Shiny

This is the homily delivered by Rev. Don Van Antwerpen to the congregations of Unfinished Community and Ashiya Christian Church on Sunday, March 2, 2025, drawing from Exodus 34:29-25 and 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2.

It has never been much of a secret that I never really “fit in” in the United States; truth be told, that’s probably why I’m so comfortable not living and working in the U.S. now. These days, after living in Japan for so long, it isn’t all that obvious; that I don’t fit in back home. After all, to nearly anyone who I might bump into on the street I’m as American as they come; loud, brash, eccentric, English-speaking, and very obviously overweight. And after living here for a while, it’s easy for me to start thinking that way as well, to start imagining that I do fit in, that I am just like everyone else.

And then I go back.

Now I haven’t been back in a looooong time of course, but I still remember the first time I went back, after having lived here for several years. I was excited, even eager, in a way I had never been at any other point in my life, to see the people I knew, to speak to other Americans; to go to a church very much like then one I grew up in, and to stand in those places again. But when I got off the plane, went back to my old hometown, and started talking with people again…it became profoundly weird, very quickly. 

It’s called “reverse culture shock;” when you return to your home culture, only to realize that your time living in another culture has changed you more than you realized, and that you don’t totally fit in at home anymore. And this is way more intense when you didn’t really fit in all that well in the first place! And while there is much said about how changed you have become, how changed you feel, I have found that very little is ever said about how people react to the person you have become. 

People, even people you’ve known your entire life, now confront you with this weird kind of cognitive dissonance; the person they remember you as being now at odds with the person they’re seeing before them. I’ve seen people get angry, because they expect you to be exactly the same person they remember; unchanged and unaltered entirely from the person they’ve held in stasis in their memories. They expect you to be not who you really are, but this person who is years behind you, out of step with your reality by an untold number of experiences, encounters, and moments of personal growth; a relic, frozen in time and memory.

So not only is the world to which you have returned almost unrecognizable to you, but the people in it can barely recognize you either. Because change has happened. Regeneration. Transfiguration. And now you have to make a choice, a hard choice; do you continue living and acting in that space as the person you are now, or do you choose to regress a bit, to live into their expectations, tamping down on your newness to avoid trampling on their expectations, to avoid the discomfort, fear, and confusion of those you have come to see? 

This is, as you can probably guess, much the same question Moses had to face when he came down that mountain. Moses had just spent time in the presence of God, which is something that nobody can walk away from quite the same as they were before; it changes someone to be in the presence of perfect love, seeing clearly before you what love actually looks like. It reorients you, rearranges you, forever changes who you are as a person. Moses didn’t yet realize it, but his face was shining as he walked down that mountain!

Truth be told, I kinda like to imagine him strutting, even skipping down the mountainside, so full of joy he must have been at the end of that meeting! But when he got down to his people he realized that his exuberance wasn’t shared by all; his friends, his colleagues, even his own brother were scared out of their minds. They wouldn’t even come near him!

Because he was changed. Different. Strange, to their eyes. 

And Moses…well, he had a decision to make. Allow the people around him to be discomforted, disturbed, even angry at seeing who he become - changed by his time in the presence of God’s impossible, reality-breaking love - or hide it. Conceal it. Cover it up, so that the people could see who they expected to see, rather than the new and improved, re-invented, transfigured person God had placed before them. 

He spoke with them. He really tried, but at the end of the meeting with the leaders of the congregation…Moses decided that he would have to cover himself, hide himself, conceal who he was, only ever revealing the fullness of himself before God, so that the people could be comfortable enough to see him, and perhaps to hear him still. 

Moses dealt with this situation like a lot of us do, and I would argue wrongly; he veiled himself, covered up who he was so that those who were looking at him would see instead who they remembered him being before he had spent time in the presence of God. He edited himself, conformed himself to the standards of the world, turned down the brightness of the light that was shining out from him, so that he would fit into the preexisting mindsets of a world that wasn't ready to accept how radical God's love truly is.

This was the choice that Paul took issue with, what he describes here in 2nd Corinthians, albeit fully-loaded with a lifetime of his own unexamined bigotry and bias behind him. If we extract Paul from his biases here (or, if you prefer, should we ask Paul to restate himself after having finished his Good Place examination), we might find Paul more clearly explaining that Moses’ decision to intentionally hold back the glory of the Lord that was shining out from him may have made things easier for him, may have facilitated easier communication with the leadership and the people, may have spared them all an full-on unmitigated public freakout at the revelation of just who and what Moses had become for his time spent in the presence of God, but that choice came at the cost of the message God had intended to communicate through him. 

In veiling himself, Moses presented them a dampened, flawed, imperfect image of God’s shining light, depriving them of the necessary conflict we all face when our own imperfection is starkly contrasted with God’s perfection. When we witness another changed by God’s love - real, perfect, divine, love.- it’s a lot like what our friends and family experience the we come home from years living abroad. Seeing someone changed like that throws our own lives into stark relief, highlights all the ways in which we could have changed, could have grown, could have improved ourselves, but instead chose not to in favor of safety, security, comfort, or ready access to a Pizza Hut. 

And that can be infuriating, sure. But necessarily infuriating. 

Because change - whether its our change or the change of others - doesn’t come unprompted and out of nowhere. Change never happens without a reason. Change doesn’t come, can’t come unless there is some kind of motivation to change, unless we recognize that which is within ourselves which isn’t right, which isn’t working, and which is fundamentally incompatible with the bright and shiny glory of God. In order for change to occur - real, positive, necessary, change - there must first be a very real kind of culture shock, both for ourselves and for those around us. 

We need to let the glory of God discomfort people, We need to allow that brightness to shine unrestricted, unobstructed, and uninhibited. We need to surrender our very understandable fears that people might not understand, that people might not like who we have become, that people might not accept us, respect us, or even care for the people we are now, changed by the presence of that Love which shines so brightly in the darkness. 

As Christians, Jesus is our revelation, given to us straight, unfiltered and blazingly clear; bright and shiny as the sun. And it’s on us to reflect that love clearly, without obstruction, without a veil, and to bear the discomfiture that must necessarily go with it.  

Love hard enough to piss people off. Love powerfully enough that people are shocked by your decisions. Love confusingly enough that people have absolutely no idea what is going on. Love so fully and completely that all the powers and principalities of the world shake in their boots because they know change is coming, change must come, change cannot be prevented from coming

Love hard enough to break the world. 

Because that’s what it means to be changed, to be regenerated, to be made different by the presence of God’s infinitely powerful love, a love that makes all things better, all things new, just by being love. 

That’s what transfiguration really means.