Both Now and Forever

2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1

My daughter and I went camping last weekend.  It was beautiful and at night it was cold. I had not slept in a tent in a long time.  It kept out the wind, and the spiders that crawled over the outside of it but could not get in. It kept out the moisture and the dew. It did a little bit to block the cold, but not much. It did not keep out sound. I could hear the train across the lake when it passed by, and the slow crunch of the Park Ranger’s truck tires as she rolled by in the darkness every hour to check that all was well.  All through the night giant splashes erupted in the lake next to us that jolted me awake, and I had a front row seat for the cacophony of morning birds that started their music at 4 am.  And while the tent kept me from seeing the sunrise, it did not keep out the light. So I was up stumbling into the chilly morning fog not long after those birds.  A tent is not a home. It’s a temporary place to lie our head, not meant to keep us from the grace and beauty around us, or the gratitude within, but meant to make it so we can be more fully available to these things.  

Paul’s letters can get so wordy, theoretical and philosophical, so it’s easy to forget that they are written to real communities in real situations, and that Paul is also in his own drama most of the time. In this case, the small Corinthian congregation exists in a fast-paced, extremely stratified society, an environment filled with commerce and prosperity, homelessness and poverty, and clear demarcations between the haves and have-nots.  And the congregation itself includes people from the whole range of society, who know that these divisions have no place in the church – we are all one in the Body of Christ. But when some get off work early and show up to dinner and end up eating all the best food before those who have to work later can get there, the broken, sinful system creeps into the church.  When those with more means, (aka, nicer earthly tents), are given the better seat, or the louder voice, because they are used to it out there, we’re not functioning like the Body of Jesus Christ - those who lay down our lives for one another.  
We are so accustomed to maintaining, guarding and building up our earthly tents that we have trouble leaving them behind when we’re invited into the presence of God in the presence of one another.  And the Corinthians are learning that it takes a lot of faithful and consistent work to uncover their hidden biases, continue confessing their complicity in the brokenness, and practice living in freedom and mutual submission to one another as siblings in Christ. 
 
Add to that, at this point, there has been a rift between Paul and the Corinthian congregation, and Paul is trying to mend a divide. So in this part of his letter he is building up to say we need to be reconciled because we are in Christ, we have died with him and been raised to a new life of complete belonging to God and each other, we already are reconciled, for eternity, so let’s live that reconciliation now.
 
But first he has to remind them of what’s true.
 
A tent is not our true home. It is a cover, a place to rest and keep out of the rain. It can offer some protection, some structure. But it is not permanent.  A good storm can rip the stakes out of the ground in minutes. A curious bear can tear through the wall or a determined raccoon gingerly unzip it with its outrageous opposable thumbs.  A tent in the elements day after day would wear out and become useless.  It’s not made to last forever, and it doesn’t actually protect us all that well from danger.
 
The problem is, we act like our earthly tents, our temporary shelters, are meant to last. We forget that our outer natures are wasting away, as Paul says. Or maybe we don’t want to acknowledge it. We direct our effort into building up the things that can be seen. And there is nothing wrong with pouring energy into our jobs, making our houses comfortable, or cultivating our hobbies and our education.  It’s not bad to invest our money to prepare for the future or take good care of our health. All these things are good things; they make life more enjoyable and more stable.  But, the mystics remind us, we can get overly attached to even good things. And, as C.S. Lewis reminds us, “100% of people die and that number cannot be increased.”  So these things don’t actually save us from death either.
 
But that’s only half of Paul’s sentence. Our outer nature is wasting away, yes, but our inner nature is being renewed day by day.  He redirects our gaze from the temporary to the eternal, from what can be seen to what cannot be seen, and then he puts it all in context, “this slight, momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory without measure.” 
Glory is the energy of God’s nearness, the smudge of proximity to divinity, the residue of the mystery of transcendence that leaks into everything otherwise ordinary in this life. 

There is a quote that I have heard attributed to Amy Tan that says, “a soul can only hold as much joy as sorrow carves room for.”  When we let life in, we can let more life in. Because we have a savior who redeems our very humanity, we can let weakness make us stronger and vulnerability make us braver and loss make love more deeply. Our tents are meant to be permeable. They are meant to keep us accessible to the glory of God whose fingerprints are all over creation and whose presence dwells within our neighbor.
 
