February 14, 2010
Evil Reversed or Veils Off Please
Karen Bowles
February 21, 2010
Let me make clear this morning or any other Sabbath morning I do not wish you to park your sense, your reason, your intelligence at the door to this Sanctuary. I don’t ask, indeed I demand you to not suspend disbelief or deny doubt or suppress your powers of logic or reasoning – do not forget in this time about physics or biology or chemistry. Do not avoid any learning or insight you carry. Bring all that with you – all that to bear as you listen this morning.
It is Transfiguration Sunday – it is the last Sunday of the Epiphany and next Sunday marks the beginning of Lent. It is also Valentine’s Day. A day that has come to celebrate love but what many do not realize, in reality it is a day to commemorate an individual of which we know nothing about except that he was martyred at some point in the early history of the church: From dying for your beliefs to chocolates to die for. We are sometimes a funny people.
There are many reasons this book, this Bible has lasted all these centuries – but I would venture indeed I would declare the main reason is thankfulness – gratitude for the places it can take us – in the reading in the thinking in the searching and the contemplation of these words of these narratives of these stories of ancestors there are starting points – jumping off places – to, in the words of Dr. Seuss, ‘O the thinks you can think’ when you sit with these words in contemplation.
I want to speak this morning of power and of glory – two words of five letters each. We are not comfortable often with speaking of power and of glory – we do not hear of these words much in our tradition – except in the last line of the Lord’s Prayer and in some of the older hymns. Power in our time would seem to be connected with much that is negative – of allegations of undue influence of inequality of bargaining power, of self advancement, of wielding power as an instrument akin to waging war to achieve selfish ends. We seem too to be uncomfortable with the word glory. It is an old fashioned word – one that conjures up former times – times of group confessions and sayings things like ‘glory be!’ Glory would also seem harsh to our ears used to hearing of the vulnerable god – the intimate God – the one who walks with us – not one that is filled with glory – a glory that silences our religious chatter and leaves us blinking and confused in its light.
But we hear much of both these words in our passages from this book this morning – Moses speaks with God – he returns from that encounter with a face that shines. Jesus went up on the mountain to pray and his face was changed. Transformed by witnessing glory? Changed by being in the presence of power? How can these two words: power and glory: how can these two stories written so long ago bring any good news to us this morning?
What is power? Is it control, authority, strength or status? Is it the ability to with a stroke of a pen determine someone’s fate? Is it with words spoken or withheld, that we decide whether someone is given or denied a position? Is it economic – political? Does power begin and end with us – is it ours to give – and so too with glory – what is Glory? – are we the arbiter of who receives accolades of who is worthy of our honour?
My older brother in his high school years as he will readily admit did very little to apply himself. He told me some years later – that the reason for this was that no one had ever given him a good reason why? Why should I do well? what was the purpose of it? To get a job – to go to university? To be able to support a family? To get A’s? To please the parents? These reasons were not sufficient to him. Why apply himself? – and so he didn’t. Why in fact do anything? Can you hear this echoed in so many people – can you hear this echo in yourself?
These narratives would give us the answers – you who have ears listen – Moses has spoken with God – Jesus has been transformed by God. Remember keep your intelligence – hold tight to your reason.
Moses went up Mount Sinai – which is also called Mt Horeb. He encountered God and his face when he came down shone – with such intensity that his people could not look at him. And so he wore a veil. Jesus went up the mountain to pray – and when there the three who were with him saw his face changed. When I was a child my parents would take us on ‘mystery tours.’ We would set out in the car and Dad would intentionally or at least so he claimed get us lost. Sometimes we would end up at Mount Horeb – nothing more than a road sign at the top of a very large hill – both the ascent and the descent were steep – but it was the middle that we loved – the very top of the hill – Dad would accelerate and at the top we would be airborne – for a second all four wheels would be off the ground and we would be flying high. Stomachs in throat and squeals of delight would ensue. Moses and his shining face evoke much such a response – The experience of flight – this experience related of an encounter with God – the giddiness of light – the glory of God – the power of narrative to invite no demand a response – hearts in throats and shared glimpses of glory and power.
I have been back to that place since and there is no more flight there – the municipality – perhaps because it had watched our family fly – had sliced off the top of the hill. And I am struck with the parallels to our own time. To the damage we have done in centuries past and continue to do to these stories these narratives – words written down that speak of change and transfiguration – transformation. The damage we have done in flattening them – in slicing off their height – losing their breadth and their depth. Think of the damage done by the insisting on the historicity of veils and mountaintops and clouds and voices and figures appearing and tablets written by the pen of God. And conversely think of the damage done by insisting on the utter falsehood of veils and mountaintops and clouds and voices and figures long dead appearing and tablets written by the pen of God. Bring your intelligence, bring your mind, and its ability to analyze, to deduce, to contemplate, bring your consciousness, give yourself permission to raise it. And now look at these passages – re-inject them with the scribe’s attempt to put into words that for which there really are no words – an outward expression of an inward and a common shared reality. You are holy. You are glory bearing, glory reflecting and glory bound. You are power bearing, power reflecting and power bound. When Martin Luther King said “I have been to the mountaintop” his face shone. He had not physically climbed Mount Horeb – but sure as shooting he was in that car with my family. When I visited the mountaintop when I however reluctantly received my own call – I did not know my face shone. A person standing near me in that time told me it did – that an aura surrounded – Not even knowing what she meant I knew it did then – but given time and the doubt borne of societal conditioning and the rejection of all things seeming somehow ‘flaky’ I at times lose such certainty. When the person stood in front of the tank in Tianamen Square – if I could have seen his face – it was unveiled and full of the glory and the power of that which connects us all – full of the glory of God.
