Holy Ground | Week 1 (5-31-2026)

Dr. Woods Lisenby preaches on the subject, "The Mountain Top."

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Transcript

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I love hiking. I don't do it as much as I used to. I used to love hiking. I guess I still technically love it. I don't really do it anymore. I hiked a lot more when we lived in Montgomery. You could make a quick trip up to Oak Mountain. There also the Chihaucala State Park where you could, I guess not State Park, but Chihuahua Park, where you could ride your bike, mountain bikes, and do some hiking on some trails. It wasn't that long of a drive even to get to Atlanta, just north of Atlanta, there on the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. I've done most of the Georgia, North Carolina parts of the Appalachian Trail. And I I think I told you my first year here, my brother-in-law Charles and I went on a hike on the AT one time. And uh we decided it'd be more fun to like walk through the water and jump from rock to rock. So we left our shoes at the bottom of the mountain, thinking you know, that would be a good idea. But then they didn't get waterlogged. But that means once we made it to the top, we had to walk back down barefoot on the trail. There's just like, and it was just like there's all this sharp gravel, and we were just miserable the whole time saying I'm never gonna walk barefoot again the rest of my life. Um, and I, you know, I used to hike a lot more in part because I used to be closer to mountainous regions, right? Like Mobile, the Mobile Bay area where we've been living now for nine years, uh, it is not what I would call mountainous. Although I we did move into the Spanish Fort Stacy area just last week and just a walk around there, and actually it's it's pretty, I mean, like with that heat index, it feels like you're over there on Blood Mountain, you know, Springer Mountain area, it gets pretty hilly. But but in addition to living in a flatter area, the real the main reason I haven't been hiking as much the past eight years is because I have three kids. And and it turns out you do a lot less of the things you used to like to do when you have three kids. Like I used to fish. I used to, you know, we used to have, you know, quiet time, actually, times that were where there was some silence. We don't have that anymore. But but we did a couple years ago take before Wyatt was born, we took August and Bradshaw um on a kindergarten kickoff trip. We went to Atlanta and we did a bunch of fun things. We went to the Braves game. Um we went to the zoo and the aquarium. And one day we we drove up to the Delanaga area, which is one of my favorite places, and uh we decided we were gonna go for a hike with the kids. We had never been hiking with our kids. I have not since been hiking with my kids. Because uh uh we went and I thought, well, what was gonna be like an easier? I knew the area pretty well, and so I decided let's go hike Amaclola Falls. Because if I remembered right, it was like it was a more of a paved path up to the waterfalls. And I was partially right. It is a paved path, but it takes a pretty steep incline as you start moving up it. August, like literally, was trying to walk and she she just couldn't get up the hill, and we were carrying three-year-old Bradshaw. And and what I forgot, the paved path goes on this incline and it stops at a set of stairs. Somehow I forgot about the stairs. Somehow I forgot about the 604 stairs to get in the top of this thing. And so I pick up Bradshaw. August holds her mom's hand because she's determined she's gonna climb it. And let's just say we did not make it to the top. We got about halfway and there's a landing there where you can see the waterfall. Halfway, you feel the mist. We took our pictures, it's really cute pictures. And and we went back down, and August had had enough. So I carried her and Brianna carried Bradshaw. We made it back down. Um, and we we won't be doing that again anytime soon, I'll I'll say. But but one of the funny things is out of all the hiking I've done in my life, the miles of hiking, uh, the different trails, the different states. Uh we we we hiked in Alaska, we we we hiked in Greece, I've hiked all over the world. It is some of my uh my favorite, it's one of my favorite things to do. But out of all of it, uh I have a hard time remembering each trail. I have a hard time picturing the vista. Like if you show me a picture, I'll remember, oh yeah, I remember that hike and it did this thing. I the the memories, they're hazy, but the faces are clear. I remember who I was hiking with on just about every hike. I remember being in the youth group in high school and us going to work at Recreation in North Carolina outside Asheville and going on hikes with some of my youth group friends. I remember that hike with my children. I remember hiking up a small mountain in Santorina outside of San Torino, Greece, in that area. And it's not really a mountain, it's just kind of a real hilly area, but I was with Sam and I was with Love and I was with these friends. It's funny. The things that we remember in life are not always how exactly things went, but who we were with when it happened. And I want you to hold on to that image this morning. As we start talking about mountaintops, I want you to hold in your mind an idea of the people that you journey alongside. And I bet a moment ago, when we read the text from Deuteronomy chapter