Faces
“Jesus took with him Peter and the brothers James and John and led them up a high mountain where they were alone. As they looked on, a change came over Jesus: his face was shining like sun, and his clothes were dazzling white.”
November 17, 1980
Peter, James, and John probably had no idea why Jesus asked them to tromp up the mountainside with him. It wasn't the first time, nor was it the last, that Jesus said and did things that confused them. Even the disciples who lived and traveled with Jesus had a hard time figuring out who Jesus was and what he wanted from them. We completely misunderstand them if we think they caught on from the beginning. There were only glimmers of recognition along the way. Although full appreciation of who Jesus was and what he meant came only after the tragedy of the crucifixion and the mystery of resurrection, on the mountainside that day one of those fantastic glimmers of recognition happened.
What happened exactly? We will probably never know for sure. Yet those bumbling, stumbling guys – Peter, James, and John – saw something in Jesus' face. His face was transfigured, changed. His face radiated energy, light, love, something. Whatever they saw in his face, they began to see in Jesus who he really was, who God is, and indeed who they were meant to be. It has begun to dawn on me that faces are one of the keys in life to making sense of who others are, to figuring out the riddle of me, and to getting a peek at God.
This morning, I invite you to join me in daring to take a look at the panorama of faces that are present at every turn of life. We will return to the face of Jesus on the mountain of transfiguration. But not until we have paid attention to some other faces. Then we might be better able to see his face, one another's face, and perchance our own.
Human faces, everyone has one. Maybe not the one we would have picked out for ourselves. Indeed, some of you are like me: you have more face than you want. Still, the faces are there. It is hard to remember that faces are more than skin deep. They are a map and a history book of the person whom they adorn.
I want to tell you about the face of an old woman I know. Really, this face is a composite of about three women I know who live in rest homes in Birmingham and Huntsville, So, in a way she is both here and there, yet neither here nor there, but very real just the same.
This face has opened its eyes to the light of day for almost ninety years. Although the cataracted eyes don't see as well as they once did, they have shed their share of tears of joy and sorrow. Her face is crowned with gray-white hair which was once long, dark, and luxuriant. Her face is wrinkled and riddled with creases that become most prominent when she smiles because she has smiled a lot through her years. In dramatic contrast to her 1980 face stands a picture on her bed stand of her face in 1910 on her wedding day. Her face in 1910 was smoothe, young, and pretty. Now, I do not mean to be maudlin about this. But I am trying to share with you a realization I had. I realized that I would never see, know, or understand that woman unless I could see buried in the lines of her face that shy, pretty bride, or the face of her as a young mother brightened by the sight of her first child. I realized that I would never see all of her until I could see in her face the grief stricken widow who almost 50 years after that wedding day laid the loved husband to rest in the earth. I realized that I would not really see or understand her if I did not understand that her face had not seen the love of her life for 20 years yet still sees him very vividly each day in her memory. Oh, her face and the faces I see every day but fail to see because I do not stop to see all the faces buried in each of the faces.
Out of the corner of your eye right now, spot a face around you.
Don't embarrass the person or yourself by letting them know you are studying them, but peripheral vision someone. With that face in mind, ask yourself some questions about it. Who makes that face light up with love and joy? What's worrying that face today? His/her health, job, family, marriage, or just getting through another day? Wonder when was the last time that face buried itself in its hands to cry because a shoulder was not available. You see, it is no wonder that we have trouble looking each other in the eyes, that we look at our feet or over their shoulders, anywhere except in the face. Faces reveal the real person. Their faces remind me of the fears, hopes, sorrows, and dreams buried in my face.
In his recent novel THE SECOND COMING, Walker Percy develops the character Allison, a young woman who has a mental breakdown. Allison's doctor asks why she wants to sit under the table in her group therapy sessions in the hospital. She answers that she doesn't mind talking to other people, that she just doesn't like looking in their faces, that she would rather look at people's knees under the table. She says: "Knees are easy. Faces are defacing." Her doctor responds: "I quite know what you mean. I'd prefer to look at knees than some of the defaced faces....All the same, we're stuck with these faces and we have to make the best of it.”
