Did you know that people glow?
It’s
true. People, all of us, glow. All living things, as a matter of fact, emit
visible light from their bodies. Mostly
from the face. A human body, for instance, puts off this light that is one-
one-thousandth the vision threshold;
I would have to glow 1,000 times brighter for you to see me glowing.
We all
glow, even if you can’t see it. I wonder, though, if our glowing-power ever gets
better, if it ever gets stronger. I mean, think about the descriptions that you
hear about pregnant women – what do people say? They glow! When somebody has a
really happy look about them, what do we say? They’re beaming! Heck, really
smart people are characterized as bright,
so they’re glowing a lot as just a base level. Somewhere, in our bodies and in
our language, there’s a recognition that we are creatures of light, and when
something big is happening – when we’re triumphant, when we’re special, when we’re
going through a life-altering event – we get, well, shinier.
In
fact, it’s always been a part of our culture, a part of our stories. Special
people, or ordinary people in special circumstances, shine. In ancient Greek
literature, it was said that great heroes shined with extraordinary light in
the heat of battle. In most of the world’s faiths, in most of humanity’s
traditions and stories, are people who glow with an exceptional light. In many
of the East-Asian faiths, they depict the great teachers as being surrounded by
flames. The Colossus of Rhodes, a giant statue of the Greek sun-god Helios, has
a crown with sunbeams shooting from it, which you might recognize as the same crown
worn by the Statue of Liberty.
In the
Jewish tradition, and the Christian tradition, we often see our great figures
depicted with halos.
That big shining disc, like a
golden dinner plate sticking up behind their heads, or a golden ring just sort
of floating up there. The saints get it. The disciples get it. The angels get
it, along with shining bright robes. Jesus definitely gets it.
And I’ll tell ya – within my tradition? In the
Bible, a lot of it traces back to one particular encounter.
You
see, this was after the Exodus, when God and Moses led the Hebrews out of
slavery in Egypt. After that point, they
start wandering – Moses is leading the group, but they don’t really feel like
they’re getting anywhere. Just muddling along, barely surviving, with no
Promised Land in sight. They get fed up with Moses. They start to suspect that
this Moses is either a sham or a loser, and they’re not too sure about this
Yahweh thing either. This God-of-our-ancestors business doesn’t seem to be
helping them. They look elsewhere – they make a golden calf, put it on a pole, and
worship it, hoping for protection from the kind of god they’re more familiar
with. Moses orders a bunch of them dead, saying it’s God’s command, and later
Moses has to talk God out of abandoning the Hebrews entirely. This relationship
– Yahweh and the chosen people – is starting out on really rocky ground. If
they’re gonna have this relationship – you will be my people and I will be your
God – they’re gonna need some kind of code of conduct. Some kind of agreement.
Some kind of covenant. Even a set of laws simply handed from God to us won’t
work – God tried that, but the tablets were destroyed after the incident with
the golden calf. It needed to be an agreement, both sides saying, “This is who
we are, this is what we will be to each other.” But as God and Moses are about
to make this final agreement, this covenant, as they’re about to create the
Torah, Moses demands to see God. To see God’s glory. God is hesitant, and says
that nobody can see God’s face and live, but if Moses hides in a crack in the
side of the mountain, he can see God’s glory from behind as it passes by. It’s a bizarre little encounter, but what
happens next, after they make the tablets of the covenant? That’s the strange
story for today.
I’ll be reading to
you from an adapted version of the Common English Bible, and I’ll be reading
from the book of Exodus, chapter 34, verses 28-35. Let the whispers of God settle into you.
[TEXT]
28 Moses was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights. He didn't eat any bread or drink any water. He wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant, the ten words.
29 Moses came down from Mount Sinai. As he came down from the mountain with the two covenant tablets in his hand, Moses didn't realize that the skin of his face shone brightly because he had been talking with God. 30 When Aaron and all the Israelites saw the skin of Moses's face shining brightly, they were afraid to come hear him. 31 But Moses called them closer. So Aaron and all the leaders of the community came back to him, and Moses spoke with them. 32 After that, all the Israelites came near as well, and Moses commanded them everything that the Lord had spoken with him on Mount Sinai. 33 When Moses finished speaking with them, he put a veil over his face. 34 Whenever Moses went into the Lord's presence to speak with God, Moses would take the veil off until he came out again. When Moses came out and told the Israelites what he had been commanded, 35 the Israelites would see that the skin of Moses's face was shining brightly. So Moses would put the veil on his face again until the next time he went in to speak with the Lord.
