Jerusalem Presbyterian Church

One of my earliest memories of my mother ever working for money was the memory of sitting with my little sister and assorted foster-siblings in the hot car, on a summer day with the windows rolled down to let in whatever breeze happened by.

“Now you kids be good.  Julie, you’re in charge.  Keep them in the car and keep them quiet.  I won’t be but a minute.”

My mother would open up the back of the station wagon, get out her wares, walk up to the house while we kids sat in the driveway.  She would ring the door bell, then disappear into the cool of our neighbor’s homes.  True to her word she emerged a few minutes later, carrying a check and a freshly filled out order form for next time.  My mother, you see, was the Avon Lady.

Before the days of power suits and day care centers my mother supplemented our household income by selling lipstick, eye shadow, and fancy lotions—things she never wore.  We learned to identify our neighbors by what kind of Avon they ordered.  The Beunings collected the after shave bottles shaped like antique cars.  Mrs. Lemmon, although a close neighbor and the mother of one of my classmates, David, would only order Skin-So-Soft bath oil, and only in the summer to repel mosquitoes. “Southern Baptists” my mother would shrug.  “Don’t believe in make-up.”  We kids would roll our eyes in recognition.  “Oh yes.  Those Baptists.”  Since we knew mother’s Avon money paid for things like new bikes every third year or so, a new outfit for the first day of school,  and our once a year trip to the amusement park, we were suspect of anyone who didn’t believe in makeup, or hand cream, or aftershave.

We were so indoctrinated in Avon brand loyalty, I’m not sure how long it took us to realize that our mother never bought any, except for the things she was required to use as demonstrators.  Ah, but the magic of having a mother who was an Avon Lady was the samples! My mother got the lipstick samples by the hundreds, it seemed—all in tiny white tubes smaller than my pinky-finger, the lipstick inside chiseled to a perfect point, with the exotic sounding names of the colors written in impossibly small letters on the bottom of the tube—so small that even at age nine I had to squint to read them.

I thought those tiny lipsticks were magic!  My mother kept them in a box in her bedroom closet, and sometimes I would sneak in there just to look at the colors and read the names.  One thing that made those lipsticks—and the other samples my mother had—so tempting was that they were forbidden.  My mother never let my sister and I play dress up with her samples, telling us instead, “You young girls don’t need this stuff.  You are beautiful the way you are.”

Being told I was beautiful made me feel uneasy, especially coming from my mother.  I always thought my mother was drop dead gorgeous, and I knew I didn’t look anything like her.  In fact, I didn’t look like anyone in my family. The women in my family had high cheekbones, and strong noses, and a widow’s peak of shiny black-brown hair, courtesy of my Native American grandmother.  Oh—and they were also 5’2”.  That’s the beauty that surrounded me in my childhood.  I am the one whose mousy pale looks always stuck out in the family photo.

I can’t say for sure whether it was my mother’s job with Avon, or my own insecurity, or just the times I grew up in, but as soon as I was old enough to wear make-up without a lecture from my parents, I started.  And I’ve never stopped.  Over the years, fashions changed, and the “in” colors changed, and the architecture of my face has changed with time. There is a certain freedom that comes after age 40 when you realize that when they say “less is more” what they really mean is that less is better and more flattering.  But by and large the face that  I present to the world when I leave my house looks pretty much like the one I present today.  And its a little bit different than the one you would see if you happened upon me puttering at home on a Friday.  The pastor, it seems, has two faces.  

Apparently having two faces is a Biblical idea.  Moses teaches us that today, in his encounter with God up on the mountain.

Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God.

I spent some time pondering this phrase from Exodus this week.  The way I see it, there are at least two ways to read this.  On the one hand, Moses is unaware that his face was shining, and it clearly is shining because he had been talking to God.  But at the same time, was he unaware of his shining face because he had been talking to God while it was shining?  Is it Moses’ audience with God that distracts him from an awareness of the state of his face?   I think many of us could say that if we came face to face with God, our hair could be on fire and we would not be aware of it.  We can imagine that the presence of God could be distracting that way.

