Scripture: Exodus 33:12-23
For the last several years here, we’ve talked regularly and often about Federated’s vocation as a church that “transforms lives.” We’ve used that phrase countless times. It grows out of the conviction that the work of the church is not just dully to go about a life of drudgery, but that we’re to be on a journey more animated and charged, that God wants our lives to be changed to something of great note and purpose. To talk about transformation is to focus on what’s central rather than to get lost in what’s peripheral. As Tony Robinson says, “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing” (Changing the Conversation, p. 13). Transforming lives is the main thing. It’s at the root of what we do here.
Someone asked me, though, this week: what does that mean? What specific kind of transformation does Federated strive for? What does a genuine, God-blessed transformation look like? What makes that notion something more than just empty words?
Excellent questions. So let’s try to paint a picture this morning of lives transformed. And we’ll use Moses and one of his many encounters with God as our jumping off point. For Moses, what’s key is this: every dimension of life is lived in relation to God. Not an instant seems to go by without his conversing with God, living with God, looking for his place in God’s world. That, in a nutshell, is what we’re aiming for: to see the hand of God in every moment.
First, what’s striking in today’s passage is the kind of conversation Moses has with God. I’m not even going to call it prayer, because when we use that word, people think too often of stylized, austere words and formats. No, for Moses, he just jabbers constantly at God. And he’s not shy about asking God for anything. We could learn a thing or two from Moses. It’s not about saying the right words. It’s about bringing our hearts and minds to the live presence that’s at the heart of all that is.
Moses is astoundingly relentless. First, he demands to know God’s plan (Ex. 33:13). Then he says to God, ‘if you’re not going to go with us on our journey, it’s not worth going, so you’d better come with us’ (33:15). Then he says, ‘I want to see your glory, your fabulousness’ (33:18). And you can just picture God saying, after this endless litany, ‘Holy Moses, do you ever shut up?!’ Moses has been changed, over the course of his life, from an obedient Egyptian without any evident faith to a person whose whole life is wrapped up in God. In the way he approaches the Holy One, he has been transformed.
This is what we’re invited to, as well. We can live our whole life as a conversation with God. Transformation for us may involve moving into a kind of non-stop patter—“I’m tired. I’d like a latte. I’m ticked off about my spouse. I can’t believe the beauty of that burning bush on my neighbor’s lawn. I’m bored. I wish my son felt better and happier. I wish my mother would stop criticizing me. I’m worried to death about my friend’s cancer”—all addressed to God. For Moses, life with God is stream of consciousness. He doesn’t edit himself. Whatever’s on his mind gets conveyed to God. Transformation may be for us, in many ways, to become more like Moses.
So, like Moses, what we call our prayer lives may undergo a transformation. But that’s not all. What’s maybe most striking in this tale, and what may open up the image of transformation even more, is the strange encounter with God at the end of this passage. Moses asks to see God’s glory, so God says essentially, ‘OK, I’ll let you see me. But I won’t let you see my face. I’ll only let you see my back.’ Only let you see my back? What an odd thing to say!
But that distinctive image makes for some intriguing ways to look at our lives. It’s really an unusually playful image, and it invites each of us to reflect on what that might mean for us. What first strikes me is that, if we only see the back of God, it’s as though we only see a Holy Presence after it’s passed by. I’m regularly struck by the fact that I rarely if ever notice the presence of God in the moment. I don’t go through my day saying, “There’s God; and there; and there!”—as it’s happening. There’s always at least a moment’s delay before my recognition of grace and wonder. And sometimes it’s hours, weeks, months, or years.
My guess is it’s the same for you. You’ll look back at the end of the day, maybe, and say, “That conversation I had with the landscaper this morning—that was such a great boost to my day.” Or “That meeting last week with the client, the one I thought had gone so badly—look what it’s produced.” Or “That awful experience I had in college—I can’t believe what it gave me.” We look back at our lives, and in retrospect we can see that glory has passed by in ways we didn’t notice at all as it was happening.
