The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
February 22, 2009

Last Sunday after the Epiphany – B
1 Kings 19:9-18
2 Peter 1:16-21
Mark 9:2-9

Wendell Berry, among others, reminds us that in America life has been shaped by two kinds of people.

One group were the “boomers,” those who set their faces toward the frontier, those who were always on the lookout for the next boom town, always searching for a quick buck in gold or gambling, always using the topsoil and the water from the streams and ready to move on again when the topsoil blew away or the stream dried up, those never a stranger to adventure.

The other group were the “settlers” or “nesters,” those who started a ranch or a farm, dug wells and sought to conserve the land, built the church and the school and the town, opened a bank or a general store, those who preferred the apparent security of settled community life to the uncertainties and hardships of the road.

As some of you may recall, that’s what my favorite theology textbook, Western Theology, says about the Church. That’s “western,” that is, as in the Wild West. In it, Wes Seeliger says that there are two kinds of theology, settler theology and pioneer theology.

In settler theology, the Church is the courthouse, which stands in the middle of the town square. In settler theology, God is the mayor, whose office, its curtains always drawn, is on the second floor of the courthouse. Jesus is the sheriff. His job is to make sure all the laws are obeyed. The Holy Spirit is the saloon girl, who gives a special performance every Wednesday night and has a different dancing costume for every season: green, purple, red, and white. In settler theology, the priest is the bank teller, whose main job is to receive deposits, and the bishop is the bank president, who keeps all the accounts and locks the bank at night.

Things are different in pioneer theology. In pioneer theology, the Church is the wagon train. God is the trail boss, who rides hard and drinks his whiskey straight and wears size-13 boots. Jesus is the scout, whose job is to ride ahead to find out which way the pioneers should go. The Holy Spirit is Wild Red the buffalo hunter, who is the biggest man in camp and whose clothes smell like the critters he hunts. The priest is the cook, whose job is to dish up meat for the hungry pioneers out on the trail, and the bishop is the cook’s dishwasher and, between meals, the wagon train’s general handyman.

In settler theology, the most important things are to maintain law and order in town, to keep courthouse records up to date, to wipe your feet before entering the courthouse, and to tell the old, old stories about the exciting adventures of days gone by.

In pioneer theology, the most important things are to keep your eyes peeled on the horizon, to ford the next river, to pull the wagons out of the mud, and to travel today’s road with as much vision and faith and grit as the folks of yesteryear possessed in traveling theirs.

Life is like that, isn’t it? Some of us prefer the settled life. Some of us are drawn to the adventure of the road. Many are pulled in both directions at once.

Everyone who has read Tolkien knows that hobbits are settlers by nature, timid stay-at-homes. When Gandalf and the dwarves show up at Bilbo Baggins’ hobbit hole, Bilbo is doing what he likes to spend all his days doing, having tea and biscuits and enjoying the view from his front porch.

Gandalf and the dwarves hope to enlist Bilbo in an adventure. The dwarves plan to recover the inheritance that rightly belongs to them, the gold and jewels mined by their ancestors and the Lonely Mountain that was their ancestral home. But the Lonely Mountain is in a distant and dangerous land where Smaug the Calamitous, the fierce, fire-breathing dragon, now sleeps on the dwarves’ gold and jewels. And to recover their inheritance, the dwarves will need to travel through the dark and gloomy wilderness of Mirkwood, where they will have to outwit evil orcs, fend off savage wolves and giant spiders, and battle wicked goblins.

Bilbo wants nothing to do with it. He likes life the way it is in his hobbit hole, where life is secure and snug and where there is always plenty to eat and everything is familiar and predictable, life the way Bilbo has always known it!

But through the wizardry of Gandalf and the persistence of the dwarves, Bilbo is enticed to join them in their quest, and as everyone knows, all this leads to Bilbo’s own adventure to the Lonely Mountain and the Desolation of Smaug, and to his cousin Frodo’s later adventure in The Lord of the Rings.

