Rev. Kevin M. Pleas

Second Corinthians 3:12 - 4:1

February 18, 2007

Since, then, we have such a hope, 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. But their minds were hardened. 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. Indeed, to this very day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their minds; but when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. 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 from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit. Therefore, since it is by God's mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart.

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Every once in awhile, reading one of Paul's letters, I find myself thinking that he could have used a good editor. I can just imagine how my High School English teacher would have responded if I had turned in today's passage as part of an assignment. Lots of red ink: run on sentences, wordy, confusing. We know that Paul was capable of some very beautiful writing, like the passage on love in First Corinthians. But today's reading is just plain convoluted. Every time this passage comes up for me, I find myself rereading it several times just to remember what he's talking about. Which is unfortunate, because he is actually making what is for him a critically important point. A point that strikes to the heart of what he believed about Jesus. If you'll bear with me for a bit, maybe we can get inside what Paul was thinking.

First of all, you have to know the story of Moses that Paul is referring to. In the book of Exodus (34:29-35) at one point we find Moses coming down from Mount Sinai carrying the ten commandments. He's just been in the actual, living, divine presence of God. We're led to believe that this exposure was sort of radioactive. It has left his face shining brightly with an unearthly glory, rather like hot iron glows when you take it out of a blast furnace. God has given Moses the ten commandments and wants him to share them with the Israelites, but at first Moses can't get his own people to gather around because they are afraid of the way he looks. So Moses, in order to calm their fears, decides to drape a veil over his shining face until it can stop glowing.

Now fast forward to the New Testament many years later and we find Paul using this story in an interesting way. In the original story, the veil was what Moses covered up with until the glory of God had faded from his face. But Paul turns this into a metaphor by saying that the law itself was the fading glory of God. The law used to be glorious. It was the pathway that people used to reach God. All people had to do was follow the commandments and they would know they were in God's good graces. What could be easier or more wonderful than that? There are passages in the Bible in which the law is celebrated as something beautiful and divine. In Psalm 19, for example, we find these words: "The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul; the decrees of the Lore are sure, making wise the simple; the precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the Lord is clear, enlightening the eyes." The law was more desirable than gold, sweeter than honey. Can you imagine? But as time went on, as it tends to do, the law became more and more complicated, harder and harder to follow. People were increasingly uncertain about how to behave in order to be right with the law, and instead of acting with great boldness, they ended up acting with great hesitancy, afraid to trespass on some detail of the rules that bound up their lives. By the time of Jesus, it had become so arduous to be right with God through the law that hardly anyone thought of it as something glorious.

Then Jesus appeared on the scene. He was, Paul says, the new glory of God. A glory that far outshined the old glory of the law. The long awaited messiah had finally come and the first thing he did was to set the old law aside. Jesus had come to fulfill the law, to transcend the law. He came to make it possible to be right with God as a joyful and glorious thing as it once had been. No longer would the law be the means by which people made themselves right with God. Jesus was the new way, the new truth, the new life. But some, as Paul said, chose to ignore Jesus and remain under the authority of the law. And for those who did, Paul believed, the old law itself became a veil over their eyes, over their hearts and minds, that made it impossible for them to realize who Jesus truly was.

So, all of that in this relatively short passage from second Corinthians. To recap, Paul's idea here is that we have the old glory of the law on the one hand, and the new glory of Christ on the other. For those who accept Christ the old law has been set aside. For those who continue with the law however, the law becomes a veil that blocks out the sight of the glory of Christ.

Now, I'm not unaware that this is hard for us to relate to. But you have to understand that it was very important for Paul. Basically, he was talking about his own experience, his own faith journey. Paul was a Pharisee. The Pharisees were the most legalistic of all the many religious groups in the Israel of his day. They believed absolutely that obedience to the law was the highest possible expression of faith in God. Maybe you remember the story of the rich young ruler who came to Jesus wondering what he had to do to be saved. Jesus told him to obey the law. The man said he had done that ever since he was a little kid. He had obeyed the law all his life, that same law that was supposed to make him right with God. But it had left him feeling empty and alone, like no matter how hard he tried there was still something missing.

Paul could easily have been that rich young ruler. There was something missing for him as well. But at first he didn't know it. Paul was devoted to the law in a way that went far beyond the average person. His devotion was so strong that he saw Jesus and his followers as a threat to the one true faith. He began persecuting them, and probably would have gone on doing so if the light of Christ hadn't literally knocked him to the ground. As he said later, there was a veil over his eyes that had prevented him from seeing the glory of Christ, and that veil was the law.

Now, I know some of you must be thinking, "O.K., So what? What does this have to do with anything we can relate to? Well, to make Paul's argument work for us, we have to do the same thing he did. We have to think metaphorically. The law for Paul was the law of Moses, as interpreted by the Pharisees. But for us, the law is something very different. Oh sure, we still build most of our ideas about what is and is not acceptable around the ten commandments. But for us, the law is mostly social. It is about what we should and should not try to get away with in society. It is about the boundaries of how people are supposed to relate to one another. It is not however, for most of us anyway, about making ourselves right with God. In our time, the law has almost entirely lost it's spiritual side. It is the way to avoid getting fined or thrown in jail, not the pathway to heaven.