The death last week of Steve Jobs, who headed Apple, reminds me of that remarkable commencement address he gave at Stanford University a number of years ago, one many of us heard repeated in the days following his death. And while I’ve quoted from it before, I think it’s worth repeating, because it makes this point so beautifully. In that address, Jobs reflected on three lessons he’s learned in his life. In the first, he talked about his experience at Reed College. Right after high school, he attended Reed for six months and then dropped out because he couldn’t see what he was going to do with a college education. Rather than move, though, he hung around the campus for another eighteen months. One of the things he did in those months was take a calligraphy class, which had not the slightest hope of practical application in his life. “But ten years later,” he says, “when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows . . . copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.”
His observation about that experience is what he calls “connecting the dots.” As he looks back on his life, he sees what he could not possibly have seen at the time: the dots all connect. His experience at Reed led to his inventiveness at Apple. “Of course,” he says, “it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later. . . . You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” So this is what he concludes: “You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.”
So what’s a transformed life in this regard? It’s looking backward and seeing connections we never saw before and celebrating them. And it’s looking ahead to an unknown future and trusting that what Jobs calls “gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever” is what we call God. It’s that relentless force working for good in even the most challenging and difficult circumstances. To live a transformed life is to see these connections in more and more places. We become more aware of glory passing by, of God tying our lives together and making all things new. We look back and increasingly see those connected dots—that glory passing by—in all the curves and corners and shadows, as well as in the luminous, bright spaces of our lives.
To see God’s backside is not just to see connections better, though. It’s also to follow along where God leads. A transformed life keeps looking to what’s ahead, to what is still possible rather than what’s already finished. A friend of mine told me this week that, as his father got older, he stopped looking ahead. He started telling the same stories over and over again. And my friend finally said to his father, “You’re stuck. You need to quit looking behind and start looking ahead.” So his father bought a farm and put his energy into developing it. He found new purpose, he was much more vital, and his life took on a whole new urgency. This was a kind of transformation for him. Instead of stagnating, he opened himself to a new future. Because he looked ahead rather than behind.
Following where God goes has its own distinctive character, of course. So often where God goes is not where we might choose to go. Where God goes is to the place of pain. Where God goes is into the heart of poverty. Where God goes is to do something kind and thoughtful for others. To be transformed is more and more to find as our life’s center a dedication to the well-being of others. A man told me recently that he had begun to do some carpentry work for nothing for some people who really needed it, and that it had made his own life so much richer, as well. He knows that what he’s doing matters—both to him and to those with whom he’s doing it. That’s a transformed life.
To see God’s back is also, in the last chapter of our journeys, to follow God to the place of death, and to know that that scary place is OK precisely because we’re following God there. The road God walks and that we follow upon is a road not limited to this earthly life. It’s a road that walks through the barrier of death into a strange new world of grace and light.
I think of that this week with the death of Dave Hecker, who was such a stalwart and committed member of Federated and of its many music programs. He sang in three choirs here, and probably would have sung in FORTE and the children’s choir if he weren’t just a tad too old! We’ll honor God’s grace in him on Thursday, of course, but I can’t let this moment go by without saying that, even with the sadness of this loss, there’s a deep and profound sense in which Dave is following the backside of God into that unknown future, and that never shall God and he be separated.
In his Stanford commencement address, Steve Jobs finished by telling about an earlier brush he had had with death, and he said, “death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”
To be transformed in faith is to remember the bracing finality of death, and to know that we have but a limited time, and that we really need to make the most of it. I think of that bracing line of Anne Lamott’s friend Pam, who’s dying of breast cancer. The two of them are shopping for a dress, and Anne wonders whether the one she’s trying on makes her hips look too big, and Pam says to her, “Annie? You really don’t have that kind of time” (Traveling Mercies, p. 235).
We really don’t have the kind of time that we should waste it doing something that’s not right. We don’t have the kind of time that we should fritter it away with trivia. We don’t have the kind of time that we should be judgmental and spiteful and mean-spirited. A transformed life is one that takes seriously the sobering boundary of death and lives with joy and passion and love.
The bottom line is this: God wants your life and mine and the lives of countless others who have not yet found this place to be transformed. That’s what we pray for here. That, like Moses, we will talk unceasingly to God. That we will look backward at our lives and see the glory of God all over them. That we will look forward and follow God into the ways of care and support and love. That we will see the specter of death in front of us and know that there is only one real way to live. This is our mission. This is our hope. To be transformed by the glory of God as it passes by again and again and again. For surely the Lord is in this place.