All of us find knees easier. We look at the "knees" of people's race, or economic status, or whether they can be used for our profit or whatever. We lump people, write them off or ignore them because we don't want to see them. For example, people like us, mostly upwardly mobile, white middle-class folks, have a tendency to deface poor people into a nameless mass who we call welfare-freeloaders, people too lazy to work, people we resent because they get government giveaways for which we grudgingly pay taxes. We haven't ever really seen them, yet we have a picture of some character driving down to the food stamp office in a big Cadillac to pick up his or her stamps gotten at our expense. Some of us may see these persons in a particular color in our imagination, but we don't see a face or care to look. Recently, I have made it a point to drive slowly by the food stamp office two blocks from here the first of each month. I have made myself look at the faces. Most of the faces are kind of blank on top of bodies adorned in shapeless, often mismatched clothes. I have to admit that last month I saw my first food stamp recipient getting into a Cadillac - a 1959 model. Seriously, look real close and you may see an able bodied person or two. But most of all you see faces drained of much hope. And it really would be a relief if we could honestly convince ourselves that their problems are all their own fault. Yet we know the truth. God, help us look at each other's faces!
THE FACE OF GOD - Moving from human faces, let us consider for a moment the face of God. If we can believe the Bible, and I do, it has some alarming things to say about where God's face or at least a reflection of his face may be seen. In that often quoted but seldom understood passage from the Genesis creation stories are the words: "Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over...all the earth...." So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
Humans have sensed that God is a loving, powerful force that has freely chosen to create life and the cosmic conditions to support that life. It hasn't been easy, even for God. It has taken cosmic implosions and explosions for an estimated 8 billion years and a space of at least 8 billion light years in size to have the time and room to bring into existence enough carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and phosphorus to produce and maintain life. All sorts of independent variables had to be just so for there to be life at all, any one condition could have been different and the whole house of cards of life would have fallen.
God is a caring, loving, free creator. Do you want to see something of him in particular beyond seeing him in general in nature, Genesis asks? Then look into the face of humans. Humans are created in the image of God. Now, an image is what you see of yourself reflected in a mirror. The image of you in the mirror is not all of you and it is not the same as you but it is a pretty fair representation of you. This is what Genesis says humans are: a reflection, an image, of who God is. God is certainly more than what shows in humans, but he is at least that, Like God, humans are free, they are capable of love, and they are capable of creating things. The problem is that as we are free to create there also comes the freedom and capacity to be destructive. We can build hospitals or blow the earth into radioactive smithereens. With the capacity to love and care comes the capacity to hate and ignore.
The point I am moving toward is this. Humans are made to be reflections, images, of God. True humanity is a reflection of divinity. What we erroneously call being "only human" is not being human but being inhuman. Humans were created to freely create conditions for life for one another like God, humans were created like God to love one another. It is a perversion, an inhuman perversion, of our human divinity when we use our God likeness to curse, hurt, and hate each other. Still, none of life, ourselves, or God makes much sense until we return to Jesus, And Jesus on the mountain of transfiguration is a good place to see him.
THE HUMAN FACE OF GOD - Human’s faces – our own or others – and God’s face do not make much sense, really can't be seen, until we recognize in Jesus what has been called the HUMAN FACE OF GOD. Somehow, someway that day on what scholars speculate might have been high Mount Hermon, Péter, James, and John saw something in Jesus' face that knocked them off their feet. Somehow, someway they recognized that God, the life-giving force, was showing his face to them in Jesus' face. They discovered that God and his love are for real, it's not just wishful thinking. God's reality shone in Jesus' face like the sun. But that wasn't all. In the human face of God shown in Jesus, Peter, James, and John, and you and me see not only who God is but who God means for us to be.
