You may be familiar with Peter Jenkins, author of such best selling books as Walk Across America. Jenkins tells of the night he was converted to Christ. He was attending a huge revival in Alabama. "I didn’t understand all that these people were saying about what had just happened between God and me," he recalled. "Born again...," "Saved...," "The Lord led you here tonight...," "Praise the Lord...," "Well, God finally’s got you away from the Devil...," "Ain’t God good?" were words that Peter Jenkins heard that night. In using those words it "seemed as normal in their vocabulary as `taxes,’ `commute,’ and `weekend’ were to my family and friends in New York and Connecticut," he wrote.
The woman who had first spoken with him about his conversion found him again. "She stared at me with probing eyes," Peter recalled, "trying to figure out what I was feeling and thinking. I remembered what she’d said about the angels singing because I’d become a Christian. I wondered what kind of songs they sang."
"Peter, this great elation that you’re feeling now," Mary, the woman who first spoke to him, said. "You are feeling great elation, aren’t you?" she asked. "Yes," Peter replied. Mary continued talking to him. Her voice was soft and hard to hear. "At this moment it may seem like these great feelings are going to last forever, but they won’t," she told him. "Being a Christian is not based on feelings. You’re on a mountain top now, but someday, sooner or later, you’ll be far away from these great feelings. You may even wonder if all this ever happened.
"Your Christian walk is based on faith, not feelings," Mary explained. Peter had never thought about that. Later, he thought, "I was so thrilled that there could be good feelings mixed in with faith that I really didn’t care about her opinions."
More than ten years have passed since that special night. "I was on a mountain top that night," Peter reflected. "The feelings lasted a long time, but that mountain top hasn’t lasted all these years. Maybe I’ve been on more mountain tops than some, but I’ve also climbed, sometimes crawled, out of some awfully steep valleys, too." (1) Let’s talk about mountaintops and valleys this morning.
Sometimes our faith is a mountaintop faith. Jesus took Peter and James and his brother, John, with him and led them up a high mountain, by themselves. There they would be away from the crowds that were always pushing in against them. There on the high mountain they would have time for prayer and reflection.
While Peter, James and John were on the high mountain, Jesus’ appearance was changed or transfigured before their very eyes. "His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white." The spellbound disciples looked on in disbelief as they saw Jesus talking with Moses and Elijah.
Peter was so impressed with what he saw that he wanted to remain on the high mountain with Jesus, Moses and Elijah, as well as his two fellow disciples, for a while. Peter said to Jesus, "Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three dwellings here ” one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah." Peter wanted to build dwellings so they could all remain on the mountain and continue this great experience indefinitely, or at least a while longer. Caught up in the emotion of the moment, Peter wanted to prolong the experience as long as possible, so he proposed to build dwelling places. Who could blame him? This was a high point in his religious experience. Anyone who has ever been on a religious mountaintop can sympathize.
"I used to be angry most of the time," writes Kathleen A. Barrett in the Upper Room (March/April 1992, March 1, p. 4). "Store clerks were often rude to me, but I attributed it to the notion that they weren’t getting paid enough."
After Kathleen accepted Jesus Christ into her life, it seemed that the whole world changed. "Store clerks became nicer," she wrote, "the sun shone brighter; birds chirped more cheerily; flowers bloomed more beautifully."
"Of course, I thought the world had changed," she recalled. "I didn’t realize until a few years later that it was I who had been changing. I was different; I had softened. It wasn’t the store clerks who had become friendlier; I had.
"The sun didn’t shine any brighter," Kathleen reflected. "I was just more aware of it. Birds had chirped when I had been in a grumpy mood, but more likely, they had only annoyed me. And, of course, the flowers had always bloomed, but I hadn’t noticed their sweet fragrance and appreciated a peach-colored rose opening its delicate petals to the sun.
"I changed when Jesus came into my life. And he continues to change me and to delight me today," she witnesses.
Ah, that each of us could have that kind of mountaintop faith. Sometimes we do. How sad to see a Christian who has lost the joy of his or her salvation. But it was never meant for us to always stay on the mountaintop. Sometimes we meet God in the valley.
Presbyterian pastor and writer Frederick Buechner recalls one low time in his life when God broke through in an unusual way. "I remember sitting parked by the roadside once," Buechner writes, "terribly depressed and afraid about my daughter’s illness and what was going on in our family." As he was sitting there thinking about his daughter’s illness, he noticed a car that seemed to come from nowhere. His message from God, the word he most needed to see at that moment, was found on the license plate. The license plate "bore on it the one word out of all the words in the dictionary that I needed most to see exactly then," Buechner wrote. "The word was TRUST."
