Up until the age of seven, my dad was a minister. We lived in Chillicothe, Illinois, just outside the bustling metropolis of Peoria. Lot of farmland and Caterpillar heavy equipment. Nice small-town life, lazy walks with my mom to BB’s diner for lunch on a spring day, watching my dad play softball in the humid evenings at Shore Acres Park.

It was a great life.

We lived in the parsonage, which, as I’ve mentioned before, sat atop the church’s sanctuary in our basement. Which was handy for my dad and, I suspect, a little too “handy” for my mom at times. Difficult to get a good work/life balance when you live over the top of headquarters. I liked it, though. It was home.

The parsonage/church was on a 3-acre plot, with a half-acre garden in the back that my dad used to supplement his salary, growing fruits and vegetables that my mom cooked, canned, and froze. On the west side of the building sat a gravel parking lot, bordered by old railroad ties, which led to steps going down to the church entrance. My brother Daren and I spent most of our days outside roaming around those 3 acres, chasing bumblebees the size of small dogs through the clover, playing trucks in the sandbox that some of the men at the church built for us, or running feverishly to keep the baseball out the garden after errant throws. There was Vacation Bible School, sword drills, baptisms in a rented horse trough, and a big tent revival amongst that same clover on the other side of the parking lot. I loved being a preacher’s kid.

When I describe it, it sounds idyllic, I know. And by and large, it was. I mean, I got bee stings and Chickenpox, but those seemed like minor tradeoffs for a childhood that felt so protected and secure from the larger world. It was a world I was somehow aware existed, but from which I felt protected.

Looking back, safety and security were crucial during the tumultuous 1960s. The world was undergoing a significant shift, viewed as necessary and thrilling by the Baby Boomer generation before mine, but it likely felt vaguely unsettling and uncertain to everyone else old enough to have a even clue about what was happening.

Think about it: a lot happened in the first few years of my life. The height of the Civil Rights movement, followed by the assassination deaths of two of its most prominent leaders, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, and one of Civil Rights emerging supporters, Bobby Kennedy. Vietnam was at its bloodiest, prompting many to question their casual trust in a government that knew what it was doing. Riots in cities across the country and riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago locked the nation in dread of what might be coming next—and who it was coming for.

The psychedelic generation celebrated new heights of consciousness and new lows in physical hygiene. During those turbulent years, we landed a man on the moon and were introduced to Charles Manson and the horrifying prospect of crazed hippies wandering about in the dark of night, breaking in on the unsuspecting and butchering them in their sleep.

Even as young as I was, I felt it somehow—a vague sense that politically and culturally, things were very much up in the air. Who knew what was going to happen?

Which made my quiet childhood that much more precious. I had the feeling that I lived in a safe place, watched over by competent people. We had a church in our basement for crying out loud. I couldn’t have felt much safer if Batman were our next-door neighbor and Sheriff Matt Dillon roamed the perimeter.

But then, one day, my mom and dad sat my brother and me down and told us we were going to move, and my dad was going to take a job managing a Zondervan Family Bookstore in the newly built Scottsdale Mall in South Bend, Indiana.

So, to sum up, We had to leave the safe confines of our home/church in bucolic Chillicothe. My dad decided to quit being a minister. This meant I would have to adapt to a new life in a different state, far away from the secure place I’d relied on to protect me from the uncertainty of the future.

I suspect Peter, James, and John in our Gospel this morning would have understood my apprehension. But before I get into that, let me step back and set the stage a bit. Our text is the story of the Transfiguration, that episode in Jesus’ ministry when he and a handful of his disciples trudge up a high mountain so that Jesus can pray. In the midst of it all, Jesus’ clothes start glowing a blazing white, and all of a sudden, long-dead Jewish prophets Moses and Elijah show up and start having a committee meeting right where they’d planned to build the campfire.

The disciples “were terrified,” Mark tells us. Because, of course, they were. Not every day this side of Haight-Ashbury you see something as bizarre as that.

But then, Mark says, “A cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud, there came a voice, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!’”

Now, I don’t know about you, but if I’m Peter, James, and John, I’ve got that whole Shaggy and Scooby-Doo thing going on, where they see the Snow Beast and their legs start cartwheeling in a circle, as they scan their surroundings looking for the nearest exit.

But somehow, in the midst of the terror, Peter says something that appears entirely out of character for the harrowing scene they find themselves in: “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”

Wait, what?

Why is it “good for us to be here?” The whole scene looks like it’s ripped from a mystic’s fever dream.

To know why Peter might have been motivated to set up tents at the “Pink Floyd night at the Lazerium™,” we need to know what happened before and after Jesus and the three amigos took their mountain hike.