Mountain Top Experiences

Today's scripture reading comes from the book of Exodus, chapter 34, verses 29 through 35. Let us hear these words. When Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the two tablets of the covenant law in his hands, he was not aware that his face was radiant because he had spoken with the Lord. When Aaron and all the Israelites saw Moses, his face was radiant, and they were afraid to come near him. But Moses called to them, so Aaron and all the leaders of the community came back to him, and he spoke to them. Afterward, all the Israelites came near him, and he gave them all the commands the Lord had given him on Mount Sinai. When Moses finished speaking to them, he put a veil over his face. But whenever he entered the Lord's presence to speak with him, he removed the veil until he came out. And when he came out and told the Israelites what had been commanded, they saw that his face was radiant. Then Moses would put the veil back on over his face, until he went in to speak with the Lord. This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.

Well, good morning, church. It's good to be with you today. A couple of things before I get into my sermon.

First of all, next Sunday, Labor Day Sunday, as I've been doing recently, I'm going to be preaching at Lake Church, Cedar Creek Yacht Club Church by the Lake. And it's open to anybody if you want to come. They have an outdoor chapel that backs up to the water. I love it because if I get boring, people can just look past me at the water and enjoy that. But it's at 10 a.m., and the public's welcome if you want to come be a part of that. But also, I'm excited to tell you that next Sunday here at 8.30 and 11 o'clock, our former senior pastor, Mike Ripsky, is going to be preaching in our services. And I'm just so excited about that because Mike means a lot to this church. He means a lot to our community. He means a lot to me. I don't know if you know, but after he retired from full-time pastoral ministry, Mike, he went and was the chaplain over at Cumberland University for about a decade, and they just loved him there. They hated when he retired from that. He made a huge difference on that campus. And I'm so excited that Mike's a part of our church and teaching a class on Wednesday nights and filling in Sunday school classes and a part of our church. And he's back in the corner back there now, so I'll come in. But he just means so much to so many of us, and I'm thankful that he's willing to share a word with us next Sunday. And I hate to miss that, but I know you'll be blessed by it. 

The other thing I want to share with you is starting two weeks from today, I'm going to be starting a new sermon series called Faith and Politics, Loving God and Neighboring Election Year. And this may be the stupidest sermon series I've ever preached in my life. There's days I'm going, no, I can't do this. This is dumb. But I will tell you that I've been working on this for months, and I've been praying about it and discerning it, and there's not been a sermon series that I've been more excited about in a long time. And there's not been a sermon series that I've been more scared about in a long time, and to have them both with the same sermon series. My hope is that it's something that maybe steps on all of our toes equally as we seek to be better followers of Jesus as we approach this election year. But anyway, what I need you to do as we prepare for that, the two weeks leading up to is pray for it, pray for me, and maybe invite some friends. It might be great drama, I don't know. You can watch me fall flat on my face, but my hope is that we can all grow. The goal is to not be better at politics. The goal is to be better followers of Jesus, and that's what I hope that we can accomplish with this. Today we wrap up our camp meetings sermon series, and we're going to have a little camp meeting of our own, and I'm excited about that tonight on the front lawn under the tent. Good food, good fellowship, good music, and passionate singing, as it was always a part of camp meetings, so I hope you will make plans to join us, invite friends and family.

We've sent out invitations to the highways and byways to all of our community, especially to those who serve our community. It's saying come and let us give you a meal as a way of saying thank you, but it's open to everybody, and we'd love for you to come join us this afternoon for that. But just as this series is coming to an end, so do camp meetings. All camp meetings eventually come to an end. The week is over. People have to return to their homes, return to work, go back to school. All those things have to happen. Now, I've never been to a camp meeting before. I've had family members and friends and whatever, and they've shared with me their experiences, but I have had a mountaintop experience.