Evil reversed is live. Scott and I travelled to Arizona in December and climbed if that is the right word the Grand Canyon. It is one mile down and takes 5 hours to descend and five hours to ascend. Signs at the top recommend hiking boots and lots of water. “If it is past 8am do not even attempt to go down and up in one day!” the sign read. There was 2 feet of snow at the top and it was dry and baking at bottom. At first we laughed and joked but then the road became more difficult boulders and with it pains in the legs – who would have thought climbing down would cause shin splints? We spoke less often and became more aware of the incredible silence and the amazing majesty of that place. We began to notice a difference both in ourselves and in the people we met both on their way down and on the way back up. Help was offered that rang true – those on the way up – their faces shone – without baggage or luxuries – simply a walking stick and a bottle of water readily offered and eagerly shared – and the silence – the glorious silence – this is participation in the glory and the power of living the faces and the towering valley walls seemed to say – this is shared life. There were not furtive glances or avoidance, there was full frontal eye to eye contact and even those who were exhausted and breathing heavily barely taking another step – would look up to meet eye to eye – another traveller on the same road. On our way down we were passed by 2 young men – 2 barefoot young men who were yodelling and running – literally running down the hill! Someone yelled out to them as they passed: what are you doing? And they yelled back – ‘living.’ Their yodels and their whoops drifted up to us for a time – and then they too were swallowed by the silence. Strip us of our possessions, our titles, our perceived positions of power, travelling on the same road as all others, seeing and acknowledging the shining face of the other.
A Canadian woman who survived the earthquake in Haiti stands disoriented outside of their ruined hotel and a Haitian boy gives them a bottle of water – a tall Haitian man offers to show them the way to the Canadian embassy. And she continues to be troubled by her response: “I kept asking myself, ‘Why are we following this man? We don’t know him.’ I was wary; I didn’t freely receive his generosity for what it was.”
And what was it? It was the same gift given to each of us this morning in these stories of Moses and Jesus in these stories of change and transformation in these stories of our God given ability and God demanding recognition that we access that we share in that power and that glory.
With each passing day we hear stories of power abused of glory debased of lives wrecked by violence in our own city. It is not cool to be Christian – it is not cool to proclaim from the rooftops or the mountaintops the love of God or the power or the glory of God – it is not cool to let our faces shine – somehow it is seen as anti progress or against multiculturalism or some such rot – and it is rot – because without such proclamation – we are doomed to let evil creep in – there was a time in my life when I scoffed at the wisdom of the ancients of anything written down before my time – that I had not experienced that I had not had proved to me empirically. I was wrong – so wrong – and we continue to be wrong in hiding under a bushel what, keeping our intelligence, indeed applying my intelligence, knows to be true. You are worthy. You are holy. The truth we speak to power is indeed true power spoken to false power – power perverted and borne of fear, evil – the reverse of live.
We are all or have been subjected to the call of such power – false power that negates the holiness within each of us – power born of evil, the wish for power that leads not from our strengths but to our weaknesses – that breeds on our fears and our insecurities – LET THAT GO – if there is anything you take from this morning let that be it. And we have certainly all seen in the last while what the claim of somehow possessing a glory others cannot participate in – can do to those in power – the sense of invulnerability – the certainty of being untouchable – puffery and ego – isolation and loneliness.
And we have perhaps been confused by the repeated statements in some theological circles that as all power and glory and holiness belong to God, then somehow we are nothing – as if we are puppets with stuffing for brains, with God up there somewhere pulling our strings. And then there are the chosen few – the Moses and the Jesus – who make the trek up the mountainside and speak with God. The rest of us are relegated as the disciples were to sleep – or as the Israelites were to fear and blindness. Hogwash to both. Participate. Experience. Meditate. Pray. Search out written wisdom in others. Search out those whose face you see shining. And listen too to your own wisdom. It is God as Karl Barth said ‘who makes us radiant. We ourselves cannot put on bright faces. But neither can we prevent them from shining.” Take off your veil, please. Let your face shine. Reverse evil, first in yourself. And then do God’s good glorious powerful holy work. It is yours – intelligence intact – to do.
Amen.