Readings (click here for full text of the readings):
   Exodus 34:29-35; Psalm 99; 1 Corinthians 12:27-13:13; Luke 9:28-36

The Ten Commandments are serious business. They are the essence of holiness.  When we hear about them, we tend to look down the list to see which ones we’re keeping, and which we’re not. Once a year the movie comes on TV in impossibly vivid coloration, and Charlton Heston keeps us in rapt attention as he battles Pharaoh like piety incarnate.  And in some parts of the country the Ten Commandments have come to epitomize the battle between Christianity and secular culture, as a stone monument in Alabama became a symbol of faith and godly government.

But if you take off those stained-glass lenses for a minute and look at today’s Old Testament reading for what it really is, it’s more Keystone Cops than holy drama.  It’s more Abbot and Costello than Cecil B. DeMille.  There’s as much humor as holiness, which is where most of its lessons lie this morning.

The first thing that happens this morning is Moses comes down Mount Sinai holding the sacred tablets. The comedian Mel Brooks, in one of his movies, added a little levity to this scene by having Moses juggle three stone tablets, and proudly announce that God had given him 15 – at which point on the tablet fell to the ground and crumbled – er, 10 Commandments. But the truth also pretty humorous.

Here we have Moses, dying to tell his comrades what God had said to him, and they’re too busy cowering in fear to hear anything he has to say.  Finally he gets them to calm down and tell him what’s going.  He realizes that his face is shining because he’s just spoken to God, and so he puts a veil on his face, to shield the people enough from God’s light so they can sit still long enough to listen.  And he tells them about the tablets – the Word of God, given directly to him and then to them.  Rules for living. The way that God had called them to act.

There’s the first lesson for us today: real Christians don’t go around talking about how holy they are. They don’t brag about having just talked to God. They don’t draw attention to the holiness that shines off their face.

Real Christians are too busy doing the job God gave them to do to pay attention to stuff like that.  Other people are the ones who notice how holy the real Christians are, just like the Israelites noticed how holy Moses was, when he didn’t have a clue about it.

The author Anne Lamott talks about this in one of her books. She wonders why Christians feel the need to go around proclaiming that they’re Christians.  Shouldn’t it really be the other way around?  Shouldn’t we just act like Christians, and trust that the people around us will notice?

And maybe we should take it a step further and wonder how we got to this place, where we make some private deal with God, and bam we’re “Christians,” and then we tell everybody else about it.  Maybe it’s not just that we need to wait for other people to notice that we’re Christians; maybe we’re only Christians because other people notice.  Because we reveal the gifts of the spirit that Paul talks about. Because God’s love shines forth through us, like it did through Moses back then. Maybe we should stop talking the talk and just focus on walking the walk.

Getting back to Moses – after he speaks to the Israelites, he puts a veil on his face and returns to the Lord. Which is a little odd, because he doesn’t need a veil to talk to God.  Eventually he realizes that and takes it off and has a nice conversation with the Almighty.  So, basically, Moses forgets to wear a veil when he needs to, and wears one when he doesn’t. 

And then it happens again – Moses returns from visiting with the Lord, and he forgets to put his veil back on, and once again the Israelites can’t hear anything he’s saying, because they’re so awed by the shining of his skin. Moses hastily puts the veil back on, so the people can concentrate and he can tell them more about God. And there’s the second lesson for us today: humility.  You’d have thought that Moses would be feeling pretty good about himself right there: he’d seen God, and survived. God had chosen him to convey the Ten Commandments to the people.  He was a regular pal of God, and God’s glory shone through him so much that the people cowered before him in fear and wonder.  Pretty heady stuff.

But Moses wasn’t thinking about any of that stuff, and he certainly wasn’t taking any of it for granted. The first time he came out from the visiting with the Lord he didn’t realize his face was shining. Nor did he the second time, because he wasn’t assuming anything: just because it happened before doesn’t mean it’ll happen again. God doesn’t have any obligation to do that all the time.  And that’s who this story, and this world of ours, is all about: God. It’s not about Moses and his shining face.  It’s not about the people and their fear. It’s about God, showing His face to us, revealing His will to us.

And Moses accepts God’s gift for what it is. When the people cower in fear, Moses doesn’t say, “Oh, it’s nothing.  No big deal.  Just little old me, Moses.  Now just stand up and hear what I have to say.” Moses realizes that God is shining through Him, and he knows how powerful that is.  So he puts on the veil to help the people, all the while focused on getting the job done.  On getting God’s word out to them.