Moses realizes that his face is shining when he sees the reaction of the Israelites to his changed appearance.  Or maybe he just thinks they are afraid of him because he is carrying the tablets of the covenant.  This is Moses’ second time around with those stone tablets, you see.  He had brought them down once before, only to find the people worshipping a golden calf.  The tablets ended up getting smashed to smithereens.  The people outright rejected God’s covenant with them.  Maybe the people thought that God would leave them alone after they had rejected God.

But God’s love was tenacious.  Or maybe God is stubborn.  Either way Moses has encountered God up close and personal, and is standing there with the covenant, and the people are scared to death.  Moses tells them about his encounter with God, then puts a veil on his face to shield the Israelites from having to look at his frighteningly shiny face any longer.

By the time I got married, in the mid-80’s, the tradition of a face veil for brides was out of fashion, so I’ve never worn a veil, strictly speaking. But I’ve hidden my face plenty of times, and not just with makeup.  There are super-8 movies of me as a child cowering behind my older brother to avoid the camera’s gaze.  I’ve just never liked to be photographed.  I guess I never really felt that a photo—a representation of a moment in time— could truly reflect the person I am, or hope to be.  Looking at pictures of myself, just like listening to my own voice recorded always brings up the same reaction: Is that me?

So I wonder about the look on Moses’ face after being that close to God.  Can the reflection of God’s glory truly depict the experience of being in the actual presence of God?

My favorite part of this story is that Moses keeps taking the veil off when in the Divine presence.  It seems that in the truest moments of this encounter, no veil is necessary—as if nothing need come between Moses and God.  There is no pretense, no fear, no covering up, no distortions.  There is no way for Moses to hide from God.  And why would he want to?

This story seem to be telling us that even when we feel the need to hide from each other, through the masks of dishonesty, shame or fear we wear when we struggle with communicating with each other, the most transparent relationship we have is with God.  And God’s love is tenacious—stubborn, even.  God keeps on showing up, even when rejected by us.

The most frustrating part of this story for me is that Moses keeps putting that veil back on when he comes down to see the Israelites.  I want him to get rid of the veil altogether, even though I know he’s just being a good pastor.  He’s just protecting his people from what frightens them.  It seems like a pure motive.  But maybe what the people need is more reflected glory, and less coddling.  Perhaps if the Israelites more fully understood just who God was and what God expected from them, they wouldn’t have rejected the covenant in the first place. Perhaps.

About nine years ago, there was a film called “Pleasantville” in which two modern teenagers suddenly find themselves transported into the seemingly idyllic world of a 1950’s sitcom.  Like television in the 50’s everything in Pleasantville is back and white with shades of gray.   The boy’s high school basketball team never misses a shot, none of  the streets go out of town, it never rains, and the only purpose for the fire department is to rescue the occasional cat from a tree. David and Jennifer, the two modern teenagers are renamed Bud and Mary Sue Parker in this alternate reality in which they find themselves.  And in to this two-dimensional world, Bud and Mary Sue bring dangerous ideas: that books have actual words in them, that artists should be free to express themselves, that an ordinary housewife can experience physical pleasure.  And when these ideas are introduced, a surprising thing happens: the residents of Pleasantville find that their world has slowly become brightly colored as they begin to reject the saccharinely cheery but dull, meaningless, and achingly predictable script they had been living.

The introduction of color is suspect at first.  When Bud and Mary Sue’s sitcom mother finds that the passion she has discovered has transformed her into a Technicolor splendor, she is terrified of being found out. In what is probably the most tender and poignant but sad commentary on conformity and society, Bud helps her to mask her newfound color with gray makeup.

Maybe the reflected glory of a face-to-face encounter with the living God was just too much for the Israelites, and maybe Moses was doing what he really had to do by not exposing them to it full strength.  Transformation of our lives and of the faces we present to the world is hard.  It’s a good thing, then, that God was and is tenacious in the Divine love for us. God kept coming to Moses and the Israelites again and again.  God made Godself known, and in Jesus Christ put a human face on Divine Love forever.

Even though we my feel the need to conceal ourselves with one another, to hide behind veils of our own making in an effort to protect ourselves against the vulnerability of transparency we can, like Moses approach God with faces unveiled. Basking in the tenacious love of the One who will not let us go, will not let us down, and will not let us off, we can be strengthened for the transformation of our human relationships, and the light of Divine love will shine from us unobscured by any veil, for it is in each other that we see the face of God.

Thanks be to God!