A life of faith, a life shaped by grace, is a life that points us not into ourselves, to build up and guard and protect, but out toward one another.  Always.  In our Apostles Creed catechesis this week we talked about how ours is a faith that follows a God who came into weakness as a human being and laid down his life for others, and this rocked the very foundations of all thinking from Jesus onward; for the first time in human history humility became a virtue instead of a shame. Instead of guarding honor, building up dignity, upholding strength and might, taking care of one’s own, here was a humiliated and killed savior, who surrendered to weakness and bore the suffering of others.  

And in exchange for our suffering, Jesus gives us his glory, right here in our humiliating humanity, he draws us into the deep and unbreakable connection with God that Jesus himself has, and makes our very humanity, our weakness, the place where God is revealed.  The faith of Jesus becomes our faith. The life of Jesus becomes our life.  

God’s grace spills over on us and feels inside like gratitude, increasing and spreading, spilling more grace and bubbling up more gratitude, life after life. The grace of God turns people away from our project of self-protective tent-building out toward this wonder-filled world and the magnificence of other humans, to see the glory of God in the very face of one another. 
 
In a wonderful essay called, The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis brings this home:
It is…with awe and circumspection … that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. 
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.…Next to the Blessed sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.

Our true home is in the presence of God in the presence of each other – a deep dwelling of belonging in this momentary life and forever. So we do not lose heart. For this reason, we do not lose heart!  Things fall apart. Yes. Civilizations crumble, institutions end, we must come to terms with the fact that our very own bodies gradually disintegrate around us. But we are not afraid to acknowledge this—in fact, we cannot be free until we do so! Because our earthly tents provide a temporary place to lie our heads, and weather storms, and take in the world’s beauty, music and light. 

But the Holy Spirit makes a spacious and welcoming dwelling within us and between us that cannot be seen, but will last forever. It is secure, indestructible and unending. Right here – faintly all around us and blazing within and between us, shines the glory of God. On this side of eternity we can only bear but a faint brush against, handle the tiniest glimpse, or tolerate the smallest teaspoonful of God’s glory before it overwhelms our senses, but we are even now, being prepared to one day hold the full weight of it. And we experience it paradoxically through weakness and suffering shared, through confession and forgiveness, through mutual submission and lifting each other up. In our true home of God’s grace we are seen and we see each other as none other than bearers of the very glory of God in Christ, guests together at the table of this glorious feast of a life, sharing glimpses of what is to come.  

Amen.

Where Jesus Is

 

Mark 9:2-9

It’s so cold out there that one of our church families froze clothing into statues in their yard, and someone in my facebook feed froze an egg half cracked open, balanced in the air on a frozen puddle of egg white on the sidewalk like a pedestal. It’s so cold you can hammer a nail into wood with a frozen banana, and throw boiling water in the air to make a puff of cloud that doesn't fall back down.  Maybe those are the ways to celebrate what has come to be called The Transfiguration, because words can’t do it justice.
 
Jesus knew words couldn’t work here. He tells them not to talk about this moment till after he’s risen from the dead, when they’ll recognize that the laws of physics, and life and death, and time and space don’t always apply, and it will be fun to recall that one time on the mountain when Jesus all glowey and the mvps of the faith were back from the dead chatting him up.  
Still, they whispered to each other all the way back down the mountain, “What does he mean by risen from the dead?” 
Because, whattity what??
 
So maybe next year on Transfiguration Sunday we’ll just listen to ethereal music, or watch amazing colors, or contemplate some unfathomable intricacy of nature or boundless mystery of space instead of turning to words to try to understand what’s happening here. 
 
But perhaps the gift of this scene –for us today but for the disciples there on the mountain and for Jesus himself – is the mystery of it. The inexplicableness of the encounter.   
 
Peter at least has his wits about him enough to recognize that whatever this is, it’s important, so he jumps in with a strategy, Let’s just stay here never leave; we’ll make each of you a dwelling.  But he’s quickly shushed by an almighty cloud, and by the words of the gospel writer apologizing for him – he didn’t know what he was saying, you guys, because they all were terrified.
 
This captures it all! Peter thought. The glory of Jesus revealed! Here is where we should stay. Here is where the truth is, the way is, the life is. Right here. 
 
But the moments of mystery and wonder are not where Jesus remains.  As soon as they get back down the mountain they are confronted by the utterly anguished father of a child tormented by illness and demons, whom their prayers couldn’t heal. And in Matthew, Mark and Luke, these two scenes come back to back, like a boxed set, like they belong together: the mountaintop glory and the valley despair.  You can’t have the one without the other. 

Who is Jesus? Both of these. We see him revealed in the limitlessness of the inexplicable mystery and wonder on top of the mountain AND in the heartbreaking barriers of impossibility below. Both are where Jesus is, and both are part of the disciples’ experience of following him. 
 
