It was only a couple of months ago that we were celebrating Advent and Christmas. That season found our sanctuary decked out in her finest greenery, and we gathered to worship with an air of pageantry, festivity and wonder. If you remember Christmas eve, there was poetry and story and candles and music. A wonderful and exciting time of year by most anyone’s standards.

But here at the beginning of March life finds us in a more ordinary mood. The greens and decorations are long since removed. The candles are packed away for another year. The festivity is sometimes hinted at, but only in vastly more subtle ways, and only occasionally. And the wonder has, for most of us, been set aside with the rest of the holiday stuff.

In terms of the Church calendar we are at the end of the season following Epiphany. An epiphany is an experience when the glory of God’s mystery shines into the everydayness of life. This is traditionally the season when we spend time examining and contemplating the ways in which we find God revealed in and through the life of Jesus -- those times when it becomes abundantly and obviously clear that he was indeed the Messiah. And, yet, here in the midst of our sometimes grey, sometimes chilly northwest winter, when festivity and wonder seems ages away, it becomes difficult to give much thought to such matters.

It is a strange paradox in which we find ourselves. The times in which we live are anything but ordinary. You have but to read the newspaper, or listen to the news, or merely walk around town with yours eyes and ears open to realize that these are most extraordinary times. So much is going on around us that we scarcely know where to look or how to begin taking it all in, to say nothing of figuring out how to understand it and respond to it. There are those who describe these times as the end times, the final days. I do not choose to think of them in those terms, but in many ways it is easy to understand why some do. There are others who think of this time in terms of a New Age. The times they are a changing. Again it is easy to see why folks would take such a position.

But, even as we live out our lives in such extraordinary times, we do so one day at a time, and each of those days can seem very ordinary indeed. They are filled with the same, old routine that days are always filled with. We wake up in the morning and drag ourselves out of bed (sometimes it’s the other way around). We take care of all the various pieces of business with which we are faced -- taking kids to school. Picking them up. Making appointments with the dentist. Getting the car fixed. Doing the weekly shopping or taking care of the laundry. The list goes on and on, and you can fill in all of the blanks from your own list. And, then, we find our way back to bed, so that we can begin again tomorrow.

So in the midst of such routine, the wonder of the Christ, appearing on a mountaintop in all of his shining, divine, spectacular glory can be difficult for us to identify with. How often I have thought, “Faith would be so easy, if only I could have seen something like the transfiguration. If only I could have actually witnessed Jesus in the flesh.” Except that such thoughts miss the point. First of all, such experiences are still possible. It wasn’t Jesus’ physical presence with them that allowed Peter, James and John to witness the transfiguration. It was because the extraordinary presence of God broke through the surface of their lives. And that still happens, even today. Secondly, such thinking leaves us with the impression that such “mountaintop experiences” are somehow the model for what all of life should look like. It is true that Jesus had moments of spectacular glory. But it is also true that such did not make up the majority of his days. Jesus spent most of his time living in the midst of ordinary folks, going about their ordinary days.

If we look closely, we will see that even in the dazzling light of such events as the transfiguration we find a Jesus who seems intent on being more down-to-earth. In the midst of this spectacular divine display, with Moses and Elijah appearing before them, the disciples are understandably awe-struck. They want to somehow hold on to the moment. Peter even offers to set up temporary lodging -- anything so that the experience will last. But Jesus calls them back to the routine of their lives. He calls them to come back down the mountain to the level places of the ordinary. That is where life takes place. That is where we live. It is, I suspect, no accident that the liturgical designation for this season following Epiphany is Ordinary time. We have witnessed the extraordinary, and are now called to discover how such experiences will transform our ordinary living.

Last summer, I had the privilege of spending two months on sabbatical. There were several mountaintop experiences during that time -- playing with dolphins, watching the sunset over the Arizona desert, walking along the rim of the Grand Canyon. There was a strong sense of God’s presence in those moments. You may have noticed, however, that I did not stay on sabbatical. For one thing, it was not an option. But, I would not have wanted it to be an option. Times on the mountaintop are times to renew the spirit and gain a new sense of direction for the journey, but the journey does not happen on the mountain.

And so, while these cold, plain, ordinary days in which we live hardly seem the time in which to contemplate the great mystery of God’s incarnation, perhaps they are the very best of times. It is in days such as these that we do most of our living, just as it was in days such as these that Jesus did most of his living. Many of the things which Jesus taught can best be heard on days such as this. In the midst of a mountaintop experience we can be tempted to think that such things as the beatitudes, or his command that our righteousness exceed that of the Pharisees can be accomplished if only we just try a little harder. But on ordinary days such as these, we stand a chance of recognizing the foolishness of such thinking. We can begin to understand that such things are not commands at all, but promises for our ordinary days.

At Christmas time we celebrate the coming of Emmanuel, God with us. But we sometimes forget that the child grows up to be a man, who is still Emmanuel. And the man is crucified and resurrected as the Christ, who is still Emmanuel. And Emmanuel is God with us, in this and every day, ordinary as well as extraordinary. One implication of incarnation is that we are called to declare ourselves in league with the one who, in his birth, in his baptism, in his living and in his dying, has declared himself to be in league with us. And that is good news both for ordinary days and extraordinary times, because it means that we need not become bored with the one or overwhelmed with the other. In the midst of both there is something greater at work. In the aftermath of experiences such as the transfiguration, we begin to recognize that the ordinary is no longer simply what it appears to be. God’s extraordinary glory is waiting for us just beneath the surface of this and every moment. We have but to open our eyes and our lives to the ever-present reality of the Christ.