I wonder if you’ve ever had something like a mountaintop experience.
There are times in our lives, aren’t there, when something happens that opens our eyes, dazzles us and gives us a sense of affirmation.  This can be in many different areas of our lives. For example, a mountaintop experience for a PE teacher might be seeing their student make it as a professional footballer.  For a climber it could be literally a mountaintop experience – making it to the summit of Mount Everest, and for an artist it might be selling their artwork to a renowned collector.

These moments, even those that are experienced by other people, make all our hard work worthwhile. It is these moments that help us to get through the everyday stresses of our lives. They spur us on and give us a renewed sense of purpose.

There may be moments in your life that you can look back on now and identify as a turning point. Perhaps there was a significant moment in your relationship when you knew that your partner was the person you wanted to spend your whole life with?

I encourage you to pause today, and reflect on those mountaintop experiences you’ve had in your life and how you were transformed by them.

As Christians, we may be able to identify a specific moment when we felt the love of God as a gift of grace to us personally. A moment when we accepted Christ as our saviour and perhaps, felt called to a particular path as a result of this.

These mountaintop experiences come out of nowhere and can stop us in our tracks.

In our reading today, Matthew says that Jesus was ‘transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white’. Those who have true mountaintop experiences are transformed in the process.

Once you’ve been to the mountaintop, you never see things in the same way again and it can be tempting to want to stay on that mountaintop – like Peter, in our reading, wanting to hold on to the moment,
saying to Jesus ‘Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish,
I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah’

But these moments aren’t meant to last forever. Inevitably, mountaintop experiences lead to the valley below.  If we look at what follows right after Jesus’ transfiguration, He, Peter, James and John come down from the mountaintop only to meet a man with a son who has epilepsy begging for Jesus to heal him.  So much for the ecstasy of the mountaintop, now there’s work to be done and not a moment to spare!

This is the message for us all. Consider the experiences of Peter, James and John, and that bright dazzling light on the mountaintop. Reflect on the mountaintop experiences in your life, and how they have transformed you but remember, that as Christians, we are called to be Christ’s light to the world. So don’t stay too long on the mountaintop, there is work to be done. Amen