Rev. Eric Anderson Pastor's Corner, Sermons

Sermon: The Mountain

February 15, 2026

Exodus 24:12-18
Matthew 17:1-9

In his documentary on the Darkness of the Renaissance, British art critic Waldemar Januszczak said, “Mountains have a powerful effect on people. Mountains cloud your judgment. They heighten your emotions and intoxicate you.” He’s right. The vistas from mountains – and the views of mountains – go right to the feelings. You find your breath catching, and not just because of the altitude.

We live at the foot of two of the earth’s great summits. I grant you that I’ve lived here not quite ten years, and most of you have lived here much longer than that, but I put it to you: have you ever looked up at Mauna Kea on a clear day and not felt something? Can Mauna Kea ever make you feel… nothing?

They make me feel something. They catch me, heart and soul, every time.

But do they cloud our judgment? I’m less sure about that. I do know that a mountain makes me see things in a different way. That can be quite literal, when I’m at the mountain summit and seeing the world as I can’t see it from the mountain’s foot. It’s also emotional. There I am, feeling at the top of the world, and not just from lack of oxygen.

I can feel at one and the same time both the greatest of all living beings and one of the small creatures I can’t even see far down the slopes.

Mountaintops are powerful. That’s true. They bring us away from the day-to-day of human living. They show us grandeur that’s beyond us. At the same time they place this grandeur in the palms of our hands.

I suspect that Simon Peter, James, and John anticipated something like that when they climbed the mountain with Jesus. They looked to see the glory of Creation stretching out below them. They expected to gasp air in deep breaths after the exertion of the climb. They probably hoped to hear something new from Jesus, whom they’d just acclaimed as Messiah (and been scolded for misunderstanding what Jesus meant by Messiah) six days before. Top of the world.

They got more than they’d bargained for. Jesus glowed like the sun. The two greatest religious leaders of ancient Israel stood there with Jesus: Moses who’d freed the people from Egypt and delivered God’s Law, and Elijah who’d maintained the faith against hostile monarchs and been carried away to God without dying. The Messiah, people whispered, would be a prophet like Moses. The Messiah, people whispered, would be heralded by Elijah returned.

“It is interesting,” writes D. Mark Davis at LeftBehindAndLovingIt, “that neither the transformation of Jesus, the appearance of Moses and Elijah, nor the bright light evoked fear in the disciples. Hearing the voice out of the clouds is what did them in.”

We don’t usually collapse at the top of a mountain – well, except to catch our breath from the climb. In fact, I usually find that the sight energizes me, lifts me up. I move about from place to place to take in the view in all directions. Mountaintops inspire. They rarely overwhelm.

Booming voices from clouds overwhelm. I’d have been overwhelmed. Without doubt. But as Rev. Davis says, all the strange and overwhelming things before that didn’t overcome them. Unusual? Yes. Unexpected? I wouldn’t have expected it. Frightful? No. I think there’s even a hint that, like the simple view from a mountaintop, the disciples found the experience inspiring as well as awe-inspiring. If I understand Peter’s offer to make shelters correctly, they were prepared to extend the inspiring experience, to learn more, to plan more, to prepare themselves for the work they’d undertake when they returned to the mountain’s foot.

Unsurprisingly, significant religious experiences in people’s lives tend to be called “mountaintop experiences.” Those experiences don’t have to happen on mountains. Plenty of them don’t. But like experiences on mountains, including most of the Transfiguration, they tend to inspire, not overwhelm.

Listen to that again. Most of the time, when God reaches out to someone, God doesn’t overwhelm them. God inspires them.

Mountaintop experiences aren’t necessarily visions of glory accompanied by angelic music and words of thunder. Mountaintop experiences are the ones that make a difference to your soul.

Mountaintop experiences are the ones that make a difference to your soul.

Debie Thomas writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “…as long as I can remember, I’ve measured the depth and ‘success’ of my faith by the number of mountaintop experiences I can truthfully claim.  Have I ‘felt the Spirit’ in Sunday morning worship?  Has Jesus ‘spoken’ to me?  Have I seen visions?  Spoken in tongues?  Encountered God’s living presence in my dreams?

“Most of the time, the answer is ‘no.’  Which means I’ve spent most of my life feeling like a spiritual failure.”

Without commenting on the rightness or wrongness of the feeling – feelings, as I’ve noted before, happen whether they reflect external reality or not – I’ve never found Ms. Thomas a spiritual failure. Given how often I quote her in sermons, I’ve found her to be a significant spiritual guide. She’s described here a fairly widespread notion that spiritual success equates to overwhelming spiritual experiences. And… it doesn’t.

