2 Corinthians 4:3-6

And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing clearly the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’s sake. For it is the God who said, “Light will shine out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.

Sermon Text

Today is Transfiguration Sunday, the day when we celebrate Christ climbing the mountain and showing a select few of his disciples his full, unadulterated, resurrected glory. The exact way this miracle was possible, how it transpired just so, is unknown to us. Most miracles are that way, beyond any possible explanation or belief. When the disciples went up the mountain, they learned something about the character of Christ they did not know when they stood at the base of the mountain. A voice thundered out and told them, “This is my Son; listen to him.”

I love scripture’s depiction of that miracle, and our celebration of it, because it reveals to us that God is a God of revelation and of mystery. Revelation in that God is always pulling back more of the curtain, always shining out more light into the darkness, always teaching us new things. Mystery in that God is infinitely complex, always able to show us a little more, and capable of wonders that our mind simply cannot comprehend. We know about the ones we encounter regularly – how does baptism give us grace just by pouring water on us? How does Communion become the body and blood of Christ? Yet, there are many more miracles – mundane and extraordinary – that baffle wherever they appear.

For a person with faith, when we find ourselves baffled we often find ourselves celebrating. When the tumor has shrunk and no one can explain why, we celebrate. When the job we lost became a job we found, we celebrate. When the person we have prayed for and loved so earnestly for years, finally seems to have a breakthrough in their life, we let out a hallelujah! Yet the methods behind most of this are completely hidden from us. How did God get one thing to run into another, into another to make life happen the way it did?

Some of the most impactful moments in my life have been complete accidents, at least from my own limited perspective. I met Grace just because we happened to be signed up for seminary at the same time, something that only happened because she waited to go to seminary till after she got her first graduate degree. One of my closest friends and I bonded over the fact I anonymously gave her a marker when we both lived in the dorms – we had no idea who the other was until we worked together and she saw the same style of marker sitting on my desk. Simpler than all of these, I remember better than most moments in ministry, the moment I was able to pray for a parishioner who had come in for a cancer screening, just because they were walking through the door of the hospital as I was entering to visit another parishioner.

These were all moments of impossible odds. Even if we write them off as small pools of people interacting with each other across a certain amount of time, they would all be overthrown by just a little detail being different. A car trip taking a little longer than expected, a job assignment being one building over, or a graduate degree taking one semester longer. God makes all things collide in just the way they need to, so that wonders can happen wherever we look. There are even greater wonders, but we can never talk about them all.

The thing about faith is that we often treat our experience with God the same way we treat scripture. We see our own experience as an index that we can pull information out of as needed – we seek to have answers to the world and to its many problems, to every question we are ever asked, rather than treating our faith and our scripture as a living thing we are encountering. I’ve talked before about how I do not like indexes in Bibles that act as Q and A entries. “Want faith? Turn here. Feeling sad? Turn here! Questioning everything in life? Just read Job!” That’s not how we encounter God. That’s not how faith works. Faith has to be more than just a bag we pull excuses out of. It has to be something we live out and lives through us.

I love Transfiguration Sunday because Christ became light for the disciples. They experienced Christ and learned something through that experience. They were not given a new answer to the questions that life presented to them – but they were aware of the truth in a way they had not been before. Truth is something more than an answer, truth is an essential part of existence. I can give answers to just about any question, but they may not be truth. Even if they are correct, they may not reveal the truth in the world.

What does that even mean? Well, I can tell you that I was in my office earlier today, but does that reveal anything essential about life to you? No! Except that I had to do some paperwork ahead of us worshipping in here. If I tell you, however, that I was praying this morning, and that in prayer I felt myself come closer to the Author of life – then suddenly we are entering the world of “Truth.” Truth is not just an accurate statement of things as they are, truth is a claim to the essential nature of knowledge itself. We are claiming, as Christians, that we hold Truth in our hands every time we talk about what God has done in our life.

Our scripture today has Paul reflecting on God’s revelation in general. The Gospel is not known to everyone, and some seem to struggle to accept it all. The most recent survey of American religious attitudes seems to suggest that there is a growing apathy toward faith.[1] People are not against religion, they do not feel rejected by religion, they simply do not care.

There are many reasons for this – people working themselves to death to pay rent and feed themselves don’t have time to devote to something like faith. We remember the stories of children in the coal fields who, when asked if they knew about Jesus, who responded “He must work in another mine.”

One thing that makes a difference, however, is simply to be frank in how we share our faith. I do not think that having answers is overly helpful. I know for me I did not join the faith because I was shown the Romans Road. I was never interested in memorizing all the scriptures I would need to quote if I felt one way or the other. I wanted to see truth, and I wanted that truth shown to me in the people around me. Paul puts it this way, “We do not proclaim ourselves, we proclaim Christ.”

The darkness of this world is not dispelled by us forming the best arguments. Not by having a perfect life that we can flaunt. Instead, it is simply the act of proclaiming God in every aspect of what we do. The word for preaching in the New Testament is “Κηρυγμα,” (Kerygma,) and it means “proclamation.” At the end of the day, preaching is not making an argument, it is not even telling a story, it is a revelatory act. We make Christ known when we speak about who Christ is, when we live as Christ taught us to, when we enter into the world and roll back the darkness.

Paul did not say that the Gospel was veiled to the perishing to say that they were hopeless, or that God only lets some people have faith. Instead, God asks for us to go out and speak life into the world. The first part of 2 Corinthians is focused on how life is overwhelming, yet truth sees us through the troubles. More than that, it asks us to live a life that lets God shine out fully through our actions – not because we are particularly wonderful, but because the God within us is that wonderful.

Here, in the midst of this celebration of God’s light, we commit ourselves to proclaim God’s goodness. I ask that we join together, that we share what God has done in our life, and we let ourselves be unafraid to show God’s light to all we meet. Not in arguments, not as though we are answering questions like a reference book, but simply as light answers the darkness. Go forward, and in love proclaim what God has done. – Amen.

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[1] Gregory Smith, et al. “Religious ‘Nones’ in America: Who They Are and What They Believe.” Available https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2024/01/24/religious-nones-in-america-who-they-are-and-what-they-believe/