Jesus says to the boy’s dad, “How long has he been like this?” And he invites the father to tell his story of pain, to speak of the affliction his son has experienced his whole life. How long have you suffered? And Jesus listens and receives him. Then he heals the boy, and blesses the father, and calls the disciples again to follow.
 
The voice on the mountain said, This is my son, the beloved, the embodiment of my love, listen to him. The same voice said at his baptism, This is my son the beloved, in whom I delight. Then immediately Jesus was sent into the wilderness where he was tempted to use his power to protect and save himself, tempted to get the recognition he deserves. Hungry, tired, weak and emotionally spent, he was tempted to claim and stay in the glory. But instead, he chose to claim and dwell in his humanity and weakness. And there is where God’s angels were able to minister to him, and restore his strength. And he was sent to minister from that place of being met by God in his weakness and need. 
 
Why can’t we just live up on the mountain in touch with the transcendence all the time? Peter thought, What else matters when there is this? 
 
And yet, there is also that. And Jesus came for that, not for this. Jesus came for the broken children and the anguished fathers and the temptations we all face. 
We swing between the mountains and the valleys, the transcendent glimpses that there is something more, tastes of joy or terror, moments where we feel absolutely alert and awake to the deeper, where words don’t make sense and can’t contain it, and the complications, temptations, stuckness, brokenness, sorrow, desperation, impossibility.
 
The world the needs redeeming; we need ministering to. And while the inexplicable glimpses of glory feed us, God’s redemption ultimately doesn’t come through these mysterious, unexplainable moments of transcendence.  It comes through the transcendent one taking on our humanity and letting what breaks us break him too. It comes when Jesus dies, just like every one of us and all those we have loved and will love will die. It comes when Jesus goes through death and comes out the other side and death no longer has the power to define or determine reality, and the glory and the brokenness come together in the person of the risen Christ.  
 
And so much of life is lived not even purely on the mountains or in the valleys or even in the wild swings between, but in the midst, the both/and – where in the midst of the sorrow we have a flash of joy, in the midst of the tension, a feeling of letting go, in the midst of fear, a moment of trust and absolute love. And very often we don’t have words for these glimpses of glory; they are not experiences that make clear, logical sense.
 
So we are asked to live in the paradox. Always. In the tension and the honesty of it –that the complications and temptations and divisions and weakness are real and they feel insurmountable. But also that we are held in a reality that transcends all the limits and boundaries of this world and calls us to something deeper, and wider, and eternal, that holds us all together in love. Both are true at the same time. Just like Jesus was both fully God and fully human. 
 
We exist inside the constraints of this world in all our messy, broken, impossible situations, but also inside a bigger story of love so powerful it transcends all limits of space and time. We live in the paradox of the piercing division in our families, communities and country, and also connection and belonging so deep we are joined not only with those around us but also with those gone before and those to come.
  
Our faith exists in tension, the paradox that runs deeper than logic.  
So we watch for the glimpses of beyond while we live utterly here.
 
Can we entrust ourselves to the one who embodies absolute love and walks this earth as the great paradox of God’s unlimited otherness and also persistent nearness?  The father of the boy trapped in seizures says it best, I believe, help my unbelief. I trust, help my untrusting heart. 
 
Jesus will soon say again to Peter, James and John, “Come with me” and they’ll follow him to the garden, where he will pray with so much fear and intensity that he sweats blood, begging God not to have to face death. I can’t help but think these three needed thismoment to get them through that moment.  But maybe so did Jesus.  Unspeakable glory and wonder exist alongside unspeakable horror and suffering.  Jesus takes on our horror to bring us into his glory.
 
There is one command in this text: Listen to him. Listen to Jesus. And sure, you could go back and read the things in the bible that he said and let those in. That would be a lovely way to listen to him.  See who Jesus is, what he says, what he does, let that speak to you. 
 
But also, just listen. Maybe we can cultivate a posture of openness to Jesus. In his humanity, in his divinity, in his risenness and presence with us even now. 
 
Jesus, help us listen to you.  

You who were tempted and afraid, who cried and died, you who sits at the right hand of God far above all powers, through whom the whole earth had its life spoken into being. You who listen and receive the whole of us and our stories when you set us free and bring us healing. 
 
We’re tired, Jesus. We’re despairing. We’re divided and in pain. We’re struggling. Some of us are sick. Some of us are angry. Some of us are lost, or hopeless, or afraid.  
 
