The View from the Cursillo Mountain Top

De Colores!

What a privilege to be invited to share in this Cursillo weekend with you. For me its been a sacred time that began with my prayers for you all week. And I’ve also been thinking a lot about Moses on Mount Nebo looking out over the promised land, and also about Jesus summarizing the law and the prophets in his great commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” And “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Today’s lessons from Deuteronomy and Matthew have been on my mind all week because reading through the Sunday lessons is one of my favorites disciplines for both prayer and study. And as I learned when I made my own cursillo, prayer, study and action are the three-legged stool of a deeper relationship with Jesus Christ.

As I mentioned when I was introduced, I have been profoundly shaped by Jesuit spirituality, so one of my go-to ways of prayerfully studying scripture is to enter into it as if it were a movie I myself were an actor in. I highly commend this practice to you. It’s a practice as easy as it is transformative. Just give thanks for the scripture—thanksgiving is always a great way to begin prayer—and ask for the Spirit’s guidance as you imagine your way into the story.

So this week I found myself right alongside Moses as he surveyed the abundant land that God had promised to his weary band of refugees. Can you imagine the joy of that moment? All this risk-taking, all this flight, all this wandering, all this conflict mediation between God and a stiff-necked people, as the scripture calls them: all forty years of exhaustion was for a purpose. The whole people would have a chance to thrive in this new place.

Was Moses disappointed that he himself would not have a chance to cross over into the promised land? I tend to think not: he had long ago surrendered his ego to God’s will (the text even says that he died at God’s command) and his personal desires in favor of the wellbeing of God’s people. And he actually made it to the mountaintop! Its just so glorious to be there in the place where the truth of all God’s promises become visible; it hardly matters that perspective may not last forever.

But I don’t have to tell that to new cursillistas who have experienced the love of God and of Christian sisters and brothers all weekend. You’ve seen the view from the mountaintop. Which is a great gift to receive, and an even greater gift to be able to share. All of your sponsors and team members know what I mean. If we think of the mountaintop as the literal or figurative place where the enormity of God’s grace is revealed, we recognize it because it not only feeds our souls in the deepest way, but also moves us to offer this gift to others.

I have no doubt that’s the way Moses experienced it, as did our own Martin Luther King when he referenced the same passage from Deuteronomy as a nationwide mandate for black and white people to live together in new ways. From the holy mountaintop of his heart, God showed Martin Luther King new ways of being community, and then he faithfully shared the vision. You remember his speech in Memphis given the day before he was assassinated—

“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.”

“I just want to do God’s will.” Isn’t that a beautiful statement of Christian maturity for all of us to aspire to? Ponder for a moment what that might mean for you right now. As you end your cursillo and enter into the fourth day—the rest of your life—stay close to that prayer, it will take you to where you need to be.

And what might have been God’s will for Martin Luther King? There’s a whole Bible full of law and its interpretation between Moses and Martin Luther King, or between Moses and us, but our great national prophet of racial reconciliation read the same Gospels we do. So I’m willing to bet that he would say that God’s will is that we love God and love our neighbor. Because on these hang all the law and the prophets. It really is that simple.

And its also really that complicated, because when we descend from the mountaintop and find ourselves in the trenches of daily life, the neighbor we’re called to love may look or act quite unlike ourselves. May annoy us, may vote differently from us, may root for the other team, or do things our culture considers unacceptable. A neighbor showed me that kind of love this weekend: our own Father Kirk approached me to ask for my blessing. He stepped outside of the norms of his culture to affirm the priesthood of an Episcopal woman.

I was surprised, but I don’t know why I should have been. Cursillo is the place where we learn to live like people of the Promised Land, because we’ve seen it. We’ve seen walls break down, we’ve seen grace break through, we’ve made new friends across ages and class and culture and gender. So as you enter into your fourth day, remember what you’ve seen. Let the mountaintop vision inspire you to love in the courageous way Jesus calls you to. And be not afraid, because your God goes before you.