Spiritual success, I think, takes place when we pay attention to our experiences of God, whether they’re grand or subtle, and let them change our path.

As Audrey West writes at Working Preacher, “Then and now, the full meaning of a mountaintop experience may not become clear until after the return to the valley, after the passage of time. After they come down from the mountain, the disciples listen, as the voice has instructed: they hear Jesus’ parables, they hear his response to friends and foes, they hear his repeated references to the Son of Humanity.”

“Listen to him,” thundered the voice from the cloud. That overwhelmed Peter, James, and John, but it’s also the central theme of Matthew’s Gospel. Listen to Jesus. Each occasion of listening to Jesus is, to some degree, a mountaintop experience. It has the ability to transform us. It has the ability to redirect us. It has the ability to inspire us.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.” Are you inspired?

“Blessed are the peacemakers.” Are you inspired?

“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Are you inspired?

“Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” Are you inspired?

“In everything do to others as you would have them do to you, for this is the Law and the Prophets.” Are you inspired?

I know you’ve been inspired, somewhere, somehow, by something. Why? You’re here. I have plenty of illusions about myself, but I’m pretty sure you can find things to do on Sunday morning that you’d enjoy more than dreading one of my puns coming along. But you’re here. You made the time. You made the effort. Why?

You’ve been inspired. Maybe you’re hoping for some more inspiration, but you’ve already been inspired.

It doesn’t happen every day, as you know. As Amy Frykolm writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “This makes me think that perhaps the experience wasn’t given to the disciples so that they could cling to it. Perhaps it was given to them so that they could practice letting go. On the difficult path ahead, they are going to have to let go of Jesus again and again. Here they are asked to let go of even a vision so profound that it was called ‘transfiguration.’

“Maybe living with the coming and going of clouds incapsulates this lesson daily. ‘And thus I saw him and I sought him,’ Julian of Norwich writes. ‘And I had him and I lacked him.’ This isn’t something to mourn, she counsels, but is instead ‘the common working of this life.’ We glimpse God, and then God goes behind a cloud. In this way, we learn to love rather than cling.”

I’d add that we learn to love rather than puppet. We learn to love of our own initiative rather than depending on ongoing inspiration. We’re inspired for a moment. We’re changed in a moment. We move forward from there… and continue to learn, grow, change, and love in each place we go, no matter how far from the mountain.

As Maren Tirabassi wrote this week in a comment on ordainedgeek.com, “And so life-changing experiences are not really life-changing, just moment-changing and that always must be enough.”

It must, and it is. Those moments for each of you brought you to this moment. This moment may not inspire you that much, and if it doesn’t I apologize, since that is sort of the point of this exercise, but these moments, these experiences, they lead to new moments, new experiences, and if not all of them have the power of mountaintop moments, they all have power, they all give direction, they all inspire.

In these continuing moments, we follow Jesus. In these continuing moments, we love.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric writes his sermons ahead of time, but he makes changes while preaching, so the text prepared does not match the sermon as preached.

Photo of the summit of Mauna Kea by Eric Anderson.

Rev. Eric Anderson Sermons

Sermon: Signs and Wisdom

March 3, 2024

Exodus 20:1-17
1 Corinthians 1:18-25

Let me admit, right up front, that the Apostle Paul and I are not on the same wavelength today. Almost two thousand years ago, in the mid-50s of the first century, Paul was concerned about things he’d heard about the Corinthian church.

“It has been made clear to me by Chloe’s people that there are quarrels among you,” he wrote.

Watch out for Chloe. She’s got people.

As Douglas A. Campbell writes in The Christian Century, “The church at Corinth was a mess. I count 15 distinguishable problems that Paul addresses in 1 Corinthians…” Dr. Campbell, by the way, went on to list them, which I’m not. He offers this summary, however: “Underlying this mess, there were four main difficulties: a basic failure in relating to one another in love; a dramatic failure of the local church leaders to act considerately in the face of their competition for status and influence; arrogant theological reasoning that denied the importance of the body (which we might call ‘Christian intellectualism’); and tensions arising from the pressures that Paul’s teaching about sex placed on his converts. Each of these problems would have been bad enough, but when they were all present together, the combination was toxic.”

In the first chapter, Paul took on the divisions Chloe had reported in the Corinthian church, people identifying with the opinions and commitments of different apostles, including Apollos, Simon Peter, and Paul himself. “Was Paul crucified for you?” he wrote testily.

