What We Can Gain

2 Corinthians 4:3-6

And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake. For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness’, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

It’s Transfiguration Sunday—the day we celebrate the theophany on the mountain, the day we celebrate Jesus revealing himself to be fully divine to his awe-struck and dumbfounded disciples— so why then, did Alison just read this short, odd, defensive verse from Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians? Why is this the passage we’re reading on Transfiguration Sunday?

Well, the first answer is—it was a lectionary options, I’ve already preached on all the gospel versions of the Transfiguration, and I wanted to do something different, and this was actually the best choice. But the real theological answer is this veil Paul writes of. What ties this passage to the story of that glorious mountaintop moment is this idea of a veil obscuring the word. In the chapter before this short passage, Paul talks about Moses coming down from the mountain after communing with God, his bright, shining face—it was so bright that his people couldn’t handle looking directly at him, so Moses put on a veil to obscure this divine light from frightening his people. Now, the reason Paul is writing all of this to the Corinthians this time around is that there’s been a challenge to Paul’s authority—since his first visits and letters to Corinth, an offshoot this new Christian faith made up of Jewish-Christians seem to have gotten to the Corinthians—this is the best scholars have been able to piece together—that his group seems to lean a little too heavily on Jewish law and customs, and Paul believes they are obscuring the true Word, the true message of what Jesus came to this world to do.

Now, I want to remind us of last week’s sermon from a passage in First Corinthians—remember, we talked about then about the fact that  Paul was ultimately meeting people where they were in life, not forcing anything they weren’t yet ready for—in fact he was known for being completely fine with Jewish-Christian converts continuing to practice and study Torah… this passage today doesn’t feel quite so open-minded and accommodating. We (and by “we” I mean we preachers) always have to watch out for the fact that in some of Paul’s writings, it's sadly easy to preach in a way that could veer into antisemitism, so I want to make it clear here that Paul is writing to a group of Gentiles—people who have never studied the Torah before, people who are no Jewish. So it’s unlikely that Paul is insinuating here that the law is unimportant, or that we should get rid of Jewish ideals and theology altogether. I believe he's worried that this other sect will undermine him to the point in which the story and concept of Jesus himself will be lost to these Gentiles who have no context for any of this, really.

And so we should absolutely not take this passage as Paul saying that the Jewish religion should be forgotten— Paul is writing in a very anxious and somewhat defensive tone here. This new Jesus movement is still very new, and it’s vulnerable to all different types of people trying to subvert it and mold it in ways that would benefit themselves, rather than all. It’s also believed that this letter was written after someone in the Corinthian Christian community deeply offended Paul in some way. So he’s coming from a place of hurt and anxiety here.

Now I say that Christianity was vulnerable in Paul’s day, as this new faith movement, but in reality, it’s just as vulnerable today. The basic tenet of Christianity of Love—loving your neighbor as yourself, the greatest gift of all being Love, championing the meek and the oppressed—these ideals have clearly been pushed aside by so many powerful Christians in favor of something that barely resembles what Christianity is supposed to be, the type of communal, faith and love-driven religion about which Paul was trying so hard to educate people. He was terrified about the possibility of Christianity being corrupted by those who did not fully understand it. And sadly, it seems his fear was not unfounded. We currently have people in the highest reaches of power using some false version Christianity to justify their own bigotry and hatred, to justify keeping in place hierarchical status-quos—and in some cases, to justify not only keeping the status-quo, but even going backwards taking away the rights of women and queer folks so that they can solidify and consolidate their power over those they see as less-than.

Now, let’s move to what this Sunday is all about—the Transfiguration. When Jesus takes a could disciples up the mountaintop, and he is shown to them as a radiant, glowing being, and God speaks and makes it known that Jesus is indeed the savior. In the story, Peter, who Daun Smith always lovingly referred to as a golden retriever, gets way too excited about what he’s just witnessed and insists on building some shelters, or monuments to commemorate the moment. But this is the old way of celebrating. Peter was so confused and excited that he fell back on the familiar, fell back on what was comfortable. It was emblematic of the issues the disciples continued to have during their time following Jesus— they were constantly either unwilling or unable to understand that Jesus was doing something completely and entirely new, and the old ways would no longer suffice.

This is what Paul was afraid of— the Corinthians were already struggling to rid themselves out the power dynamics of the society they were subjugated by and now he sees another group of people coming in to undermine and confuse his teachings even more. And the Corinthians are understandably confused! Wouldn’t you be? It’s impossible to not be influence by the society in which one lives, and they’re living under Roman occupation, so they have that influencing them; then Paul tells them everything they’re doing wrong; and then they have these new Jewish-Christians coming in telling them all these laws they have to adhere to. So now Paul is being accused of complicating the gospel, of veiling it, because the Corinthians are just overwhelmed by all this information. And let’s be real, Paul can be a little verbose.

