Weighed Down
A sermon on Luke 9:28-36 and Exodus 34:29-35
Preached Sunday, March 2, 2025 at Saratoga Springs UMC.
Video available here.
Would you pray with me?
God of awe and wonder, God of cloud and dazzle, God of sun and thunder, thank you for bringing us to this time and this place, whenever and wherever we are. Be with us here today. And may the worlds of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
You know, as a kid, I remember learning about the Holy of Holies in the Temple in Jerusalem, about how all our churches are kinda patterned after the Temple, how there’s the outer courts and the inner courts and the further in you go, the fewer and fewer people have access to the space, until you get up to the altar, to the Holy of Holies, where only the High Priest can go, and he can only go there one day a year, on Yom Kippur, to offer a sacrifice, to atone. I remember learning all this and thinking, “Well, and the cleaning lady.”
Because for me, right, the Holy of Holies is… a place. It’s a sacred place, an important place, a hallowed place, a place where you will encounter the living God, but I grew up getting to church every Sunday at least half an hour before the first service started, because my mom was in charge of childcare, and we stayed at least half an hour after the last service ended, because parents like to chit chat and take their time picking up their kids. We turned the lights off at the church. So I knew, maybe better than most at my age, the quiet beauty of an empty sanctuary and the work that went into maintaining it.
So while I had no problem believing that there was a space where one person went to perform an important ceremony once a year, I did have trouble believing that a priest was the only person going into this room. Who was getting the cobwebs down? Who was wiping away all the dust he brought in? Who was vacuuming up the crumbs from the sacrifice? (I’ve been to church on communion Sunday. I know how crumbly the Body of Christ can be.) My point is, it was never just the high priest in this place. It was the high priest and cleaning lady.
And to be clear, I didn’t think this made the space any less holy! I thought the ladies of the altar guild were closer to God than the pastors, by a long shot. They were the ones who set up the altar, who prepared the communion elements, who got the acolytes and the crucifers ready every Sunday, even on that fateful Sunday where I was carrying the cross and my little brother was carrying the light behind me and my hair “somehow” caught on fire, and God knows it was an altar guild lady who put my hair out. No, when I thought about the cleaning lady in the Holy of Holies, it wasn’t out of doubt or rebellion. It was out of the acknowledgement of the holiness of the everyday world.
Maybe these are my Appalachian roots showing, but I have never had much trouble seeing the holiness of the everyday world. It just seems obvious to me. A field of lightning bugs on a June night is just as holy as St. Peter’s done up for Easter. My mountains are as sacred as any of the ones Jesus preached on, my rivers as good as the Jordan. I got a travel scholarship to backpack around Europe studying sacred architecture after college and I have to tell you, I love Notre Dame and Sainte-Chapelle, but I felt the presence of God just as surely when I sat in the afternoon sunlight shining through the stained glass windows of my home church, a kid in children’s choir worrying away at the ugliest green carpet that ever graced the floors of a sanctuary.
But I mean I was (and am) fully bought into the wisdom of the burning bush. Moses had to turn and see this wonderful thing, this bush that was burning but was not consumed, and when he did, he took off his shoes because he was standing on holy ground. I wandered around my home church barefoot because I knew where I was. It’s no wonder that when I was looking for a quote to center my first ever blog, I found Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Aurora Leigh”:
Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries,
And daub their natural faces unaware
More and more from the first similitude.
I have wondered what I would have done if I had gone up on that mountain with Jesus that night. I mean, Peter and James and John? Blackberry pluckers if I ever saw one. And I didn’t get it as a kid, but I do more and more as an adult. I didn’t understand how anyone could be weighed down with sleep when Jesus is right there, going up a mountain to pray. I didn’t understand how tired your bones get when the stress of everyday life seeps into them, how tired feet and an aching back after a full shift behind the bar can sap all the energy you have left until you collapse into bed, smelling like drain cleaner and whiskey and someone else’s spilled beer. (I was never as tired as I was when I was a bartender.) When I was a kid, I truly thought that I would get the transfiguration right, that I would be right there with Jesus and Moses and Elijah, awake and listening in and not trying to build any silly little huts.
