http://christchurchlr.orgChrist Church Little Rock

It must have been in one of those real life anecdotes in my grandmother’s Reader’s Digests where I read about the boy who was talking with his mother about his first day of second grade. And when Mom asked, “So what does your new teacher look like?” the boy replied, “Just like my teacher last year. Except with a different head.”

I suppose the moral of this little story is that a different head really does make a difference. So it makes a difference that when Michelangelo sculpted Moses, he gave him horns rather than a shining face. Granted, it’s tricky to make a stone face shine, even for Michelangelo. But actually the sculpture bears horns rather than a shining face, because a rare Hebrew word can refer to either. Michelangelo gave us the same Moses, except with a different head, you might say. And a different head makes a lot of difference indeed.
Which is also why veils aren’t for elbows or ankles or hands. Veils are for faces. And it matters not only whether our faces are shining or sprouting horns. It also matters when and before whom we choose to lift our veils. Because faces make a difference, and sometimes we’re changed by what and whom we let our faces get close to.

When we remember the story of Moses returning from his 40 day meeting with God on Mt. Sinai, we probably think first of the two stone tablets bearing the Ten Commandments, the basis for Israel’s covenant with Yahweh.

And we remember these commandments, perhaps, because it’s a little easier for us to figure out what to do with them than with a prophet’s face that shines with the glory it’s just absorbed.
“Don’t lie, or murder, or covet, or commit adultery.” These are helpful bullet points for the moral life. These are clear instructions that can be chiseled into stone and set up in churches and synagogues and courthouses and brothels, I suppose.
We’re pretty sure we know what to do with the commandments, whether we choose to heed them or not. But what do we do with all that excess glory?

Among the benefits of living in 21st century America are a lot of great special effects. I haven’t seen the movie Avatar, though even I have heard a lot about it. But for all the buzz, I have yet to hear a plotline. I know that the story comes to the viewer in the latest mind-blowing 3D technology, but I haven’t a clue about what that story actually is.

Now, this might seem like just the sort of stuff a preacher ought to rail against: our shallow modern obsession with special effects rather than substance. But there may be something very biblical in all this too.

Because in the story of Moses’s trip to the top of Mt. Sinai, what may have been more important than the information he brought back, was the glory he encountered, the glory that made his face shine. The special effects, you might say.

You see, the commandments were more than good advice for living. They were the basis of a covenant, an agreement between God and Israel that they would make a relationship over time. A covenant to stay close. And Moses was changed most startlingly, not by the ideas he was presented with on the mountain, but by standing closer to God than anyone thought a person could.

Contrast Moses on the mountain with the people down below, hammering their gold into a calf. A tame god of their own making, completely under their control. Its glory could be nothing more than the sum of their own. But Moses went up Sinai to meet a God he wasn’t even supposed to look upon and live. Moses went up Sinai to present himself to an uncontrollable mystery. And see what happens.

What God gave Moses during their visit was the beginning of the Law. But I think we get the nature of the Law wrong when we translate it wrongly into our lives. We tend to think of the 10 Commandments a lot like speed limits, if we’re looking for a modern analogy. Don’t go past these limits and your life might be a little less fun, but it will be safer, happier, a bit more under control.

But a better contemporary legal analogy might be marriage vows. The vows matter a lot, but the vows aren’t the end. The vows define a relationship in which transformation takes place. Marriages in which the vows function as speed limits, prohibitions to be obeyed and little more, such marriages die. And couples can stay legally married without ever opening themselves up to the kind of transformation God can work on two people through a lifetime of love and struggle and growth. Through a lifetime of unveiling one person’s true face to another, we might say.

Marriage vows can be fulfilled, but if our veils are never lifted, has anything worth the trouble really happened?

Let’s be clear. There’s no allusion to marriage implicit in Moses’s veil. Although, come to think of it, some people say their spouses sprout horns at times. Rather the unveiling of one face to another at a wedding might be best understood as a symbol of the way our faces change as they are exposed to another. In a way, it is about the special effects more than the plot.

The vows lay out the basic story line. They lay out the structure of life lived for better and worse, for richer and poorer, in sickness and health until two people are parted by death. But the people are changed during fights at the breakfast table and walks to the grocery store, changed at company softball games and in haggling over paint colors.

And so it was with Israel. The Law was about staying in relationship with their unpredictable God. The Law was about staying close enough to God to be transformed.

So Moses showed his face to God. And God, we’re told, placed Moses in the cleft of a rock, shielded him with his hand, and passed by. Making Moses’s face glow like the face of a giddy groom.
The special effects aren’t just spectacular flourishes added to the storyline to sell Bibles. The special effects are the story. The story in which each time Moses went before God, he would unveil his face, and then return with the lingering glory to his community. The story is about the transformation that came through a covenant to stay near this strange, frightening, unpredictable God called Yahweh. A covenant less about unchanging instructions for living as it was about living close enough to God’s glory to see our faces changed.

The second commandment carved into those tablets of stone was “Don’t make for yourself an idol.” And one ironic outcome of reading this passage may be finding that if we carve the 10 Commandments into stone as an end or a truth in and of themselves, we may make these commandments into an idol. If we think we’re finished with the work of being Christian once we’ve fulfilled our moral and religious obligations, we’re in a dead relationship in which veils are never lifted. We can fulfill every one of those commandments while keeping our lives and our faces safely veiled from the God whose uncontrollable glory might change us forever.

The temptation to build golden calves is alive and well. And we have to ask just what we’re about here, in this place. In our worship, are we hammering out something beautiful, but tame? Something that reflects our dim glory rather than that transforming glory of the God who is beyond us.

Two children will be baptized here today. And while water is a life giving symbol, it is also a dangerous one. It is the stuff of the flood and the Red Sea and the chaos before creation. And Baptism is more than a sweet religious ritual. Baptism is that promise to do our best to keep these children near enough to their loving source to be transformed throughout the course of their lives. We are doing what we can to begin to unveil their faces to the mystery of God, and see what happens.

Isn’t all our worship meant to be a kind of unveiling of ourselves to God, then seeing what happens? And remember, Moses didn’t know his face was shining until other people told him so. So it will probably be someone else’s face that we see shine. And might we even begin to see God’s glory shining on the faces of strangers and enemies, on the faces of the least and the last and the lost of this world, on the faces of the sick and the poor, as Jesus told us we would?

Getting close to such glory, even just taking it in through the eyes to begin with, can transform us if we let it. Maybe God can still make our own dull faces shine in ways we’ve never imagined. And maybe the truth remains that all we have to do is draw near. Amen.