See also our rector’s 2013 sermon of the same title.
Epiphany, Last Sunday. 2 March 2025. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz
Exodus 34:29-35. The skin of his face was shining and they were afraid to come near him.
2 Corinthians 3:12-4:12. Since then, we have such a hope, we act with great boldness.
Luke 9:28-43a. And all were astounded by the greatness of God.
O God of faithfulness, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
One of the many benefits for me of sharing the pulpit of Emmanuel Church with a rabbi-in-residence and with an Ark of the Covenant in my peripheral view is that it continues to challenge and change the way I encounter Holy Scripture and the prayers and hymns of the Episcopal Church. My sensitivity to the need for corrective lenses in the Church is heightened. My desire to preach against the ways that the Christian Church has promoted supersessionist theology continues to rise. Christian supersessionism is very much like racism as far as I am concerned. It’s systemic, oppressive, often internalized, hard for many Christians to see, and always wrong. It distorts our vision and damages our souls.
I especially need to call this out on a day when we welcome a child with dual citizenship in the realm of God, as both a son of Israel and a member of the Body of Christ. Levi and his older sister and brother all have two spiritual passports in the realm of God; they are full citizens of both Judaism and Christianity. How is it possible? I don’t exactly know, but I do know that with God anything born of love is possible. And I know that at Emmanuel Church we have a long history of experiencing glorious impossibilities.
And so on this day on which we mark the end of the Epiphany season with stories of the transfiguration of Jesus, in light of the stories of Moses’ shining countenance, I’m drawn to preach about the Apostle Paul and his words to the Church in Corinth, because our passage today sounds as if Paul was dismissing Moses and the Israelites as old news (and he was). It sounds as if Paul was preaching the newness and better-ness of Christianity (but he wasn’t quite doing that). I have to tell you (or remind you) that Paul was not a Christian. [1] While he recruited Gentiles to follow Jesus, as a Jew through and through, he was arguing with people within his own tradition for openness and inclusivity in the realm of God, . Furthermore, neither Paul nor Jesus was inventing the ideas of openness and inclusivity. To varying degrees both of them were declaring stretched boundaries and widened gates for belonging and beloving as people of God, using the Law and the Prophets as their scriptural foundations. The Apostle Paul and the Evangelist Luke were asserting continuity and expansion of belonging and beloving in encouraging people to follow the Jesus Way. Looking back on Paul’s arguments with corrective lenses, however, it becomes clear that he was arguing about who was out and who was in as he contended that the glory of Moses was dimming and the glory of Jesus was brightening.
Paul was reacting to rivals, whom he derisively called super-apostles, who were insisting that to be faithful to Jesus required being faithful to Torah. The Rev. Dr. Dan Joslyn-Siemiatkoski, Director of the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning at Boston College, wrote the other day that although this was an intramural argument within Judaism, it was “aimed towards Gentile Jesus believers, [and] it quickly becomes an argument that can and does fuel anti-Jewish perspective.” [2] Dan argues that this reading should not be included in the Lectionary at all. I think he’s right. We should go back to using the Episcopal Church Lectionary assignment for this Sunday, which calls for 1 Corinthians 12:27-13:13, Paul’s treatise on the primacy of love.
I know that there are those who dislike Paul, and they have good reasons. I used to dislike him, but now I like him enough to want to argue with him rather than just discount him. My seminary professor and Jewish New Testament scholar Larry Wills taught me to use a different interpretive framework or lens to know and appreciate Paul. The new framework or lens getting developed over the last several decades takes into account all of what Paul wrote (that we still have in scripture). It’s a much broader approach than the one that excludes the things that don’t fit in a more traditional Protestant Reformation framework.
I would like to persuade you that Paul was not a phony, ignorant, or a liar, although I admit he was a bit of a jerk. I would like to persuade you that we don’t need to imagine that he was hating and rejecting himself or his tradition even as he challenged his rival apostles within it. He was a great writer, and he had a passion for welcoming folks into the beloved community by proclaiming that the God of Israel’s mercy and grace extended to all nations, i.e. all Gentiles.
