For many people, life peaks early, and then they seem to run downhill all the way thereafter. There are many people who do well early in life -- they have a happy childhood, they do well in school, they launch their careers, all in their early years. But then something goes wrong. Something goes a little sour. And a life which showed great promise of success peaks early and then appears to decline. The heady wine of the early years just turns into sour grapes, and you wonder what happened. Just what stalls these folks?
We’ve just finished with the Winter Olympics. Some of the people who starred in the Games four years ago were no longer around in Albertville. And some others who were gold medallists before can barely stay in the competition now. What happened? In addition to the aging factor, what happened to the promise of the early years? Some people seem to peak early and then go into decline.
Some of us when we were in school used to sit around and dream about our careers. We used to elect "most likely to succeed" candidates and envy one another’s job offers. Now, a few years later, "most likely to succeed" has disappeared into obscurity, and you wonder whatever happened to the promise of those early years.
I’m going to suggest to you this morning that what seems like decline may in fact be more spiritually satisfying and more successful than what most of us think of as success. I’m going to ask you to inventory the pattern of your own life, and I’m going to ask you to consider, if you have gone from a mountaintop, successful early experience into what seems like disappointment and decline in your middle and later years. I’m going to ask you to consider whether it may be that God has led you into this new experience, just as He led you in the glory days, and I’m going to ask you to consider whether, in the end, what you’re experiencing now could be more meaningful, more satisfying, than those earlier, more spectacular successes.
As the Gospel writers tell the story, Jesus spent the first few months of his ministry in Galilee, on his home turf, preaching, teaching, and healing. Despite some controversies and despite some doubts in his hometown, you would have to say that it was an early success. He seemed to be getting somewhere. He had healed a great many sick people – one passage says that in Capernaum they brought to him everyone who was sick and that he spent the whole night healing them. An exhilarating experience! And another passage tells us that huge numbers of people came to the shores of the Sea of Galilee, hoping for His healing touch. Any place you look in the first eight chapters of Mark’s Gospel, you see Jesus being adored by large crowds. He is the darling of the moment. He is the man of the hour. His work is peaking at its very outset.
And so when you come to the ninth chapter of Mark, it is no surprise when you read the gripping story of His transfiguration. To see Jesus on a mountaintop, surrounded with the very glory of God, acclaimed and approved – it seems only right. It seems like just the latest and best in a string of successes. The story of the transfiguration – and by the way, don’t get hung up on that long word, it just means that his appearance was changed, it means that for a moment his appearance was more than human, more than ordinary – the story of the transfiguration seems to say, "Well, the successful get even more successful, the rich get richer, the beautiful get more beautiful." Successful Jesus is being acclaimed one more time.
But as I read the story, I ask you to see, underlying this peak experience, this mountaintop success experience, a different theme. I ask you to hear that in this very moment of dazzling success, there is another and more somber note, and that is that this Jesus must die. He must go from the dazzling mountain to the dying mountain, from the peak of success to apparent failure. What does that mean? Listen for it:
"It is written about the Son of Man, that he is to go through many sufferings and be treated with contempt … They questioned what this rising from the dead could mean." Jesus’ life seemed to be at peak. This has been a great moment for him, climaxing many other fine moments. Why would anybody speak of suffering and death at a time like that?
But remember, I am asking you to consider whether if you and I go into eclipse, if we seem to disappear, if we think we are going into decline – I am asking you to consider whether that is not potentially more spiritually satisfying than all the success we thought we had achieved early on.
I
First, what is the meaning and power of a successful experience? I think it is that God gives us uplifting experiences, God gives us great mountaintop highs, as moments which can shape us and prepare us for what is to come. I believe that God offers us defining moments. He offers us defining moments – great, wonderful, high times which can shape us and affirm us, empower us, for whatever is to come. I believe that God offers us, just as He offered Jesus, transfiguring moments, times in which we know without question that we are gifted by God, that we have what it takes, that we are authentically all right, no matter what else happens.
