August 18, 2024
• Rev. Rob Fuquay
St. Luke’s UMC
August 18, 2024
Finding Your Mountain
“Surrounded by Glory”
Exodus 16: 1-10
It is told that John Wesley once said that a preacher must be willing to do three things at a moment’s notice: preach, pray or die! Well, when I got back from Everest Base Camp to Kathmandu I felt like doing all three! Let me explain why.
I had learned before the sabbatical about our only United Methodist congregation in Nepal, so I emailed the pastor before we began our trek to introduce myself and say that when I returned I wanted to visit his church and worship there. Fast forward two weeks. We arrived back at our hotel in Kathmandu on a Friday afternoon, exhausted and glad to have a hot shower and comfortable bed. I checked my email and found that he had responded. He was excited to have us visit, explained that they worship on Saturdays rather than Sundays, told me the time the service started at 9am, and ended saying, “You will be preaching and I will interpret.” Not exactly what I expected after hiking a hundred miles and having just over 12 hours to get ready. I thought I would preach, pray and die!
But I chose not to get anxious. I recalled our experience hiking and decided to share that with them. Here’s part of that sermon, and let me say first, that the hat on my head is a traditional Nepali hat for men called a topi that was given to me and the pastor encouraged me to wear as I preached…video
We are surrounded by glory, but you don’t discover that in the midst of worldly glory. You have to get away from the glitter to see the glory of God. It’s like the stars in the sky. You see them best when you get away from manmade lights. The glory of God is seen best in the wilderness.
The Israelites experienced this reality after being liberated by Moses from 400 years of slavery in Egypt. They fled to the wilderness where now they had to cope with all new challenges. Their challenges made them look backward to the days in Egypt. Isn’t that typical of a crisis? Have you ever hit a hard time that made you second guess the road that got you there? You look back and think, “If only I had stayed where I was. If only I hadn’t followed this opportunity, taken this job, married this person.”
The Israelites, facing a food shortage in the wilderness, cried out to Moses, “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the pots of meat and ate our fill of bread…” (Exodus 16:3) Sometimes an uncertain present makes an unpreferred past look a lot more appealing. But the wilderness is where God’s glory stands out.
This was the gift God gave the Israelites. They faced a very real problem, they were hungry. They needed food. So God promised them that the next day they will go out and there will be manna from heaven every morning, and in the evening there will be quail. They will have meat to eat. In other words they would find out that there are provisions in the wilderness. It may appear like an empty place, but it holds blessings.
But notice an interesting detail in the story. Right before their first experience of the miraculous provision of food it says, “…the Israelites looked toward the wilderness, and the glory of the Lord appeared in the cloud.” (v.10) The experience of God’s glory precedes the answer to their prayers. And which way did the Israelites have to look in order to see God’s glory? Toward the wilderness. They had to face their wilderness in order to see God’s glory. You see the Israelites had been faced toward Egypt. They thought they had to go back in order to go forward. They thought they had to retreat before they could ever advance. They thought this because they believed their wilderness was bereft of God’s power. But when they looked to the wilderness, when they embraced that hard place, that’s where they found that they were surrounded by glory.
Mary Bethune Cookman was a great United Methodist, educator and leader in the first half of the 20th century. She was a personal friend of Eleanor Roosevelt. She started a college for black students so they would have a chance to compete in the job market. The college became Bethune Cookman College which today is located in Florida.
She knew those graduates were headed into a wilderness. She knew they were going into a world where life would not be fair. Where they might not always get the opportunities they earn and deserve. Where things would be hard. And if their goal was to have peace, then every time they faced conflict, it would be easier to give up on their dreams. So every year she gave the commencement address. She included the same line every year, “Faith ought not be a puny thing. If you believe, have faith like a giant, and may God grant you not peace, but glory.”
Perhaps she said understood that if peace was the goal of those graduates, then they might give up too quickly when hardships came along. But if they have glory, they have something better than peace. If they have glory, they will have assurance that they are not alone in their trials. If they have glory, they will be sustained.
When the Israelites looked to the wilderness they saw the glory of God in a cloud. I believe I know what that cloud looks like.
I showed you last week the short video of Susan touching the rock Everest Base Camp when we arrived. She didn’t really believe she would make it, but that experience gave her a confidence that became scary. You see it was shortly after that when I hit my low moment. As we walked the 2 hours back to where we were staying that night, I felt my gut getting worse. I had been dealing with intestinal things for a while, but now it was getting tougher. I was tired and that wasn’t helping.
The next morning we were to get up at 4am and climb to the top of a mountain called Kala Patter at over 18,000 feet. I knew that would be really hard. It had been cloudy so Susan and I said to our guide that if it’s cloudy in the morning we don’t want to do this. He said he would wake us and let us know.
