A Pre-Lenten Summit
Transfiguration Sunday - February 22, 2009
Transfiguration Sunday - February 22, 2009
Let us pray: O God, guide my words, just as we ask you to guide our feet - on mountain tops or in the valleys/ Amen.
You just heard two stories, one of them telling of events on a mountain top. I would like to tell you two more mountain stories, the point of which will hopefully become clear in the telling.
I want to tell you about Canada Day in the mountain town of Jasper. My first full day as a resident of Jasper happened to be July 1, 1993 and I was privileged to spend eleven more Canada Days in that mountain community. The pattern for the day was largely unchanged over those dozen years.
It all starts with a Pancake Breakfast, served by the mayor and members of the town council. We were lucky to live quite close to the park where the breakfast was served, and that usually allowed us the opportunity to get over there for our pancakes and sausages before the line-up got too long - swelled as you can imagine by all the extra tourists who were in town to enjoy a holiday in the beauty of the Canadian Rockies.
Breakfast over, the residents and tourists alike would start to move to the two main streets in town in preparation for the Jasper Canada Day parade. It was a pretty good parade too. Jasper is about a quarter the size of Yellowknife, but they mustered a very good collection of floats, marching bands and colourful assemblies of local and regional community groups - Girl Guides, Boy Scouts, Service Organisations and lots of horses - supplied by the local riding stables, and the National Park Warden service.
Following the parade there was always a party in the park, with musical performers, a variety of other kinds of entertainment and sometimes even a dog show. Our local hero one year was Mischief, proudly entered into the dog show by our niece Andrea, who was thrilled when Mischief came home with the ribbon for fluffiest dog! I forgot to tell you about the flag raising in front of the Park Information Centre with the singing of our National Anthem and a variety of other events, sometimes including demonstrations by the forest fire initial attack team or the backcountry wardens showing how they tie the diamond hitch on their trusty pack horses.
All in all, it was a lovely day that made us proud as Jasper residents, and Canadian citizens, to think that our little town could put on such a good show for the large number of visitors from other parts of Canada, the USA and the world.
The culmination of the day was the fireworks display - made possible by generous contributions by Jasper residents. It gets dark on Canada Day in Jasper - not all that early - it’s still north for a good number of Albertans, but of course we the North of 60 crowd would laugh at how early it gets dark, but anyway, it does get dark around 11:00 pm on July 1 in Jasper. And so Canada Day ends with a series of oohs and aahs as the fireworks explode mid-town augmented orally by the sound of the explosions echoing off the surrounding mountains. It’s quite a sight and something we always looked forward to.
Now you may be wondering if I’ve been paid by the Jasper Tourism and Commerce Association or the Jasper Canada Day committee to tell you all of this, but believe me when I tell you that the reason for this story will become clear in a few moments. Before that however, I want to tell you another mountain story.
It was probably sometime in the early 80's. Three of us - my hiking partner and fellow scout leader Kevin and I had invited a former scout to come along with us on one of our backpacking trips. The destination was a circle trip in Kootenay National Park in the Canadian Rockies. It would start with a bit of a slog uphill to the summit of Tumbling Pass. Once at the summit of Tumbling Pass you can look across the valley to the summit of another pass - Numa Pass, also on the route. From the top of Numa Pass you can see Floe Lake - so named because it accepts small icebergs (by Arctic standards) which have calved off the glacier which hangs precipitously above the lake below. As I said, from the top of Tumbling Pass you can see Numa Pass - roughly the same elevation, but in between is a deep valley. The full importance of this is not really understood until you get from one pass to the other. Yes, you can see the valley lying below you, but it doesn’t become real until you walked down into it and then back up again to achieve the same elevation you had some number of hours before. I think it’s the most elevation loss and gain I ever hiked in one day in all my backpacking trips in the mountains. Knowing how deep the valley goes, would I still hike the trail - well, probably, but the full value of what that entails is not really understood until you’ve done it.
So what about these two stories? A travelogue designed to send you on a mountain holiday this summer? Well, perhaps that’s a side effect, but here’s the primary connection I intended when I chose to tell you these stories. I was thinking about Canada Day in Jasper in connection with the season of Epiphany. Here’s a rough comparison. The day consists of a series of events, more or less the same each year, but with small variations from year to year, all culminating in the fiery show of light as the pyrotechnics explode in light and sound before the skyward gazing throng.
If you can think back to the way Mark tells the story of Jesus’ ministry in Galilee it consists of a series of events with a certain amount of similarity. Jesus tells what it is like to live in the community of God’s people and then he offers healing that demonstrates acceptance into that community - offering the invitation both to the person being healed and the ones who are watching and learning as this all happens.
Now to understand the next part you need to remember that these gospel stories were written after the fact. They aren’t journals. They are explanations. Things are about to change for Jesus in the story told by Mark. The ministry of preaching and healing is over for Jesus. A fork in the path is about to be taken, the one that heads toward Jerusalem. Strength, celebration, mystical power are going to be needed on that journey. The transfiguration is the fireworks. It’s a show of light and power that demonstrate just who Jesus is, a kind of storing of energy and light for the dark road that follows. Mark, despite being the minimalist when it comes to words, is no slouch at making the literary point. Who is Jesus is going to be one of the important questions that gets asked during the dark road that follows, so it’s important to have a reminder before we get started on that road.
Oh yes, one small difference - Canada Day in Jasper begins with a meal of pancakes, but the season of Epiphany at least in Yellowknife United Church ends with a meal of pancakes. There I got my commercial break in!
I thought of the Tumbling Pass, Numa Pass, Floe Lake backpacking trip this week as I read some commentaries on the transfiguration story. Perhaps it was the mention of mountains, or a reminder of the road through the valley of Lent, or a combination of those mountain-top (the view from a mountain pass isn’t that much different than the view from a mountain top) vistas and the valley between them that helped me to cast my mind’s eye back to that weekend. Sometimes it helps to have a visual and the memories of that long hard day of down and up into and out of the valley between the passes, is a helpful metaphor for the spiritual journey that Lent represents for us. Oh yes, I remember the valley, but the view from both passes - the one at the beginning and the one at the end were both worth the effort. As we stand at the pass summit which is represented by the mountain top story of transfiguration and the pass summit which will come at the top of Pilot’s monument on Easter Sunday morning, with the valley through Lent that lies between them, my hope and wish and promise for you is that the view from both will be just as grand. God’s blessing for the journey. Amen.