Mountaintop

Art work from Pastor Luke’s mom’s house

I grew up in a small house. I shared a room with my sister until I was 16. My mom rented out the second floor to make money. We made do. There wasn’t a lot of wall space but there were three mountaintop paintings on the walls.
I’ve w

 

ondered about my mom’s choice in art. We lived in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. The don’t look like the Rocky Mountain paintings my mom had up. They just seemed like a strange choice. I mean, don’t get me wrong; mountaintops are amazing places. You can see so much from there. You get the layout from up there. Sometimes, if you climb high enough, you’ll even be above the cloud cover and you can see EVERYTHING. Almost like you’re looking down from heaven. The wide view beckons dreamers and adventurers. But you can’t live up there. Life isn’t really sustainable up there for humans. We have to live in the valleys.

Maybe growing up in these cramped conditions, mom wanted to give us bigger views. Expand our horizons. She would take us around to various open houses around town. Not to buy, never to buy. Just to see that there are other homes out there. We even toured the Biltmore Estate. A big house seemed to be in my future. I started making plans of living in a home like that and if I didn’t live in something like the Biltmore, I’d settle for Stan Hyett. I had no idea how I’d afford that place. Maybe I’d be a writer. I’ve tried to write a few novels but the effort thus far petered out. Maybe I’d be a famous artist or architect.

Whatever I would do, I would fill the walls with art. Pictures of mountains and maybe a Van Gogh or two. And a library. I would need a huge library in the house. My mom was always taking us to the library. Sometimes mountaintops can be real, they can be art, or they can be in books. Mom wanted to expand our horizons by getting books in our hands. All sorts of books. I read the Hardy Boys, National Geographic, and J.R.R. Tolkien. My mom was a great storyteller too. She would tell us stories when we got too fussy in the car. Stories filled with adventure and the possibilities of life.

She would tell us that we could be anything we set our minds to. That’s what made our country great! Abe Lincoln was born and raised in a dirt-floor, log cabin and he was the best president we ever had. My mom has a mountaintop view, and my sister and I believed her.

Sometimes you need a different type of story before you can see that a different world is possible. You need that mountaintop view and you need others to see where you’re heading. They need to get a sense of the dream before they start the journey with you.

The problem with mountaintops is that it takes a lot of work to get to the top. In the rabbinic teachings of Exodus, the rabbis talk about how the entire nation of Israel was called to the top of Mount Sinai, but only Moses was willing to do the work to get to the top. He goes up and talks with God. He gets 10 Commandments and a new law of how these former slaves will live together and become God’s chosen people, a light unto the nations. It had to be so disorienting to the Israelites. New laws. New commandments. Can’t we go back to Egypt? Life was bad, but at least we knew what was expected of us there. But now we have Moses who goes up to the mountaintop and comes down with all these crazy ideas that will require us to live in new ways.

Moses is looking for some credibility from God. “If I could just see your face… If you’re calling my people to this high and holy calling… If they are to trust this vision. I need some help here. If I could just see your glory…”

And God replies, “Go to a cleft in the rock and I will put my hand over the cleft because no one can see my face and live, but you will see my back.” Another translation of the Hebrew could read, “…you will see where I was.”

When I was back for Christmas in my mom’s house, I noticed that only one picture of the mountaintops was still hanging. They have been replaced by family pictures. My whole life seems to be up on the walls. There’s my high school and college graduations. Here’s my wedding. And my sister’s wedding. And there are Eve and Sam through the years. There’s my life. And as I see those pictures, I see where God has been. We don’t always see God in action.

It is only after the fact. After we read a book that helps us feel our call to ministry. After we start the work on an impulse. After we look back over time and see all the things God had in store for us. You will see where I was.
But that’s not the point. God is calling me to another way of life. There’s still a great future out there for all people, the promise land, the Beloved Community of God.

I have a call here to help work on making the Beloved Community a little more real here in Medina. I have been to the mountaintop. I am obsessed with telling stories of where God has been in my life. I have a dream Medina. It’s a dream deeply rooted in what I have already sensed and seen of the dream you are casting. A dream of a community of people who love each other and look out for one another. Where strangers become friends and friends become family. Where we see that there are hungry people in our city and we feed them. We take the practical steps to helping others. We’re already doing this, like when we heard that kids weren’t coming to school because they were being teased for not showering or having hygiene products, or can’t even walk to school because their shoes are falling apart, we do something about it.

I see a world where race is important but it’s not a determining factor. That the content of our character determines our fate and doesn’t inhibit our drive to achieve our dreams. A world of peace, not a surface, idealistic-hippy peace of no troubles, but the hard peace of owning your faults and forgiving your neighbors theirs.

I have been to the mountaintop. I have seen a bright future for our church and community. We will have a homeless shelter in our community. The church will be a place of refuge and expectation that you will do the work of achieving your dreams and overcoming life’s obstacles. We will become carbon neutral with renewable energy. We will have a sustainable budget. We will be a place that bridges the divides in our culture, and talks about the unspeakable parts of life. A place that welcomes, loves, and serves and everyone finds their place in this community and the challenge of transformation. Here we will name and fight the powers and principalities that have people in bondage and tears apart the fabric of community. We will be repairers of the breach. Healers of the wounds. Fighters of poverty and where the place where the voice of the voiceless is heard and amplified. We will fight addiction, we will help those in recovery. Those addicted to alcohol and drugs and those addicted to consumerism, materialism, militarism, sexism, racism, hopelessness, and more.

We will be a place of hope. Where our old see visions and our young dream dreams.

But here’s the thing about dreams; they are only wishes if you aren’t willing to work on them. And the thing with mountaintops… they seem so far away. So inaccessible and foreign to our daily lives in the valley. “How can we possibly get to the top of the mountain?” we might ask.

Step-by-step. No amount of wishing will get us to where we want to go, only step-by-step.

You just don’t start climbing Mt. Everest. If any of this sounds like big change, too much… it won’t happen fast. We have to gather our team, pack the gear, plan the meals, and get ready for the climb. Then step-by-step. When we reach that summit, when we survey the view from up there, one of you might see something you want to head toward. You might receive a vision. We’re all about unlocking what God is saying to each of us and where we go together. This is a participatory journey. Together we will reach higher and higher mountains, see more and more of the wider view of God’s vision for us and for the beloved community.

And as we look over our journey together, as we look back to what we thought were mountaintops… we will see that they have been replaced by family pictures. Our walls will be filled with these pictures of our life together. And when we can’t climb any more, when we finally head up and see the place that Christ has prepared for us… we’ll remember, “that in God’s house there are many rooms.” And God loves to fill those walls with photos of all God’s children.God who knows us and formed our inward parts. I know those same pictures will be there. Step-by-step we’ll get there. And when we come to the end, we will find that God is still with us. God hadn’t left us, not for a minute, not for a second, not for a breath.

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