I hardly slept that night. It was rough. At 3:30 he knocked on the door. I opened it and he said, “It’s perfectly clear.” Not what I was hoping to hear. As frustrated as I had been at the amount of clouds on this trip, I was finally ready for a cloudy morning.
Susan immediately jumped up and started putting on heavy clothes and boots and headlamp. I just sat on the edge of the bed. She said, “Arent you going to get ready?” Now let me interject that on previous occasions in our life together, whenever we are going to do something challenging, especially hiking related, and I initiated the idea that maybe we’ll just skip this time, Susan would say, “Oh, if you think so, okay.” She was always glad to skip!
I said to her sitting on the bed that morning, “I feel awful, something is going to come out of me and I don’t know which direction.” She said, “Then what are you going to do?” I did not recognize the woman looking back at me. She was like, “Look, I came all this way for this moment. I’m not going to miss it.” It was clear she found her mountain.
So I headed to the restroom for a puke-and-rally moment, got dressed and we headed out with our sherpa. It was about 15 degrees. And we began climbing in the pitch dark, but the sky looked like this…(pics of night sky with stars)
As the sky grew lighter, we got up to about 18,000 feet, and I could see how we were surrounded by these enormous peaks. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen. And then our guide pointed toward the east and said, “There. There’s Everest.” And this is what I saw…(pics of Everest with orange glow)
That was very much a spiritual experience for me and I still don’t know how to put it into words. It was like the mountain said to me, “You came all this way to see me so let me put on a little show for you. I was here milleniums before you, and I will be here long after you’re gone. But I’ll give you something you can hang onto.” That was my glory.
God’s glory stands out best in the wilderness. If we push through, if we just keep going when everything about us says we want to quit, we will find glory. But there’s one last thought about this matter I want to share. And it comes from my journal. I would wake up early each morning and go to the dining room before anyone else arrived and I would journal whatever was coming to me. Several days before this, I wrote an entry I title “This is Hard.” Here’s what I said…
We knew this would be hard…the elevation changes…having a bad cold…the altitude. But there’s another element that increases the hard factor. First the weather has not been great. From oppressive smoke in Kathmandu to the clouds and rain on the trail we haven’t seen the sun. Then staying in unheated rooms, (dirty conditions), unclean drinking water, intestinal issues. This is all what makes you say, “This is hard!”
But what truly makes something hard? What is hard for me is simply normal for people who live here. In fact, their conditions are a lot harder. To say something is hard is like calling something abnormal. Abnormal to whom? Compared to what? Hard depends on normal. If normal is having a heated/air conditioned home with a clean restroom streps away, consistent electricity, clean drinking water accessible by the turn of a faucet, then Nepal is hard. But my hard is their normal.
It is hard to enter other people’s normal. Relating to other’s conditions can be very hard. And this brings hard close to home. It can be hard trying to relate to a friend’s anxiety, a neighbor’s worries, a refugee’s challenges, the reality of a person of a different race, someone in prison, and so on. When normal is comfortable, hard is anything different. But hard things help us grow, become more than we are, allow us to discover what we are capable of, and bind us closer to others we may never know or understand if we hadn’t been willing to do a hard thing…Perhaps looking for the common ground we share with others, finding our mutual humanity-helps make life less hard. But it doesn’t remove hard and it probably shouldn’t. Hard helps us.
I felt inspired as I wrote those words thinking about how doing hard things makes us more useable to the world. That was God’s hope for Israel, that they would be, as the Bible says, a “light to the Gentiles,” which simply means a source of hope to people different from themselves. That is God’s desire for all of us. We are made to give hope to others.
Go back to that picture of Everest. This is what God wants to make us. God wants for others to see us this way—as a sign of God’s presence giving them hope.
I close with a story you might have seen on the front page of the Indy Star last Sunday. It’s about Bridget Balcerak who discovered in high school at Martinsville that she had cancer. She was taken to Riley Hospital where she endured very rough chemo therapy. She would get discouraged believing she was going to die, but there was glory there in the form of nurses who sat through the night with her, holding her hand, encouraging her not to give up.
It had a profound impact on her. She chose to become a nurse herself, and not only that, to go back to work in the very unit where she had been a patient just a few years before. Now she works alongside the nurses who saved her life. She said, “It sounds weird to people to say I’m thankful for cancer, but I got to learn the kindness of people, and honestly, I want to be that person for somebody else.” The article went on to say, “Her Riley nurses changed her life. They saved her life when she was ready to give up the fight. And now she is trying to instill that same fight and spirit in the patients she cares for.” (IndyStar Aug. 11, 2024, p4B)
She found glory in her wilderness. And now she wants to be a source of glory of others in theirs.
Go back to that picture of Everest. You don’t see that just anywhere or in just any condition. It’s seen when you look toward the wilderness. That’s when God shows up best. And it’s what God wants to make of us for others. And when we become that source of God’s glory it’s like finding it all over again for ourselves.
Amen.