Sermon — March 2, 2025
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Last week, I went on a short trip to London, and after getting four hours of airplane-seat sleep on the way over, spending the day with my one- and three-year old nieces, going to a conference with a few hundred people, flying back on a plane full of British teenagers on a school trip, then making it through church and confirmation class, on Monday I somehow strangely found that I was coming down with a cold. Who could’ve imagined?
It wasn’t a bad cold, not at all. But it gave me that feeling that a head cold or allergies often do, of a kind of fuzzy barrier between my brain and the world. Do you know what I mean? As if there was a layer of gauze in front of my face, and I just didn’t feel myself. So although I wasn’t particularly tired, and I didn’t have a particularly sore throat, or much of a cough, I just didn’t quite feel like myself.
And then over the course of the week, I finally felt a little better each day, until finally, on Saturday, I woke up feeling like myself again, and it was as if a veil had lifted from before my face.
There’s a question that I have sometimes when I read these two stories about Moses and Jesus, in which they are transfigured and a divine light shines from their faces: Is this a process of addition or subtraction? In other words—In these moments, is God adding to their faces something new, some holy light that wasn’t there before; or is God taking something away, removing some outer layer that had obscured the divine spark within? Is the Transfiguration like putting on a layer of makeup and looking extra good—or is it like recovering from a cold, and suddenly finding that you are yourself again?
The answer may be different, of course, in the two stories. Moses has been up on Mount Sinai with God, receiving the Law, basking in the divine presence. And you can almost imagine him as an iron left in the fire, heating up. He’s been immersed in holiness for 40 days, and when he returns, he glows—like the iron pulled from the fire, he is himself a source of heat and light. And the people are afraid. He has to veil his face; he has to hide that light. He needs something to obscure his holiness so that the people are not burned. But whenever he goes into the Tabernacle to be with God, he lowers the face again, and it’s as if his holiness is continually renewed by returning once again to the presence of God.
For Jesus, it seems to be the other way around. Jesus goes up a mountain, too, but in this case, he’s the source of light. As he’s praying, it seems that an invisible veil has fallen away. His face is changed, and even his clothes become “dazzling white” (Luke 9:29). In this moment on the mountain, Jesus’ true nature is revealed. A voice comes from the cloud that overshadows the disciples, and says, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” (9:35) And they are stunned.
When Moses comes down from the mountain, it seems like addition: the Spirit of God has added something to Moses to infuse him with a holiness that is visible and palpable. When Jesus goes up on the mountain, it seems more like subtraction: the Spirit seems to take away something that otherwise hides the divine reality of who Jesus is.
But we didn’t only hear two stories of change, today. There was a third, this strange story of a boy who’s been possessed by an “unclean spirit.” Now, we could speculate about the medical details of his condition, but that would miss the point. There is some spirit, Luke tells us, some outside force, that’s in control. It oppresses him, it makes him act unlike himself. And Jesus frees the boy from the thing that is controlling him. He heals him, he restores him to wholeness, and the boy’s true self, no longer weighed down by the power of this spirit, is revealed. It is the miraculous version of recovering from a cold: The greatest miracle Jesus does is to allow this boy to be himself, as he really is. The boy is revealed just as Jesus was: he is himself, exactly as he is.
This is the beauty and the promise of the Transfiguration for us. We are not Jesus. But sometimes in our spiritual lives, we are like Moses, and what we need is to spend some time in the presence of God, and be filled with God’s holy warmth and light, so we can bring those back down to the world. And sometimes, we’re like the boy; sometimes we need to be freed from the things that are weighing us down, so that we can be revealed as ourselves, as we truly are.
It’s occasionally been observed that churches are full of quirky people. And it’s true. I’m sure I’ve said it before, but if you’re sitting in a church on a Sunday morning in Boston in 2025, you must be at least a bit unusual. (In a good way!) In a statistical sense, just by virtue of being among the small fraction of the population who regularly go to church, you’ve proven that you’re kind of strange, but that actually misses the point. Here’s my thesis: Every human being is kind of strange; faithful Christians are just more willing to admit it. In a healthy church community you should expect more quirkiness than in the world outside, because the nature of the Gospel is that it frees us to be ourselves.
We come here into the presence of God, and we hear that God is love. We hear that God loves us, as we are in our inmost selves, and not as we pretend to be. And at our best, we can lower the veil for a moment that hides our faces, and see one another as we really are. For a moment, together, we can see the glory of God “as though reflected in a mirror,” and we can be transformed, growing from glory into glory. (2 Cor. 3:18) We can absorb a little bit of the radiance of God, and more importantly, we can be freed from the unclean spirits of judgment and criticism that afflict us in the world. We can be ourselves, and we can be a little weird, thank God. Because God wants us to recover from our life-long spiritual cold. God wants to set us free from the things that keep us from being our true selves. God wants us to lower the veil, and to let our faces shine with the radiance of God’s own love and light.
And this may sound like a frivolous thing, like a whole sermon built around the slogan “Keep Austin Weird.” But I think it’s the most serious thing in the world. I genuinely believe that the message of God’s unconditional love is good news, and I genuinely think that is has the power to change the world: not by giving us a new burden, a new commandment to love one another as God has loved us; but by releasing us from the burdens the world puts on us to be anything other than the people we truly are.
There is a weight of expectation that seizes many of us and dashes us to the ground. There is a veil we use to hide ourselves in shame, praying that nobody really find us out. There is an epidemic of anxiety driven by the brutal judgment of social media and dating apps. There is a real crisis of masculinity driven by our failure to say that to be kind and compassionate and vulnerable is, in fact, to be a man, and a better man than the one who’s brash and arrogant and rude. There are a thousand small ways in which we veil our faces so that the world cannot see us as we are, and every one of them is a lost opportunity for light to shine in the world. And while I don’t want to go through a whole list, I really do think that there are dozens of social and political effects of our basic inability to believe that God loves us, and that God’s grading us with a rubric that’s nothing like what we would call success.
So Lent begins this week. And Lent is a good time to make an honest reckoning of who we are. Lent is a good time to let go of some of the ways in which we hide our true selves in shame, and to let the veil disappear. Lent is a good time to act with great boldness, as Paul says; to be who we really are, as God has made us and as God loves us. To turn toward the Spirit of the Lord, knowing that “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom,” (2 Cor. 3:16) and to let ourselves be freed from the burdens that hold our spirits down, so that we stand before God and be transformed from one degree of glory to another.