Unveiled Faces, Kathy Hykes, Last Sunday after the Epiphany--Year C--Feb. 18, 2007

Exodus 34:29-35, Psalm 99, 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2, Luke 9:28-36, (37-43)
“Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord our strength and our redeemer.”
 
“Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God.”
When I was a young woman I took my three children to visit my family in Pennsylvania. On the drive back to North Carolina we stopped for gas in the town of South Hill, Virginia. The three children were rammy and quarrelsome from being in the car so long, so I let everyone out and sent the girls to the restroom.  I kept three year old John next to me to “help” while I filled my tank. Just as the automatic hose clicked that the tank was full, in a split second, John grabbed the hose and pulled it out. As he did this, the gasoline left in the nozzle splashed into his eye.

I picked him up and ran to the restroom, shooed the girls playing in water out of the way and put John’s head under the faucet, holding his eye open as best I could to wash out the gasoline.  With his head dripping wet, and shouting to the girls to follow me, I pleaded with the station owner and auto mechanics to give me explicit directions to the nearest hospital. With John still screaming and the girls tight lipped and ashen and my heart beating ten times its normal rate, in a few minutes we pulled up to the emergency room and tumbled inside. After somewhat calmly describing what had happened and what I had done, the doctor on call took John immediately and flushed the eye, numbing it some to do a thorough wash while I held his sisters and tried to comfort and distract John. After about 20 minutes of this, the doctor sat John up, dried off his face and said you will be just fine now, you are free to go.  Then he turned to me, put his hand on my shoulder and he said, “You are a good mother.”

Up to that moment, mothering was something I did because I had children. I was often preoccupied doing what I considered other important things, “living up to my potential” as we used to say in those days. In fact I was bringing the children home after we had spent that day marching on Constitution Avenue in Washington D.C. pushing John in a stroller; “working to make the world better” I liked to think. I was quite exhilarated by the thousands of people marching in our capitol and spent part of the ride home musing about being active in these events more, wishing I had a bigger role in the whole scheme of things. But now all I could think about was this idea of being a “Good Mother”. It made me feel great. It felt like a great relief. As the children fell asleep in the car after the ordeal, I mulled it over in my mind. It made me feel more satisfied with myself. I could do this. And over time it transformed me. Now I saw myself with fresh eyes: as a good mother. No one had ever said that to me before. My face must have been shining.

I have to say that I saw myself more as a “good enough” mother and still do. But for a while, I tried to do more good mother things with my children, like pitch softballs, and decorate cupcakes. It of course wore off, or they got older and the doctor did not give me any directions for being a good mother to adolescents. So I fell back on “good enough”. But still, I remember that day, and I know I was different after that.  I had more respect for my ordinary life, the scary stuff that could happen in it, and the sense that I had the resources to handle them like no one else could, as reflected in the eyes of a complete stranger.

The story of Moses we read this morning is found in the Book of Exodus, forty chapters of fascinating psychological drama, new nation building, and religious meaning. It begins with the very real life of Moses, his murder of an Egyptian, the Pharaoh’s threat to kill him, his escape, his marriage and his shepherding for his father-in-law where the presence of God is made known to Moses in the startling image of a fire in the bush that does not burn. And after four arguments where Moses outlines all of his shortcomings, he signs on to become God’s mediator in the battle between two forces: a people enslaved to the prevailing earthly power, versus the conviction that real power is in the reality of their covenant with the one God.  You know the rest of the story. From there Moses, with God’s guidance, brings to an end the life of picking straw and baking bricks in Egypt, breaks out of slavery from Pharaoh, marches through the parted Red Sea, across the desert to Mount Sinai where they are able to find just enough manna and water to keep them alive.  Yet every year or so someone says that things were better in slavery because at least we knew where the next meal was coming from.  Every other year or so someone tries to melt all their jewelry to make into a golden calf because it was easier to fall back into the familiar forms of worship than to work out this new way of being a tribe, a people of the one God. God gives Moses the commandments, what he requires of the covenant, so that the Hebrews might live together in a new land, in harmony, but the people rebel. So Moses marches back to be with God, and God calls the people stiff- necked, stubborn and Moses asks God why God would bring them this whole way and kill them all now. There are many conversations and there is no pretense on either side.

Now this is my imagination here, but when the story arrives at this passage, it occurs to me that each time Moses is called back into the presence of God he probably sits still for a while. He does not have to answer to his brother, Aaron, to the priests or anyone else. When Moses is in the presence of God he can take the veil off, the veil of confidence, the veil of conviction, the mantle of leadership, that he must have had to wear to keep this people together as every day life went on. As he hefted the two tablets of stone with the freshly etched rules for organizing a whole new kind of neighborhood, he might have balanced them against his knees while he pulled the gauze over his face to head back amidst the people. He is going to have to be the translator, to carry out God’s plan for a whole new way of different clans and tribes living together, in harmony, as one people after 430 years in a foreign land.  But after being in the presence of God, Moses is practically beside himself with gratitude, with praise that God has helped him bring this people so far. By now Moses knows the measure of himself, but only with God can he be truly known. Moses knew the answer to the existential question; he knew at this point why he was here. After so many visits he knew God was with him to help him and guide him to do God’s will no matter how difficult the task would prove to be. Because when God and Man seek and find each other, there is nothing to do, but breathe deeply and stay very still. Doing this regularly may cause your face to shine.

Where do we find the transforming power of God, the true measure of who we are? What were the moments in our lives when our faces shone, when we felt such joy, such gratitude, when we knew without thinking that God was with us, was present, that we were seeing God as through a veil, that we saw goodness, or beauty, or strength in trouble and knew afterward that we had to praise, give God the glory, because there was no rational explanation we could come up with, because there was no language to describe the feeling. No language. No way to say it, like the Hebrews, it was the breath of life, of goodness, of fire, of light, and they could only breathe Yah -weh, to describe it.  Think on those times of your life, think of when your face was shining. What do those times tell you about yourself? About God? Think on these times, because this is the you without a veil. This is where the ‘spirit of the Lord is, and there is freedom’, as Paul tells the Corinthians.(3:17)

A Peanuts comic strip last week showed Charlie Brown in bed with the covers pulled up looking out at us and he says, “Sometimes when I lie awake at night, and I ask, “Why am I here?” The next frame has him facing the ceiling and he says, “Then a voice answers, “Why, where do you want to be?”

Where do you want to be?

Consider the wisdom of Rabbi Zusya, an early Hasidic leader and Jewish folk hero. Zusya was known as a modest and benevolent man who, despite his meager knowledge of Torah, attained merit because of his innocence and personal righteousness. Before he died he said, ”when I reach the world to come, God will not ask me why I wasn’t more like Moses, He will ask me why I wasn’t more like Zusya.”

Our yearning, our seeking during this church season of the epiphany that is ending is, like Moses’ story, balanced with the One who lives and moves and has our being, seeking us.  I think the story of Moses means that God yearns for us too. Right when we think we are alone, or we cannot handle what we have to do, or we don’t know if we matter, something or someone shows up and reveals God’s presence once again, in the stranger, in the natural world, in the friend.  You are where you need to be, doing what you need to be doing if when you take off your veil in the presence of God you can say Here I am Lord, And simply be ‘astounded at the greatness and mercy of God’.

Amen.
 
Note: The idea of Moses building “a whole new kind of neighborhood” comes from the lectures of Walter Bruggeman. The term “good enough mother” is from child development theory and I don’t know the author’s name anymore. As my late mentor Canon John Diehl used to assure me, “everything we say is ‘tattled’ from somewhere’. The Zusya story I found in The Blessing of the Skinned ?Knee, author’s name forgotten.