You see, Jesus lived as a true human reflection of God the way all of us are meant to live according to that passage from Genesis we read earlier. To be truly human is to be loving and caring like the God who made us. We confuse ourselves when we see Jesus' humanity and divinity as opposites. They are really two sides to the same coin. He was divine because he was truly, lovingly, freely, and creatively human. Because he was human the way God means for all of us to be, he was divine. Remember, God created humans male and female - in his image. The opposite of divinity and humanity is that selfish, perverse inhumanity we erroneously often call being human. Again, Peter, James, and John were knocked off their feet, not only because they saw God showing his face in Jesus but because they saw the kind of human God wanted them to be and had to face how far short they fell.
The point I am trying to make is that God is to be seen, if he is ever to be seen by us, incarnated, in-fleshed, in the faces and actions of humans. Like God used Jesus to show his face and love in the world, he must finally use a you or a me. There isn't a soul on earth that will ever believe that God is real or that he cares if that person doesn't find love and care in the face of at least one other human. Further, I will never do you or myself justice until I recognize that even in your face and my face is buried a glimmer of the face of God. God just may use you to get his love and forgiveness to me. He may use me to get his love and presence to you. Even a you and even a me are meant to be human faces of God on earth for somebody.
The gifted writer from Milledgeville, Georgia, Flannery O'Connor, suggests something of this in her short story, "A Temple of the Holy Ghost". The story is about three spoiled teenage girls. Two of them go to a ritzy private school operated by nuns. The two girls get a big charge out of one of the old nuns' speeches about how each person is a temple of the Holy Ghost. That is, the nun refers to Paul's letter to Corinth where he warns people against sexual immorality because their bodies are like a temple where God lives, a bodily temple. that should not be desecrated by misuse. The girls think all of this is very funny because the sister instructs them to tell any boy who gets fresh with them on a date: "Hands off, Mister, I'm a temple of the Holy Ghost. The girls who teasingly call each other 'temple number one' and 'temple number two go to a county fair one weekend while staying with their 12-year-old cousin. At the fair they go into a sideshow which turns out to be a freak show. One of the freaks is a human who is not quite female and not quite male who makes its living by letting people look at its distorted body. That night the twelve-year-old dreams about the hermaphrodite freak. In the dream the freak keeps saying to her, "I am a temple of the Holy Ghost. The story ends with the reader getting O'Connor's point, a deeply Biblical point I might add: Every human being, even the most physically or morally distorted, is a human expression of God.
Whether you are thinking about Russians you want to bomb, or welfare recipients you resent, or some family member who is about to drive you crazy, or even looking at yourself in the mirror considering giving up, each face in some way is a human face of God.
It was said that Moses' face had a mysterious shining glory to it when he came down from Sinai with the commandments from God. Moses and Jesus on the Mountain of Transfiguration are in the background when Paul says to the Corinthians, and I think also to the Huntsvillians: "All of us, then, reflect the glory of the Lord with uncovered faces; and that same glory, coming from the Lord... transforms us into his likeness in an ever greater degree of glory." (2 Cor. 3:18)
O God, show your love in my face. God, show your face in my face not just in spite of me but also because of me. Amen.
God, we live in a sea of faces... faces of people wanting things from us, wanting responses we are not sure we can make.
We search for faces around us who will love us, understand us, maybe even know the real us – and miraculously still care about us.
We see our faces in the mirror and realize that we don't always understand even what we want from life and how we really feel. There is a sea of faces on earth today – hungry faces, faces of people on the brink of war.
O God, in this sea of faces we search for your face. We search for signs that you are here with us, that you are still in control, and signs that you do love us with a love that will never let us go.
God, you can give us the eyes to really see each other in love and understanding. You can give us the courage to see ourselves as we are and the strength to become who you mean for us to be. You give us the strength to dig into life's problems when our strength slips away.
And we thank you.
Amen.