Reformation Sunday, October 26, 2014 | 4:00 p.m.

The View from the Mountaintop

John W. Vest
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Deuteronomy 34:1–12

I’ll never forget the day I visited the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee. It has been built into the Lorraine Motel, the place where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. The façade of the old building is striking. The sign is right out of the 1960s, and there are vintage Cadillacs parked out front. A memorial wreath hangs on the balcony railing where King was shot.

Once you enter the building, it begins to feel more like a museum, and I became less aware of that particular location. There is a guided tour through the extensive collection of photographs, artifacts, and reproductions of items and events from the history of the civil rights movement. It is a powerful tour that stirs one’s emotions and challenges one’s mind.

The tour ends at the motel rooms where King and his companions were staying when he was killed. These rooms have been recreated to look exactly as they did on that fateful day. As I approached them and peered through the glass, I must admit that my mind wandered to a comparison with another famous tourist attraction in Memphis: Graceland—a place I had been several times before. I guess the recreated rooms evoked for me the same kind of kitschy nostalgia that I feel when I see the rooms in Elvis’s house.

But all of that came crashing down when I arrived at the window overlooking the balcony where King was shot. I suddenly became much more somber and pensive. I eventually noticed something quite remarkable. While the balcony, along with the rest of the motel, has been renovated, there is a concrete square from the original balcony that has been preserved and set into its original place. On this concrete square is an unmistakable crimson stain. With a chill and a tremble, I knew that I was standing on holy ground.

The writer of Deuteronomy tells us that there has never been another prophet like Moses. We tend to speak of Martin Luther King Jr. as a modern-day prophet, though it has been nearly fifty years since he was killed in Memphis.

The day before his assassination, King delivered what would become his final speech, a speech delivered at an event in support of striking sanitation workers. At the end of it, he recalls an incident nearly a decade prior in which a mentally ill woman stabbed him in the chest with a letter opener and he almost died. As a man who lived amidst a constant stream of death threats, it caused him to reflect on his own mortality. And he concludes his remarks by putting himself into the story of Moses. Listen now to the last words of the last speech Martin Luther King Jr. ever delivered.

Well, I don’t know what will happen now; we’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter to me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life—longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. And so I’m happy tonight; I’m not worried about anything; I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. (Martin Luther King Jr., “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” 3 April 1968)

This speech has rightly been called prophetic. I don’t know how many times he used that imagery in his public speaking, but what a tragic irony that he would say these words just hours before being killed.

Yet prophecy—in the biblical sense—really has very little to do with predicting or foreshadowing the future. Biblical prophecy—and Moses is the prototypical prophet of the Bible—has much more to do with interpreting history and culture and current events through the lens of faith. It has much more to do with critically naming the realities of the world in which we live and offering a vision of the world as it could and should be.

The great Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann has said it best in his study of biblical prophecy and prophetic ministry, what he calls prophetic imagination. “The task of prophetic ministry,” he writes, “is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us” (Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 2nd ed., p. 3).

Prophets are those who can, with a critical eye, name the elements of society and culture that are out of line with or run counter to God’s good intentions for the world. They then go on to articulate an alternative vision of the world and energize God’s people to be a part of what God is doing to bring that vision into reality. Prophetic communities—which should be our goal as the church—live out those movements and do their best to demonstrate to the world the new reality God is causing to emerge around us, what Jesus called the kingdom of God. Prophetic living is when we internalize this way of being and allow ourselves to be transformed by God’s Spirit into the people God created us to be.

But how do we get there? How do we get to the mountaintop from which this kind of view is possible? How do we get to a place from which we can say with integrity that “mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord?”

Walter Brueggemann suggests that imagination is key. Somehow we need to retrieve or discover our capacity to imagine alternatives to the realities that confront us every day.

Edward Chambers, one of the founding fathers of faith-based community organizing and a longtime executive director of the Industrial Areas Foundation, agrees. Community organizers speak of the tension we experience between the world as it is and the world as it should be. Imagination is how we navigate that tension.

Imagination is a gift, a unique faculty like good instinct, but it frequently gets lost in our modern worship of intellect and will. Imagination is no less important than our abilities to think and choose. Imagination lets us glimpse a world that has not yet materialized and move mentally back and forth between what was and what is, and what is and what might be. Although dismissed as mere fantasy since the Enlightenment, which sanctified reason and will, imagination is what allows the tension of living between the two worlds to create newness, first in our mind and body, and then, through our actions, in reality. (Edward T. Chambers, Roots for Radicals: Organizing for Power, Action, and Justice, p. 34)

To me that sounds like the view from the mountaintop.

Where this capacity for imagination comes from, I don’t entirely know, but I am convinced that it is a critical element of our most foundational spiritual journeys.

All I know is what my own experience with imagination has been. Last month I read an essay marking the fortieth anniversary of the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (Robert M. Geraci, “Monstrous Futures: Dungeons & Dragons, Harbinger of the ‘None’ Generation, Turns 40,” Religion Dispatches, 21 September 2014). The author suggested that the fantasy worlds of this game, in which young people could escape reality, became a substitute for traditional religion and has contributed to the rapid rise of the so-called “nones”—people who claim no religious affiliation, many of whom are considered “spiritual but not religious.”

The article caught my attention because I am passionately interested in the growing ranks of the nonreligious and because, as a child I was an avid Dungeons & Dragons player. Of the four cousins in our family that played this game with regularity, all of whom came from typical Southern evangelical stock, one converted to Presbyterianism and became a pastor, one converted to Catholicism, and two did in fact become “nones”—though to be fair, they were not raised in a very religious home to begin with.

I’m not so sure what kind of causal link to draw between this game and our eventual religious attitudes—in the small sample of my family, it seems like a wash—but I will say that immersing myself in fantasy instilled or awakened in me an active imagination that has in fact allowed me to envision alternative worlds. In this respect, the games and movies and books that I found so fascinating growing up were not simply escapism. In fact, I might argue against this essay that these activities prepared me for the kind of spiritual awakening that I would eventually experience.

Of course, it wasn’t until I began to immerse myself in the stories of the Bible and the mysteries of God revealed in Christ that my imagination found a vision worth living for. It was indeed the vision of Moses, the vision of the prophets, the vision of Jesus that really caught my attention and ignited within me a passion to see the world differently, a passion to live differently. God knows I’m a long way from arriving, a long way from the promised land, but I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it in the potential of the world to be the way God created it to be, and I’ve seen it in myself and my potential to be the person God created me to be.

Have you been there? Have you been to the mountaintop? Can you look out into the world and envision a different reality? Can you take an honest look within and see past the layers of false self that obscure your true self, to the image of God within you that is longing to be free?

Have you been there? Can you see it? That’s the view—the view from the mountaintop.

Amen.