three, you probably weren't thinking, wow, that was really inspiring. You hear that text, and I bet I bet in your mind, yeah, Woods, I totally understand why you picked that one to kick off the series. I mean, just real deep stuff there about Bashan and King Og and a big bed that's not nine cubits is a pretty big bed. But we are starting a new series this morning called Holy Ground. And for the next five weeks, we're gonna look at geographical features in the Bible, which it might sound super Bible nerd, right? Like just push up my glasses here. Um, but the Bible uses geography to tell the story. Sometimes having a better understanding of how the land is set up and what these features are, it brings deeper meaning to what the scripture is trying to tell us. And so uh this morning we're starting by talking about mountaintops. And of all the mountaintops in the Bible, we could have started with Sinai. We could have started with the mountain where the transfiguration happened, but instead, we decided to start uh with King Og of Bashan, his nine-foot bed, and Mount Hermon. Maybe you don't remember hearing about Mount Hermon before. But the reason we're starting here is because Deuteronomy is doing something well with Mount Hermon that we all basically understand that is kind of natural for each of us. Uh, the author is telling us something pretty obvious that we all know about mountains. He's telling us that a mountain is a marker, it's a place on a map. It's a it's a thing you use to navigate by. It's a fixed point where everybody in the region can see it. It's kind of like if you're in Oregon and Portland, Oregon, you can say like it's north or south of Mount Hood. Or if you're in uh St. Helens, or if you're in Washington, you can see St. Helens and say it's uh to the west of St. Helens, right? It you know, Herman wasn't a solitary mountain like those, but it is just as prominent, as noticeable. People know where it is. The Israelites could see it and point to it, and so could the Sidonians and the Amorites, and everybody knew this mountain, but they all called it by a different name. The different people had a different name for it, but they're talking about the same feature. And I want you to notice that we we heard two passages, one from Psalm 133, one from Deuteronomy. Uh, they're talking about the same mountain, but they don't agree about what that mountain is. In Deuteronomy, it's the boundary, it's a waypoint. Moses, he's recounting Israel's victory on the way to the promised land, and he mentions King Og and his big bed, and he talks about the towns, and he talks about the territories. And he says, at the very top of the map, there's Mount Hermon. And so for Deuteronomy, Hermon is a fact. It is a spot on a map. But turn your attention back to Psalm 133. That same mountain becomes something else entirely. Uh, the psalm is one of the songs of ascent. It's these songs that the pilgrims would sing on their way to Jerusalem. There's 14 psalms that would become these uh sung responses that people on their journeys would sing, and this is one of them. And it's three verses, and it says, How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity. The psalmist says that unity is like oil that runs down from Aaron's beard. Unity is like the dew of Hermon falling on the mountains of Zion. For the Lord has ordained his with his blessing life forevermore. In a way, this psalm makes absolutely no sense. If you understand how the geography of the Holy Land is set up, uh Hermon sits at the very top of the country near the Lebanon and Syria border today. But Zion is almost 200 miles south. Dew doesn't blow that far. That's not how it works. And so it's important to hear that the psalmist uh he understands something about this mountain. The psalmist is not writing about weather patterns. He's saying that this mountain is more than just a border. It's actually a fountain. It's a fountain that waters ground that it never actually touches. It's more than just a spot on the map, it's the source of life. What's born up there flows down and holds the people of God together. I kind of like how the Bible has different ways of talking about the same thing. That there's this intertextual conversation to where for Deuteronomy the mountain is one thing, but for the psalmist, it's another thing entirely. I I think a lot of us see mountaintops like Deuteronomy. I think we we think of them as places that we visit. And I mean that both physically and metaphorically. When we use the phrase a mountaintop experience, we almost always mean a destination, a place we have been or hoped to go. We think of it as the peak experiences in life. The mountaintops are the times at camp where uh the band hits the right notes and the preacher says the right thing and your eyes swell and your heart fills, and in that moment you know God is real. Or it's as an adult, you go to a conference and you come home with a notebook full of underlying sentences, of inspired words, of just uh restful times. It's it could also be the season of life where everything seems to be going right, where uh your family is exactly as you want it to be. It's this either short or long window where things are well. We collect mountaintop experiences the way Moses uh collected and talked about conquest. We can point to them, we can name them, we can mark them down as a place we have been, as something we visited once. But then the alarm goes off on a Monday morning and the kids won't get