From the Mountain to the Moment

I don’t know about you, but life feels a bit more extreme these days. Not just busy - but heightened, intensified.

We notice it in work. Since COVID, many of us now move from one back-to-back online meeting straight into the next, fewer moments to just casually wander between commitments, fewer conversations by the kettle or water cooler, and so fewer pauses that weren’t planned ahead.

We notice it in our personal life too. So much of what we do has become digital and transactional. By default, we don’t wander down to a local office or shop - we register, log on, and submit our requests, making sure we’ve done the right thing in enough time so we don’t get into trouble. As of a week or two ago, that now includes crossing the Humber Bridge. We can’t just rock up to the toll booth now, exchange a chirpy “good morning”, or another brief human interaction. Just pure efficiency.

We notice it in how information reaches us. A 24-hour news cycle, with social media updates constantly feeding us deliberately challenging stories - with very little space to absorb them.

Everything feels compressed. Everything feels heightened. And it’s exhausting.

So it’s tempting to think: this must be new - it’s just the spirit of the age. This must be unprecedented.

Then we hear today’s Gospel from, of course, nearly two thousand years ago.

And the reading begins just after the most extreme, heightened moment of all - the Transfiguration. Blinding light. Glory revealed. God seen crystal clearly. And almost immediately… they come down the mountain. Into confusion. Into failure. Into a father pleading for his ill child. Into disciples who suddenly cannot do what they thought they could.

It’s a stark contrast.

And Jesus says something puzzling - and dangerous if it’s misheard: “You have so little faith.”

That line of Scripture has caused harm when it’s been misunderstood. It’s been used to blame. It’s been used to justify. It’s been used to claim certainty where there should be humility. But Jesus isn’t praising powerful faith. He isn’t endorsing confidence. He isn’t giving permission for us to control events or rename our will as God’s.

Instead - rather confusingly - he points to a mustard seed. Very small. Unimpressive. But alive. A seed that doesn’t manage God, but makes space for God. A seed that is ready to receive.

And this is exactly what our Old Testament reading builds upon, to help us to see.

The book of Ecclesiasticus, written by a chap called Sirach a couple of hundred years before Jesus, looks back over Israel’s great figures - Moses, David, Elijah - remembering them after the danger has long passed. Elijah is remembered as fire, and force, and certainty. Faith recalled as power that looks unmistakable. Spectacular. And obvious.

But then, turning back to our Gospel reading, Jesus says something quietly devastating to the disciples: “Elijah came - and you missed him.”

Because when we expect God to arrive as spectacle, we often fail to recognise God when God comes quietly.

I’ve seen this temptation at every level. On a local level, I’ve heard someone say to another person in the Minster, “You’re standing in the way of God’s work,” spoken with absolute certainty. And we’ve seen, on the world stage (perhaps across the Atlantic recently), just how easily God’s name can be used to bless power rather than to question it.

That isn’t mustard-seed faith.

Mustard-seed faith doesn’t shout, “God is on my side.” It whispers, “I might still be learning how to trust.”

So, as we stand here, on the Sunday before Lent, perhaps the invitation is not to intensify our faith, but to steady it. Even in a world that keeps asking us to move faster.

To ask ourselves: where am I right now? Are you on the mountain, flying high? In the depths of the valley? Or somewhere in between?

And what would it mean, as we enter Lent, in a world that feels loud, efficient, and polarised, to become small enough again to receive God - not as power, but as presence.

Amen.