Going up on the mountain

 This week's verses are Exodus 24:12-18:

The Lord said to Moses, “Come up to me on the mountain and remain there, and I will give you the stone tablets with the law and the commandments that I have written, so that you may teach them.” So Moses set out with Joshua his attendant, and Moses went up the mountain of God. He told the elders, “Wait for us in this place until we return to you. Here are Aaron and Hur with you. Whoever has any matters of dispute can approach them.”

Moses went up the mountain, and the cloud covered the mountain. The glory of the Lord resided on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it for six days. On the seventh day he called to Moses from within the cloud. Now the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in plain view of the people. Moses went into the cloud when he went up the mountain, and Moses was on the mountain forty days and forty nights.

 I have been watching an interesting online lecture series on geography and the Bible lately, and one of the things they mentioned was that in a mountainous place like Israel, the low places tend to be pretty crowded, but the high places tend to be less and less occupied as you go up. It's therefore no wonder that God often calls us to the high places.

I live in a place that has some of the highest mountains in the world. I've done my share of mountain hiking, and I can say that it's not just in Israel that the empty mountaintops principle holds true. Any high place is going to be less crowded than an similarly accessible low place, especially if the means of access is your feet and/or hands. I've even been in wide open spaces, as big as the valleys I grew up in, where I could go hours without seeing another hiker because of how high it was.

 In these verses, God is about to meet with Moses in a big way. He's going to lay out plans for his community of believers on Earth that will be followed for hundreds or thousands of years, and he's chosen Moses to listen to what he has to say. But he doesn't call Moses to a nice conference center with a bunch of good speakers, a well-practiced band that sings the latest Christian hits, and soft comfy beds. He doesn't call him to four years of seminary. Instead he says "Come up to me on the mountain and remain there."

For awhile, Christian monks would seek out high places where they could be alone with God. Some even built monasteries there. There are several high mountain passes that have medieval monasteries, even though they were so high up that it would have been impossible for them to grow their own food. Think about that for a bit. Who now, as Christians, when building something to serve others and become better believers, says "let's put it as far out of the way as possible and make it really inconvenient to get there?" Nobody! They want to make it easy to get to, close to airports, highways, etc.

I visited one such isolated monastery in the St Bernard pass, which separates Italy and Switzerland. It's the place the St Bernard breed of dogs came from, because in their months of snowed-in isolation, the monks would go out in search of people who had gotten lost in the blizzards up there and needed a robust animal that wouldn't itself die of frostbite or hypothermia in the extreme conditions. When it was built, it was only accessible a few months out of the year.

Imagine being one of those monks. All of your shopping has to take place during the warm months. The only path to your monastery is a steep old Roman road that cuts through barren valleys and along rockslidey cliffs. And for half of the year, your job is to go out and look for lost travelers in miserable weather, where you don't always get a chance to be the one to save their life.

Instead, just as often, you may have to spend months nursing them back to health at your own expense, or worse, you may find them already dead when you find them and have to deal with all of what that entails. And the poor person's relatives might not ever show up to claim their body or pay you for your troubles. Who chooses that life?

And yet God calls us to come up to him on the mountain. Why? Doesn't he know that it's cold and dangerous and lonely! There's no internet! Nothing is open! It's exhausting to get there! And yet, in all of the places in the world, that's where he called Moses. Why not in his nice comfortable tent? Why not in the tabernacle? Why the mountain?

On the mountain, some random guy isn't going to drop by and ask you if you can share your lunch with him or give him directions. Your wife isn't going to ask you to help out with making dinner. You're not going to be guilted into going to work early and then be goaded into working late. Your friends aren't going out for drinks and inviting you to join because they saw your light on. The mountain is a sacred place, because it's just you and God. The mountain is quiet.

You can see that Jesus and his disciples would go up on the mountains or hills too. It likely wasn't just to enjoy some cooler temperatures or a nice view. Jesus often goes out to the barren wilderness to be alone in prayer too. Prophets like Elijah also end up going onto the mountain from time to time. Yeah it's a pain to get there, but where else are you going to get that freedom to focus?

Moses doesn't just isolate himself in location by going up the mountain. He also isolates himself in time. He arranges for the elders to stay down and take care of running his household and job duties while he is away. He's not checking his phone every five minutes (even if he had one) or just running off without a plan. He makes sure he has the time he needs and that that time belongs to nobody but him and God.

In Moses' case, it was quite a bit of time. He waited around for six days before God started speaking to him, and he was up there for forty days and forty nights in total. None of my Christian friends have ever had a forty day devotional marathon like that, not even the ones that pride themselves in being kind of spiritual endurance athletes. But the delivery of the framework of the first nation of Israel is a bit more extreme than our usual devotional time. And would he have been ready to receive it if he was watching the clock or answering emails while it was being delivered?

But do we ever go up on the mountain to meet God ourselves? Do we ever put other people in charge of our stuff so that we can focus on him? Or are we too important? Too busy? Too lazy, too weak, too old, etc? What keeps us from going?

And what if there's no mountain? Jesus also tells us elsewhere to pray in our closets rather than in public. What's going to distract you in a closet? Probably about as much as would distract you on a mountain, if your closet is clean. But in our connected world, maybe a close simulation of a mountain is to turn your phone off for an hour and sit in a quiet corner of a park. Maybe there's a place in your basement or your attic or a spare room nobody uses. Maybe your local monastery has a spare room. Maybe there's a hotel with a low rate and room service.

The key is recognizing what you need in order to be free to focus on God. What distracts you or ties you down? Friends? TV? The Internet? Social Media? Work obligations? Domestic obligations? On the mountain, there's none of that. How you create a space where there is none of that for you is probably something you and God will have to work out together.

So your task this week is to find your mountain. God's mountain. Where can just the two of you meet? Where can you go to escape everything that is not God? Find that place and make sure you know how to get there when you are called to go up on the mountain.