Sermon for All Saints-by-the-Sea, The Last Epiphany, February 24, 2010
by the Reverend Rob Fisher

Texts: Exodus 34:29-35; Psalm 99; 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2; Luke 9:28-43a

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Sarah and I were very fortunate to receive tickets to attend one of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s special awards nights this past week.

They have the Arlington Theater stage set up to look like a living room, with two very comfortable-looking chairs, backed by palm fronds, and with a very large movie screen up above the chairs.

The famous actor or director takes a seat in one of the chairs and an interviewer sits in the other chair, and they have a discussion about movie making interspersed with clips of movie scenes.

Julianne Moore was the special honoree the night we attended.  She is a freckled, red-headed woman with an unconventional beauty.  She shared some of her insights on her approach acting, and the clips we saw showed how gifted she is.

In my life, I have not given a lot of thought to the world of acting, so it was fascinating for me to realize that in many ways it is all about the face.

Above everything else, it is the face that an actor uses to convey who a character is. 

If an actor is an artist, it is her very face that is her medium.

And it is a profound medium, because our faces are the windows to our hearts.

***

The Old Testament lesson this morning is a story about Moses, whose face is a window to God.

In Exodus, Moses has a special role among his people, as he is able to stand on the border between the divine and the earthly.  He literally travels between the two worlds every time he goes up and down the holy mountain where he spends time with God.

In this passage, Moses comes down carrying the tablets of the ten commandments in his arms, and unbeknownst to him, his face is shining.

I imagine the people wincing and shading their eyes, and Moses wondering what is the matter? And why are they looking at me like that?

To his own surprise, a little bit of the brilliant and dangerous light of God is left with him and remains reflected on his face, and while it may be a beautiful thing, it is apparently too much for the people.  When he finishes reporting to the people of Israel what God has shared with him, he covers his face with a veil.

The reason for the veil is not stated, but it seems that it is to protect the people from the light that they cannot take.

Remember, in Exodus we are told that no one can see God face to face and live—not even Moses—though he comes the closest.

Incidentally, you may have seen the famous statue by Michelangelo of Moses.  He is seated, holding two thin tablets under his arm, and he has small horns sticking out from the hair on top of his head. 

This is in fact based on a mistake in the translation of this passage made by St. Jerome when he translated the Bible into Latin in the fifth century.  The Hebrew word for radiance is almost the same as the word for horns, and for many years Latin speakers thought that Moses had horns on his head and that’s why he wore a veil.

But this is of course not the case.  Rather, Moses uses the veil to cover the shining residue of glory that rubs off on him after he has spoken with God.

Paul comments on this text, and Paul does not approve!

Paul actually accuses Moses of not being very bold, which is a pretty amazing statement.

But he reads the text somewhat differently.  He sees the veil as something that Moses uses to cover the fact that the Lord’s glory on his face goes away after a time, and that Moses uses the veil so that the people will not see the light fading between visits.

Whether Paul is being fair here or not, his next point is not really about Moses but about the veil itself.

Paul says that:

“Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.  And 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.”

For Paul, the crux of the matter is that in Christ, the veil is set aside for us all.

Christ is the new mediator.

Moses was the go-between.  He functioned like a priest in this regard.  But Christ does more than Moses could possibly do.  He doesn’t merely go back and forth between us (down below) and God (up on the mountain top.)  Rather, Christ steps in between. 

Christ fills that space between heaven and hearth, so that we can be in God’s presence and not be afraid.

When you see God—whether it is in prayer, in times of serving others, or simply when by grace God’s beauty and truth suddenly comes into your life and makes the distance between us and the divine become thin—do you let it be reflected in your life?  Do you let God’s glory linger on your face?  Do you let God’s light shine out of you so that others can see it reflected in you?

***

Sin is marked by space—by a distance between.

Originally, the term is an archery term.  To sin, in archery, is to miss the bull’s eye.  Sin is that space between where the arrow landed and where it was meant to be.

Likewise, sin is the distance between where we are, and where we would be if our lives were in harmonious sync with God.

Sin is what comes between us and God.  It is what blocks us from God.

Whether it be a veil or a fig leaf, it estranges us from God.

As the earth eclipses the light of the sun and prevents the moon from shining, sin blocks the glory of God from our lives and keeps us in darkness.

Christ came to abolish sin.

He came to come into that distance between us and God, and to fill it with himself.  He overcomes sin, and makes our relationships right again. 

He is a living sacrifice, an agent of God’s mercy.

Life is in the meeting, the relationship space.  Moses meets God, hence the shining face result!  But it stops there. 

It should not stop with us. 

Amen.