Frodo, you’ll remember, carried a grave responsibility. The world was mired in a struggle between good and evil. Evil Sauron, the Dark Lord of Mordor, needs the Ring of Power in order to rule the world, and he enlists the orcs and all the evil forces of the world to help him find it, so that he might resume his treacherous plan of domination. But Frodo finds the Ring and assumes the responsibility of destroying it, and so save the world from the evil Sauron. To do so, he must take it to Mordor, where the Sauron himself lurks in the Land of Shadow and Evil, because only the fires of Mordor are hot enough to destroy the Ring.

Weeks into his dangerous journey, Frodo is sailing down the Great River, and he comes to a crossroad, to a place of decision, and he is tempted by the apparent ease and safety of the less difficult road. Two powers strive in Frodo. “Think of all the good we could do if we just kept the Ring ourselves,” Boromir the Tempter pleads. “You and I would use the Ring’s power only for good.” But Frodo, who has himself worn the Ring and has personally experienced its pull toward evil, overcomes his fear and the temptation to take the easier path, and he chooses to stick with what he sees as his vocation and responsibility. He decides to go to Mordor. His faithful friend Sam will not abandon his master, and the first part of the journey ends with Frodo and Sam setting out with the Ring for the Land of Shadow and Evil, with their fate uncertain but with the assurance that it is the road they are called to take.

Moses, and later Jesus and his disciples, came to that same crossroad in their journeys. Tired of their journey through the wilderness with Moses, the people of Israel wanted to settle down, spiritually as well as physically. Those early pioneers of the Bible had set out from Egypt with the trail boss leading the way to freedom and urging them on. At first they were pleased to be on the road, which is what the word “exodus” means. They were happy to leave their slavery behind, excited to be on the way to a promising future in a promising land. But life on the road was hard. When night came in the wilderness, it came suddenly and completely. Water and food were scarce. Some found their traveling companions insufferable, and many began to complain. “Life was a lot better back in Egypt,” they said. “Even if we were slaves there, at least we had enough to eat and drink. What good is it to be free if we’re just going to die out here on the road?”

Even Moses the cook, when he went up the mountain to talk with the trail boss, complained to God. Moses was pleased, of course, when the trail boss gave him some assurances to take back to the people. But they were kind of “iffy” assurances. Moses couldn’t even get the trail boss to tell him his name, and all he got for directions was that they were to follow the clouds by day and the fire by night. It was, really, just a promise, a promise that life lay ahead of them on the road and a warning that only slavery and death lay behind.

So when the weary people finally reached the Promised Land, they heaved a sigh of relief and settled down. They were ready for a hot shower and a martini, glad to build some houses to live in, glad to have some settled rules to live by. Theirs became a tabernacled life and a tabernacled religion, a life and religion of place. It was reassuring to know that God would be in his courthouse when they needed him, at home in the ark. It was reassuring to know that when they sinned, a lamb or a goat could be sacrificed to atone.

In time, they even built God a permanent house, a magnificent Temple in Jerusalem, which became the place to worship, the place to find God. Life was finally free, they thought, of the uncertainties of the road. Life now was settled and dependable, they thought. The trail boss had become a mayor, they thought. God had settled down and now lived in his Temple, they thought. And the people presumed a new self-assurance about God and his relationship with them, and about their relationship to God, a presumed self-assurance that St. Paul would later share and describe to those people of the road in Philippi: “I had it all,” Paul said. “I was settled. I had been circumcised on the eighth day, an Israelite by race, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born and bred. In my practice of the law I was an officer of the courthouse, a pharisee, and by the law’s standard of righteousness, I was without fault. My relationship to the mayor was solid, my knowledge of God secure.”

It was a similar self-assurance, a similar certainty, that Peter and James and John carried to their own crossroad on the Mount of Transfiguration. It was a self-assurance they wanted to capture and keep forever. “Lord, we’ve been on the road for years now. Can’t we settle down here? This is good!” Peter said. “We’ve seen the glory of God shine in you, Lord, the way it once shown through Moses, and we now know that you are the Son of God. Let’s stay here. We’ll build you a place to live, a tabernacle. And we’ll build one for Moses and one for Elijah, too, shelters for you to live in, a place for all of you to be at home and enjoy your splendor and use your power. Why, up here there are lots of stones you can turn into bread, so we’d have plenty to eat. And from this mountain, you can see and rule all the kingdoms of the world!”