[/TEXT]
So
that’s what happens when you see God’s glory a little too closely. Some of it
just sticks to ya. Now, the science nerd in me is fascinated by this story. If
it happened in real history the way this story describes it, I have to wonder
about the process. It could be that whatever makes us glow already, that life
force that emits energy from our bodies, just gets stronger and pours out when
we get near God, when we get near the source of our life.
The
theologian in me understands that, whether or not it happens this way, it’s a
way of understanding what happens to us when we encounter God. How it can
transform us. How it can transfigure us, make us look and sound and seem
different. How, whatever it is that makes God God, whatever that “glory” stuff
is, it seeps into our pores and then explodes back out at the world around us.
How we can be a reflection of God to other people, how we can point people to
God by the light of our lives and our love.
The
domestic man in me is fascinated by the idea that somebody could be shiny and
bright after they’ve been wandering in the desert with no bathing abilities to
speak of. Moses’s shining face, the shining clothes of the angels and of Jesus
– make no mistake, these things are special because it’s hard to keep something
clean and bright, especially in the wilderness of the ancient Middle Eastern
desert. If your robes are shining brilliant white, or if your face is gleaming,
then there has to be something special about you. There has
to be something strange going on.
Look at
these images. Look at the people that we venerate, the people we lift up as
special and holy. These otherworldly figures. They’re glowing because something
different is happening. Because they’re connected in some special way to God.
What
makes you glow? What makes me glow? I’ll tell ya, when I’m glowing, most often,
it looks more like this:
Maybe
some of the impact of the glowing people is lost on us these days, because this
is the modern glowing person. Glowing has come to mean comfort, joy, and
connectedness. And, y’know, those things are holy as well. God can be found in
a text conversation just as much as in a mountaintop transfiguration. We can
experience the sacred through the meditation exercise known as Angry Birds just
as much as we can through an hour of studying Scripture.
But I
wonder if there’s something else, too. I feel like Christians, God-people of
any kind really, are expected to be shining and glowing all the time. The world
expects that connection to the Divine means that you radiate beautiful light,
that anything not shiny and not glowy couldn’t possibly
be good enough or pure enough to be Holy.
I
believe that having an encounter with God doesn’t necessarily make us all
Shiny, Happy People Holding Hands. It can. But it can also make us look the
opposite. It can make us choose to stay in the dust and grime of this life, to
nestle in here and live in this world. An encounter with the Divine doesn’t
just make people rise above this world, but to transform it from within by the
power of knowing God. And that can be messy work. It will get your glowing
robes dirty, and it will dim a shining face. But it’s holy work all the same.
It’s all a part of that covenant, all a part of that connection with God.
That’s what it can mean to know the God who loves this world and everything
within it.
Moses
went up to the mountaintop, and he came down with some Holy on his face. The
encounter with God made Moses a Shiny Happy Man. What would you look like if
you got some holy on your face? If you dusted up your shoes by kicked around in
the sacred for a while?
It
might look like loving your enemy and praying for those who despise you. It
might look like loving all people, especially those whom nobody else loves. It
might look like living your life together with people who look, act, think, and
believe differently from you. It might look like giving of your own time and
energy in service to the world around you. It might look an awful lot like
following the path of God, following the path of Jesus Christ.
Even if it’s not shining, even if
it’s dirty, it can still make people uncomfortable. Perform a blatant act of
radical welcome, radical love, in public and tell me that it doesn’t make
people uncomfortable. Sometimes we might even have to veil it, like Moses, to
shield those around us from the dangerous power of sacred enthusiasm. But we
cannot stop. We keep seeking to connect with the sacred, again and again in a
thousand different ways, to be transformed by God.
Amen.
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