February 27, 2022 “Unmasked” – II Corinthians 3:12 – 4:2

II Corinthians 3:12 – 4:2
“Unmasked”
February 27, 2022 – Transfiguration Sunday

The president of Russia has launched a full scale invasion of Ukraine to depose its legitimate government. He’s done so under dreadfully thin cover of a claim to be freeing Ukraine from neo-Nazis, despite the fact that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish. Putin’s writings show that he also claims to have a spiritual mandate to restore, with violence if necessary, the unity of the Orthodox church across both Russia and Ukraine. He wants to force the Ukrainian church to submit to Moscow once again.

Putin’s political and religious rhetoric, echoed by other Russian officials and believed widely in that country, particularly by older Russians, masks a long history of abuse of Ukrainian people by Russian people. In 1932 to 1933 as many as ten million Ukrainians were systematically starved to death. Policies of the Stalinist Russian regime confiscated and took away food even as it was being produced in Ukraine. To this day many Russians will say it never happened or try to argue that the “famine” had natural causes. As in many such cases, not just for Russians, the real, ugly history is covered, veiled.

In our epistle reading for Transfiguration Sunday, Paul reflects upon what is told in our Old Testament reading from Exodus, how Moses wore a veil, a mask, after coming down the mountain from his conversations with God. For a couple of weeks now I’ve been tempted to toss aside my plan for preaching on this passage. I feared that merely hearing Paul talk about freedom in the Spirit and having “unveiled faces” would suggest that it is O.K. to just toss aside the masks we have been wearing to protect each other from COVID-19, that there is even a spiritual justification for going unmasked in a pandemic.

Yet jump to the end of the text and you will see that a literal direction to have our faces uncovered is not what Paul is talking about. In chapter 4 verse 2 he says, “We have renounced the shameful things that one hides.” That’s the unveiling, the unmasking, which concerns him in this text. He’s worried about a veil of sinful darkness and willful ignorance which keeps us from seeing and receiving the glory revealed to us in Jesus Christ.

Here in chapter 3 of II Corinthians, Paul in part defends his reputation as an apostle. We have to read between the lines, because we only have Paul’s half of the dialog, but the beginning of the chapter makes it appear that some Christians in Corinth were questioning his apostolic credentials. He wonders if they think he needs some sort of letter of recommendation, maybe some good reviews on Google or Yelp.

In verse 2, Paul declared that he didn’t need a literal letter because the Corinthian believers themselves were all the recommendation or reference he needed. Their own faith, written on their hearts, was testimony to his apostleship. From there, Paul riffs on in verse 6 to say, “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” He’s setting up a point about the change from the written letter of Old Testament law, the law of Moses, in which people did see the glory of God, to the greater glory of Christ the living Word. Jesus and His Holy Spirit came in person, not in letters written on stone or papyrus or anything else.

So in our text when Paul begins “Since, then, we have such a hope,” he means the hope of glory in Jesus, a greater glory even than people saw when Moses climbed Mt. Sinai to receive the written law. As we said in our call to worship today, verse 6 of II Corinthians 4, we have the hope of “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” We heard a brief description of that glory in our Gospel reading from Luke 9 today, “the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white.”

Because of that hope, the hope of glory, Paul says “we act with great boldness.” He’s talking about the boldness of himself and the apostles to preach and teach about Jesus. He goes on to say that the apostles are “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.”

Paul was bold enough even to ascribe to Moses a negative motivation that’s not stated in the Exodus account. You get the impression in Exodus 34 that Moses veiled his face for the sake of the people, because the glory shining from his face was too much for them. But Paul says Moses veiled his face because he did not want the people to see that glory ending, fading away from him. In other words, Moses wished to cover up the fact that he was merely human, that the glory of God was not always with him.

In verse 14, Paul moves from Moses’ veil to an ongoing veil which keeps people from seeing the glory of God. “Their minds were hardened.” Again it’s not a literal veil he’s worried about. It’s a mental veil, a veil of ignorance and spiritual hardness. He says twice, in verses 14 and 15, “Indeed, to this very day… that same veil is still there.” It’s a veil of ignorance and misunderstanding involved in reading the old covenant, in reading Moses. The very words of God were given to His people written in stone, but they constantly misunderstood and disobeyed those words. Ten commandments which would bring peace to the world if they were only heard, understood, and obeyed, have been constantly twisted and disobeyed, even as Paul says, “to this day.”

