Psalm 99:1–9 · Exodus 34:29–35 · 2 Corinthians 3:12–4:2 · Luke 9:28–36 [37–43a]

This is the last Sunday after Epiphany, a time of revealing the love and nature of Jesus Christ. Our weekly theme is removing the veil, and our readings today focus on the first step of transformation: removing that which hinders our vision of what God’s kingdom is like. This theme is reflected in our call to worship Psalm, which refers to God revealing Godself to Moses, Aaron, and Samuel from a pillar of cloud. Exodus 34 recounts that whenever Moses went in before the Lord to speak, he would take off his veil. The Gospel account in Luke 9 shows the disciples Peter, James, and John having a similar reaction to Jesus at his transfiguration. After witnessing the vision, Peter’s response is to ask Jesus if they could build dwellings for him, Moses, and Elijah. We, like Peter, can miss the point of mystical divine experiences. We can become swept up in wanting to somehow perpetuate the experience. But these are glimpses of our union with God — evidence of what is always there but unseen or unrecognized due to our distraction or distorted perception of reality. Our sermon text, found in 2 Corinthians, addresses how our veiled or hardened minds can prevent us from correctly perceiving reality.

The Water We Swim In

2 Corinthians 3:12–4:2 NRSVUE

There’s a common joke about fish that was used by the late author and essayist David Foster Wallace in his commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005. It goes like this:

Two young fish are swimming along, and they pass an older fish who nods at them and says, “Good morning, boys. How’s the water?” The two younger fish swim on for a while until one of them looks at the other and says, “What’s water?”

In his commencement address, Wallace was making the point that our orientation toward the world and the way we create meaning is absorbed from our culture, education, upbringing, and life experiences. Because we are literally immersed in culture — it’s the water we’re swimming in — we can be unaware of and miss the implications for our faith.

For example, we can be unaware of how we engage in discriminatory behaviors and the way unspoken narratives influence policies and systems. Research studies have documented this. In 2004, economists Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan conducted a study about racial discrimination. They responded to help wanted ads in Boston and Chicago newspapers with made-up résumés that were randomly assigned African American or white-sounding names. Otherwise, the résumés listed equivalent experience and qualifications. The study results showed that white-sounding names received 50 percent more callbacks for interviews and also more positive responses to the resume quality than in the case of the resumes paired with African American-sounding names. Bertrand and Mullainathan found that this racial discrimination was consistent across industry, employer size, and occupation.

In 2021, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Chicago repeated the experiment, filling out “83,000 fake job applications for 11,000 entry-level positions at a variety of Fortune 500 companies” (NPR). In their report titled “A Discrimination Report Card,” these researchers found that “the typical employer called back the presumably white applications around 9 percent more than Black ones. That number rose to roughly 24 percent for the worst offenders” (NPR). Despite the progress made in reversing segregation and creating policies to help eliminate discrimination, these research studies show something important: an unspoken and unwritten narrative is still at work. This narrative negatively impacts the lives of people of color as well as women and other marginalized groups.

We all struggle with various forms of cognitive bias though we likely never recognize it. We may rely on stereotypes to make quick judgments without allowing for differences among people, and it’s easy to be unaware of the hurtful, microaggressions we could be committing. Here are a few of the most common forms of bias from the book Why Don’t They Get It? Overcoming Bias in Others (and Yourself) by Brian McLaren (Share the ones that you discern will resonate or convict your fellowship and use personal examples.):

Confirmation Bias: We judge new ideas based on the ease with which they fit in with and confirm the only standard we have: old ideas, old information, and trusted authorities. As a result, our framing story, belief system, or paradigm excludes whatever doesn’t fit.

Complexity Bias: Our brains prefer a simple falsehood to a complex truth.

Community Bias: It’s almost impossible to see what our community doesn’t, can’t, or won’t see.

Complementarity Bias: If you are hostile to my ideas, I’ll be hostile to yours. If you are curious and respectful toward my ideas, I’ll respond in kind.

Consciousness Bias: Some things simply can’t be seen from where I am right now. But if I keep growing, maturing, and developing, someday I will be able to see what is now inaccessible to me.

Comfort or Complacency Bias: I prefer not to have my comfort disturbed.

Confidence Bias: I am attracted to confidence, even if it is false. I often prefer the bold lie to the hesitant truth.

Catastrophe or Normalcy Bias: I remember dramatic catastrophes but don’t notice gradual decline (or improvement).

Contact Bias: When I don’t have intense and sustained personal contact with “the other,” my prejudices and false assumptions go unchallenged.

Cash Bias: It’s hard for me to see something when my way of making a living requires me not to see it.

Conspiracy Bias: Under stress or shame, our brains are attracted to stories that relieve us, exonerate us, or portray us as innocent victims of malicious conspirators.

Cognitive biases are like a veil that prevents us from seeing others and ourselves the way God sees us. Cognitive biases fabricate a god that we can control, keep us from taking responsibility for our own thoughts and emotions, and often feed our projection of shame and resentment on others. Cognitive biases are the water we swim in, and unless we recognize them, they operate like a veil that keeps us from seeing clearly how we can love our neighbor as Jesus has loved us.

