Unveiled

Exodus 34:29-35; Luke 9:28-36

February 10, 2013

Last Sunday, about an hour or so after worship, I was walking through the downstairs hallway checking to see that things were put away, lights turned off and doors locked before heading home. I was singing to myself, “and God will delight when we are creators of justice,” and I heard someone around the corner humming to herself: “la, la, la, lalala, la, la, la, la la.”

I smiled as two thoughts ran through my mind:

First, that is a ridiculously infectious tune that I’ll be singing all afternoon.

Second, there is something more infectious than that song going on in this place these days.

If you’re not careful, you might just catch it!

It is undeniable that there is something powerful and wonderful going on here these days. The question is – or, better, the questions are: what is it? And how shall we respond?

This story from Exodus provides an interesting lens for looking at our present moment. This reading comes rather abruptly in the lectionary. We haven’t been reading the Exodus story, so let me remind you of the context. This is the second time Moses has gone up Sinai to get some tablets. If you recall, when he came back after the first trip his brother, Aaron, had made a golden calf. Moses pitched a small fit, and pitched the first tablets, too.

So he’s had to make a second trip, not only to receive the commandments again, but, more importantly, to bargain with God because the divine Yahweh is really ticked off at the stiff-necked people of Israel.

In the negotiations, we learn a great deal about the God of Israel.

In verses 6-7 of the same chapter as our text for today we find these words, spoken by God about God:

‘The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,  keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty, but visiting the iniquity of the parents
upon the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.’ 

In this seminal litany, we discover the profound tension that lies at the heart of Israel’s understanding of Yahweh, if not, indeed, at the heart of God’s self: God’s faithfulness and grace reside in tension with God’s response to the people’s lack of faithfulness.

God will keep God’s promises for a thousand generations, the text suggests, and stay peevish for three or four.

It’s almost like that parental gesture of counting down when you want a child to do what you want and you want it to happen now: “three, … two, ….”

Cheryl’s mom once asked, “what happens when you get down to zero?” The answer: it’s never happened.

But, of course, it has happened, in our lives and in everyone else’s, too. There are times when you anger and disappoint the ones you love most. Sometimes, with human beings, that anger and hurt is enough to rupture a relationship beyond any reparation, and then relationships die.

God, according to the Exodus story, is not like that. We may rupture the relationship, but God will remain faithful forever even if disappointed for a little while. God says, in the verses I just read, that God’s anger will be visited upon several generations, but, of course, in the story of what God actually does, the anger dissipates in the blink of an eye and pretty soon God is patting Moses on the head and sending him back down to the same stiff-necked people with another nice, new set of commandments.

Of course, when we are faithless – out of fear, out of anger, out of hurt – we miss out. I think that’s what the three and four generations is all about. We miss out on seasons of love and justice because we choose not to respond to God’s steadfast love and faithfulness.

But when we open our lives to the presence of God – to the love of the Divine alive in the world – then, to borrow from Isaiah, even our darkness shines like the noonday sun.

The spark of the Divine shines through. The Spirit, alive and working as the power of love in the world, will put a shine on your face.

That’s what Moses discovers on the mountaintop.

A similar thing happens to Jesus in the story of the transfiguration. His encounter with the Divine puts a shine on his entire being, and it’s so wondrous that his disciples are dumbfounded.

Or, maybe, they’re just dumb. Peter is so impressed by the experience that he wants to pitch a tent and just stay right there, presumably forever. I can imagine that maybe he was also hearing some ridiculously catchy music that wormed its way into his ears and he’s just humming it over and over, and is feeling so full of the spirit, and he’s seeing Jesus there all aglow, and he can’t imagine anything better ever in the whole, wide world and so he just blurts out: “guys, let’s just stay right here forever!”

At that point, the whole thing shifts. It is always tempting to stay put when you’ve reached the mountaintop but both of these stories insist on moving on. More than that, however, they insist on moving on changed.

That’s the part of the stories that speaks powerfully to our present moment. When I walked through the halls humming, and hearing someone else humming, last week I knew that we had reached a mountaintop moment here. All of the work of dreaming, discerning, and deciding has brought us to a peak that is beautiful and joyous and fun.

I’d like to pitch a tent and stay for a while.

But Moses had to go back down to the people and say, “we’re not supposed to say put, we have a land of promise to keep on marching toward.” Jesus had to go back down and say, “we’re not supposed to stay put, we must turn our shining faces toward Jerusalem.”

So what do we do with this moment at CPC when the Spirit is moving powerfully in our midst? We can’t stay put, we must move on. That much is clear. The question is, how shall we live transformed lives?

If we listen and are guided by the values of our culture, we meet such moments as this one – filled with energy and ready to go – and ask the question, “what can I do?” It’s the classic American question, and it makes of the energy of worship a kind of filling station to check into once a week or so in order to go back out and live in a culture that really doesn’t care a whit about the source of one’s energy as long as it is turned toward the purposes of the world as it is.

But the gospel presses a fundamentally different question. We do not ask “what can I do” but rather “what do I owe to God and to my neighbor?” Moreover, the gospel insists that we ask these questions not merely as individuals but also in community: “what do we owe to God and to our neighbors?”

If we understand what is going on CPC right now in cultural terms or, better, in terms of cultural values – then we’ll interpret this moment as giving each of us individually a song to sing that gets us through the week and helps “me to do what I can do.” This small “s” spirit will wear off in time – a time that may be visited to the 4^th generation.

If, on the other hand, we understand this moment as empowering us to live fully into our debts to God and neighbor, we will find more than Sunday morning transformed for more than a few weeks.

We can come down off of the mountaintop, filled with the spirit of God, faces shining in transfiguration to be those who work for the transformation of the world. That is what Moses came down the mountain to do. That is what Jesus came down the mountain to do. That is what we shall come down the mountain to do. May it be so for the sake of a world desperate for transformation. Amen.