To counteract the divisiveness Paul raised the basic scandal of the Christian faith: a crucified Messiah. In Judaism, a Messiah who fails to free the people from the domination of outside nations is, by definition, not a Messiah. Among the Greek-influenced people of the Eastern Mediterranean, among the Greeks of Corinth, a crucified leader is simply a rebel, and a failed rebel at that. A crucified Christ is ludicrous.

Adam Hearlson writes at Working Preacher, “Near the palatine hill in Rome, there is this remarkable piece of graffiti scrawled into the wall of the dormitory of imperial pageboys. In the depiction, which any Google search will unearth, a Christian boy is mocked for worshipping a crucified man with a donkey’s head. The boy, standing in front of the cross, raises his hand in adoration of this donkey God. Scrawled below the picture are the words: ‘Alexemenos worships his God.’”

You are together in this foolish faith, wrote Paul. You’re up against a world that sees you as fantastically deluded. Dividing against yourselves is ludicrous.

If you’re thinking that’s a pretty good argument but maybe not quite enough, Paul continued on for three more chapters.

But I’m not on that wavelength. In verse 22, Paul wrote, “For Jews ask for signs and Greeks desire wisdom.” That’s something of a stereotypic statement, and like most stereotypes it has some truth to it and some falsehood. Certainly Greek culture was well known for its philosophy and commitment to reason. It was, after all, the society that had molded Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, and so many others. Early Christians embedded Greek philosophical ideas into their writings, notably Gospel writer, John.

“Jews ask for signs.” Did they? The Hebrew Bible is full of the mighty acts of God, and much of the rest of those ancient Scriptures refer to mighty acts of God to explain the obligations of human beings to God. For the early Jewish Christians, Jesus’ own resurrection was a great big brightly lit sign of God’s favor. For the early Christians, signs of the Holy Spirit’s presence defined a church doing God’s will.

In our twenty-first century setting, I think relatively few people look for signs or wisdom to be a support, a buttress, that keeps faith from collapsing. We have a marked ability to discount potential signs. Is there a natural explanation for this, we ask, and if there is, it isn’t a sign.

As for wisdom, well. We do not live in a time that values wisdom. Contemporary people tend to want to know what they can do. What are the limits to our power, and if there are limits, can we push them farther? As the opening to the Six Million Dollar Man went decades ago: “Better. Stronger. Faster.”

As we found with weaponry, as we found with transferring carbon into the atmosphere, as we may be finding with artificial intelligence, we do things and only later do we start to wonder, “Was this a good idea?”

That’s… not wise.

If it’s not signs and it’s not wisdom, though, what is buttressing our faith? There are Christian preachers out there who will tell you that visible accumulation of wealth shows the presence of God. I think they’re wrong. In fact, I think they’re lying. But if you’re looking for something to support your faith and you’d like it to be riches, there are people who’ll cheer you on.

There are a bunch of people who will tell you that it’s power. The Church, they say, must be in charge. These people have been around for centuries, first succeeding in making Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire in 380 CE through the Emperor Theodosius, and failing to recognize the folly of this project from then until now.

I’ll tell you that for me it’s the support I find in my soul when things get really bad: when I’m deeply sad or emotionally fragile or lost for the next part of my journey. To be honest, I don’t recommend relying on that as your buttress of faith. I may receive a lot of strength in pain, but it’s still painful.

For many Christians over the centuries, it’s been study of the Scriptures that has sustained their faith, and if that what it is for you, push it a little further. Go a little deeper. For many Christians over the centuries, it’s been prayer. Some desire nothing more than time and silence. Others find it helpful to have words to follow, which is why we have a Lenten devotional. Some need to be along. Some treasure the company of others.

I’d encourage you as well, when your faith seems the most fragile, to remember than God called you. That wasn’t an accident. As Carla Works writes at Working Preacher, “God, in God’s wisdom, chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise. To Paul, that does not just mean the cross. God continues to display God’s power by choosing even the weak and lowly to be part of God’s church.” Weak and lowly us to shame the confident and powerful of the world.

I hope that at least one of your supports is what we do today to close our worship: nourish ourselves at the table of Jesus. It’s a sacrament. We believe that God has promised to be there when we gather to do this, and we believe that God fulfills these promises. So come to the table in a few minutes. Come to be nourished. Come to be filled.

Come to experience the signs and wisdom that support your soul.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric frequently diverges from the sermon he has prepared. Sometimes it’s an improvement!

Photo by Eric Anderson.