Roger Ray, pastor
Transfiguration Sunday
2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2
12Since, then, we have such a hope, we act with great boldness, 13not like Moses, who put a veil over his face to keep the people of Israel from gazing at the end of the glory that was being set aside. 14But their minds were hardened. Indeed, to this very day, when they hear the reading of the old covenant, that same veil is still there, since only in Christ is it set aside. 15Indeed, to this very day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their minds; 16but when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. 17Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. 18And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.
4Therefore, since it is by God's mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart. 2We have renounced the shameful things that one hides; we refuse to practice cunning or to falsify God's word; but by the open statement of the truth we commend ourselves to the conscience of everyone in the sight of God.
Magicians do not actually practice magic because, of course, there is no such thing. What they actually practice is more accurately called the "art of illusion." Magicians have long used scantily clad young women, puffs of smoke and flame in order to draw the audience's attention away from where the real sleight of hand, the real action they need for you to not see is taking place.
I've recently read the suggestion that we watch or read the news in the same way. It may be helpful if you ask yourself, when the news is full or reports about a famous General's sexual escapades or a movie star's drug problems, what is the story they are wanting us to not know about while they are distracting us with this fluff?
Though I am often critical of our Springfield paper, as a contributing writer, I'm enough of an insider to know that the decline in newspaper advertisers and subscribers has resulted in the layoff of so many writers that any real investigative reporting is nearly a thing of the past. There are just not enough journalists to do much more that grab news service stories and reprint them.
On the TV side of the equation, we've seen a rather more intentional dumbing down, as resources have shifted, year after year, away from investigative reporting in favor of huge contracts given to celebrity news readers......most of whom have about the substance as "Bambi, my lovely assistant" or a sudden puff of smoke.
Monsanto doesn't want us to know what they put in our food or that the government officials who regulate food safety used to work for them and will work for them again one day. Boeing, GE, Morton Thiokol, General Dynamics and Haliburton do not want you to know what their profit margin is in military manufacturing. In the conversation about sequestration, you hear lots about how the economy couldn't stand to cut the military budget because it would cost too many American jobs..... total bologna, of course. For every million dollars we spend on the military we only create 11 jobs but for ever million cut from education, we lose 26 teachers.
I know the pulpit is not a great place to get into statistics and accounting but folks, what I'm trying to say here is that important things are going on while we are being asked to stare at smoke and mirrors. A prophetic church is in need of the whole truth, but the media mostly feeds us gossip. They call it the "liberal media" but something as important as global climate change is almost never mentioned and, those who analyze media content have reported that in almost every case that it was brought up last year, it was brought up by conservative politicians who were making fun of it.
Part of the false equivalency of the media is the sense that if one person says something about the dangers of climate change, they have to balance that with someone who undermines or denies climate change, as if it were a 50-50 proposition. The truth is that 98% of qualified scientists agree on human caused climate change as a fact but 90% of what you hear in the media is the opposite.
In our scripture lesson today, Paul metaphorically refers to the Exodus account of Moses covering his face with a veil after he had been with the Lord......, In Exodus it said that Moses' face shown in a disturbing way so he covered it for the sake of the people.
My high school science teacher in Kentucky speculated that God must be radioactive since being with God made Moses' face shine. Which leads me to two conclusions..... public school teachers not only shouldn't lead prayer in school but they should talk about religion at all..... and, my science teacher needed to not talk much about science since she clearly didn't understand.... while radiation does make some chemicals glow, no matter how many science fiction shows say it does, radition doesn't work on people that way.... radiation makes people dead.
The glowing face of Moses in Exodus is a metaphor and Paul uses the reference in a different kind of metaphor. Paul talks about the veil as something that is cast over your minds to keep you from seeing the truth. And though I do not always find it very easy to agree with Paul theologically, I certainly agree with him in his insistence that honest spirituality demands that we take off the veil and see reality.
An old classmate of mine from Vanderbilt, Dr. Paul Jones, has recently published a book entitled, "The Church's Seven Deadly Secrets." I loved the title but I have to admit that I am not crazy about the content of the book. I had hoped that Paul was going to do something really bold with this title but it is mostly very safe Sunday School chatter.
For example, chapter three is entitle: The Bible is not the word of God, Jesus is. He is correct, of course, to call out the modern fundamentalist assertion that the written text of the Bible is actually the word of God but he dismisses one unprovable truth claim for another, insisting that Jesus is the incarnate word of God. If he had said that out loud while he was sitting next to me Jack Forstman's theology class everyone would have burst out laughing at the absurdity of it.... in fact there is some relief in the fact that Dr. Forstman passed away about six months before this book went to press.
You don't replace one magical claim with another magical claim. We take the teachings of Jesus very seriously but the naked truth of those teachings doesn't need to be hidden behind a theological veil of smoke and mirriors.
When I think of the deadly lies of the church, I think of the ways in which the church has tried to get people to think about heaven and hell, rather than the economic realities of the present. Jesus told people to sell all they owned and give it to the poor. Jesus said that the rich have no more chance of entering God's kingdom than a camel has of walking through the eye of a needle.
The church says that Jesus is God's incarnate son but that God can't have any more sons or daughters..... it is just the two of them..... except for when it is not just the two of them, when it is God but not God or Jesus, then it is Spirit and when you consider that you have a trinity of gods that you must still believe is only one god so to be acceptable you have to believe that one plus one plus one equals one or you are really a very bad person and not Christian at all. Don't try this in math class boys and girls, it only works in Sunday School but if you don't make work in Sunday School then God will hate you.
See, Dr. Jones, that's the deadly lie of the church..... that's the illusionist's distraction. Jesus said to love your enemies. Jesus said to forgive the person who has hurt you seventy times seven times. Jesus said to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, care for the sick, visit the imprisoned, welcome the alien among you and sacrifice for justice, liberation and healing.
The church has told us to be baptized, take communion, recite the creeds, repent of our sins and avoid all physical pleasure, primarily by singing really boring hymns and being quiet during tedious sermons...... of which, if I must point it out, this is not one. And honestly, I don't despise religious ritual or doctrine and I wouldn't mention it at all if we were generally pretty good about the loving your enemy and forgiving your brother and caring for the poor, the sick, the imprisoned and the alien but we all know that the church of our experience was a lot better at rituals than they were at reality.
Our spirituality should give us insight and courage to deal with was is, not become an elaborate hoax that makes us focus on the illusion while reality passes us by.
Many of you are old enough to remember the Berrigan brothers, Fathers Daniel and Phillip. During the 1960's they were both on the FBI's 10 most wanted list and eventually spent more than 3 years in prison. For serving communion? For baptizing? For telling people how to go to heaven? No, but the crime for which they went to prison wasn't bank robbery or murder either.
After visiting Vietnam and seeing the carnage there, they made a kind of homemade Napalm and used it to burn up draft records in a Maryland draft office.... burning paper rather than children.
Father Daniel wrote: "Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise....We say killing is a disorder, life and gentleness and community and unselfishness is the only order we recognize. For the sake of that order, we risk our liberty, our good name. The time is past when good men can remain silent, when obedience can segregate (us) from public risk, when the poor can die without defense."
Father Philip was more poetic. He said:
"The poor tell us who we are,
the prophets tell us who we could be,
So we hide the poor and kill the prophets."
So when you hear me saying things like "I want to get magic out of the church." What I mean is that though the church has a history of hiding the poor and killing the prophets, my modest proposal is that we focus on finding and serving the poor until we have served so much that we find that we have become prophets.
