Mientras Jesús oraba, su cara cambió de aspecto
While Jesus was praying, his face changed in appearance.
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25 years ago, Pasadena’s Octavia Butler wrote a beautiful novel called Parable of the Sower. It is told through the journaling of a Christ figure named Lauren, a 15-year-old black girl who has grown up in the church – and is beginning to question that faith. She finds the God she has been sold is too narrow, too manipulative, too conveniently structured to keep the world as it is.

Lauren begins to imagine a new faith. And the very first words she writes are these:

All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
Is Change

God is Change.

Lauren’s theology is nothing new. It is as ancient as our oldest scriptures. It has just not served the Church to preach it.

This morning, we hear our ancestors’ story of Moses coming down the mountain after being with God. Only Moses was not the same. Moses was changing.

Moses had spoken with God, but that is not what was changing Moses. Moses was changing because God had seen Moses … and Moses had seen God seeing him. Moses saw God seeing all of him just as he was.

You see, when God sees us as we truly are, God smiles.
When God sees us as we truly are, God dances, God shouts for joy.

And when we get even a glimpse
…a taste
…the smallest touch in our heart that God delights this much in who we truly are, something inside us begins to hope that we do not need to be afraid.
That we do not need to be ashamed.
That we do not need to hide.

And we begin to change.
We begin to become not something different but more fully who we are.

The change starts deep inside.
As small as the tiniest flicker of hope.
And as it grows inside us, we begin to feel proud … and powerful … and beautiful and wonderful and holy.

And we begin to shine.

Shine with the knowledge that we are God’s beloved.
Shine with the knowledge that we are loved just as we are with a love that will never end.
Shine with the knowledge that we never need to be afraid or ashamed again.

That’s what happened to Moses.
Moses went up on the mountain and saw God seeing all of him … just as he was.
…and God smiled
… and danced
… and shouted for joy.
…and Moses’ face shone.

It shone so bright that when Moses came down the mountain, eager to share the incredible joy that he had experienced, eager to bring everyone into that joy, everyone noticed that something was different about Moses.
He wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t ashamed.

They had never seen someone so fully themselves, so free of fear and shame. And instead of inspiring them, it threatened them. It made them feel their own fear and shame even more.

And Moses saw that they were afraid.
And Moses didn’t know what to do.
So Moses did what we do far too often.
Moses covered up his joy and radiance.
Moses covered up his true self.

Not because he wasn’t beautiful … or powerful … or good. But because Moses’ true self made others uncomfortable and afraid. Because Moses’ changing, because Moses’ becoming made others uncomfortable and afraid.

Moses came down the mountain with two things. He came down the mountain with some tablets full of community rules. And he came down the mountain with his shining, changing, becoming face.

And the people kept the rules, and made Moses veil his face.

It happens all the time.
We glimpse how God sees us as our true selves, the selves the world judges and condemns and ignores.

We glimpse how beautiful and powerful and holy we really are just as we are.

We glimpse how bright the light of God shining through our true selves really is and we begin to change … and become … and shine.

And the world reacts in fear. And we cover it up.
We veil our faces just as Moses did – not because we weren’t meant to shine but because our shining makes other people uncomfortable.

We keep the rules, immutable, manipulatable.
We keep the rules … and we veil our faces.

Because we forget … or fear … or do not trust … or cannot believe … that God is Change.

Rules without radiance. That’s how we got where we are.

Rules without radiance is how we have a system of mass incarceration instead of mass restoration.

Rules without radiance is how we have schools that offer detention and suspension instead of art and music and theatre and dance.

Rules without radiance is how we have a Church that is more concerned with respectability and control – with those ABC’s of empire – Attendance, Buildings and Cash — than helping God’s children become fully alive.

And then we have this morning’s Gospel.

Jesus is on the mountain with his friends … and like Moses, he is transfigured.
He begins to change, to become more fully himself.
He is beautiful. He is powerful. He begins to shine.

And his friends want to keep him there. They want to keep him from going down the mountain where his radiance might make other people uncomfortable.
Where his radiance might get them all into trouble.

And God says, “No. This is my own. My Chosen One. Listen to him.” And Jesus went down the mountain.
Unveiled.

That is the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Jesus. Fully who he was. Unveiled. Unashamed. Radiant.

That is the Gospel that Jesus longs for us to hear
Each of us. Fully who we are.
Unveiled. Unashamed. Radiant.

And yet that is not the Gospel the Church has preached. That is not the Gospel the Church has become.

The Church has kept the rules – immutable, manipulatable. The Church has kept the rules … and when someone begins to shine … the church has made them veil their faces.

From nearly the beginning, too often the Church has taken the transformative power of the transfigured, unveiled Christ and turned it into dogma designed to serve a narrow agenda of control. Rules without radiance.

As Episcopalians we claim scripture, tradition and reason as our sources of authority. And yet that core doctrine must come with a planet-sized asterisk.

The scripture we read is indeed holy. And … it is a carefully curated and edited selection of holiness. Our scripture is a story edited and told primarily by men ignorant at best and fearful at worst of anything that didn’t uphold patriarchy and cis-heteronormativity.

As Church merged with and was shaped to serve the needs of Empire, what we call “the tradition of the church” is essentially how that story has been interpreted and dogmatized by men who are deeply invested in upholding a system of white supremacy.

Even our most common conception of “reason” represents modes of thought springing from a Eurocentric and patriarchal worldview.

