A Mountaintop Experience
Isaiah 2:1-5
December 2, 2007
Leslie A. Klingensmith
Years ago, my family used to vacation in Colorado. We always spent time in a small town called Grand Lake, where my grandparents had vacationed every summer for something like forty-five years running, and where my parents had honeymooned. We had a lot of good times in Grand Lake. There was a trail that we liked to hike - I cannot even remember the name of it now, but it was not terribly strenuous. It wound around the mountain at a manageable grade and ended at a comfortably wide ridge that faced the Rocky Mountains on one side and an immense waterfall on the other. Even as a fairly young kid, that waterfall mesmerized me. It was no Niagara Falls, but still the scale, the vast difference between the size of the mountains and the waterfall and a puny morsel of humanity such as myself, was fascinating and oddly comforting. We usually would haul a picnic lunch up the mountain, and the shenanigans of my siblings (and me too), and my extended family seldom left much time for reflecting up there. Nevertheless, I liked to squeeze between two largish rocks up on the ridge (where I felt very safe) and watch and listen to the waterfall. There was a peace there that at the time I had not experienced anywhere else. Just a few years ago a close friend of mine who is an avid hiker said that when she reaches the top of a mountain she feels like she is sitting in God's lap. I thought back to those hikes in the Rocky Mountains, and knew exactly what she meant.
"Come, let us go up to the mountain of our God. Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord." Sometimes we speak of our desire to have a "mountaintop experience." We talk about life's "peaks and valleys," with peaks being the good times and the valleys, well, we don't want to go there. No question about it, mountaintop experiences are good - they are the high points of life after all, the infusions of energy that carry us through the mundane times and sustain us through the difficult ones. There are literal mountaintop times, like the one I described a moment ago, and metaphorical mountaintops as well. Perhaps you can think of some mountaintop experiences in your own life - a pilgrimage to a place you had always wanted to visit, the initial rush when you fall in love with someone, the completion of a hard-won goal. In addition, I can certainly recall conferences or retreats, gatherings of like-minded people who care about the same things I do (some of which literally took place in the mountains) that served to energize and empower me. Whenever I experience mountaintop time, I am deeply grateful for it.
Some people are disdainful of the mountaintop, saying it is not "real life." Who's to say? Of course we cannot stay on the summit forever, but is the time spent there not every bit as "real" as the time we spend on the trail or scrabbling up the face of the mountain, or down in the valley? Seems to me that all of those parts of life's journey are important and that any life is going to be a mixture of highs and lows, plus a lot of time just getting from one to the other. As much as we would like to live on the mountaintop, if we lived there all the time we would lose our appreciation for it, and would come to see the mountaintop as just another place where laundry has to get done and bills have to be paid. It may be that the temporary nature of a mountaintop experience is part of its allure. We cherish those moments all the more because we know that they do not last forever. Maybe a faithful life is one that can integrate all parts of life and keep learning and growing through the peaks and the valleys.
The prophet Isaiah has something to say about what God intends the Israelites (and Gentiles as well) to gain from a mountaintop experience. Today we begin the season of Advent - a time of year that is billed culturally and ecclesiastically as a "mountaintop time." We are preparing for one of our most major liturgical celebrations and celebrating the gift of the incarnation. The prophets lived and preached a long time before Jesus was born, but it is fascinating to look at the things they said and see (whether the prophets themselves realized it or not) how their words articulate God's plan for humankind. Isaiah lived approximately 700 years before the birth of Jesus. Like many of the prophets, he relies heavily on imagery and metaphor to convey his message. The word "saw" in verse one indicates that this prophecy is part of an elaborate vision that Isaiah had and begins describing in his first chapter. The mountaintop is symbolic for the unity of all peoples when God's sovereignty is established throughout the earth. Isaiah is an Israelite, and he is going to see his nation as having the "right" way, the only way to live. That is why Israel will be established as the highest of the mountains.
However, Isaiah is not talking about any kind of forced conversions. Every person becoming a practicing Jew is less important to him than every person learning the ways of peace and justice as they are taught in the Torah. He sees humankind becoming unified around love for God and adherence to God's law, with God being the sole judge of individuals and nations. That is one thing that strikes me as critical here - Isaiah is not portraying the mountaintop as a place where we go to be alone. We are not intended to pitch a tent up there and beauty of all creation, with no thought given to the well being of that creation.
"Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, so that we may learn God's ways and we may walk in his paths." The mountaintop experience that Isaiah describes is something we are supposed to do together. Furthermore, we see from the next few verses that that togetherness is not intended to be a small group of like-minded people that reinforces one another's worldview. The mountaintop is intended to be a place for all nations - even the ones that we understand the least and that trouble us the most. "All the nations shall stream to it."
