Exodus 34: 29-35 (links validated 2/5/25a)
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Sermon Starters (Transfiguration)(C)(2025)
Many college football fans will be familiar with the mosaic mural, affectionately nicknamed ‘Touchdown Jesus” on the side of the Hesburgh Library. Jesus with his arms raised in nearly the same gesture as a referee declaring a successful touchdown, can be seen from the Notre Dame football stadium. But, there is a lesser-known though no less affectionately named statue on the campus of Notre Dame. As a proud former resident of South Bend, Indiana I remember the first time I saw “First Down Moses” outside the library. While his hand is raised, almost certainly in a gesture intended to draw our attention to God and almost certainly not intended to look like a referee calling a “first down,” that is not the strangest or most relevant aspect of the statute. The face of the 17 foot bronze sculpture has two prominent protrusions around the temple region of his skull. This is commonly thought to be based on a mistranslation of this week’s Lectionary text. Where we are told that Moses came down from the mountain with a shining or radiant face, the word might also be translated “horned face.” Indeed, much Medieval art depicts this mistranslation, which is likely where the 20th century sculptor got his idea.
Resources from 2022 to 2024
Sermon Starters (Transfiguration)(C)(2022)
In her book Speaking of Sin, Barbara Brown Taylor has a chapter that bears the rather startling title, “Sin Is Our Only Hope.” It seems an oddly perverse title and yet Brown Taylor makes a good point. After all, if we look around us in life, we see so much that is painful. We see children abused and spouses cheated on. We see corporate greed and wanton pollution of God’s beautiful earth. We see people who have fried their brains with cocaine and drunk drivers who run down children playing hopscotch on a sidewalk. We see suicide bombings that reduce precious human bodies, the very temple of God’s Spirit, to so many severed limbs and organs. If there is no such thing as sin–and what’s more, if there is no God who can declare a definitive judgment on what is sinful–then there is no hope that anything can be salvaged. Sin is our only hope because if sin exists, then so does sin’s opposite: namely, a moral goodness to which God can restore us. But if there is no sin, then there is nothing to hope for because there never was any better world from which we fell away in the first place. If there was once what John Milton called a “paradise lost,” then there is the possibility that a gracious God can make possible a “paradise regained.” But if there is no sin, there is no paradise to restore because life turns out to be just a booming, buzzing confusion with no right, no wrong, and no God to tell the difference.Desmond Tutu Transfigured
Scroll down the page for this resource.Asked by the BBC to identify the defining moment in his life, Desmond Tutu spoke of the day he and his mother were walking down the street. Tutu was 9 years old. A tall white man dressed in a black suit came toward them. In the days of apartheid in South Africa, when a black person and a white person met while walking on a footpath, the black person was expected to step into the gutter to allow the white person to pass — and nod his or her head as a gesture of respect. But that day, before a young Tutu and his mother could step off the sidewalk, the white man stepped off the sidewalk. And as they passed, he tipped his hat in a gesture of respect to her! The white man was Trevor Huddleston, an Anglican priest who was bitterly opposed to apartheid. It changed Tutu’s life. When his mother told him that Trevor Huddleston had stepped off the sidewalk because he was a “man of God,” Tutu found his calling. “When she told me that he was an Anglican priest I decided there and then that I wanted to be an Anglican priest too,” he said. “And what is more, I wanted to be a man of God.” Huddleston later became a mentor to Tutu; his commitment to the equality of all human beings due to their creation in God’s image was a key driver in Tutu’s opposition to apartheid...
Mountains and Valleys
Bob was 18 when he was asked to be a counselor at a church camp for junior highs, and it was a tough week. He wasn’t used to the woods, and the night sounds of mice and owls startled him and kept him awake. Like most teens, he liked to sleep late and getting up early (especially with his sleep interrupted!) wasn’t easy, either. The camp director and other counselors made fun of his morning crabbiness, forcing him to hide his feelings behind pleasantness. And, the boys in his cabin were busy testing his limits each day. Yet, each day he loved it more and more. The hardships were overshadowed by the sheer joy of finding himself atop a bluff, reading aloud from the Psalms, “I will lift my eyes unto the hills...” and the eager report of a camper that 15 minutes stretched out on the grass taught him that “ants build highways, and isn’t it neat that God made them so small and so smart?” By the end of the week, he had come to really love the kids and was thrilled to see several campers give their lives to God around the campfire. He returned home radiant, eager to tell family and church friends about this experience. But family and friends weren’t all that interested. Some even made fun of him, and welcomed him “back to the real world.” “It’s so hard to communicate the beauty of what happened out there,” he complained to his pastor. “And it’s true, I wish I could feel that way all the time! How do you cope, coming home from such a great experience?” With his pastor’s help, Bob did manage to translate that mountain-top experience into daily prayer, Bible reading and meditation. He did learn how to keep in contact with God. And eventually, he learned how to communicate that experience to others—in fact, he became a parish pastor, teaching and guiding people every day into a vital relationship with God...