And that’s the nature of humility: realizing when God’s divine hand is at work in our lives, but not getting too caught up in it. Not getting addicted to it.  Not falling in love with it.  The author Frederick Buechner – whom we’ll be reading for the next book club, if you’re interested in coming – makes this very point about humility. He says that if you just built the best bridge in history, it’s not humble to deny that it’s the best bridge in history. It’s humble to admit, “Yeah, that is the best bridge there ever was,” but to also wake up the next day and not give the bridge another thought, because there’s work to do.

Too often Christians fail to see that. We’ll do something really wonderful but deny that it’s really all that good, because we don’t want to seem proud. Or we’ll deflect the compliment God’s way, by saying that it’s really God’s doing, not ours. Noble as that may seem, it’s a little confusing, because God didn’t bake those cookies or repair the roof of the church: some person did. Also, if God really loves us – which He certainly does – He wants us to be appreciated.  After all, I certainly don’t want Catie, after she’s drawn a lovely picture someday, telling people that it’s really her father’s doing, because he helped create her! I want her to feel a healthy sense of pride in what she worked hard to do, and I’m clearly not nearly as loving as God is. 

Finally, denying the good that we’ve done can tend to be a little proud. Now that may seem contradictory, because shifting the glory God’s way seems humble, not proud. But when we make a big show of it, when we brag about being so humble, it’s still bragging.  For example, a friend of mine is famous for proclaiming that he never, ever prays for himself.  Other people are much more important than he is, he says, and his time is much better spent on other people.  To pray for yourself is a sign of pride and self-love, he says. What he doesn’t realize is that not praying for yourself is a sign that you don’t think you need God’s help. And telling everybody that you don’t pray for yourself is a way of getting points for selflessness.  In the end, when you brag about humility, you’re still a braggart.

Today’s reading concludes with a cycle repeated over and over again: Moses going in to talk with the Lord, where he can remove the veil; and then Moses coming back out to the people, where it sounds like he still forgets for a few seconds that they can’t hear anything he’s saying without the veil on, but eventually he gets the routine down pretty well, and ultimately he gets the Lord’s message across, which is the most important thing.

And in the end, instead of the Ten Commandments being sober and serious, they’re humorous and maybe a little bit farcical, at least in the way Moses brings them to the people.  That surprises a lot of people – the comedy that is Christianity – but it shouldn’t.  The story of salvation itself began with Abraham, whose barren, gray-haired wife, Sarah, laughed when God told her that she’d have a son.  But God didn’t get angry with her – instead He laughed with her, at the absurdity of grace, of dreams long-since forgotten finally come true. And she bore a son, whose name was Isaac, which in Hebrew means laughter. 

And the comedy continues throughout the Bible, when God chooses the outcast Jewish people as His chosen, when He continuously breaks the rules and favors the younger son over the older, when His only begotten son enters the world in poverty and humility, and ultimately dies an ignominious death surrounded by criminals and mocked by the rich and famous. 

This is how Buechner describes the Gospel as comedy:

The coming together of Mutt and Jeff, the Captain and the Kids, the Wizard of Oz and the Scarecrow: the coming together of God in his unending greatness and glory and man in his unending littleness, prepared for the worst but rarely for the best, prepared for the possible but rarely for the impossible.  The good news breaks into a world where the news has been so bad for so long that when it is good nobody hears it much except for a few. And who are the few that hear it?  They are the ones who labor and are heavy-laden like everybody else but who, unlike everybody else, know that they labor and are heavy-laden. They are the last people you might expect to hear it, themselves the bad jokes and stooges and scarecrows of the world, the tax collectors and whores and misfits. They are the poor people, the broken people, the ones who in terms of the world’s wisdom are children and madmen and fools.  They have cut themselves shaving. Rich or poor, successes or failures as the world counts it, they are the ones who are willing to believe in miracles because they know it will take a miracle to fill the empty place inside them where grace and peace belong with grace and peace. [1]

It might, at first, seem inappropriate, even blasphemous to see humor in Moses and the Ten Commandments.  But it’s there in the text, and it was there back then. The real blasphemy, as I see it, is viewing the Ten Commandments and all of salvation history as serious, and sober, and expected.  Because if the Good News of Jesus Christ was expected, then it’d have more to do with us and our sense of right and wrong, than God’s.  And it wouldn’t be very Good News, in the end.

[1] Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1977): 70-71.

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