out of bed. The emails are already piling up. That same coworker who said the same thing last week at the same meeting is saying it again at this meeting. By Tuesday, the mountaintop feels like something that happened to somebody else. And when the feeling fades, we start trying to think of ourselves, grade our lives based on how far from the mountain we are. We look at our lives and we wish, how do we get back there? How do I do that again? Uh the mountaintop is so sweet. I just wish we could have stayed there. And so we start looking for the next escape, for the next retreat, the next season of clarity, and we stack up mountaintop experiences and we go jumping from one peak to the other and wonder why none of them sustain us in our daily lives. The Deuteronomy reading of the mountain is one that we know. It's where the mountain is the destination. You arrive, you stand there, you take a picture, and then you start looking for the next mountaintop. You move on from one to the other. But but I want us to sit with this idea that Psalm 133 gives us this morning. And it's helpful if you understand just a little bit more about the geography. If you understand what it's describing, because you see, Mount Herman is on the most northern part of the Israel country. The psalmist isn't saying the map is wrong. He's saying the the map is not the point. The the point of it is what comes from the mountain. What you need to know is that Mount Hermon is it's it's so tall that it holds a lot of precipitation. The snowfall up there uh stays most of the year, but eventually a lot of it does melt and it feeds these springs below the mountain. And those springs become streams, and those streams form together and create the river Jordan. Have you ever heard of the River Jordan? You probably have if you've read the Bible. It's a pretty prominent feature of the Bible because it runs from the northern part of Israel all the way through the promised land. When you look at it, you hear about how John baptized in the River Jordan, about how Joshua and the people crossed the River Jordan. The land of milk and honey is only the land of milk and honey because the Jordan feeds the land with fresh water. In real life, there's a stark difference between the desert, the wilderness that surrounds the Holy Land, and this lush vegetative area that is created because of the fresh water that flows down through the river. Without Hermon, there is no Jordan. Without Jordan, there is no promised land. And so when the psalmist says that the dew of Hermon falls on Zion, he's describing how the holy city of Jerusalem can only exist because that mountain that's 187 miles away. That'd be like the difference between getting in a car here and driving to Birmingham. Zion, Jerusalem, can only exist because of the life that flows down because of that mountain. For the psalmist, the mountain is not just the peak you climb, it's the headwater for everything downstream. And notice what he does, the psalmist, before he even gets to talking about the dew. He gives us this really strange image. He says, Unity is like precious oil poured on the head, running down the beard, running down on Aaron's beard, running down the collar of his robe, which is a weird picture, right? I mean, I don't want anybody pouring oil on my head. And, you know, I don't have a full enough beard to use beard oil. You know, it's kind of it's not patchy per se, but it's not like thick. But even if I did, I wouldn't want that beard oil to run under the collar of my shirt. I have a hard enough time keeping food off my clothes as it is. I don't need to add extra oil to the mixture. Brian would have to try even harder to get all the stains out of my shirt. Uh but as uh look at what this psalmist is trying to say, I find it's helpful to understand the religious context. Aaron is a high priest. An oil running down Aaron's beard is the oil of consecration. It's a specific thing. This is how in the Old Testament uh the people would be consecrated to become priests is to pour the oil on their head and let it drip down. That's why naming Aaron is important because he is a priest. So the oil runs down onto the beard, onto the collar. It saturates everything on its way down and it keeps going. And the psalmist says, this is like the dew from Hermon. It begins at the top, but it doesn't stop there. It keeps running, running down. The mountain is anointed, the promised land is born because of that anointing. And that's what God does. He gives life that keeps going. It doesn't stop, it doesn't stay on the mountain. God doesn't only exist in the escape, in the retreat on the mountain. God comes down with the people. I mean, Psalm 133 is describing what most of the rest of the Bible is describing when it talks about mountains, also, right? Moses goes up on Sinai, gets the Ten Commandments, and then what's he do? He brings them back down. He doesn't stay up there and keep it for himself, he shares it with the people. Whenever Elijah goes up and hears that still small voice on the mountain, what's he do? The voice sends him back down and he finds Elisha. Whenever Jesus goes up on the mountain to pray multiple times in the gospel, what does he do? He comes back down and he does the word that God has called him to do, and he lives his life among the people. Even the Mount of Transfiguration, this incredible experience where there's Moses and Elijah and the voice and the glowing and the wow. Afterwards, God sends Jesus