The sermon text talks about the effect a veil has on our spiritual transformation. Let’s read 2 Corinthians 3:12–4:2.

The Context of 2 Corinthians

In their book The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church’s Conservative Icon, authors Marcus Borg and John Crossan refer to Paul as a Jewish Christ mystic.

Paul was a Jew and in his own mind never ceased being one. He was a Jewish Christ mystic because the content of his mystical experiences was Jesus as risen Christ and Lord…And as a Christ mystic, he saw his Judaism anew in the light of Jesus (26).

This is important to note because many scholars mistakenly view Paul’s letters as systematic theology, ideas that need to be explained, rather than a witness to his mystical experiences with Christ as expressed through his Judaism. Paul’s mysticism is referenced with imagery involving a “veil” in our sermon text (2 Corinthians 3: 15–18), but similar imagery about not seeing God clearly is found in other letters from Paul, specifically 1 Corinthians 13:12.

Paul’s mystical experience with the risen Christ not only changed him from the persecutor of Christ followers to a preacher of Christ, but it also changed his view of those who crucified Jesus — the Roman empire and the Jewish high priests. Borg and Crossan write that this transformation in Paul set up “the fundamental opposition in Paul’s theology. Who is Lord? Jesus or empire? In Paul, the mystical experience of Jesus Christ as Lord led to resistance to the imperial vision and advocacy of a different vision of the way the world can be” (28).

As we consider our sermon text from 2 Corinthians 3, let’s keep Paul’s background in mind, considering how our unconscious biases might be veiling our faces and limiting our participation in spreading God’s love in the world today. We’ll think about how transformation relates to transfiguration and why we can have hope.

Transformation and Transfiguration

2 Corinthians 3:12–15 speaks about a veil or a way of viewing the world and God that is hard and unyielding. However, v. 16–18 remarks about the removal of the veil when we turn toward God and the Holy Spirit offers and enables us the freedom to choose to see God more expansively. Paul says in verse 18:

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. 2 Corinthians 3:18 NRSVUE

In this verse, the Greek word translated as “transformed” is the same word used in Matthew 17:2 to describe Jesus’ transfiguration, though translators chose the English word “transfigured.” At the Transfiguration, Jesus was revealed in all His glory. We are being transformed into His image, “from one degree of glory to another.” As God is conforming us to the image of the Son, the veil over our minds — the unconsciousness bias — is being removed, perhaps one degree at a time. As we grow in our understanding of who Jesus is, we can’t help but be transformed in our behavior and mindset toward others and their flourishing.

From experience, we understand this transformation is not instantaneous. It is a lifelong process that deals with our past and present and leads us into the future — all in relationship with Father, Son, and Spirit. As we are healed and freed in Christ, the layers of cognitive bias that cloud our vision of others are peeled away, and we can move closer toward showing others the same love Jesus offers us.

Why We Have Hope

Our sermon text began in 2 Corinthians 3:12 with hope (“Since, then, we have such a hope”), and then it echoes the theme of hope as it concludes by saying in 2 Corinthians 4:1, “Therefore, since it is by God’s mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart.”

Our hope is fueled by God’s mercy, offering us a possibility of change in our worldview due to the Holy Spirit’s revelation of our biases. Professor Lois Malcolm writes,

Amidst whatever is taking place in our lives, God’s mercy is at work. Thus, we can boldly renounce the shame we would rather hide and the pernicious things it would make us do. We no longer need to be cunning or calculating; we can face up to the ways we deceitfully use God’s word to buttress our interests.

We do not have to be controlled by our cognitive biases. We have freedom in Christ, the freedom to choose love and kindness over fear, scapegoating, and hurtful narratives. As David Foster Wallace said in his commencement address, “The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.” It starts by knowing what water you swim in, and from there, receiving God’s mercy and the encouragement and empowerment of the Holy Spirit to follow Jesus’ example of loving concern for others.

Call to Action: Read through the list of common biases compiled by Brian McLaren and ask yourself which ones you struggle with. Offer them in prayer, asking God to work on these areas in your heart, giving thanks for mercy and the long arc of transformation.

---

For Reference:

Borg, Marcus J., and John Dominic Crossan. The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church’s Conservative Icon. HarperOne, 2009.

Crossan, John Dominic, and Jonathan L. Reed. In Search of Paul: How Jesus’ Apostle Opposed Rome’s Empire with God’s Kingdom. HarperSanFrancisco, 2004.

McLaren, Brian. Why Don’t They Get It? Overcoming Bias in Others (and Yourself). Ebook.

https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/transfiguration-of-our-lord-3/commentary-on-2-corinthians-312-42

https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/transfiguration-of-our-lord-3/commentary-on-2-corinthians-312-42-2

https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/transfiguration-of-our-lord-3/commentary-on-2-corinthians-312-42-5

https://cac.org/daily-meditations/recognizing-our-biases-2021-03-01/

https://www.npr.org/2024/04/11/1243713272/resume-bias-study-white-names-black-names#:~:text=The%20watershed%20study%20found%20that,names%20indicated%20they%20were%20Black.

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/0002828042002561

https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/A-Discrimination-Report-Card-1.pdf

https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/

---

Small Group Discussion Questions