Now the thing about such moments is that they don’t come very often. They are rare. You may not have more than one or two or three such moments in your whole life. But when you have them, they shape you and empower you from then on out.
Look at Jesus, taken to the Mount of Transfiguration. This is certainly a unique, special, defining moment. Nothing else like this happens in the entire story of his ministry. It’s a dazzling experience; not only is his appearance changed, but he is privileged in some mysterious way to find himself in the company of Moses and Elijah, two of the greatest figures in Israel’s history. And best of all, he hears the very voice of God affirming him, "This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him." I submit to you that no one could feel more affirmed and more successful than that! And nothing like it ever happens again.
But – but, immediately thereafter Jesus begins to speak more and more of his eventual suffering and death. And the next several chapters show him striding, almost running, toward Jerusalem and to his death. I am saying that this defining moment, this time of dazzling success, has shaped him and will stay with him for the moments that will look like defeat and failure. He can take whatever is to come because God has given him this high hour, this unique, special, unrepeatable hour.
I say again that most of the experiences that shape and empower us are like that. Can you look back on something that just stays with you and defines you? Maybe it was your conversion and baptism. It was a dazzling mountain experience, and it’s empowered you. You don’t have to get converted and baptized over and over again; once is enough, because it became a defining moment.
Many of us can look back on our weddings like that. I tell you, there is a moment of grace if there ever was one. Some fellow grows up as a nerdy four-eyed non-athlete, about as sexy as a frog. But then in a dazzling moment some young woman says, "I love you" and he feels about nine feet tall. When you hear at the altar of God that certain someone saying, "I will share your life and your destiny ’until death us do part’’’, it’s a dazzling, deeply spiritual, profoundly defining moment. It’s real, you don’t have to do it over and over again, you don’t have to repeat those vows time and again; you just live with confidence and with trust in your mate. You have what it takes to get through the tough times, because you’ve had the dazzling mountaintop experience.
I’ve repeated from time to time my own sense of call to the ministry. I mentioned only last week that it came when I was a twenty-year-old college student working as an engineering intern in Kinston, North Carolina. I had been struggling with the decision even before I left home to take a three-month internship in a chemical factory. But that spring, walking along a street one night, I passed a churchyard where they had put up a crude cross, and on it they had painted the words from the Book of Lamentations, "Is it nothing to you, all you that pass by?" In that defining moment I said, ’’No, it is not a nothing to me that Christ died. It is not a nothing to me. Christ is affirming me." And that night I acknowledged my call to ministry. It was a dazzling, mountain top experience.
And you know it has never left me. Thirty-four years later, it has not left me. Now I don’t have to get it repeated. I don’t have to feel it all over again every Sunday before I stand to preach. It’s just there. It’s not like a driver’s license; I don’t have to get it renewed every four years. It’s just there. It grows out of an early dazzling, grace-filled, transfiguring experience that stays with me and empowers me.
Our God gives us affirming, transforming experiences. They may come early in life, or they may come a little later. But when they come, they are intended to define us and to carry us through all the rest.
II
Now, however, here is the real thrust of my message. Whatever it is that comes later, even if it looks like disappointment, defeat, or decay – whatever it is that comes later, if it is shaped by that mountaintop experience, can be even more satisfying than the success times. I’m saying that even though you peaked early; even though it seems as though you never have these great and glorious moments anymore; even though sometimes life now seems to be deadly dull drudgery, still that can be even more spiritually fulfilling than the high moments were.
I refer you again to what Jesus did after the Mount of Transfiguration. As the Gospel reports it, particularly Mark’s Gospel, from this moment on Jesus speaks frequently of His suffering and death. He knows that it is coming.
And not only does he speak of it frequently, you can sense as you read that there is an urgency in him. He not only travels toward Jerusalem, he hurries toward Jerusalem. He not only walks the roads of Judea aware of what is to happen; he strides with power toward his inevitable death, as a man obsessed with his purpose.
