I don’t know how many of
you have climbed a mountain. If you haven’t, spoiler alert, it’s quite difficult.
And I’ve never done any of what they call “technical climbing,” where you
actually need ropes and harnesses and things, but I have made it to the top of
Pike’s Peak, one of the many 14,000-foot-high mountains in Colorado. If you
want to walk it, as I did, you start at an altitude of around 7,000 feet, and
over the course of walking 14 miles, you ascend the other 7,000 to make it up
to 14. Between 11,000 and 12,000 feet is what they call the tree line. That’s
the altitude above which no trees grow. One of the many realizations I had on
that walk was that the trees are probably a good deal smarter than we are. Air
that low in oxygen is really hard to walk through. The whole climb took me
about seven hours, but the last mile, over which we climbed almost 1,000 feet,
took me an hour. Now, Pike’s Peak also has a Cog railway that you can take to
the summit, as well as a road. You can drive up. And at the top, is a little café
and gift shop. All I remember about the café is that they served chili, and, at
that moment, the chili was the best thing I’d ever tasted.
I mention
this, because whenever I hear visions, prophecies, promises, like the one we heard
form Isaiah as our first reading, passages that involve mountains, I remember my
time on Pikes. Isaiah has this gospel vision of people coming from all over and
streaming up Mount Zion. This is his grand vision of the consummation of all
things, that after a time of judgment (which is in the verses just before we
started reading), all peoples, not just Jews will stream up the Lord’s Mountain.
They will come to witness God’s glory, they will come to worship, they will
come to offer sacrifice (which will mean feasting), and – most radically,
almost scandalously – Isaiah suggests that God will select priests not just from
among the house of Levi, not just from the Jewish people, but from the whole
gathered assembly of humanity.
And when I
hear something like that, I think of two things. Firstly, I think of just how
good that chili tasted after seven hours of climbing. I hope you can feel that
in your bones, in your stomachs, in your mouths. Taste food that truly satisfies
a real hunger. That’s what the world to come tastes like. Or, rather, that’s a
pale unseasoned imitation of what the world to come tastes like. We build up
our hope, we build up our desire for salvation, our zeal for sanctification by
spending time enjoying foretastes and remembering what they’re foretastes of.
Salivate your way towards holiness. Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.
But, my
time on Pikes makes me think of something else too. It makes me feel something
else in my bones, in my legs, in my lungs. It makes me feel how arduous it is
to climb a mountain. Jesus gets that. It’s hard. It’s beautiful, but it’s hard.
I mean, Jesus has some mountain climbing experience, maybe a little more than
Isaiah had, I don’t know. When Jesus talks in our gospel about the narrow gate,
he’s saying, it’s hard. It’s not a closed gate, but it’s a narrow gate. It’s
not a 7,000-foot leap, but it’s a 7,000-foot elevation gain over 14 miles of
walking at altitude. The life of faith is hard. When I first saw that this was the
reading this week, especially after we also had a hard gospel about division
last week, I thought, “oh, no, I really wanted some straight up good news to
preach this week.” But I’ve got to believe that there are people here who need
to hear this, who need to hear, “It’s hard. I get it. It’s hard for me too.”
It’s hard
to be holy. It’s hard to be loving. It’s hard to love people when they’re annoying,
when they’re wrong, when they’re our enemies. It’s hard to love God when He
seems to be sleeping during the storm. It’s hard. And when it’s hard, taste
that chili in your head. Salivate your way to love, to holiness, to the table
in the kingdom of God where the hungry will be filled.
The people
that stream towards the Mountain in Isaiah’s vision do that, he tells us, because
they’ve seen signs, signs that God has planted in their midst. As well as the
hope, the anticipation, the hunger that drives us, we need to look for those
signs too, because God has planted them in our midst. At the end of every day,
one of the things I ask is, what did I see today? What did I see of God’s
goodness today? And where did I see Jesus today? Because Jesus has made this
journey. The beginning of our gospel reminds us that Jesus was on a journey
when he was asked that question. Jesus was journeying to Jerusalem to suffer
and die for us. And because of that, here in this place, at this Mass, we witness
Christ’s sacrifice at Calvary re-presented to us.
We’re in
this in-between time, because we know that mountaintop came down and dwelt
among us. But we also know we’re still climbing. Think of Dr. King’s final speech,
the mountaintop speech. He talked towards the end of that of all the signs of
hope he saw in the midst of a sick world. And he described having seen those in
this biblically rich language, “I’ve been to the mountaintop.” That’s why he
kept climbing.
Friends,
taste and see the goodness of the Lord. And let’s keep climbing.
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