The big story about Moses was that after whatever happened up there on the mountain between him and God, he never looked the same again. The skin of his face glowed like a nightlight. God is so holy, and the glory of God is so powerful, so overwhelming, that God told Moses that nobody could see the face of God and live. So God showed Moses the almighty backside and still Moses' face was permaglow. And it freaked people out.
Being thoughtful like that, Moses decided it was good to just cover the offensive thing when he was out in public and only to let them see the proof of his encounters with God when he was actually delivering messages right from God. So Moses wore a veil.
This both lent a little gravitas to the messages delivered with special effect veil removal, and also made potlucks a little easier, without his big mug beaming across the table at you while you were trying to eat your hot dish in peace.
Imagine if he just let his light shine! Mercy! There would be no forgetting, ever, that the universe-creating, law-giving, covenant-making, ancestor-leading, Red Sea-parting, Egyptian-army sinking, manna-giving God was meddling in your affairs.
This was back when things could holy, a conduit of the divine: the Ark of the Covenant; the Holy of Holies. This mentality went on for quite a while – holy places, the bones of dead saints, relics. In the Middle Ages the reason the priest would put the Eucharist host right on your tongue, and then check to make sure you swallowed it, was so that you didn’t smuggle it home and feed it to your sick cow to cure its illness.
We modern people don’t see it that way anymore; we’re too rational to believe in holy things. We have a hard time believing in transcendence at all. We no longer take for granted the active, meddling presence of God in all of life. We have to get into the right mindset when we share the bread and the cup to trust that God is with us in this act, and this moment is holy, because it is. And then we take the bread into the Gathering Room after the service and eat it with peanut butter because, after all, it’s bread.
But with that shining light face of his there was no getting around that Moses had been made holy. He was set apart, a bridge between humanity and God. Even when he was sleeping, or using the toilet, or doing his taxes, he was different, holy. Holy people are so extra! To navigate being near regular humans it’s just easier and kinder for everyone if he wears a veil.
A veil you can get used to – that’s a human thing. You might even, from time to time, forget why he had it on and just act almost normal around him (just don’t swear in front of Moses!).
Perhaps when we think of what it means to live a good life,* we think it means a holy life, in this way. It's to be somehow different, better, other than human, set apart, not normal. And probably we'd answer, in this veiled version of holy, that it's a life that doesn't do bad things but does good things instead, a life that strives to be good and admirable, and please God, and so also maybe hides the things in us that feel bad, or weak, or less than stellar.
Perhaps we think this is what God wants from us. To project faith as belief without doubt, instead of receive faith as the dependable presence that of the One who will never let us go. And to treat prayer as a skill we can master and excel at, rather than it being really present ourselves in the real presence of God. And to see being a disciple as something to strive for, rather than a state of being, characterized by attention and expectation that God will act. In a veiled version of holiness, both prayer and faith are then also things we can use to measure and compare ourselves, ranking and dividing ourselves from each other. "He's a good pray-er; I could never pray like that." "She's such a faithful person; I could never be so selfless and devout."
And so we’re not so different than the people of God have ever been, thinking, let’s just keep it how it was when God gave a list of helpful guidelines and the only one who had to bear the shock of meeting the transcendent was one dude, and he would veil up.
In fact, let’s all veil up! – just to be safe. For the Corinthians, it was asking the Gentiles to become Jews, for us, we’ll set out purity tests for wokeness, or right theology, or agreeable politics, and silo everyone off into like-minded groups of good or bad, right or wrong, and guard our true selves from others, and stick with our own, who are obviously the right ones, and we’ll call that living a good life.
And with all of us veiled up then nobody has to deal with the unexpected shock of glory coming through some face we don’t recognize or approve of, or God, forbid, through our own faces at one another. An uncontrollable kind of life that would be – just maybe coming across glory at any turn! Geesh! It might make us have to talk about it and share in it, and change what we believe about each other or God, or be changed by each other and God! Frankly, we’d rather just point helpfully to the list of rules and the guy in charge and keep ourselves safely to ourselves.
It is easier, maybe, to live with a barrier between us, than to have to be confronted all the time with the honest truth of being chosen by God, in a relationship with the Divine and smudged with inescapable glory. In any case, it made things easier for the people, but it made it easier for Moses too, maybe, if they didn’t have to be reminded all the time that God is near.
But God is near. All the time. Joy is right here, just under the surface of life, for each of us to taste or touch at any moment. (Perhaps remembering that is what it is to live a good life).
My friend Peter who has spent many years in Africa, shared a story about a wedding he attended in Morongo, Tanzania. The bride was wearing a veil- one of the many western imports creeping into life there and into the marriage ceremony.
Now, in that culture, Peter explained, the bride is not to look happy on her wedding day. She is leaving her family, and should be appropriately melancholy. She is meant to have despondent demeanor, downcast eyes, look generally bummed out enough to show respect to her family who raised her and whom she is now leaving; and all the formal wedding photos reveal a properly sad bride.
But Peter took a picture of the veiled bride on her way down the aisle, and, being that this was some years ago, did what we all did back then and waited some time before having the film developed. When he saw the photo, he discovered that the flash captured through the veil an enormous, joyous grin on the bride’s face as she made her way to her wedding alter.
He said he loves that photo, and that in some beautiful way, the veil over her face allowed her to have a foot in both worlds- to respect and give to her family and people what they needed to see (and needed to not see), but to also be glowing with joy in privacy behind that veil.