So Paul tells them, no, no, no, I’m not the one veiling the gospel—but then he doesn’t blame the Corinthians, or even the interlopers who were trying to undermine him—he blames the “god of this world.” Now this is the only time any kind of “Satan” figure is referred to this way, as a lower-case “g” god. And I think in many cases, this could be considered a cop-out, right? The devil made me do it, it wasn’t my fault! But I actually like this a lot—because I think the god of this world can be so many things. I think for a lot of people it’s money. I think for a lot of people it’s social media. I think for a lot of people is jealousy, it’s materialism, it’s fear of the unknown or the different. And it doesn’t mean we take no responsibility for our shortcomings or our mistakes; rather, we work on being aware of our limitations, our “growing edges” as we called them in chaplaincy training, and we work with them and past them to get to a better place, in which, in our cases, we can become better, more understanding Christians.

So what does veil us form the gospel? What does obscure the Word of Christ for us? What in this world corrupts Christianity, turns it into something it should never have become? What god of this world, what idol is blinding believers and unbelievers alike? In Moses’ day, it was a literal veil that had to be used because his people were just not ready to see any likeness of God. When it comes to the Transfiguration story, it was that shelter that Peter so desperately wanted to build, the old ways taking away from this incredible thing that just happened. In our passage today, it’s the god of this world, whatever that may be to those Paul is speaking of, blinding people to the true message of Christ.

Lent is coming up— this week! And so this is a perfect time to really think about what in our lives is separating us from God, what gods of this world are making us anxious, fearful, angry, and taking us away from the feeling of the unconditional Love of God. Admittedly, I haven’t given up much for Lent over these past few years. And more and more I’m less moved by the idea of giving something up, as opposed to adding something to our lives.

I’ve talked about this in sermons on more than one occasion, but my biggest weakness as not just a pastor, but a Christian, is my private prayer life, or lack thereof. I have such a hard time turning off the noise in my brain to really sit and meditate or by. And to add to this, since being pregnant and having Frankie, my sacred time spent walking or hiking out in the woods has decreased quite a bit. And when I don’t get that time, run a little wild—and the gods of this world that have a tendency to draw me farther from God are ones of anxiety sometimes verging on despair that can come from doomscrolling news articles or tiktoks on my phone. So I think for this Lent, rather than giving anything up, I’m going to try to add being outside, being peacefully active in some capacity to my life— really, try to find something that takes me away from the harmful monotony of sitting and endlessly scrolling.

It's hard to change our ways, even when we know they’ll benefit us. It’s hard to break bad habits, to start new ones—even when Peter on the mountaintop saw the most incredible thing he could have ever imagined, he immediately fell back to the old ways, fell back on what he knew and was comfortable with. In today’s passage, Corinthians are balking at much of what Paul is asking of them, of the sacrifices he’s asking them to make. They’re hard-pressed to give up whatever kind of new status they were beginning to mistakenly cultivate within their new Christian faith, so much so that they’re even entertaining new belief systems that might fit their comfort levels better.

Because that’s just it, right? We have a tendency to stick to what is easy or what we know, even if it’s not serving us, or those around us. I was reading Christian Wiman’s book of essays the other day, My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer, and I want to read you a passage from it that really spoke to me, and I think really speaks to today’s message—

Be certain that your expressions of regret about your inability to rest in God do not have a tinge of self-satisfaction, even self-exaltation to them, that your complaints and your anxieties are not merely a manifestation of your dependence on them. There is nothing more difficult to outgrow than anxieties that have become useful to us, whether as explanations for a life that never quite finds its true force or direction…or as a kind of reflexive secular religion that, paradoxically, unites us with others in a shared sense of complete isolation: you feel at home in the world only by never feeling at home in the world.

Paul was so deeply worried that the Corinthians were going to fall back on what they knew, or fall back on something that was easier for them to understand that would, in turn, isolate that from one another, from Paul, and isolate then from God. This "shared sense of isolation” Wiman writes of is so dangerous, and so easy to fall into. It’s easy to become dependent on our own anxieties and fears rather than on the Love of God. So this Lent, rather than think about what we can give up, let’s think about what we can gain. Let’s think of ways we can feel more community and kinship with one another, and in turn, God’s Love and light.

“God said ‘Let the light shine out of darkness,’” and so this Lent, let’s make sure we don’t obscure that light. Amen.