back down. And he goes and does some of the greatest miracles of his ministry. And what's so telling about that transfiguration story? We talked about it a couple weeks ago, but but if you remember, Peter's like, hey, let's just stay here. It's great. Things are really nice. I'm gonna build three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, one for Elijah. We'll just live here. It'll be awesome. Peter was operating from this Deuteronomy way of understanding the mountain. Jesus understood Psalm 133. The goodness of God is not confined to the mountaintop, but it journeys down with us. Which means when we are always looking for the next mountaintop in our lives, sometimes we might fail to see how God is already at work. How God is already there with you. We keep asking, how do I get back up there? But the Bible keeps saying, well, what does it look like for you to come back down the mountain and have the river Jordan nourish the ground that you walk on? I mean, if you've ever uh had a mountaintop experience of God, it doesn't mean you lost God when that feeling faded a little bit. If you came down the mountain, God was with you and God is still with you. Whether the perspective you got uh on the mountaintop is influencing your life, I think is the bigger question, right? Does the peace that you found up there is that showing up and how you treat others? Let me make it even more concrete. The dew coming home with you fueling your life when you're not in those mountaintop seasons? It should look like the patience you found when you were away coming to bear when you're at the dinner table with your family, or with your coworker who is treating you in a way that you don't love. Is that patience that you found there also present in your life here? It it looks like that conviction that you brought home with you from the mission trip. Is that encouraging you to go serve in your local community? Or do you only serve whenever you're off in a way? It looks like that quiet that you found from being in retreat, being the thing that you offer your friend who just needs a listening ear. They don't need your advice. They just want you to sit with them and hear them. When the psalm says that it the dew flows down from Hermon, it's not naming a private blessing. It's not naming something just for you. What's it say? It names the unity, the goodness of living together. The dew of Hermon is like unity. It comes down in the form of community. It creates a place to belong. You find the blessings from the mountain when you experience life with other people. When you experience the joy of being together. It's like how you remembered who you hiked with more than you remember the views of the vista. I mean, think about the mountaintop experiences in your life, the ones that you really remember. They're almost always stories about being with other people. When the mountaintop moments come back to us in memories, the view might be hazy, but the faces are clear. That is God's blessing for the mountaintop. That is the dew. That is what the mountain is for, which is why the church is like the dew of Mount Herman. Life can be like a desert. Dry, barren, hard. Anytime we try and do that work and live in that world by ourselves, it can be exhausting and unyielding. But the whole architecture of the Christian life is that we nourish one another, give each other life by being together, by going to groups, by being in worship, by serving one another. The whole point of Psalm 133 is that the dew lands on the community and it creates a place for all of us to dwell, a life that wouldn't be possible without it. That's what I hope for us here in this church. That's what I hope for Spanish Lord United Methodist Church, that we are building together a place where the things that you receive on the mountaintop come down and nourish the lives of those around you. I hope that the people you sit beside and worship are the ones that will help you when you go through the hard things in life. I hope when the feeling fades and the doubt creeps back in that in this room you will find it filled with friends who will help you remember that God is still with you even when things aren't perfect. I pray that we can stop chasing the next peak long enough to look and see if God is still here with us now. Because the truth is, God is. God is uh faithful even when we're not on those mountaintops. And God's grace continues to be with us even when we don't know it's there. Uh, provenia grace works on you even after you've been justified, even after you've been saved. God's grace is still there, even when you don't know it, you can't you're not sure. God is still with us, nourishing the very ground that we walk on by giving us the blessing of this community. If God has met you on the mountaintop, don't build a shelter there. Don't seek constant escape. Come down. Bring with you what you received, share it with others, and if you are nowhere near. Mountaintop right now, if everything in your life feels like that dry corridor between Beersheba and Herman, then let me tell you this. Even in those valleys, you are not alone. There's a river nourishing the very ground that you walk on. This congregation, it's on holy ground. And it's because we have experienced the goodness of life with Jesus Christ. And we want to share that with you and the whole world because we know God is here and God will always be here. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. We pray with me.