“Surely this is better than all the roaming from town to town we’ve been doing,” Peter adds, ”and it’s certainly better than the suffering and death you’ve been talking about down on the road. You don’t have to go to the Mountain of Doom, Jesus. We don’t need to go down to Jerusalem to face all the dangers and troubles and evil of the world. We know now that you really are the Son of God, so let’s just stop here and settle down.”

But before Peter could even finish his speech, the cloud and the splendor that had enveloped Jesus evaporated. It moved on, as clouds do, and they saw only Jesus, who was packing up for his trip back down the mountain. And he spoke of his exodus, of his need to depart and take the road down to Jerusalem, of his need to follow his vocation and to defeat the Evil One, to destroy him in his own territory, right in his own home town. He spoke of the road that had to be taken, the road to the Cross and to his death. Like the pillar of cloud in the wilderness, the cloud of the Mount of Transfiguration moved on, and it led Jesus and his disciples back onto the road through the wilderness, the only road to resurrection and life.

Jesus’ transfiguration, as I see it, is the Bible’s way of confirming the Exodus as the central story of life, the Bible’s way of saying that God is, finally, a God of the road, a trail boss, not a mayor, and that Jesus is a scout, not a sheriff, because life is an adventure, an active experience of walking a road, the road from birth to death and beyond.

The gift the disciples received at the Mount of Transfiguration was not the gift of certainty. The gift they received was not spiritual insurance. Instead, it was the gift of hope, the hope that if they followed Jesus back down the mountain onto the road of the wilderness of everyday life, with all its bumps and bruises, they would surely reach the land of life and promise, just as the people of Moses’ day had reached the Promised Land when they followed the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night through their wilderness. The gift they received was not the assurance that God was always at home in the Temple, but the promise that he would always be with them wherever they went, even if, especially if, they walked the way of the Cross with Jesus.

A Samaritan woman once asked Jesus where God was to be found. “Sir,” she said, “our fathers worshipped on this mountain, but you Jews say that the place where God must be worshipped is in Jerusalem.” And Jesus replied, ”Believe me, the time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. The time is coming, indeed it is already here, when true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth.”

This became Paul’s assurance, too: ”I once had it all,” he said. “I was settled in. I had been circumcised on the eighth day, an Israelite by race, a Hebrew born and bred, by the law’s standard of righteousness without fault. I knew who God was and where he was to be found, I thought. But all such assets and assurances I have written off because of Christ. I forfeit it all as so much rubbish for the sake of gaining Christ, with no righteousness of my own based on the law and nothing but the righteousness which comes from faith in Christ. My one desire is to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and to share his sufferings in growing conformity with his death. My one desire is to walk the road of life with Christ in hope of somehow attaining the resurrection from the dead. So forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”

This is the hope of the road, the hope of faith and life. It is the hope of the road of Lent, the road through the wilderness of the Cross and death to resurrection life.

For we know, finally, that however much we like our tea and biscuits beside the hearth, at the end of the day, life itself is a mysterious journey and all settlement fails us. Whatever the virtues and apparent certainties of the settled life, they ultimately provide no assurance, no security. The Golden Rings of the world, the Rings of Power, the Rings of Wealth, even the Rings of Religion – all of them fail in the end. For when God calls us, as he certainly does, it is a call back to the road and the wilderness, a call to the Mount of Transfiguration and to its crossroad that leads back down to Jerusalem to the way of Lent and Calvary, to Gethsemane and the Cross, where good and evil, death and life, intersect.

We can try to avoid it for a while. We can build our houses. We can build our temples and our armies. And, for a while, we can move our pawns of wealth and power. But, in the end, we will have to hit the road again and move on. For there is one crossroad we cannot avoid. And when death calls us, as it certainly will, it is a call back to the road, where we must walk the wilderness again and where the only assurance is the assurance of faith, the trust and hope that the God of the road who walked it before us will see us through.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.