And so, we must remember when we hear, as we did this week at the United Methodist Church convention and as we still hear throughout the Episcopal Church and Anglican Communion

…we must remember when we hear people talk of how we must not “throw away 2,000 years of the church’s teaching” that this “sacred theology of the church” and the ethics we draw from it spring from a narrowly defined and selectively nurtured patch of ground.

That the Church as institution has never been the same as the People of God or the Body of Christ fully embraced and understood.

Because for nearly 2,000 years, the church has valued rules over radiance. For nearly 2,000 years, the church has ignored, rejected, persecuted and euthanized

women’s voices
voices of color
economically impoverished voices
colonized voices
lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex voices.
children and youth voices
…and more.

Those voices have been out there.
They are out there still.
They are in here right now.
They have written amazing scripture.
They have deeply holy tradition.
They have brilliant ways of thought and expression.
They have met God on holy mountains, and they have seen God seeing them for who they are.
They have seen God gazing on them and smiling and dancing and shouting for joy.
And they have begun to change, to become more fully who they really are.
And they have shone so brightly …

And over and over again, the church has clung desperately to our rules and veiled the radiant face of Christ.

We have created a closed canonical, ecclesiological, and theological system … and vested it with the full authority of the divine.

In the name of one who came to be God among us in the form of the least powerful, we have constructed a God in the image of and for the benefit of those with the most power. And when Christ among us cries for justice, for basic human dignity, for their stories, their lives, their truths to be told …

The Church keeps the rules and veils the radiant Christ among us.

We tell Christ among us that Christ’s story has no place in the church.

We tell Christ among us that Christ’s ideas have no place in the church.

We tell Christ among us that Christ’s image, iconography and music have no place in the church.

We tell Christ among us that Christ has no place in the church.

And like Jesus in this morning’s Gospel, the Christ among us is exhausted with we who are the Church and throws up their hands and says “You unbelieving and perverse generation! How much longer must I be with you and put up with you?”

How much longer before you let me just be who I am?
How much longer before you let me show you the healing, transformative, radiant greatness of God?

The brilliant transgender pastor and theologian Austen Hartke writes:

“What if the lost sheep didn’t wander away from the safety and goodness of the shepherd? What if it was just trying to escape the cruelty of the flock? Sheep will occasionally pick out a flock member who doesn’t fit in—maybe because of an injury or a strange marking—and they’ll chase that individual away. There are times when I think Christians need to see ourselves more in the ninety-nine sheep who stayed put and ask ourselves if we may have been part of the reason that the lost sheep got lost in the first place.”

Who better than a transgender theologian to bring to us the heart of the Gospel that God is change, and that what God dreams for each and all of us is for us to be changing, be becoming that strange sheep, that radiant, shining person we truly are.

Unafraid. Unashamed. Unveiled.

As Hartke writes, “Theology done from the perspective of marginalized groups creates a richer, more comprehensible, more compassionate Christianity.”

This is not a call to abandon our faith. This is a call to reclaim it. To liberate it and ourselves from the shackles of two thousand years of rules over radiance.

For as the womanist scholar and prophet Dr. Wil Gafney proclaims:
“God is bigger than our theologies and our politics.
God is bigger than our church.
God is even bigger than the Bible.
God is bigger than its slave-holding culture.
God is bigger than the Bible’s patriarchy and the sexism and misogyny of its interpreters.
God is bigger than the understanding of gender in its pages.
God is bigger than the Bible’s Iron Age theology.
And yet, God still speaks through it.”

And that is what we are here to proclaim, trust and embody. That the God who is Change still speaks. That the God who is Change still calls us to this mountaintop to see ourselves as God sees us, to continually be changed more fully into who we are … and together to go unveiled into the world.
“Whoever you are and wherever you find yourself on your journey of faith, you are welcome at All Saints Church.” That’s what we proclaim. And yet it is not enough to say words of welcome. Because every day we are welcomed into places where the price of admission is following the rules and veiling our radiance. And that is not a welcome that is worthy of us as beloved of God.

So, let our welcome be as radical and radiant as God’s beloved children. Let All Saints Church be where the veils come off. Where in each other, we meet the God who is Change and see her seeing us … and delighting in us. Where we find in each other the safety and the courage to change and become more fully who we are.

So, if you are gay or lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex or queer – take off that veil.

If you are black or brown or Asian or indigenous – take off that veil.

Whoever you are and wherever you find yourself on the spectra of age or gender or any of the other ways the dominant flock marks sheep as strange – take off that veil. Be who you are boldly. Be who you are joyfully. Become who you are fully. Be that in the heart of this community and know that the God who is change means for you to change us all.

And as we have participated in dominant cultures, whose images are centered in the music and iconography and liturgy and ways of being … let us let go of our fear and our need to be centered and welcome with joy the gift of us and our community being changed by the full, radiant expression and being of all God’s children.

Let us make rightful, powerful, permanent space not in the basements and outskirts of our community but deep in the heart of our community for the full, radiant expression and being of all God’s children.

Because the journey to truly inclusive beloved community does not end with mere ornamentation but calls us to the joy of being profoundly changed by the presence of the radiant, unveiled Christ in our midst.

For the God we follow is not a God of veils and rules. The God whose beloved we are is a God who looks at you as you are and smiles, dances and shouts for joy.

The God whose beloved we are is a God who means for who you are to change who I am, to change who we are.

The God whose beloved we are does not cling to rules but delights in the radiance of our faces. For the God whose beloved we are knows that

All that you touch … You Change.

All that you Change … Changes you.

The only lasting truth… Is Change

God is Change. Amen.