The Cloud on the Mountain
A few weeks ago, when my parents offered to keep my daughters for a night, Emily and I took the opportunity to get away. We couldn’t go far, but we wanted to stay in a quiet place with natural beauty, so we decided to book a room at the lodge of Mount Magazine State Park.
We imagined that this get away would involve starry nights, grand views of the valley, and ample opportunities for hikes and wildlife watching. But when we began to drive up the winding road to the mountain’s top, we soon found ourselves enveloped in a fog that made it difficult to see even 5 feet ahead--road signs appeared from the cloud just in time for sudden turns and at one point several deer leapt in front of us in a heart skipping surprise. When we finally came to the lodge, we couldn’t see the massive building from the parking spaces just outside of it--I don’t know if I’ve ever been in thicker fog.
Fog, these days, comes with a warning on our phones; a weather advisory to slow down. A foggy mind, cloudy thinking, caught in a haze--the metaphors of our culture reflect a negative stance toward life in the clouds. We love to be able to see what’s ahead and around us. But our scriptures are full of places where it is in the fog that faith is found, it is in the fog that we encounter the divine.
This was true for Moses on the mountain, waiting forty days within the burning cloud. It was in the fog that Moses listened, stilling his mind and heart in order to catch the quiet voice of God. It was through the confusion of the cloud, the long wait upon the mountain, that Moses finally heard how his people were to live into the promised land.
But while Moses was waiting on the mountain, the people beneath were becoming restless. They did not like the stillness of the cloud that had settled over their guide. They craved clarity, but were unwilling to wait through the fog to find it. Instead they created their own certainty by casting a golden calf—a dumb deity who could give voice to whatever they wanted it to say.
All of our idols could be seen as a quest for certainty, a desire for clarity and control apart from the clouds that demand us to slow down and listen. Idols need not be objects made of stone; images cast in metal. Idols can just as well be concepts, ideas and ideologies that help make sense of the world around us, even if that sense is far from the truth.
Peter shared in this temptation toward idolatry. As we hear in the story of that other mountain in our scripture readings this morning, for one shining moment he saw the glory of God in Jesus as clear as any reality on earth. But rather than taking it as a light to ignite a life of mission, Peter wanted to make an idol of it. He wanted to take the transfiguration of Jesus put it into a building, institutionalize it so that it could become a system of certainty rather than a relationship of constant conversation.
Peter is rescued from his idolatry by the cloud that envelops him and draws him back into the unknowing that is at the heart of faith. In that cloud the temptation to cast an idol of certainty gives way to the ongoing work of listening. It is in the cloud that he hears the way forward: to listen to Jesus—not in one moment of revelation, not in one clear call to conversion, but onward in the daily discernments of discipleship.
And this is the way for all of us to live in a world of fog. Like bells on the waves beyond the shore, horns blasting through the clouds that hang over a harbor, it is by listening to Jesus that we learn to find our way. And until we hear that quiet, often hidden voice, we must learn to wait, to be still rather than rushing to create our own clarity through the idols of certainty. Until we hear a clear call forward, being still and quiet is the safest way to be.
We live in an uncertain time. There are the questions that creep in: What will become of us in the face of the climate crisis? Will the coronavirus by become a global pandemic? Who will be the next president of this country? Will we find meaningful work? Will our children be okay? Will we have meaning after our work has ended? And then there are the constant discernments of our daily life: how should I live through this difficult period of relationship? What should we do with our time? How should we make the myriad choices before us?
In search of answers we may climb a mountain so that we can see into the distance, but we are just as likely to find ourselves in a cloud as discover a view into the future. And in that cloud we may want to escape and go searching for certainty somewhere else, among the myriad idols our world offers, always ready to give us an answer, answers we are often ready to accept even if they are the wrong ones. Or, we could follow the way of Moses, the way Peter eventually found on the mountain of transfiguration. This is the way of waiting upon God, the way of silencing our hearts so that we can hear.
It is there in the silence that we will begin to realize that God is not so quiet as we thought, that God is speaking to us always in the electric hum of our bodies, in the depths of our beating hearts. But we can never hear that voice, closer than our own sound, until we enter the cloud of unknowing and wait there; until we get quiet enough to listen.
On our getaway, Emily and I waited in the fog and gave up the plans we’d had for hikes and wildlife watching and gazing at the stars. Instead we had time together in quiet and stillness and conversations where we could hear one another in a way the noise of our everyday life rarely affords. It was a beautiful time; one we never could have enjoyed if hadn’t accepted the clouds as they were and discovered their gifts.
Our scriptures today are invitations to accept the gift of clouds, the obscurity of fog. In those clouds we are welcomed into a blanket of silence that covers over all of our idols of certainty. In the fog we can begin to listen to the quiet voice of God, the voice that gives us the basic instructions for discipleship: “Listen to Jesus.” Listen when you hear him, listen when you don’t. It is in waiting and listening to Jesus that we will find the certainty born of clouds, true clarity in the confusion. Amen.