In his book, Through the Wilderness of Loneliness, Tim Hansel shares a childhood experience on a weekend camp-out to Bainbridge Island near Seattle. He writes:
During a ferocious game of hide-and-seek, I discovered a great hiding place in the ivy next to the big house. I crawled in along the wall and squeezed myself behind the ivy, so I was completely camouflaged. When the seekers came close, I could almost touch them. I held my breath. It was exciting watching them look for me.
The problem came when they got tired and stopped looking. They just gave up. They were not trying hard enough. They’re all looking for me far away when I was right there. If they would only look right under their noses, they would find me.
I resorted to making some subtle noises to give them hints, but they still didn’t spot me. It was as though they were refusing to look for me up close--it was too obvious. Finally, I hung my red bandanna on one of the branches. Jeremy, a kid I didn’t know very well, found the bandanna...but never saw me.
Hansel writes, “What a picture this is of much of our lives. Often, we don’t find what we are looking for because we don’t look at what is close to us. We don’t find God because we are only looking for Him in faraway places. God is hidden in our midst, if only we could see Him”
Luke tells us that Jesus climbed the mountain to pray. While he was in prayer, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became blinding white. Though we cannot easily penetrate the mystery of this moment, one thing is clear: they have an experience of God.
In the transfiguration of Jesus, Peter, James, and John saw him in a new light. They discovered the proximity of the holy to their lives. Did you ever look at someone and suddenly understand for the first time the wonder of that person? How did you miss it before? Just a few verses earlier, Peter had declared Jesus to be the Christ, the Son of the living God. But now the fuller meaning of his confession comes into focus. They see Christ in the same company of Elijah and Moses. It had not occurred to them that he was in the same league as the major figures of the Old Testament. In the presence of Christ, Moses and Elijah were also transfigured. They too appear in glory. In Christ the law and the prophets are fulfilled.
How difficult it is for us to seize the moment, to enjoy the ordinary events of life. We have a fatal attraction to the spectacular, a fascination for the fabulous. In matters of faith, we are hooked on spiritual ecstasy. We are programmed to expect the big, the unusual. We miss, all too often, the glory of the ordinary. We cannot imagine the sacred in the familiar or, heaven forbid, the holy in the secular.
It is just like Luke to stress the fact that the transfiguration took place while Jesus was praying. Prayer is our means of conversation with God. “Our God remains a hidden God,” writes Brennan Manning, “but in prayer we discover we have what we seek.” What occasions do you give yourself to discover God’s presence? The Psalmist wrote, “Because God is at my right hand I will not be shaken!”
Together with Jesus they discovered that the depths of God’s love reaches down. They liked that, in fact, Peter wanted to lock it in and offers a sophomoric suggestion to build three memorials for Jesus, Moses and Elijah. Even Luke is embarrassed by Peter’s idea and offers excuses for him. “He did not really know what he was saying” (Good News). “He blurted this out without thinking.” (Message)
We are tempted to confine the holy to a specific place and time in our lives. Our lives are impoverished when we locked God into a childhood religious experience. The high moment of our spiritual experiences was at camp, and it's all been downhill since then, a frozen memory in time. Our spiritual formation is put on hold. Maturation finds the holy when times are tough, a richness in the complexity of life beyond easy answers.
I remember Mickey, a young high schooler, desperate on the last day of camp, who uncharacteristically asks the guys to join him in a prayer meeting to pray for Jesus to reveal himself to them that night. His taste of glory had not been enough. He wanted more.
Jesus did not physically appear that night, and Mickey was frantic. He came to me and suggested we not go home. He had been made to come to camp, he reasoned, but no one could make him leave. The thought of leaving was like prying an ice cream cone away from a baby.
We are surprised when we find God (more precisely when we are found by God). We can’t imagine God being found even amid our pain and our struggle.
Our journey may be strengthened by overhearing the conversation of Jesus with Moses and Elijah. They talked about the way he must take and the end he must fulfil in Jerusalem. God does not make life for his son like one eternal summer camp. They explored the exodus Jesus would complete in Jerusalem. Together they confirm the way of the cross.
The journey is not escaping but embracing. Painful conditions do not lie across the way but on the way. God is present even in hardship.
Jesus, Moses, Elijah. Peter, John, James. Two gatherings of two or three gathered in his name. It doesn’t take everyone to fortify the journey, but it does take someone. Kenneth Callahan, in his book Twelve Keys to An Effective Church, suggests that ministry is built upon this...two or three gathered in his name.
Our appearance changes when we discover that it does not take everyone to get the ball rolling, but once it is rolling others come along.
So where along the journey are we? What is our capacity for God? The beloved community is given life through the persistent collaborative of those gathered seeking God in their struggle, loneliness, and pain.
I sat in a gathering of concern with a young man and his wife at a treatment center. After a month of strong progress, he was about to go home. He and the group were concerned, however, about his capability to continue his recovery. They offered affirmation for his progress and laid blessings on him. They were encouraged by his strengths. Their major concern for him was that he kept them at arm's length. Someone asked him this curious question, “Do you have any idea why you won’t let anybody get close to you?”
He sat there for a long while and tears began to roll down his face. In a whisper he told of the horror of finding his high school friend and fellow soldier who had been killed and hung in a tree in the jungles of Viet Nam. He felt that he had let his friend down. If he had been reliable and dependable his friend would still be alive. He could not let anyone get close to him. If he did, he would let them down. He would disappoint them. Therefore, he had resolved to not let anyone depend upon him or to depend upon anyone. He had decided to go it alone, on his own.
He then admitted that this had not gotten him to the place he most wanted to be and took the hand of his wife and the hand of his counselor and made eye contact with all of us in the circle and thanked them for being there for him.
There were two or three gathered in his name. Incredible things happen when we put ourselves in that position. It happened for Jesus, and it happened for Peter, James, and John, and I believe with all my heart, it can happen for you and for me. We have what we seek.