Even Christians succumb to and fall under that veil of ignorance and misunderstanding when they read their Bibles and somehow believe that what they find there justifies war and violence and racism. Putin claims to be a Christian, claims to be acting on behalf of the church in Russia, even while he is giving orders that are destroying a nation and killing so many people. That’s the veil, the mask which is there to this day.

That same sort of veil covered the minds of American Christians who read their Bibles and believed they found there words which justified killing indigenous people or enslaving Black people in the beginning of our own nation, from the very discovery of this land by Europeans. That same veil covers the minds and hearts of current white supremacists and others who claim faith in Christ and in the Bible but who continue to hate, oppress, and even kill people of color.

Dare we say that the veil which covered people’s minds and hearts as they read Moses still sometimes covers our own hearts? We read and even sing the prophet Amos’s words, “let justice roll down like waters,” or Micah’s call to “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God,” or Jesus Himself telling us to “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” But we constantly fail to fully understand and practice those words even in our personal relationships, much less in society around us. We’ve covered our faces with spiritual masks that hide the fact there’s not as much glory, not as much greatness to us, to our society, as we’d like to believe.

That veil of misunderstanding and failure is exactly why we come round to the season of Lent every year. We need to peel off the masks which cover up what we really do, what we really think, what we really are, and turn once again to the true glory, to Jesus.

A key principle of Alcoholics Anonymous is that you cannot get better until you acknowledge you have a problem. As long as you keep covering up, putting on a mask that you hope will hide those sips you take at 10 a.m., those days you call in sick after a bender, those life-threatening drives following way too many, as long as you hide all that, there’s no possibility for change. It’s only by tossing aside the veil, the mask, and standing and saying, “I’m an alcoholic” that transformation becomes possible.

Transformation is the point of all this for Paul, the holy and glorious change into something that you and I are not yet. He wants the veil which hides who and what we are now in our sin torn away so that we may become people who can truly see and appreciate the glory of God in the face of Jesus.

Thus we will stand and confess our sins together this Wednesday evening. We will admit that the masks which are the problem are not made out of cloth, but out of our own attempts to pretend that we are not sinful. We will stand together, with brothers and sisters and each say, “I am a sinner,” taking off, for a moment the veil, the mask by which we try to hide that fact even from ourselves.

Commenting on this text, upon Paul saying that the veil remains “until this day,” church father Cyril of Jerusalem said, “‘Until this day’ means not just until the time of Paul but until our time also, and indeed, till the end of the world.” We get up to confess our sins on Ash Wednesday every year because the veil is still there until this day, the masks behind which we hide and which keep us from understanding and changing.

Our hope is this. Verse 14 ends, “that same veil is still there,” but goes on “since only in Christ is it set aside.” Verse 16 tells us, “but when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed.” The only, only hope we have is to turn to Jesus. Alcoholics Anonymous teaches addicts to turn to a higher power. Jesus is the highest power, the name above all names. We want to take away the veil, the mask off our minds and quit covering up our sins and turn to Jesus. That’s why we need Ash Wednesday and the season of Lent.

Why do we need to keep doing it, you might ask? Didn’t I give my life to Jesus a long time ago? Aren’t I already a Christian? Why do I need to keep wallowing in my sins and saying I’m a sinner? For exactly the same reason an addict must constantly go to meetings and stand and say, “I’m an alcoholic,” even after years of sobriety. The mask must keep coming off. We must keep letting our true inglorious faces show in order to remember that we have no glory of our own, nothing without Jesus.

I haven’t said anything about Black History month this year and I regret that now as it’s coming to an end. For white people, remembering that history over and over is not wallowing in shame that is long past. It’s a way to acknowledge our own current complicity whenever we fail to speak out. It’s a way tear the veil away from present day racism and injustice.

In the same way, Ukrainians want what came to be called the Holodomor to be remembered, that human-generated famine which murdered millions of them less than a century ago. The violence and murders they are experiencing “to this day” are part of something which goes far back. It’s only now being unmasked again before the world.

