Transfiguration 2013 Lk. 9, 2 Cor. 3, 4, Ex. 34

Before the internet, I heard an expression, you can’t judge a book by its cover. For intorverts, we said that still waters run deep. Our vision and ability to judge is severely limited. Here we are in the season of epiphany, the season revelation, of manifestation.It hit me hard this year that this Sunday forms a frame with Epiphany Sunday. the Magi did not grasp fully what was revealed to them through the stars, but now the disciples see firsthand a revelation of the full reality of Jesus through resurrection eyes. So we move back to Epiphany and forward to the resurrection. I think of transfiguration as an inner change made visible to others. Quite simply, Jesus Christ unveils, reveals the nature of God and of being fully human in this tough, but wonderful world.

Moses was in such close contact with the deity that his face shone, so he veiled the luster. It was a protective device to allow the people to quell their fear. Paul twists the story a bit and sees it as keeping the people in the dark. We live in a time when we have seen the thick veils placed over the heads of women in Afghanistan. the veil obscures their sight and of course obscures the sight of those looking at them in public.Paul goes on to make the excellent religious point that we all have the full relgious truth veiled from us, due to our mortality, the limits of our understanding and ability to apprehend the gravitas of God.In more stark negative terms, sin is a veil over our hearts and minds. It prevents us from seeing things with any sense of objectivity.It is at the root of our willingness to accord personal virtue ot our successes and personal fault to the fialures of outhers, the blaming of situation for our failures and attributing luck to the success of others.

Paul then says that we are on the road to clarity due to the way of Jesus Christ. The burka is gone, and we what we are meant for:freedom, freedom to live as god has envisioned us.Where the spirit of God is, there is freedom-Freedom transfigures people and whole societies. The very word freedom is a transfiguration of the meaning of the human. We are not made to be slaves but free people. years ago in a Star Trek episode they encounter a primitive group of people and the leader says, “Freedom-that is worship word.” Yes, given human nature, we often abuse it. Do we mean freedom from, or freedom to? What opposite of freedom would God’s spirit be opposed to? Christian freedom is exercised in the freed from bondage to powers other than God. Christian life is not only the moment of conversion, but it is the lifelong transformation of the self to more and more resemble Jesus Christ. It affords us the opportunity to become whom god envisions us to be at our best.

Freedom reveals who we are and meant to be. Years ago a project was called Free to Be, You and Me. We rarely live that out, do we? Instead we lived behind veils as impenetrable as any awful burka. We build up so many defenses, so many facades, that we don’t recognize ourselves after a while. We are convinced that no one can accept us as we are, who we are, so we hide behind a variety of veils and try to match them to what we think they may want of us.We then go so far as to try to deny to others the freedom to be themselves, the people God intends.