The context for our passage from 2 Corinthians is this. Having founded the community of Jesus followers in the city of Corinth, Paul moved on to gather similar communities in other cities. After he was gone, some super-apostles came to Corinth and insisted that, in order to truly be people of the God of Israel, the Gentile men had to be circumcised and the Gentile people had to follow halakhah, or Jewish dietary laws and other established faithful practices. The thing is, Paul’s audience in Corinth was made up of Gentiles. He was arguing that the Torah does not apply to Gentiles. In his letter to the church in Rome, he wrote: “Do we then render Torah void? God forbid! On the contrary, we uphold the Torah!” Torah is so much deeper and wider than our English word law. Torah is a way of being, created before the world (as in, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”) Torah is the Word, the way of being, given to Jews.
So if all of this is true (and I believe it is), what does any of it have to do with us? Well, according to Paul, God’s mercy and grace extend to people even if they aren’t Jews. This is good news, great news actually! Interest in openness and inclusiveness has its roots in the Hebrew Bible and is continued in the Christian Testament. We bear witness to openness and inclusiveness at Emmanuel Church with scripture, tradition, and reason as our foundation, and with the authority that comes from engaging with the Holy One, Who is always doing a new thing.
New covenant doesn’t nullify any previous covenants from the standpoint of the God of Israel. God was offering new covenants to God’s people throughout ancient history: the new covenant of Noah, the new covenant of Abraham, the new covenant with Moses and the people in the wilderness, the new covenant with David, the new covenant written on the hearts of the people described by the prophet Jeremiah, the new covenant proclaimed by Jesus. In her book entitled Paul was Not a Christian, Jewish New Testament scholar Pamela Eisenbaum asks the rhetorical question: “Has Jesus’ act of faith rendered the covenant between God and Israel meaningless? God forbid! On the contrary, we who are members of Israel are fulfilling the prophesies of Torah by acknowledging God’s redemption of the whole world.” [3]
Here’s what I notice about the story of Moses veiling his face and about Paul’s interpretation. Moses was radiant, brilliant, dazzling, terrifyingly luminous because of his encounters with the Divine. Since the people were afraid, he he veiled his face to avoid frightening them when he talked to them. The scripture tells us that Moses, plagued by doubt and anxiety, had sought the Divine Presence and positively glowed after his encounter. with God. According to Paul, Moses had good intentions; but in trying to protect people from their fears, he obscured something essential: the reflection of the glory of God. According to Paul, being shielded from the reflection of the glory of God hardened the people’s minds. That’s an interesting idea. Paul was encouraging his audience to be bold and to shine with the glory of God. The Church has been wrong in making this an anti-Jewish message. The story of the transfiguration in our Gospel today, written decades after Paul’s letters, reveals and upholds that Jesus’ closest companions saw Moses, Elijah, and Jesus in relational community. Sadly, our English translation willfully obscures the word exodus when Jesus was talking with Moses and Elijah about his departure, which he was about to accomplish in Jerusalem. Jesus was speaking with them about his forthcoming exodus, i.e. liberation from slavery and journey through the wilderness to a land of well-being, a land of the well cared for.
We are all called to boldly shine with the glory of God when we encounter the power of love in community. Shining can be so much more difficult than lamenting, especially when times are tough. To express beauty and joyfulness in the midst of so much anxiety and sadness in the world is brave and hopeful. It’s not a denial of suffering, but a nevertheless gladness to be alive, gratefulness to have survived to this point. It doesn’t negate any of the sorrows prior to this day or the sorrows felt by other people. It’s bold to say it, to pray it, to radiate with it, and not to hide it. It seems like a most fitting way to end this sermon: giving thanks to God for the joy of this gathering. If you know the Shehecheyanu, say it with me! Baruch atta Adonai eloheinu melech ha’olam, she-hecheyanu v’ki-yemanu v’higianu lazman hazeh. Blessed are you Holy One, sovereign of the universe, Who has kept us in life and sustained us and brought us to this time.
- Pamela Eisenbaum, Paul was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle (HarperCollins, 2009).
- Dan Joslyn-Siemiatkoski. https://www.facebook.com/dan.joslynsiemiatkoski
- Eisenbaum, op. cit., electronic book edition (no page numbers).