A great sermon...

"Transfigured Moments"

Check out this 1926 sermon by Vernon Johns, a highly revered black pastor who appears to have had great influence on other famous black pastors (recall MLK's "Mountain Top" sermon). He looks at the mountain-top experience of Jesus and prescribes such experiences to us. He takes his text from Mathew 17.

This is good stuff to consider when ascending the landscape...

"It is good to be the possessor of some mountain-top experience. Not to know life on the heights, is to suffer an impoverishing incompleteness. To be sure, there is better opportunity for practical pursuits in the valley regions, and life is easier and safer there: but views are possible from the mountain top which are not to be had in the vale. A missionary in the Balkans once took a small boy, who lived at the base of a mountain, on a journey up its side. When they gained the summit, the little climber looked this way and that, and then said with astonishment: 'My! What a wonderful world! I never dreamed it was so large.' Horizons broaden when we stand on the heights. There is always the danger that we will make of life too much of a dead-level existence: that we will make of life a slavish following of the water courses; a monotonous tread of beaten paths; a mat­ter of absorbing, spiritless, deadening routine. There is the danger that we will drop our lives into the pass­ing current to be kept steadily going, we hardly know where or why. Crowded in the throngs that traverse the common ways, we proceed through life with much motion and little vision. The late President Wilson, in a wonderful essay, speaks of the man who allows his duties to rise about him like a flood. Such a man goes on through the years 'swimming with sturdy stroke, his eyes level with the surface, never seeing any clouds or any passing ships.' We can pay such regular tribute to Motion that all valid sense of Direction is lost; so that all our hurrying activities may prove but the rush to ruin. In view of this, it is good for us, occasionally at least, to clamber up from the levels of our set habits of thought, our artificial actions and our settled prejudices to some loftier plane, which affords a more commanding view than we have from the crowded thoroughfares, the low familiar ways. From some mountain eminence let us have occasionally a quiet look upon life, to reflect what it means and whither it is carrying us. The luminaries of humanity were familiar with elevated ground. Moses, Elijah, Mohammed and Jesus all had mountain traditions. It is said by a well-known Old Testament interpreter that the religious history of the Hebrew people is inseparable from the topog­raphy of their country. The mountains round about Jerusalem are tied up with the vision of God and the vision of life, which Israel gave to mankind.

Who of all the contemporaries of Jesus, busy in market place, fields and thoroughfares, dreamed that the next great strides of history would take their direction from the vision of one who was praying in the midst of three unheralded fishermen, far above sea level and the level of life! So it was. So may it ever be. How many people in high and lofty mo­ments, when they have taken the time and pains to climb above the dingy, foggy levels of incorporated thinking and living, have struck out for themselves and others new and better courses! 'I thought on my ways, and I turned my feet.…' 'I will turn aside and see.…' 'When he came to himself he said…' 'And he taketh them up into an exceed­ing high mountain.' These passages belong to the experience of epoch makers. On the heights is the location for moral discovery. It is a slower process and requires stouter gear to do the mountain roads than to run along the shining speedways of the val­ley. But woe to the world when there are no visitors on the heights!"