I am not fool enough to think that everyone is going to agree about everything up on the mountaintop, and it looks as if Isaiah is not either. Relationship is difficult. People are different, with widely varied ideas and ways of living. That is why Isaiah gives the Israelites the assurance that when the mountaintop experiences come, the people of Israel and all those other people are not going to have to work out those differences on their own. It is left to God to judge, to arbitrate, between the nations. And God has something different in mind from the strife and warfare that has characterized Israel's relationship with her neighbors up to this point. In some of the most gorgeous and hopeful poetry of God's Word, Isaiah makes it clear what God has in mind. "God shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." That is a radically different way of living together. The people 2,700 years ago probably thought Isaiah was crazy. We still don't get the possibility that he expresses - the possibility that we could figure out a way to live together without killing each other, the possibility that God knew what God was doing when so many different types of people were created in the first place, the possibility that in God's time God's vision for humanity and the world will be realized. But what is Advent about if not about possibility - the possibility that a mountaintop experience could change us-all of us, as a people-for the long term and not just the short? Maybe that is the type of mountaintop experience that God has in mind and that God articulates through Isaiah. (PAUSE)
It was serendipitous this week, as I was thinking about mountaintops and what they mean in our spiritual and communal lives, I started reading the book Three Cups of Tea. Several friends had recommended it to me. It is about a guy who did not reach the literal mountaintop, but is creating the mountaintop that Isaiah describes in one of the most forsaken places on earth. Greg Mortensen, in the late 1980s and early 1990s was part of the extreme climbing culture. If you have ever read Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air you know what I am talking about. These are not casual hikers. These are people who give up months of their lives and spend their life savings to go months without a shower, be freezing cold all the time, and be in mortal danger pretty much all the time. These are the people who climb the Himalayas in Nepal and the Karakoram in Pakistan. Pakistan - one of the world's foremost powder kegs right about now. That is where Greg Mortensen had his mountaintop experience.
In 1993, Mortensen joined an expedition to try to reach the summit of K2, the second highest peak in the world and arguably the most deadly because of its steep and icy terrain. Reaching the summit is the gold standard for these types of climbers, and Mortensen wanted to do so to honor the memory of his sister, who had recently died. Sadly, Mortensen came within 600 meters of K2's summit when he had to turn back to assist a team member who was suffering from pulmonary edema. Mortensen's own life was in peril when, suffering from severe exhaustion, he became separated from his teammates and got lost on the mountain.
It was in this disoriented state that Mortensen wandered into the tiny cliff village of Korphe. He was so lost that he thought he was in another slightly larger village called Askole, the place where he was supposed to meet up with the other hikers. He had never even heard of Korphe. Korphe is part of a tiny little sliver of Pakistan that once was fought over when India and Pakistan divided and drew borders. Most of the people who live there are Muslim, although a few consider themselves Jewish. Even though many of them, especially the children, had never seen a foreigner, the people of Korphe welcomed Mortensen. The villagers live an unimaginably hard life, but their culture demands that hospitality be shown to the stranger. The village leader, Haji Ali, took Mortensen to his own humble hut, where he was given food and water. When they bedded down for the night, Mortensen was touched to see that he was given the finest possession that Ali owned to keep him warm - a heavy, warm beautifully decorated quilt. Even though he was past his limit physically and mentally, Greg Mortensen knew that he had narrowly escaped death and had made new friends in the experience. He just did not know that his life was about to change forever.
Mortensen stayed in Korphe several days, getting his strength back and learning more about the people. He was especially taken with the children, who were so curious about him and make friends with him immediately. Toward the end of his stay, he asked Haji Ali if he could see the children's school. Ali was hesitant to take him, but eventually was persuaded. Greg Mortensen was shocked by what he saw. For one thing, the children only had a teacher for part of the week, because they had to share with a neighboring village. Their "school" was a flat area of rock. The children sat on the ground in a circle and traced letters and numbers in the dirt with sticks. Even without a teacher, their desire to learn was so strong that they sat quietly, in the cold, with no adult supervision, and worked on their lessons. Mortensen could not believe it. He realized that there was a much better way to honor his sister's memory than reaching the summit of K2. He promised the people of Korphe that he would build them a school.
That was just the beginning. Three Cups of Tea is largely about Mortensen's journey from struggling to build one school in one village to winning the trust of religious and civic leaders in some of the most religiously radical areas of the world. Eventually, Mortensen founded the Central Asia Institute, which to date has built 58 schools and 14 women's vocational training centers in some of the most remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Some of the first educated women to come out of these areas have received their education at schools established by the CAI. Three Cups of Tea is about one ordinary person's journey into an extraordinary life, but it is more than that. It is also about coming together despite barriers of culture and faith and seeing one another as human beings, created in the image of God. That is what it takes to beat swords into plowshares and to walk together into the light of the Lord who came to us so long ago and is coming again. The title of the book comes from the village chief that I mentioned earlier Haji Ali. He said once to Greg Mortensen "In Pakistan and Afghanistan, we drink three cups of tea to do business; the first, you are a stranger, the second you become a friend, and the third, you join our family, and for our family we are prepared to do anything-even die."
That is the kind of outlook that will lead us to the mountaintop. This Advent season, may God cultivate that same spirit of hospitality and openness in each of our hearts, as we welcome the one who came to welcome us all.
Amen.