Sitting in his car along side the highway, God’s message was revealed on the license plate of a passing car. It’s certainly difficult to describe such an experience. "Was the experience something to laugh off as the kind of joke life plays on us every once in a while?" Or was it the word of God? "I am willing to believe that maybe it was something or both," Buechner wrote, "but for me it was an epiphany." The owner of the car turned out to be a trust officer at a local bank. After reading of the incident somewhere, the trust officer paid a personal visit to Buechner one afternoon. He presented Buechner with the license plate which bore the word which he so desperately needed to see that day, TRUST. Buechner placed that license plate on a bookshelf where it serves to remind him of his trust in God. "It is rusty around the edges and a little battered," he writes, "and it is also as holy a relic as I have ever seen." (2)
Anyone who has ever met God in the valley knows how precious the experience is. The important point is that we should not feel guilty if we are going through a period of life when there are more valleys than mountaintops. There are some believers who have the mistaken notion that a perpetual smile is a sign of authentic faith. Not so. The joy of the Christian is an inner assurance that wears well both on the mountaintop and in the valley. As the lady said to Peter Jenkins, the Christian walk is a faith, not a feeling. It is an eternal verity, not simply a glib testimony. The God of the mountaintop is also the God of the valley.
The important thing is the quality of the change that takes place in our lives. While Peter is speaking to Jesus about building dwellings and staying on the mountain, a bright cloud overshadows them. Suddenly, they hear a voice speaking from the cloud. "This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him." There on the high mountain Peter and the other disciples hear the voice of God confirming that Jesus is indeed "the Son of the living God." The voice challenges them to "listen to him." This would be a transforming moment for Peter. Years later, when he is one of the great Apostles, he will retell his experience on the high mountain with Jesus. In the book of II Peter we find his words: "We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven, while we were with him on the holy mountain." (II Peter 1:18)
Much more would happen to Jesus and the disciples. I would like to believe that as a result of this incident Peter and the other disciples would be forever changed. This was the decisive, transforming moment in their life. When we meet Jesus and accept the challenge to become modern day disciples, our lives are changed or transformed.
Florence Littauer, in her book Dare to Dream, tells about a valley that once faced former Motown record producer and song writer Frank Wilson. At the crest of his career, Wilson faced something over which he had no control. In 1974, having sold over thirty-five million records, he found himself in a nasty custody struggle over his young son Franko. He claims he had tried everything on the boy’s mother, "psychology, money, my influence with her friends, and nothing worked." Desperate for any kind of a solution after a confrontation with the Los Angeles police and the prospects of a lengthy court battle, Frank gave up control of his life. The Lord showed him how to handle the situation. Frank recalls, "Having looked at my life, then, at that point in time, I realized I had been deceiving myself, and there was little I was actually controlling. He offered to take care of the situation for me.
"It was the most difficult thing I’d ever done ” to leave the situation in the hands of God ” but He came in and by His power resolved it. I thought if God can do what I had tried to do for five years without success, then what would the rest of my life be like if I had the guts to turn it over to Him?"
Frank did "turn it over to Him." He took a year off from Motown, grounded himself in his new faith and returned to share his repaired dream with others in the record business, including Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson and Marilyn McCoo who all gave their hearts to the Lord because of his witness. (3)
What Frank Wilson discovered was more than a feeling. It was faith in the living God.
Seeing Jesus speaking with Moses and Elijah was the experience of a lifetime for the three disciples. When they heard the voice of God speaking to them from the cloud, they fell to the ground and "were overcome by fear." Jesus comforted his disciples and touched them, saying, "Get up and do not be afraid."
The season of Epiphany ends as it began, with the voice of God giving divine confirmation to Jesus. As Jesus and the three disciples make their way down the mountain, Jesus tells them to remain silent about what they had just experienced.
The time will come for them to tell all the world the identity of Jesus. That time is at Pentecost, and Peter will take the lead. He will tell the world about Jesus. That’s what happens when you meet God, whether your experience is of the mountaintop variety or whether you meet him in the valley. What matters is the change that takes place in your life. What matters is not a feeling, but a faith.
1. Peter and Barbara Jenkins, The Road Unseen (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1985), pp. 32-33.
2. David Douglas, Wilderness Sojourn (San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1987), p. 68.
3. Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets (San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1991), pp. 49-50.