The problem of bullshit religion

Jesus didn't like it either

I know I promise no sermons in this platform called No Sermons. But I do want to share what I’m preaching tomorrow at St. James, my home parish. This is partly because I have a lot of Christian readers, and it’s partly because I also have a lot of non-Christian readers. The former are invited to ruminate on my topic today because here at the end of Epiphany this is laid out in the appointed readings. (For you civilians, the readings are scheduled by liturgical season in what’s called the ‘Lectionary’.) For the latter, I share this because I keep seeing the problem of fake Christianity come up in social media. It comes up a lot lately, for political reasons that we all understand.

The thrust of this talk is ‘transformation’. To say it in different language, it’s about toxic religiosity masquerading as religion. Jesus is famous for having let everybody off the hook whenever they’d done something bad. He forgave a lot. But he was harsh about this thing. Every time it came up, he got genuinely pissed – once to the point of violence. It was on religious hypocrisy that he had no mercy. Non-Christians are right to call us out on this when they see it. Jesus did too.

Here are the salient parts of the readings:

Exodus 34:29-35 (exerpt):

As he came down from the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God. … When [he] had finished speaking with [the people] he put a veil on his face; but whenever Moses went in before the Lord to speak with him, he would take the veil off.

2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2 (exerpt):

We act with great boldness, not like Moses, who put a veil over his face to keep the people of Israel from gazing at the end of the glory that was being set aside. … Indeed, to this very day, when they hear the reading of the old covenant, that same veil is still there, since only in Christ is it set aside. … And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image; … for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.

Luke 9:28-36 (exerpt):

Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazling white. Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him.

And here’s what I’m saying tomorrow.

‘Today in Scripture we learn that when you talk with God, face-to-face, your own face gets all shiny. And everybody sees that – unless there’s a veil in the way – and they know from this that you’ve been talking with God. And that makes them want to listen.

Scripture is funny. It comes to us as a literary form, or collection of literary forms. It’s full of imagery, and allusions, and rhetorical devices that are probably opaque to us most of the time. And it’s easy to take them all literally, and it’s easy to get distracted, and not be sure what the intended message is. You have to adjust to the way the ancients said things, so that you understand them.

Imagine people 2,000 years from now trying to interpret a Pizza Hut menu. Or an episode of The Simpsons. David MacAuley wrote a very funny book about this some years ago. It was called Motel of the Mysteries. It was a spoof archeological report, in which people in the future dug up a Best Western and completely misunderstood it. All those chambers in a circle, as I recall, were monastic cells, and this was a cloister, and there was a central worship space called ‘Office’.

All these shiny faces, on Mount Sinai … all these glowing bodies, on Mount Tabor. Did they really shine? Did they really glow? I don’t pretend to know.

Did they have to light up, just because God was making himself known there, face-to-face? Maybe not, if the account of Jesus making himself known on his resurrection from the Easter tomb is any evidence. That was a God-encounter moment. Victorian paintings love making him glow when he emerges. But eyewitnesses didn’t say he did. Nobody said his face shone. They actually thought he was the gardener, they thought he was some guy walking along a road. Angels glowed there, but he didn’t. Nor did the Apostles in response. So you don’t have to radiate light just because you’re in the presence of God, I guess.

But here’s what does have to happen in the presence of God, and our Luke, or pseudo-Luke, is very clear on this:

You have to transform.

In the unmediated presence of God, a human being cannot but change.

That’s the message in our readings today. That’s what Luke, or whoever wrote as Luke, meant to say. Whoever he was, that author, he knew the story of shining-Moses on Sinai. He also knew about Lazarus later on, on Sinai. And he tells the story about Mount Tabor with Jesus glowing, and Moses probably glowing with him, and also Lazarus likely glowing too.

He’s not talking about glowing; he’s talking about transformation. The fact that these people are there together, and are visibly different all of a sudden, contains the message, whatever the physical event actually looked like.

The message is that where God is, anywhere in time, transformation happens.

And boy, does it. Everywhere. Look what happened to Paul. Paul/Saul, the killer. We forget that he was a murderer before he met Jesus. Look what happened to Thomas. Look at all the Apostles who saw Jesus resurrected. They may not have seen glowing faces, but they sure saw something, or experienced it, and that turned them into gentle fanatics, for the rest of their violently shortened lives. Look at Mary. She only needed an angel presence to capitulate to God.

Divinity is like that, and we’re built to receive it, to recognise it … and we cannot but be changed by it, transformed. THAT is the full message, the rest of the message, of Epiphany. The season we’re ending now. This season started with everybody discovering Jesus, and knowing who he was – the Persians, local Hebrews like the humble Simeon, and everyone else. Here is God, is the message. Now the season comes to its fulfilment with the effect of this revelation. The beginning of the astonishing power in the world of God With Us.

It's still here. We see transformations to this day, whenever God arrives. People’s testimonies are full of them. That’s … kind of the point of testimonies. Sometimes they’re dramatic. You’ll see truly awful people completely turn around, and be truly wonderful people, for the rest of their lives. And you can tell by what they do that they really did get transformed. You can tell just by being around them. Their transformations were the real deal. It still happens.

So here arises something that I want to emphasize.

And this is a part of our Epiphany Scriptures today that we can miss easily.

It’s the fact that we can tell when transformations happen. We who are watching.

It isn’t just that transformations happen … it’s that transformations happen and we can perceive them, in ourselves and other people, and evaluate them for how real they are.

