Seek His Face (sermon for the third Sunday after the Epiphany)

Who are the faces you see in your heart?

The lines we've skipped in the psalm tell us the issue for the psalmist was that false witnesses had risen up against him. When someone tells a lie about us, they invade our minds with force. They violate our boundaries. They take center stage in our spirits and they tend to hold it, particularly if the lie is being believed, and particularly if any of our own inner voices believe it. We might have a whole host of people who have entered our minds in the past with accusations and judgments and they may have been put away somewhere, but when a lie is told about us, these accusers come swarming into our consciousness and raise their voices as well.

Our inner lives might very well be described as a community of people we have let into our minds and hearts. I know some folks who have struggled with various forms of mental illness who describe this very well. I've heard some call the negative, diseased voices in the mind "the committee." They're going along, trying to do something positive, and the committee speaks up and starts telling them all the reasons they won't be able to do that, and all the reasons they really need to do something self-defeating and hopeless.

Depending on our life experiences, we each have in our minds a whole community of people. Our inner lives is really like a nation, filled with territories and the people who live in them, and who we are and how we feel and what we do is then conditioned and shaped by this community of people who are speaking to us in our minds.

These people tell us what is right and what is wrong, where we belong and where we don't belong, whom we can trust and whom we can't, what is our concern and what isn't. You can imagine if you like a crowd around you, a sea of faces, all of them representing someone you have known, someone who has made an impression on you, positive or negative.

Isaiah was writing about two territories at the northern boundary of what had been Israel, Zebulun and Naphtali, the names of which were simply synonymous in most people's minds with danger and turmoil and violence and oppression. Bad neighborhoods you might say. I suppose to this day if we hear "South Bronx" or "Harlem" or "Watts" we automatically see in our minds riots and slums and scary people of dark complexion, even though those neighborhoods may have changed a great deal since the sixties.

Zebulun and Naphtali were like that. The people of those lands saw nothing around them but the evil leering faces of powerful nations lusting to take them into captivity.

But on them, Isaiah says, a light has shined. A new face is in the picture, one much greater and more powerful than any of the evil faces, the face of the Lord, who breaks the rod of their oppression. Those evil faces are scattered like birds before a running child.

In Paul's letter, he spoke about the factions in the Corinthian church, naming even himself as having been identified as a faction leader. Apollos, Peter, Paul, the faces of great spiritual leaders, wonderful people who must certainly have really changed a lot of lives. Apollos was known primarily for his eloquence, his power as a speaker. Peter was known for his profoundly Jewish perspective and his intense personal history with Jesus himself, and finally Paul was known as the fiery and innovative ex-Pharisee with strange ideas about reaching out to the Gentiles. Their faces were powerfully present in the minds of the new Christians they'd inspired.

Even today, depending on the denomination you're talking about, this or that biblical author will take precedence. I kid my Southern Baptist colleagues that all they preach on is John and Proverbs, and I can do that because there's sadly a lot of truth to it. But they can also kid those of us who were trained by the Lutherans, that we can't find our way out of Paul.

The diversity of the biblical witness is itself saying a lot about Christian community. Paul puts it very well: "Did John the evangelist die for you? Were you baptized into the name of Proverbs? Did Paul save you from your sins?" The people who put the bible together wanted us, I think, to see that there are and will always be diverse witnesses, but they want to assert at the same time that there is really only one Christ.

Of course we know even in congregations certain individuals become popular. It's not surprising. Christians in many cases are pretty amazing and admirable people. But it is a short step to these folks getting claimed by scrapping factions as leaders, even when they themselves have no interest in being claimed as such,.

These also are those faces that float around in our hearts, those influential persons who tell us who we are, who we belong to. Paul reminds us that the biblical author or church leader we like is not the person who truly tells us who we are, and is not the face in our hearts we can really trust. That face is the face of Christ.

The fishers Jesus called in our story from Matthew this morning are defined by their jobs and their place in society. They work the water. They pay their taxes. They have relationships with family, parents, wives, children, all of which identify them as sons, fathers, husbands. And they are citizens of those troubled, turmoil-filled places lots of people had given up on. The faces in their heads no doubt told them, "stay where you are, there's no hope, settle for the difficult lives you lead, settle for the early deaths of your parents, the dashing of your children's joy, because that's the way things are, that's the way you are, and that's all you are."

But Jesus comes along and says, "the kingdom of God has come near; you are more than they say. Come follow me."

The psalmist's heart says "seek his face." Out of all the voices, the voices of our parents, our teachers, our friends, our spouses, our siblings, all these faces we see in our mind's eye, the face of Christ alone will tell us the truth, the face of Christ alone will tell us who we really are.

The face of Christ by itself unites us. I know many people are troubled by what sounds to them like exclusivity, like a rude claim that Jesus is the only way. But the exclusivity, if there is any, in the notion of "Christ alone," is not oriented toward dividing people, but is instead focused on this peculiar notion of oneness.

There is no other religion I'm aware of that focuses on the idea that human society can and should be concretely and visibly healed of divisions and can and should be united under the rule of a loving God. There are ideas like that in other religions, but the prayer of Jesus from the gospel of John was that we might be one, one with each other and one with God.

Seek his face, our hearts tell us. Among all the faces in our hearts and minds and souls, among all the voices telling us who we are and who we aren't, seek his face, listen for his voice, for he alone sees us and knows us in spirit and in truth.

Amen.