Poolesville Presbyterian Church
Rev. David Williams; 02.10.13
Our world is filled with shiny people. Or rather, it’s filled with images of people who are shinier and sparklier than the rest of us. We know these folks, or we think we do. They are the names and the faces that come pouring out at us from magazines and websites, whose lives are the carefully managed constructions of their agents and their PR firms.
These shiny people are part of our community. They are the A-listers, the names that we all know, or that we’re all supposed to know. They beam out at us from the magazines in the checkout lines at the grocery store. They’re right there on the primary home-page of the news sites we frequent. They are just people we know, because they’re part of the relentless bombardment of media inputs in our lives. For some reason, information about their lives is part of who we are.
Like, say, all that information about Taylor Swift’s dating life. I mean, Jake Gyllenhaal? Really? After his relationship history? Are you trippin’? Donnie Darko was a great movie, but girl, you were two when that came out.
I ask myself, why in the name of the Sweet Lord Jesus do I know this? What possible reason is there for me to know this? And no, The Theology of Celebrity 922 was not part of my doctoral program. I know this because they are lit up by the light of our mass attention. They are the shiny people.
I find myself wondering, sometimes, if the bombardment of the names and faces of shiny people crowds out our ability to have a deep and genuine network of friends. There’s a thing called Dunbar’s number, named after British anthropologist Robin Dunbar. Dunbar’s number measures the number of human beings we seem able to keep in our network of actual relationships. Throughout human history, that number appears to be roughly 150 souls. We understand how they relate to one another. We know their life stories, their backgrounds, what they’ve done and how they’ve done. They are truly part of our social selves.
Get higher than that number, and we start losing the ability to keep track. Oh, we might know a name or vaguely recognize a face. But as that count of Facebook friends gets into the mid-two-thousands, the truth is that these are no longer people we know. They are data, not relationships. And perhaps, as more and more of the precious neurons we use to understand the web of interconnection we inhabit are consumed by media information about the glitterati, we start losing our ability to really be in relationship.
Worse yet, we find ourselves wanting to be one of those shiny people. We approach our relationships and our place in the world as if we are our own publicists, marketing ourselves, pitching ourselves through our posts and tweets and pins and updates and comments. Our world becomes a blinding lens flare blur of all of our competing shine, and we can become so blinded by it that we see no-one.
This is not what we experience today in an old, strange Exodus story about Moses. We’re deep into the tale of the flight of the people of Israel from Egypt. They’re out of slavery, and have escaped from Pharoah’s armies across the Sea. Into the wilderness they’ve gone, eating manna and quail, fighting off attackers, and complaining constantly, until they finally arrive at Mount Sinai. That’s the story, more or less, of the first eighteen chapters of the book of Exodus.
When we get to the 19th chapter, the whole flow of the story changes. Now, it’s about the receiving of God’s instructions on how to live in the land of the promise. Moses heads up onto Mount Sinai, where he encounters his Maker. The Ten Commandments are received, which is fascinating and relevant to our moral lives today. We get six chapters about the schematics of the tabernacle and what priests are supposed to wear, which is a whole bunch less fascinating and relevant. Did you know that worship leaders are supposed to add golden bells and pomegranates to their outfits, so that they make a tinkling sound as they walk? It’s right there in Exodus 28. A bit of flair never hurt, I suppose, but you are not ever going to get me to wear that.
By the time we’ve gotten to chapter 34, though, we encounter Moses as he returns with version two point oh of the ten commandments, as he’d gotten cheesed off with the Israelites and smashed the first set.
The reason for that smashing was simple. The people of Israel had gotten bored and restless, waiting around for Moses to return from the mountain. And so they had asked Aaron, the brother of Moses, to make them something. Make us a god, they said. Make us something that is golden and shiny and beautiful, so that we might worship it.
So Aaron did what the people asked, and made a golden calf, and then everyone had a dance party. Moses, encountering this, got so mad that he smashed the tablets, and there was smiting, and finally chapter 34 gives us a do-over.
That chance for restoring the real connection between God and God’s people comes as a result of the relationship that Moses has with his Maker. It’s an unmediated relationship, and that means nothing stands in between them. In Exodus 33:11, we hear that God “...used to speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend.”
That connection sustains as he goes back up onto the mountain, and upon his return, he doesn’t just bring back another set of tablets. He comes back changed. What we hear is that he was “shining,” although the Hebrew word used is a strange one. It seems to imply a shaft of light, or more literally, a “horn of light.” It’s so bizarre and confusing to the people around him that he ends up covering his face with a veil...or something like it. The Hebrew word used for “veil” only occurs one place in Torah...and that’s in this verse.
The exchange with God, direct and unmediated, has left him visibly and notably different. He shines, but not in the way that light plays of a golden object. That, people knew. That form of brightness, they were comfortable with.
They encountered something entirely different instead.
What we’re left with, in this image of Moses shining with the unsettling presence of God, is a question about what sort of radiance it is that we seek. Are we primarily about the sparkle and radiance that our culture instills in us? Fame and the cold golden shine of wealth and power are all about us, and it’s deeply tempting to surrender to the cold emptiness of that path.
It’s also the danger that comes from relying too deeply on social media for our connections. There, we are not “face to face,” as were God and Moses. We are what we choose to put forward, and can make ourselves glitter as brightly as Edward from Twilight being dropped into the sun.
That’s a pretty image, actually. But it’s not a real one.
If we’re going to be in authentic relationships, not relationships based on our need to impress others, we’ve got to be willing to do a couple of things.
The first is that we’ve got to be willing to develop that relationship with our Creator, because it...more than anything else...is what changes us. Standing in relationship with God brings about transformation in ways that no other relationship can. It puts us outside of the familiar expectations and biases of our culture. It takes us out of the dysfunctions our immediate relationships, which can become their own self-perpetuating mess.
This is hard for us, particularly the extroverts. Extroverts live in the world of relation around them, drawing energy from the social and the interpersonal. That makes you connected, but it sometimes means you bring into yourself the worst spirit of the group in which you find yourself.
The relationship with God calls us to be our best self, the self that rests in the knowledge of God. That best self? Well, if you’ve known people who seem to be there, you know they’re a little radiant. They’re full of God, not full of themselves, and that makes them a little bright, filled with compassion and gentleness, so much so that it can seem a little intimidating at times.
The second is that we’re to be sure that we’re developing and attending to face to face opportunities, which offer the possibility of transformation. This is hard for some of us, particularly the introverts. Being around others can be draining, intimidating, and exhausting. We’d rather stay in ourselves, silent and quiet and comfortable.
But when we do this, we leave ourselves open to not being in relationship with others. We close ourselves off, and that lets us develop our own places of devouring darkness. Angers and resentments and self-hate can snuff out whatever joy we might have to offer the world, and we can easily disappear down that dismal rabbit hole.
And we are not called to darkness, either inward or outward.
We are all called to be that brightness, to stand in our relationships with God and neighbor so that our light is unmistakable, a bright and present challenge to the lostness in the world around us.
Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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