Pastor Strong's Sermon from Sunday
TRANSFIGURATION C/2007
Don’t raise your hand, but is there anyone here this morning who worries about their appearance? Most of us, right?
There is an old story about a woman working out in her yard when a moving van pulled up at the house next door, followed right behind by a car with the new neighbors. The new people walked over and greeted the woman. And she was quite self-conscious because she had work clothes on and had dirt on her hands and face.
A few days later the new neighbors invited the woman and her husband to an open house. So here was the opportunity for the woman to make a better impression. She colored her hair, put on a girdle, glossed her lips, applied eye shadow and false eyelashes, polished her fingernails and popped in her colored contact lenses. She looked in the mirror with approval and remarked to her husband, “Now the new neighbors will get to see the real me!”
We can laugh, but we’re laughing at ourselves too, aren’t we? We’ve all done or said something like that. So today I want you to think a bit about appearances, specifically about faces, maybe even your own.
I do that because all three of our readings have to do with the faces of Moses and Jesus. And as you heard, their faces shone! No need for mascara or lip gloss here. Their faces shone with the glory of heaven. Moses had been on the top of
A similar change came over Jesus. On the top of what we call the
In both incidents, their faces shine, revealing not just happiness, but a deeper, more profound joy, a certainty of things being as they should be. Attribute it to the presence of God. Call it the appearance in which we will see Jesus in heaven. The face of Moses and the face of Jesus give us a glimpse into the soul and spirit of each of them.
Abraham Lincoln once remarked that everyone over 40 is responsible for his or her own face. Now that’s a daunting thought! But it has a truth to it, doesn’t it? Whatever is in our heart or our character eventually shapes who we are, even to our very appearance.
I read about a couple named John and Amy, two beautiful young people. John was captain of the high school swim team and president of the church youth group. Amy was a member of the National Honor Society. She could have been a model. They were both from well-off families, families active in church. Their faces shone with promise and possibilities.
One day on a youth outing Amy was sitting beside one of the church’s pastors while the other kids were playing volleyball. For some reason, maybe defiance or perhaps an impulse to share a burden, Amy startled her pastor by saying, “I just wanted you to know, pastor, John and I are sleeping together. It’s all right. We love each other and when we get out of school, we are going to marry. I just thought you might like to have this information.”
The pastor was wise enough to know not to lay down a challenging condemnation that would sever the relationship with this young woman, but instead did his best to listen and respond to what she was telling him.
A few weeks later, on a weekend retreat, he noticed that Amy was more distant toward John. And on Saturday evening, quite late, the pastor saw Amy sneaking around with Paul, another boy on the retreat. Later it was apparent that John and Amy had broken up.
Over the next year Amy had several true loves. And then she went off to college. The pastor lost touch for a while, but one day while visiting the town where Amy’s college was located, he ran into her. They talked for a few moments and then she was off, with a new fellow on her arm. “You know it was really quite noticeable to me,” said the pastor. “Amy was still quite an attractive young woman, but there was a difference. There was a time when Amy’s face literally shone with youth and wholesomeness. Now the shine is gone.”
You know what he’s talking about. “The shine is gone.” Now someone is going to protest and ask ‘What about John? How many true loves did he have? Did his face still shine?’ Probably not. But this isn’t really about gender. It isn’t even really about sex. It’s about something far deeper. It is about all those things that catch up with us as we grow older: the disappointments and betrayals, the compromises, fears, and the rest of it. The shine goes. And although these lines on my face, and maybe on yours, are traced there in part, I hope, by love and sacrifice and satisfaction, they are also the marks of pain, loss, and the slow but irresistible approach of death. These lines remind me of a verse in one of Dave Mathews’ songs when he sings, “our flesh, it tires.”
And we come to church on Transfiguration Sunday, hear of the shine on the faces of Moses and Jesus, and are perhaps struck with the distance between us and them. To know that we aren’t very much like either one of them we need only look in the mirror. And that doesn’t strike me as such good news. Thinking about how much of the glow of heaven is on Jesus’ face and how little is on my own is just another reminder of my own sin and unworthiness.
But then I remember another appearance that Jesus’ face took on. The prophet Isaiah foresaw this expression when he wrote, “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him striken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.
What Isaiah foresaw was the face of Jesus on the cross: twisted in pain, covered with blood, sweat and tears, gouged by the crown of thorns on his forehead. And as I visualize that face of Jesus, as painful as it, I see a love even better than the radiance of heaven. This is sometimes called the Great Exchange. Jesus came to take on our lot that we might take on his. He takes on our pain so that we can take on his glory. Good Friday and Easter. Death and life. Condemnation and redemption. Death and rebirth. Good news indeed.
Young faces and old faces. Fresh and glowing, lined and wise. Bursting with energy, tired with the passage of decades. Jesus’ face on the cross. Jesus’ face at Transfiguration. A beauty, isn’t there?, in all of them, but a direction, a trajectory also. In the fulness of time, in God’s good and gracious ways, we too will come to shine with the glory that only His final presence will give us. And give it He will. Peter, James and John got to see that it was coming. Aaron and all the Israelites got a taste and a promise of it too. And because of their witness, we know also that in Jesus Christ, God will indeed bring us to that perfect light which will never falter and never fade. AMEN.
