| March 11, 2001 Genesis 15:5-12,17,18 + Philippians 3:17-4:1 + Luke 9:28-36 |
| On each of the six Sundays of Lent, the scripture readings invite us to look into our spiritual scrap book, as it were, in an effort to reconnect with some of ancestors in faith. This week it is Abraham, our Father in Faith who stands before us. He stands there as a figure of promise, and for those who remember his story, he pushes back the limits so often self imposed that keep us from seeing beyond the moment and the limitations of the present. If you don’t see the big picture, he looks like an old man beyond his years with a wife just as old and the two of them without children and a future. |
| Today, Luke takes us on the mountain, and there other figures of the past emerge in the mist, figures so well associated with Abraham. Moses and Elijah – two guys who had the big picture. |
| There on the mountain, Peter, James, and John for just a moment, get the big picture. I think they get what I’d like to call. “Mountain vision.” Abraham had it as he look ahead, He was invited to see from the Wadi of Egypt to the Great River of the Euphrates, it says. Moses had it on Sinai, and Elijah had it. They saw more than just the day in which they lived. They saw more than just themselves, and the circumstances of their lives. Peter, James and John saw more than the carpenter’s son from Nazareth. |
| On Lent’s second Sunday, we are invited to try a little “mountain vision.” We are invited by the word of God to see a little more than just today and just ourselves. In some ways, it’s the trouble with most of our lives. We don’t have “mountain vision.” We only see what is right in front of us. We are too close. We don’t get the big picture. We fail to see others, the delicate balance of our relationship with them. We fail to see what Peter, James and John saw. We fail to see how things are so connected, dependent, and how our past and our future all fit together |
| With a little mountain vision, the things up close may not seem so serious, so important, and so demanding. With a little mountain vision, we might come to understand how what we buy, what we use, and what we throw away affects the earth, the environment, and other people who work for so little so that we can have so much. If we see the big picture, we understand that we are responsible for much of the systematic injustice in this world. |
| This issue, which I’m calling “Mountain vision” is one of the most significantly distinctive characteristics of our Catholicism. It is one of the distinguishing marks that makes us different from Protestants and their individualistic theology We are a people of the mountain- rooted in that vision. The opposite is the individualism that sees the single person as independent, free to chose without consequence, and left to see the world through one set of eyes, their own. |
| We are invited today to ascend the mountain, and to look again at the big picture. We are invited in this season, to back away a bit from the things we hold so close, and see them a bit more clearly in relation to everything else in creation. We are invited to see each other too with a little mountain vision. Up close and isolated, we look at each other and see every wrinkle, blemish, weakness, sin, and fault, but with a little mountain vision, things might look a little different. The apostles, until they had their mountain vision saw the carpenter’s son from Nazareth. On the mountain, they saw God’s Son. With a little mountain vision, we might see the same thing in each other and recognize a brother or sister a child of God, and all those blemishes and faults are harder to see, and make less difference. |
| Abraham at first saw only old Sarah, but once he had a little mountain vision, he saw those children who became the people of Israel. Peter, James, and John, never could have imagined on their own what was going to happen to their friend, but once they got a little mountain vision, they never saw things the same again. |
| It’s time today for us to get up the mountain, to get the bigger picture, to use some of that mountain vision to take another look at what’s important and what isn’t, at who were are, and how much we are a part of a world that is bigger than our little selfish vision would fool us into thinking and acting. |