And that's a huge difference. If we're going to have any hope of understanding Paul, we have to realize that the law he was talking about is a very different animal than what we take it to be. This is where thinking metaphorically comes in. If it's true that the law doesn't mean the same thing to us that it meant to Paul, the question is, is there something in our lives that functions for us in the same way that the law did for Paul?

As it turns out, there is. The key here is not so much the law itself, as it is the fact that Paul had once thought he could use the law as his own personal ladder to climb up to God. He had once believed that, through his own efforts, he could make himself worthy; he could turn himself, all by himself, into a shining example of what God wanted a person to be. He could obey the law so carefully, so minutely, so faithfully that in the end, God would have to grant him his place in heaven because he would have earned it. That's what he thought, until he was hit over the head with the absurdity of it all, the impossibility of it all. Much of what Jesus talks about in the gospels is the impossibility of obeying the law to the extent that would be necessary to make ourselves right with God. In that same story about the rich young ruler, Jesus says that it's more difficult for a rich person to get into heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. The point is, it can't be done, at least not humanly. "With people," he says, "this is impossible. But with God all things are possible." What Paul finally realized, in Christ, is that God's love and approval could never be earned. They could never be deserved. They could only be gratefully received. What he realized, in Christ, is that God's love and approval were offered free to all. It was precisely his imagining that he could ever earn that love through obedience to the law that had become the veil over his eyes. That became Paul's whole message, his whole revelation. We can not ever earn God's love, we can only gratefully receive it.

Now, it may be true that we don't think of "the law" in the way that Paul did, but let me tell you something. I don't believe I've ever met a person who didn't have their own ladder of some kind. We all have some idea of what we're supposed to do, who we're supposed to be, the mountains we're supposed to climb, the lists we're supposed to accomplish, the burdens we're supposed to carry, the expectations we're supposed to satisfy, in order to be worthy. We all drag around some notion of all the "shoulds" and "oughts" we have to live up to in order to be acceptable; in order to be deserving of all the rewards and accolades to which we aspire.

The truth is, we can never make ourselves worthy, no matter what we do, no matter how much of our blood, swear and tears we pour out into all of our pet projects. We can never deserve God's approval. But we can receive an approval that has already been freely given. God already approves. God already forgives. That's what grace is, God's free gift of approval to all of us who do not deserve it.

It sounds so simple doesn't it. But grace is hard to believe in until you've experienced it. My own experience comes from a time when I was in seminary. I was going through a CPE course at Boston City Hospital. CPE stands for Clinical Pastoral Education. It's a very difficult course of pastoral training that was a seminary requirement. To me it felt a bit like another trip through boot camp, in that the course wais designed to put prospective ministers under a great deal of pressure. They made a point of pushing all our buttons in order to see which way we would jump. They wanted us to become aware of our own issues so that we could behave appropriately when the heat was on.

This twelve week summer course was loaded up with something like thirty five writing assignments, in addition to all-day sessions at the hospital that included intensive group meetings and responsibility for a ward full of patients with very serious illnesses. The most challenging thing though, was that we were required to produce twelve "Verbatims." A verbatim was a ten to twelve page record of a pastoral visit with a patient. It included all kinds of information, background, the patient's general appearance and mood, our own thoughts and feelings, theological reflections and so on. The heart of it was a verbatim account of the conversation that took place between the student and the patient, which is where the name came from. I had an awful time cranking out those stupid things, and I very much hope never to have to do another one.

Well, anyway, as the course went along I thought I was bearing up under the pressure fairly well, until the last week arrived. I had one more verbatim to write. I had already had the visit and done the research. All that was left was to spend about three hours writing it up. That's when the phone rang and we found out that Martha, a dear friend and the woman that had been Pam's Maid of Honor at our wedding, had been diagnosed with advanced stage cancer and was dying. That was the last straw. I sort of lost it. I became very angry and rebellious. I was sick of all the pressure, sick of all the work. Everything seemed to be falling apart. I decided that, come hell or high water, I was not writing that last verbatim.

I went in the next day to talk with my supervisor, Rosemary. I told her, in my angry and defensive way, that I was not going to write that last assignment and if she needed to fail me then she could just go right ahead and do it. What happened next transformed my life and ministry. Rosemary looked me right in the eye and said, "Kevin, you're right. You have failed. You have not done the work this course required. You have not sufficiently completed the assignments and you do not deserve to pass." And then she said, "But I'm going to pass you anyway."

That was my first conscious experience of what it meant to receive a grace I did not deserve, and it truly did change my life. I look back on that experience and wonder what kind of minister I would have been if I hadn't had it. I've heard sermons at times, and I've delivered some as well, that were pretty self righteous. When we are not in touch with grace, we can be very hard on people. When we've never known an undeserved forgiveness, we tend to treat ourselves and everyone we come across as if we are all supposed to be working our way to salvation. With veiled eyes, we spend our lives climbing up our own personal ladders to God one painstaking rung at a time. And that very law under which we suffer prevents us from seeing what the glory of Christ is truly about.

He came to tell us that we are loved by God, that we are forgiven, that we are cherished. That no matter what we do, it is not possible for us to earn this, but that we don't have to, because it is offered as a free gift of grace. We don't have to spend our lives tiptoeing hesitantly around the laws that dominate our lives. We can act with great boldness, knowing that we can never fall out of God's love. That is the message of the gospel. It is the soul of grace. It is the glory of Christ, and I hope and pray, if you haven't already, that you will take it to heart.

Amen.