Let us remember again, though, how Paul began our text, “Since, then, we have such a hope.” We must not ever, ever forget human sinfulness. We must keep pulling off the masks used to hide that, in ourselves, in our country, and in our world. We must keep lifting the veils which constantly try to hide the truth. And yet, “we have such a hope!” So after he says, “when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed,” verse 17 declares, “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”

Freedom is not being able to choose whether or not to wear a cloth or N95 mask. Freedom is not being able to decide to get vaccinated or not. Being able to do whatever you want is not freedom. That kind of “freedom” is simply slavery to your own desires. Freedom is found where the Spirit of the Lord is. Freedom is freedom to do what is good or right, not simply whatever you choose to do. Freedom to drink is not freedom for an alcoholic. Freedom is freedom from drink. Freedom is not freedom to sin if you choose. Freedom is freedom from sin through the Spirit of the Lord.

Freedom arrives when we turn to the Lord, when we seek not our own glory but the glory that is in and comes from Jesus. Peter, James, and John saw Jesus and Moses and Elijah appear in glory, we read. Peter thought he could hang onto that glory by staying camped there on the mountain. But a cloud, a veil came down and covered them and then it was gone. But then God said to them, “This is my Son, the chosen one. Listen to him.”

That’s it. Let the veil of sin and self-glory get lifted and listen to Jesus. That’s when you and I will begin to change, will start to be able to set aside our addiction to sin. That’s when verse 18 begins to happen in us:

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.

That’s an incredible promise. Just like Jesus was transformed on the mountain, you and I are to be transformed into His “same image.” We will go from whatever old, fading, diminished glory we might have had into the pure, holy, and bright glory of being like Jesus.

Putin and Sergey Lavrov believe they are leading Russia to reclaim some sort of faded past glory, to make Russia great again. What they do not realize is that real glory is happening even as they roll in tanks and fire missiles. A Christianity Today article talked about churches and pastors that are serving people in the midst of the attack. Christians are calling their people and the world to prayer. A church just north of Crimea has opened its basement to be a bomb shelter for people living in apartments. While some pastors help people escape to safer places, others stay to minister to those who must remain. That’s true glory, the glory of Jesus rather than the fake glory of conquest and domination.

I shared with you this week my own Ukrainian family background, surprised by how much the war has affected my heart despite my life-long disconnect from that background. I also shared on our Facebook group a video interview with Covenant pastor in Kent, Washington, Andrey Khilchenko a Russian who grew up in Ukraine. His heart is so broken, he said, that he could not even prepare to preach this weekend.

I am sure that many of you are aching with compassion for the people of Ukraine and perhaps anger at the darkness of the veil that has come down once again upon our world. For all of us, then, let us hear again the last two verses of the text, the first two verses of chapter 4:

Therefore, since it is by God’s mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart. We have renounced the shameful things that one hides; we refuse to practice cunning or to falsify God’s word; but by the open statement of the truth we commend ourselves to the conscience of everyone in the sight of God.

“We do not lose heart.” That’s what I’d like to leave you and myself with today. We have pulled off the mask and “renounced the shameful things that one hides.” We rely on the truth of God’s Word. That same article from Christianity Today talked about how people in Ukraine, whether Orthodox, Catholic or Protestant, have recently turned to the Bible. They used a Bible App more often to search for the word “peace.” The warehouse of the Ukrainian Bible Society was nearly emptied. In all the misinformation and misdirection being perpetrated, the truth, God’s truth comes through. “We do not lose heart.”

“By the open statement of the truth we commend ourselves,” says Paul. Now in this time we must continue to be people of truth. Let us call out the lies of leaders who are tyrants and bullies. Let us admit to the truth of our own failures and sins. And let us proclaim the glorious truth of Jesus Christ who came not as a conqueror and violent commander for a military peace and unity, but who came as the Suffering Servant who draws all people into His peace through love and sacrifice. May that be the truth we speak and live and hold up against the lies and hatred of this world. In and through Jesus our crucified and risen Savior, “We do not lose heart.”

Amen.