, even though we were still in the early years of the civil rights movement, and still had not embroiled ourselves in Vietnam. But now, in these early decades of the next century, we do not celebrate on mountaintops. We occasionally get up there! But celebration is not our mood. Our most remarkable recent mountaintop moment was the day last summer when a presidential candidate was transfigured in glory not by a celebration of his – or our – accomplishments, but by an assassination attempt. The candidate memorably stood up after the bullet grazed his ear, and with blood streaking his face, he shouted “Fight! Fight!”. That transfiguration on that mountain was an iconic image not of glory or virtue, but of belligerent defiance.
And perhaps some of us believe that that is just as it should be. I doubt many in this room share that person’s opinions about what should stir us to battle, but I expect some of us are eager to join a battle nonetheless. We want to fight for the rights and the dignity of immigrants. We want to shout “Fight!” on behalf of children in need of vaccinations, and for trans persons. We want to ride to war – figuratively, at the very least – for the people of Ukraine, for the people of Gaza, for the people employed by our government who receive strange emails written by the jackboots of an eccentric billionaire, emails that threaten their livelihoods.
We have lost an ancient binary, an old trope: as people of faith, we no longer contemplate the serene, glorious, sometimes terrifying mountain of transfiguration that rises majestically above the messy, war-torn, workaday valley of human life. Our species has always climbed mountains, literal mountains, in our spiritual life. The mountain entices us, and intimidates us. We find God there. We encounter God there. But now, we seem to have brought our messy, war-torn, workaday troubles all the way up the mountain. Today, even visions of transfiguration are not much more than defiant images of discord and rage.
With all of this grim reality in mind, we now clamber up Mount Tabor once again. Mount Tabor is the mountain of Transfiguration, the high hill in the Galilee region that our forebears in faith remember as the mountain where Jesus was transfigured in glory. The first Christians to hear this story would have instantly caught the historical reference: Mount Tabor is the site of a victorious battle fought by the Israelites against the Canaanites, led by the judge Deborah and the military general Barak. If Jesus is being transfigured on this mountain, well, that is auspicious. No wonder Peter wanted to capture the moment, to stay in the light, to stand with my uncle on a cold, bright morning and witness a glorious historical event.
But no. That’s not what happens to Jesus and his followers on Mount Tabor, a mountain that has known war. Jesus is joined by Moses and Elijah, personifications of the Law and the Prophets. They become a dazzling triptych: you could imagine them gleaming like a three-panel gold-painted icon. But they do not simply stand there and shine. They do not inspire Peter in his later years to say, “Golly, it was good.”
They talk about death. Specifically, they talk about the death of Jesus. Luke the evangelist says that they speak of the exodus of Jesus, translated for us as ‘departure.’ Jesus is about to go down the mountain and make his long journey to Jerusalem, where he will be arrested, tortured, and executed. He will then rise to life, and in his rising – even if it takes the length of human history – in his rising, the powers of the world will be reversed; the poor will become rich; the lowly will be lifted up. But none of this will happen before the suffering, before the trial, before the death.
Jesus does not stand on the mountain and shout, “Fight! Fight!” Nor does he stand on the mountain and celebrate his own glory, smiling broadly as an old poet stirs our hearts with inspired (if problematic) poetic verse. Jesus speaks of exodus.
And so we also, in turn, should speak of exodus, of the Exodus, the liberation of our enslaved Israelite forebears in faith. We will speak of this very Exodus in just seven more weeks, on the other side of Lent, in the early hours of Easter morning. On that mountaintop morning seven weeks hence, we will gather in this room, in the dark, huddled around a candle shining with the light of Christ, the light that shines in darkness, the light that has shined no matter how awfully the world has roiled around it. Mount Tabor gazes across the war-torn valley at the mountain of Calvary, where there is a garden, and a tomb, and an exodus.
This is the Exodus we will proclaim on Easter morning:
As Pharaoh drew near, the Israelites looked back, and there were the Egyptians advancing on them. In great fear the Israelites cried out to the Lord. They said to Moses, "Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us, bringing us out of Egypt? Is this not the very thing we told you in Egypt, 'Let us alone and let us serve the Egyptians'? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness." But Moses said to the people, "Do not be afraid, stand firm, and see the deliverance that the Lord will accomplish for you today; for the Egyptians whom you see today you shall never see again. The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to keep still."
“The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to keep still.”
That is a shard of Good News, just that sentence, that small portion of the Exodus. “You have only to keep still.” We need not frantically try to capture a fleeting moment of hope, building tabernacles to turn a wondrous experience into a museum. We need not throw up our hands in despair, either, at all that devastates and daunts us in this terrible age. And we need not rise up in belligerent defiance, yelling, “Fight! Fight!”.
Rabbi Sharon Brous offers a better way. Rabbi Brous is the founder of Ikar, a Los Angeles synagogue advocating for Palestinians and Israelis alike, for Jews across the diaspora, and for all people who seek justice and peace. She describes four problematic responses to the Exodus, to the crisis the Israelites faced at the Red Sea, to the crisis faced by anyone who stands on a war-torn mountain in a troubled time. Sharing the wisdom of her tradition, Rabbi Brous encourages us to avoid four problematic responses: do not flee from the challenge; do not capitulate to the enemy and collaborate with evil; do not return violence for violence; and do not simply roll up into a ball of anxiety, like a snail. Don’t run away; don’t capitulate; don’t respond in kind; and do not “snail.” This wisdom teaches us instead to do what we know how to do in these hard times.
Standing on the mountain of Transfiguration with Jesus, speaking about the Exodus, we resolve to do what we know how to do. We challenge our companion Peter with empathy, understanding that to build a tent for Jesus is just a way to stay put, to stay powerless, to snail. We clasp his hand and, together, we keep still as the Lord fights for us. Sometimes the Lord fights for us by working through us, by lifting our own arms, and minds, and hearts, in courageous engagement with the world. Other times, the Lord fights for us while we stay at our posts, helping where we can, staying informed, staying alert. And still other times, we rest while we fret, we breathe, we hydrate, we wait.
Golly, it’s not good. But I assure you that we have all we need, and we have one another, during these fearful days. And I invite you to pray with me a poem composed not by Robert Frost, but by Gail Ramshaw, a Lutheran master of liturgical prayer. Here is Gail’s prayer, a prayer for Easter Vigil, a prayer for all who speak of the Exodus:
O merciful God,
Save all whom oppression drowns. Wash away injustice. With Miriam we sing to the majestic beauty of your baptismal waters. O merciful God, we implore you: This time, save also the Egyptians, in your mercy wider and deeper than all the oceans of the earth.