Resources from 2019 to 2021
Transfiguration (C)(2019)
The Medieval mystics had one goal in their lives of contemplation and discipline—to attain the Beatific Vision, to see God in all God’s glory. Few people have that goal these days. But we still love glory– substitute glory like the glory of sports, reflected glory in spectacular sunsets, attributed glory where there seems to be none. In that last phrase, I’m thinking of the glory some people see in, say, warfare. Most Americans don’t think about the historical context that gave birth to that great patriotic hymn, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” As the slaughter that was the Civil War broke out, Julia Ward Howe took a popular tune and gave it new words that came to her in a rush. So, the victory of the North over the South became an occasion of glory, an Epiphany. “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord….” The song even ends connecting the Civil War with the work of Christ. It is human, I suppose, to claim the Lord as our ally and see his glory in our cause. But we must be careful. We see the glory of God in the face of Christ most powerfully in his crucifixion for “poor ornery sinners like you and like I.”Moons or Volcanoes?
my father once told a story about a teacher in India who was the chief speaker at a large student gathering. After the event, a Hindu student came up to him and said: “Sir I like your talks, but I don’t like your bringing Christ into them. Why can’t you leave him out?” The speaker replied, “How can I leave Christ out? He is everything to me. Without him I could not have faced life and its difficulties. If I have to put up with persecution and ostracism and even physical violence at the hands of my people, it is because Christ is all in all to me. To ask me to leave Christ out is to ask me to stop breathing — for he is my life.”...The Reasons for Veils (Exodus & 2 Corinthians)
What is the purpose of a veil? Is it to conceal? It is to reveal in part? Is it to protect? It is to hint? The story of the veil worn by Moses is told in Exodus (34:29-35) and then is referenced by Paul in II Corinthians 3:12-4:2. Over the course of those two texts, the veil is examined in a variety of ways...
Resources from 2013 to 2018
Veiled Attempts
In southeast Texas, where I once served, there is a special school – the Hughen School – for very sick children, most of whom have few or no motor skills. One very sick boy lived at that school, dying by degrees. Tragic as that could be, that is not the reason for telling this story. Children get grievously ill every day. It is one of the unhappy yet constant facts of human life on earth. But this little boy had the good fortune to be living in the same community with some faithful believers who took the story of God’s own shining in the world to be their story. God’s glory lived in them to the degree that they carried it with them where they went. A group of these people joined together to go to that child every day and read to him. Knowing that he was slowly dying, unable to move or read for himself, it was the only activity that comforted him. The social workers were amazed. Just being read to by three ladies, taking turns, one every day, transformed him from a depressed and despondent child into a responsive person whose spark of life, though soon to leave him, grew brighter, not dimmer. The boy died eventually, as we all must die. But his life had been forever transfigured by the ministry of caring Christian people. Their lives had been changed as well. I can assure you, with my own eyes I saw them glowing...Beyond the Veil: Sneaking a Peek at Our True Selves
Several years ago I read a feminist critique of Reinhold Niebuhr's account of the Sin of Pride which I found fascinating. The Sin of Hiding was written by Susan Nelson Dunfee, and she argues that pride is largely a problem encountered by men, who try to make themselves bigger or more important than they really are. Because they are enculturated differently, women tend to go in the other direction, making themselves smaller and less significant. Dunfee argues that, far from this being the virtue of humility, it's actually another sin - the Sin of Hiding...
Resources from the Archives
Chains of Love
Over the weekend we learned about love in Iraq. Our guests were our new refugee friends from Iraq, Ziyad and Ghadah, who explained to us that their marriage was arranged by their parents. Ziyad is very much in favor of arranged marriages, explaining that parents love their children and want the very best for them, and sometimes the parents make better decisions that young lovers do. That's hard to argue with. Some of the parents in the room wanted to pick their children's spouses too. It was a very traditional courtship. Ziyad did not speak to Ghadah alone until after they were engaged. And Ghadah wore a hijab, which is a headscarf worn by Muslim women, sometimes including a veil that covers the face except for the eyes. Some Muslim women wear a burqa, which is a loose, usually black or light blue robe that covers the body from head to toe. I think all of us were fascinated by these veils worn by the women. One of our Muslim guests said that she wore a hijab when she came to the states, and a woman came up to her and said, "Listen, honey, you don't have to wear that anymore because you are in America now!" But Ghadah and the other Muslim women explained to us that wearing these veils was not a dishonor, but rather an honor. It fulfilled the Islamic requirement of modesty, but it was also a way of saving their beauty for their husband. She said it was like having a beautiful diamond that you didn't show everybody, but saved it for only special people to see. After all this talk about Muslim veils, I was surprised when I looked closely at our text for today and discovered that Paul mentions veils in this text five times!...Transfiguration (C)(2010)
("In her book Speaking of Sin, Barbara Brown Taylor has a chapter that bears the rather startling title, 'Sin Is Our Only Hope'. It seems an oddly perverse title and yet Brown Taylor makes a good point. After all, if we look around us in life, we see so much that is painful. We see children abused and spouses cheated on...")It Takes One to Know One
("A storeowner put up a sign 'Puppies for Sale'. A young boy asked, 'How much?' 'Fifty dollars,' the owner answered. 'Can I see them?' The owner whistled, and from the back of the store came mama with five balls of fur tagging along behind. One pup was lagging behind the others, and the boy noticed it was limping...")