From the dazzling mountain to the dying mountain he goes. From Transfiguration to Crucifixion, read it: there is a breathless intensity in the story. And though for all the world what will happen to him at Mount Calvary will look like failure and defeat, Jesus knows now that it is for this he came into the world. From this he gains satisfaction.
You see, my point is that when you feel called and affirmed by God, then no matter what comes in the rest of your life, you can know that you are on the right track. You don’t have to have the symbols of success around you. You don’t have to be applauded by the crowd. You don’t have to have a fat bank account. You don’t even have to parade the initials of success -- you know what I mean by initials of success? Well, I mean some people have a need to announce their attainments with various initials: PhD, MD, EdD, MG, BMW! No, if you start from an experience of being affirmed by God, you don’t need that. You are empowered to go beyond every human criterion of success and to find your real success in something else. Jesus found it in self-sacrificing service.
Now let me try to say this thing very carefully: The truly satisfying life begins with a wonderfully transforming experience. In your own way God can give you a transfiguration, though obviously not what Jesus in His uniqueness had. But God can give you an experience that will change you and empower you, and that will be immensely satisfying.
But I am saying that this experience will empower you to meet the tough times, and that in fact, the tough times may even outdistance in spiritual satisfaction the glory times. Thirty, forty, fifty years of self-giving, all of it springing out of one moment of transformation, and all of it immensely satisfying to you, even though the world thinks of it as nothing. Dazzling mountain, dying mountain -- all of it fulfilling. And what seems like decline even better than success.
Just a few days ago actor Dick York died. Your kids and mine grew up watching him make a lot of money as the butt of his mother-in-law’s witchly humor on “Bewitched". Dick York’s career as an actor peaked early in his life, but then he contracted both emphysema and a degenerative spinal disease. He just about disappeared. He was down, but by no means out. Dick York spent the next twenty years using his influence fighting for medical research. And shortly before Dick York died, he told an interviewer that he had found that the purpose of his life was not in playing a witch’s husband on a silly sitcom, but rather in using the entree that gave him in order to accomplish something for somebody else. Dick York received spiritual satisfaction not so much from his days on the dazzling mountain, but from the way that experience prepared him to live the dying mountain.
A few weeks ago Alex Haley passed away. We remember Alex Haley as the stellar author of "Roots" and as the biographer of Malcolm X. But these successes were fifteen years ago. Whatever happened to Alex Haley in more recent years? Some people would describe it as failure, sitting around in Henning, Tennessee, scribbling away but with no more best sellers. Alex Haley didn’t think of it as failure. He spent his time and his resources in the years before his death giving his Christian testimony wherever he could get a hearing. He provided resources for the villagers in the Gambia, where he had discovered those famous roots. He became a quiet and effective advocate for the needs of small towns like Henning. Alex Haley peaked early and had his moment of success and of glory. But he derived far, far more spiritual satisfaction from giving himself away. The defining moment, the dazzling mountain God gave this great author empowered him to find even greater joy in his dying mountain.
We come to the table of the Lord. We come here and see spread before us what looks for all the world like the images of defeat. We can hardly see the dazzling mountain of Transfiguration. It seems light years away. This looks like failure. Here we are reminded that Jesus was taken to Mount Calvary and stripped of what few possessions he had, that he was treated with contempt, that he was beaten and mocked and finally done to death. Mount Calvary, his dying mountain.
But do not be deceived. This is not, despite appearances, his defeat. This is not simply the winding down of a life that peaked too early and then went downhill.
This is victory! This is satisfaction! Jesus came to this moment saying, "For this cause I came into the world." Jesus hung on that cruel cross and cried, “lt is finished, it is accomplished." Jesus, empowered by the dazzling mountain, by that one great affirmation by the Father, came to the dying mountain, at the end of the road, and knew victory.
Says the hymn, "Far more awesome in thy weakness; more than kingly in thy meekness, Thou Son of God". Meet him here at the dying mountain and expect for yourself a dazzling mountain that will let you live until you die.