But listen, I had a colonoscopy this week, and I know what it’s like to be weighed down with sleep. I slept all through Friday. So, in all honesty, I might be with Peter and James and John on this one. Headed up to the mountain to pray? Well, you go on Jesus. I’ll be up right after you. No, no, I’m not yawning at all.
There are so many things in this life that stop us from seeing the world as it is, as afire with God. I mean, that’s what’s going on here, in both of our passages this morning. In both passages, we have entered into the cloud of the really real, into the presence of the one by whom and through whom all things were made. We are face to face with the living God and all who walk away from this encounter shine. And that is scary. Moses veils his face. Peter wants to hide this glory in some tents. When we do come face to face with the glory of God alive in this world, we cannot take it and so we do our best not to see, not to look, not to be transfigured. We are not ready for what the wild holiness of God might do with us.
Better to be weighed down than face the terrible freedom of the love of God shed abroad in our hearts.
Let me pull back for a second.
Have y’all ever heard the poem “Jesus at the Gay Bar?” By Jay Hulme?
It’s all I can ever think of when I read about the Transfiguration these days.
It goes like this:
He’s here in the midst of it --
right at the centre of the dance floor,
robes hitched up to His knees
to make it easy to spin.
At some point in the evening
a boy will touch the hem of His robe
and beg to be healed, beg to be
anything other than this;
And He will reach His arms out,
sweat-damp, and weary from dance.
He’ll cup this boy’s face in His hand
and say,
My beautiful child
there is nothing in this heart of yours
that ever needs to be healed.
Can you see it? Can you see the holiness there? It’s there in the touch, sure. It’s there in the affirmation, the assurance, yes, and that’s essential. But the holiness is also there in the dance. The holiness is there with the robes hitched up to knees to make it easier to spin. The holiness is, despite all our efforts to avoid it, there in the sweat, as surely as it is under Moses’ veil or in Jesus’s sparkle on the mountain top.
And holiness isn’t limited. Holiness isn’t something far away or over there or reserved for a few. For all my childhood misunderstandings, I was dead right about the holiness of cleaning ladies. This task is just as sacred as priest’s, and just as sacred as yours.
My friends, the world is weighing us down. The world is filling us up with tragedy and hurt and chaos and worry, and I’m not saying that we stop paying attention to it. I’m not saying we stop speaking out or working against injustice or building community responses to the problems we see. But we can’t do any of this work on empty. We can’t do it weighed down. Jesus on the mountain top and Jesus in the gay bar tell us the same thing: in order to face the trials of this world, we need to see the holiness of this world. We need to see it as he sees it: beautiful, and tragic, and utterly worth working to save.
We need to be prepared to offer beauty and holiness to everyone who needs it. We need to stock up, as often as we can, so that we’re ready to share when someone is in need, because friends, we are the Body of Christ on this world. We are Christ’s hands and feet. Jesus doesn’t have any other flesh and blood on this earth but ours and so he can’t be on that dance floor, but brothers and sisters, siblings in Christ, we can. With enough contact with the living God, we can shine into this world begging for transfiguration and carry the love of Jesus into this world that sorely needs it. With enough practice, we can be enough like Christ to make a difference.
So here’s my ask for you this week, as we move into Lent: practice finding holiness in your world. Practice noticing the sky, the Sun and the clouds and the Moon and the stars. Practice noticing the living things all around you: your pets, your plants, the birds, the people. Practice noticing laughter and kindness and the beauty of sleeping baby and the joy of teenagers in love and the quiet holy patience of people making a life together. Practice finding holiness in ordinary things. Communion is a great place to start. Store up that holiness in your soul, friends. Let it fill you to overflowing.
And be ready, at the touch of your hem, to let it out, and let it heal.
In Jesus’ name.
Amen.