I've had plenty of mountaintop experiences. In fact, I've been to those spiritual retreat places. I've gone and had my life refreshed and renewed both physically and spiritually, and I've come home recharged and ready to take on things. In fact, I was just reflecting this week. I remember when I first started UMYF as a seventh grader at Cookville First United Methodist. That's when MYF started was with seventh grade, and I remember going on my first youth retreat, and it was an amazing experience. I still remember the feeling I had on that retreat of, you know, kind of taking my faith seriously and growing in my faith and having that encounter with God in a powerful way. And then I remember coming back Sunday evening and I went to school on Monday morning at Cookville Junior High School. And after school, that day was kind of unmemorable.

I don't remember much about the day, but after school, I did what I always did, and Cookville Junior High was about a mile away from my granny's house, and I would walk from Cookville Junior High School to my granny's house every afternoon after school and be there until one of my parents could pick me up. And I was walking home from school, and I was on cloud nine. In fact, what I remember about that day, and that's been a long time ago, was walking down 1st Street towards my granny's house, singing that old campfire song, Pass It On. You know, it only takes a spark to get a fire going, and soon all those around can warm up from its glow. And then at the end it says, I'll shout it from the mountaintop, praise God! Y'all know that song, right? And at that moment when I said, I'll shout it from the mountaintop and I shouted and looked up, praise God, I failed to see a break in the sidewalk, and I tripped and fell flat on my face. What a way to come down from that mountaintop experience.

Here's the thing, we all have to come down from those mountaintop experiences. We can go away and we can have those memorable spiritual times, we can have those top-of-the-world kind of experiences, and we can come home refreshed and rejuvenated physically and spiritually and emotionally and even mentally. We can go on vacation even and get away from the day-to-day routines of our work. We can go and spend time with family and spend time doing the things we enjoy doing and not have to worry about all of the grind of work. But eventually we have to come back. And what we find every single time when we come back is that whereas we may have changed, whereas we may be different, the world around us hasn't changed. The world around us, in fact, is the same. It's important for us to know that, because if not, then we can get caught off guard and it can lead to a whole lot of problems. The term mountaintop experience comes from Scripture.

In fact, it comes from the text that Pastor Rebecca read for us today, because Moses literally went up on the mountain. He went up there to spend time with God. He was there in the presence of God, spending time with God, having an amazing encounter and experience with God. And in the midst of that, his heart was on fire. You heard in the text there, it said that he had a glow about him that couldn't be put out. He had to put a veil over it just to kind of dim that light because it was shining so bright.

And in the midst of that, God gave Moses a gift. He gave him the law, the Ten Commandments, to take down to Israel to help give them guidelines that can help them to have a better life, that can help them avoid pitfalls that can lead to their destruction. He put it on stone tablets, gave it to Moses and said, take it down the mountain to the people and know that this is a gift that I am giving them. And so Moses with the stone tablets under his arms comes down the mountain with just a glow about him from his mountaintop experience until he gets back to where Israel was gathered and he sees that while he was gone, with his brother Aaron in charge, the people had convinced Aaron that if they took all of their jewelry, all of their gold, melted it down and formed an idol that they could worship, that that would be a good thing. And Moses was enraged. I can imagine in my mind's eyes coming down the hill having his mountaintop experience and he comes down and says, guys, guess what? God has given us a gift.

Let me read it to you. It says, the number one is, you shall have no other gods before me. Okay, let's just go on to the second. The second one says, you shall not make graven images to worship. And then he becomes angry and in a fit of anger and a fit of rage, he throws the stone tablets down, crushes them into smithereens and becomes so frustrated. Moses was glowing, literally glowing from his mountaintop experience. And as he came down off of it, he tripped and fell flat on his face in his reentry back into the real world. I dare say that many of us in the room, if not all of us have had some type of experience like that in our lives. It's happened to us, right? Our first day back at work after a great vacation, our first day back after having been on a mission trip or having been away at a spiritual weekend or all the different things that we do and we come back to the world and it just smacks us upside the face.