Veils, by design, don’t so much keep us from seeing out, they most often keep others from seeing us. When the veil is removed, people have to see you. There’s no hiding to keep yourself, or others, more comfortable. You have to be seen. For who you are. For the glory of God that shines out of your ordinary life.
And what the heck is glory anyway? Isn’t it the halo around the saint’s head in the paintings? The glory of the Lord shown around those angels when they sang to the shepherds in the fields keeping watch over their flock by night, and they were sore afraid!
Like a residue of mystery, power, transcendence, glory is something connected to God, something other than ordinary, something worthy of awe, something clinging on or shining forth or drawing us near its holiness.
By its very nature glory is NOT inconspicuous or unnoticeable, it’s not a blend-in kind of thing, and it doesn’t spend much time worrying about boat-rocking or institution-building or rule-respecting or people-pleasing, because it comes from quite beyond all of that, some kind of intense nearness to or reflection of the Divine, come what may.
Paul says that all of us, with unveiled faces, see the glory of God as though reflected in a mirror. Remember last time he talked about a mirror? He was talking about faith, hope and love, those things that come to us from the complete into the partial. “Now we see in a mirror dimly, then we will see face to face,” he said (1 Cor. 13:12-13). In those days mirrors were just polished metal; they were vague, a rough estimate, a glimpse of the truth.
Imagine seeing the glory of God, however vaguely, in your own face, when you gaze into a mirror? Imagine seeing the glory of God, when you are face to face with one another?
Who is this God and what is God up to?* God is making us holy – conduits of the Divine. The Spirit of God is transforming us. We are being transformed. From one glory to the next. From the glory of an immortal, invisible God only wise, in light inaccessible hid from our eyes, to the glory of God-with-us right there in the very opposite of glory – muck, filth, ordinariness, shame, boredom and the mundane.
Is there glory in a dozen dirty diapers in a day that never gets out of the pajama pants with a shower nowhere on the horizon?
Is there glory in a daily drudge commute and a cubicle with little satisfaction and no chance for advancement?
What about our recycling and gardening, voting and volunteering, listening, trying to forgive, letting out our tears and anger, injuries and healing, celebrating the birthdays and going to the funerals, do these things have anything to do with glory?
Is there glory when our bodies begin to fail us? Or when our minds start to go, and we can’t always tell what’s real, or remember the things and people that we used to know so well?
Does glory say anything to the questions, Does my life even matter? Am I even important?
Or to the crises and losses that knock us on our backs and makes us think we’ve got nothing to get up for?
Yes. The God of glory came right into those places, the real places, the veil-less, see-it-for-what-it-is-places. Right there, in the least likely of places, and shining off the least likely of faces, is the glory of God. The Spirit of the Living God transforms us and makes our lives holy, like it transformed a state torture and death instrument on a dump outside the city walls into the symbol of our salvation and freedom. And whether we’re caught up in pursuing purity, pleasure or protection, this story upends our definition of living a good life.
In Christ, Paul says, the veil is removed. The curtain in the Holy of holies tore in two from top to bottom when Jesus breathed his last. God has broken through, and the transcendent has invaded the ordinary; our lives are part of that glory. The Spirit of the Lord sets us free! Paul says this a million ways and not always nicely, You are free! Stop acting like you’re not! Go live the free that you are!
In Christ, your self-protection is stripped away. Your comfort in answers and control over who’s in and who’s out, who’s right and who’s wrong, and how much you personally have to invest or reveal – it’s all been removed – you have been set free for the terrifying task of living as free people, free for loving God and one another, come what may.
We are being transformed to live a holy life. It’s a real and awake life, a life drawn into the helplessness of God, as Rowan Williams says, who cannot not forgive. A vulnerable, honest, attentive, expectant kind of life, a life claimed by love, for love. Look in the mirror and see it. Look at each other and see it. In all our unglorious mess, the glory of God shines forth.
But not if we hide. Not if we cover our true selves and our inspiring, vulnerable places where God has met us, because we’re sure it would make others uncomfortable to be around such things. Not if we drape over our own struggling humanity, our failures and doubts, and weaknesses. And not if we hang a curtain between ourselves and others whom we don’t understand, because we’ve decided God’s glory can’t possibly be present there.
I’m not perfect, and I’m not always an easy person to love. And neither are most of you. If this were our own glory we were working at revealing, we’d be in trouble. If the job in front of us was to make ourselves holy, we’d be doomed. But it’s not about what we’ve earned or done, or how shiny we try to make our lives. This is God’s glory, shining off our faces, right into the faces of others. Shining from the weakness and honesty of our lives right into the lives of others. And it’s inconvenient and makes us uncomfortable sometimes. And we’d like to hide so as not to offend.
But instead, since we have such hope, let’s act with great boldness, Paul says, a few verses earlier. Let’s live bravely. Let’s not cover up that we are people being transformed by the Spirit of God. The light who shines in the darkness shines in the darkness of this world and the darkness of your life.
Let it shine.
Amen.
We are in a year of questions at LNPC - lots of question. But the two (or four, depending on how you count) main questions guiding our whole year are: Who is God and what is God up to? And, What is a good life, and how do we live it?
This is sermon 4 in a series that is following along Rowan Williams' book, Being Disciples. Here are its precursors: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3.
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