2 Corinthians today makes exactly this point, and very adroitly. We are aware of the glory of the Lord IN EACH OTHER, ‘reflected in a mirror’. That’s the language. We see the glory. We don’t mistake their reflected light for the source of that light. We’re born with the eyes to see it and to understand what’s going on.

And this makes sense. We would have to be built to see it, as children of God, however fallen we may be. We must be able to know our maker, and know our maker’s ways reflected in each other’s radiant faces. This goes for the unchurched, too – and let’s remember, we all were once unchurched ourselves. The non-Christians know divinity when they see it. It’s non-Christians who chide us official Christians when they see us do un-Christian things. I don’t think it’s cynicism when they hold us to what we say. I think it’s a dim awareness, and a wish, that what we proclaim is right. It’s non-Christians who have enough innate discernment to recognise Jesus when they find him, like we did, and become Christians themselves. We humans can see, and evaluate, God-induced transformation. It is given to us to be able to do that.

You’re actually looking right now at a once-unchurched person who capitulated to Jesus through this very mechanism.

I believe I’ve always known Jesus, back to my baby crib. I can remember him there. But when I became official, when I had my Damascene moment, this was when I was in high school … it was the shining example of about three magnificent Christians that ignited me. It was being around them that did it. I saw light in these people, and I knew it was reflected from some source, just like it’s described in our epistle today, and I wanted that source. More accurately, without knowing exactly what I meant, I wanted to be transformed.

And I was.

You know how I know I was transformed? You know how I know that my capitulation to Jesus was the real McCoy?

It’s because I remember being absolutely helpless with it. I had to capitulate when Jesus came. I wasn’t interested any longer in NOT being with this … light, I guess I’ll call it.

And because I’ve gotten worse ever since then. Every year, every season of my life I’m mercifully more captive to him.

I know that you know exactly what I’m talking about. My story is no more remarkable than anyone else’s in this room. It may be LESS remarkable. All of us know a lot about ‘transformation’ here.

So, I had a thought. Because we know a lot about the transformation that comes when we meet God face-to-face, I thought that, even though this isn’t exactly in our Epiphany readings today, wouldn’t be a nifty thing to look at this notion of being captive to Jesus, and mentally compare some notes.

Just for a minute.

Let’s ask ourselves, what does it mean when a person transforms? What do you look for when you’re evaluating somebody’s response, or our own response, to an approach by God?

Are there features that show you that yes, that God-encounter was the real deal? Were there any changes in us, in other words?

Richard Rohr is very unhelpful on this question. I went and looked. He says you Just Know when you’ve encountered God and been transformed.

Good ol’ St. Paul is much more helpful. He says – and he’s the only guy to use the word ‘transformation’ in the whole New Testament – that you’re transformed when you’re no longer conformed to the ways of the world. That’s in Romans 12.

I’m gonna be even more helpful, and offer three things that seem to me to be evidence that we’re changed when, in one way or another, we’ve encountered God. In other words, three forms of evidence that it was indeed God. Three … I dunno … three colors of light of the Spirit reflected in us. (There’s my poetic language for the day.)

One of them is readiness to accept what we see when God comes to us, the way it comes; the second is about no longer trying to force this seeing-journey, or control it in any way; and the third is having a sudden and unslakable hunger for more understanding, a new desire to grow, continually, and to keep welcoming it.

These, to me, are evidence that a person has had a transformational experience of God, and not just some emotional moment about God.

Let me unpack.

Number one. Think about the people you have known who you really, really feel, in your bones, are Spirit-filled and mature people of God. The real thing. Think about the experience of being with them. Did they ever tell you what you’re supposed to see, as you mature spiritually? Or have they been more interested in your ability to see? Have they told you what to see, or have they shown you how to see? Is life with them like going to catechism? Is it a study session where you memorise Articles of Faith? Or have they walked you into life in the Spirit? Allowed you feel it, the warmth of their reflected light? Living the Gospel is not group-joining. Transformation is not rules. Let’s remember, the devil himself ‘believes’ the Nicene Creed. Did these people show you how to see?

Second, have these people in whose reflected light you’ve been prodded you in the direction of enlightenment projects? Have they, or have you, even with pious intentions, tried to build up your spirituality? Y’know … get right with God, and all that. People do this, and it’s not evidence of a transformed self. I kid you not, I saw once, in one of those personal life-organiser books in a Franklin Covey store, a tabbed section called ‘My Spiritual Planner’. If so, how is this like the Apostles? Isn’t a real journey to faith actually a willingness to unlearn things? To unbuild edifices? To concede powerlessness? It may seem religious to engineer oneself into a godly person. It seemed religious at the time to build the tower at Babel, too. Deciding how we’re going to approach God, rather than how we’ll make ourselves receptive to God, is really just a skyward projection of Us. It’s ego-driven, and it’s almost, allllmost adversarial in its way. Or at least confrontational. Or transactional. That’s evidence-area number two. Are you doing this, or is God doing this?

And third, is there now a life habit, whatever form it may take, of living into the reality of God, the God of the big encounter? I don’t mean, is there some program of activities or anything. But has prayer changed? Has the kind of praying changed? Are there things like contemplation happening? Is there art, music, or some new way of exploring God? Have horizons broadened themselves? Is there change? Change that seems natural as breathing now? If we don’t feel transformed, or seem transformed … you know what? We probably aren’t.

I offer these thoughts here, at the close of Epiphany. I share with you my experience of trying to understand the way God comes to us, and the way we respond. I don’t take issue with shiny faces, or anything. I take joy in the fact that God does come to us, and that we do respond.

Amen.’