I can almost hear Moses say, I don't even know why I came down from the mountain. In fact, what we learned what Pastor Rebecca read today is when he goes back up the mountain. So after all this happens, I can almost just see him turning and sprinting as hard as he can, as fast as he can to get back up on the mountain. And I can hear him get to God and say, I'm done, these stiff-necked people of yours. I don't want to have anything else to do with them. I think I'm just going to stay here. I'm going to pitch a tent and just be with you God forever. How does that sound? You know what God says back to him? He says, Moses, it's time for you to lead my people to the land that I've promised them. He says, Moses, it's time for you to go back down the mountain and take them to the land of Canaan, the land flowing with milk and honey, the land where I have set aside for them to develop this great nation of my people.

Moses, I need you to go back down the mountain and to do what I've been calling you to do. In fact, before you do that, I need you to cut two more stone tablets and bring them to me, and I'm going to fix what you messed up, Moses, what you broke in your anger and in your frustration. And then I want you to take these tablets back down to my people, the ones that have the law written on, the ones that entail the gift that I'm giving them because they need this, because it will save them.

When Moses went back up on the mountain the second time, his face started to glow again. He replaced the rage that he had felt, and I'm sure he wanted to just stay there in that moment with God forever. Who wouldn't? Who wouldn't want to stay there? But God's directive to Moses was there's still work to be done. I still called you to do this thing, and just because you've had a setback, just because you've gotten frustrated, just because you had this mountaintop expansion, you came back down, and the world was still the same as it was when you left. It doesn't mean you get to abandon that, because I'm not going to abandon those people of mine. Church, we can't stay on the mountain.

The mountains are great places to visit. We love going to the mountains. The view is beautiful.

It's fresh. It's clean. It's a great retreat.

But we aren't meant to live on the mountain. We're meant to go up to the mountain, to recharge our batteries, to revive our souls so that we can come back down to the work that God is calling us to below. We go to the mountain to experience God, and then we go down the mountain to carry God to the people around us. We have to take those stone tablets back down to the people. We have to receive the directives from God that God is calling us to do, and bring that glow down on the mountain so that we can lift up others who are living in darkness, so that they too can experience God, so that we can lift them up to have an encounter, to have a mountaintop experience with God. Because here's the thing, I have seen people who want to live on the mountaintops. They seem to always be gravitating towards those mountaintop experiences. They want to go from mountaintop to mountaintop to mountaintop. And that's just not the way God intends it to be.

God gives us the mountaintop to revive us for the work that He asks for us. If we don't do the second part, if we want to stay on the mountain, then we're acting selfishly. It's self-serving that way. I mean, who doesn't want that warm and fuzzy feeling all the time that we get from the mountain, that glow that we get on the mountain? But that's never God's desire for us to stay on the mountain. He's always directing us back down to the work in the valley below. We go to the mountaintops so that we can come back down into the darkness and shine Christ's light. And people will frustrate us and people will do stupid things and they will get off track and they will cause harm. Sometimes those people are us even. But when we go back up and connect with God, at camp meetings or spiritual retreats or mission trips or vacations, and we tell God just how frustrating those people are, sometimes God will remind us of how frustrating I can be or you can be, and then He'll remind us of the work in front of us.

I need you to go back down. I need you to do what I called you already to do to lead them to the Promised Land. I need you to share this gift with them that you've already destroyed once. That wasn't good. Here it is again, the second chance. I'll give them the gift that I've promised them. I'm going to redo the tablets. I'm going to give you that second chance, but there's work to be done. Church, it's important, no doubt, that we have those mountaintop experiences, and if you haven't had a mountaintop experience in a while, then it's probably time to find one, to get away, to do something that refreshes and rejuvenates you, that helps you to have a glow about you again.

Sometimes we lose that glow, but we have to go back down. We have to go back to where the work is. We have to go back to the people that God is calling us to be with, the work that God is calling us to do, because there's so much work yet to be done.And who else is going to do it if you or I don't? 

Thanks be to God. Amen.