Help us listen to you. We want to see you and what you are doing. We want to live guided by your love—nothing less, nothing else. 
 
So help us to follow you where you lead, and seek you where dwell – right alongside one another in our weakness and our need – where you minister to us as we minister to each other. There is the way, the truth and the life, there you are.  

And from time to time, to help us through the valleys, please give us the mountaintop moments of mystery and wonder too. Thank you.  

Amen.

Your Glorious Life

2 Corinthians 3:17-18, 4:6

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.

Avoiding Freedom, Hiding Glory, and other (Un)Christian Practices

2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2

Moses wore a veil.  In case you were wondering, you can always tell who he is in the group photos because he’s the one in the veil.  

Apparently his own frequent run-ins with God caused the skin of his face to literally glow, 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.  

This both lent a little gravitas to the messages delivered, 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.

But a helpful reminder too, of his differentness, being so close to God and all - (just don’t swear in front of Moses).

We’ve been spending a bit of time with Paul and the Corinthian church – and last week we heard in one of Paul’s letters them about love being the beginning and end of it all- the whole kit and kaboodle.

Well, he has scolded, cajoled, inspired and otherwise addressed these somewhat difficult people, and he’s still at it here. It seems that there is a pretty universal argument whipping around among the  early Christians- almost all of them initially Jews, about whether Gentiles- who are the vast majority of the Roman empire and a growing contingent of believers-  can just be Christians without converting to Torah-abiding Judaism in the process.

It is the position of Paul and Peter that God has called Gentiles - non-Jews- just as they are, and the Holy Spirit is  clearly with them, so they are followers of Jesus by God’s choice, and it isn’t necessary that they also take up Judaism to be part of this thing God is doing.  Even if that creates all kinds of confusion and unknown on the human end of things.

But the conflict continues to brew, and by the time Paul writes this letter, it has reached Corinth.   Some Jewish Christians have arrived with letters of recommendation and the message that Gentiles are not true Christians unless they are also Torah-following converts to Judiasm.

Paul begins this chapter, Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Surely we do not need, as some do, letters of recommendation to you or from you, do we? You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all; and you show that you are a letter of Christ, prepared by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. (2 Cor. 3;1-3)

He brings it out of the theoretical and back to their relationship - having to see and hear one another.  And he does not shy away from sarcasm or direct insults couched within effusive affection.  (Perhaps a lost art as communication style?)

So here’s the deal: The glory of God is so powerful, so overwhelming, that God did say to Moses that nobody could see the face of God and live, and showed Moses the almighty backside and still Moses’ face glowed.  And it was perhaps too much for the people. 

But Paul is suggesting it might have been too much for Moses too. 

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.  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.

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. We’ll ask the Gentiles to become Jews, and they can veil up too, and then nobody has to deal with the unexpected shock of glory coming through some face we don’t recognize, 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 believed about it or be changed by each other, and we’d frankly rather just point helpfully to the list of rules and the guy in charge and keep ourselves safely to ourselves.

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 my friend 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 and waited some time before having a the film developed.  When they saw the photo, they 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.  You have to be seen.  For who you are.  For the glory of God that shines out of your ordinary life.  That is not always comfortable.

And what the heck is glory anyway? Honor? Being lifted up? 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. 

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. 

And 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.

We are being transformed, people.  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 mundane. 

Is there glory in a dozen dirty diapers and a day in sweats 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?

Does glory have anything to do with the questions, Does my life even matter? Am I even important?

 Or the crises and losses that knocks us on our backs and makes us think we’ve got nothing to get up for? 

Because the God of glory came 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.  And it messes up all we think we know about how this faith thing, or church thing, or following God thing, is supposed to work. 

In Christ, Paul says, the veil is removed, in the Lord, the veil is set aside.  God has broken through and encounter with the Divine happens all the time, the transcendent has invaded the ordinary and our lives are part of that glory.  The Spirit of the Lord sets us free. As a friend said this week, ‘You’re free now, SUCKERS!”   Now you have to go and be free!

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.  Being changed by this glory of God, this radiance, this I-can’t-help-but-project-the-message-of-grace kind of living. My face just shows it, my life just leaks it out - Loved, loving.  Even 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, or 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 an easy person to love. And frankly, neither are most of you.  And if it were our own glory we were working at revealing, we’d be in trouble.

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 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. Since it is by God’s mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, that we are called to love and reach out and draw near, we have hope, and we do not lose heart.

Let’s live bravely.  Let’s not cover up that we are people being transformed by the Spirit of God, part of God’s glorious love. 

Amen.