Poolesville Presbyterian Church
09.02.12; Rev. David Williams
Mirrors, or so the saying goes, cannot lie.
They are remarkably simple things, these reflective objects we find lying around our houses. They are typically made of glass, onto which is coated something like silver or aluminum, which is mixed with various substances to help it cling to the glass. What it does would seem quite straightforward. It bounces back light, typically around eighty percent or so.
But outside of some light-loss, mirrors don’t lie. They show us exactly what is reflected off of them, which should mean that what we see is exactly what is reflected. Problem is, this just isn’t so.
Even if the mirror is an industrial grade mirror, capable of returning 99% of the light it receives, a mirror can do nothing about the eye and the mind that observe it. If that eye and that mind are that of an animal, what the animal sees is another animal.
Years ago, I’d helped organize a Very Important Meeting of the Very Important People who were gathered to talk about Very Important Things. I don’t remember a single thing we did that day. What I remember most about that meeting was not what was discussed, but that the windows of the conference room were reflective on the outside. I remember this because for the entire afternoon of vital planning conversations, a male cardinal was crashing itself angrily into one of the windows, battling ferociously with a strangely identical other male cardinal that had suddenly arrived in its territory. What that cardinal saw was both true and false. The truth lay in the reflected light. But there was no other surprisingly hard cardinal defying it.
As self-aware creatures, we aren’t supposed to be like that. We..along with chimpanzees, whales, and elephants...know that what we see when we see our reflections is us. And yet for humans, that’s not always true. Human beings don’t just see things. We interpret them. We filter them through the lenses of our own identity. We observe what we wish to observe.
Men are good at this. When we inadvertently encounter our image in a reflective surface, there’s a tendency to notice what we want to notice. I mean, look at those guns. Just look at them. We are, without question, in our physical prime, particularly viewed from just the...wait...suck it in a little bit, flex slightly...shift slightly to the right. Perfect. Over time, finding that perfect angle increasingly requires the use of Google Earth, but we are nonetheless convinced that it is there.
Our feminine counterparts, in my experience, seem to have the opposite problem. Fed an endless media diet of abusively impossible photoshopped perfection, women often see only their imperfections. Like right there, under the arm, that bit of skin that wasn’t there a few years ago. It’s the beginnings of...bat wing. And that becomes the only thing to see, that insignificant imperfection, although not another soul would even notice it. If men were even aware of the concept of bat wings, we’d probably view it as an asset.
“I. Am. Batman.”
Even faced with ourselves, we have trouble seeing who we actually are. And from that difficulty seeing who we are, we have difficulty being who we need to be.
The Book of James is all about seeing, and being, and doing. This “letter” is more an essay or sequence of essays that establish the most essential nature of the Christian ethical life. It has been traditionally attributed to James, the brother of Jesus, and as it is perhaps the most theologically Jewish of the books of the New Testament, a majority of contemporary Biblical scholarship sees no reason to challenge that.
James is one of the most practical, rubber-meets-the-road books in the New Testament, because it is essentially a book of Wisdom. As wisdom literature, it concerns itself with how we human beings should act if we’re to get along in the world.
Wisdom teachings are found elsewhere in the Bible, in Proverbs, and in Ecclesiastes, and in Job, as well as in a number of the Psalms. Those books teach the basics of how to live, and particularly how to live so that you are playing well with others and doing well for yourself. They teach thrift, foresight, and patience. They teach that life is to be enjoyed, and that sustained enjoyment is best found in moderation. They teach that the wise do not speak without careful self-examination, first considering the impact of their words. They also teach about the balance between human power and human liberty.
That balance, as classical wisdom literature teaches it, lies in respecting the very real power of the king. There’s a reason that being careful with your speech in the ancient world was important. That reason was that if you were not careful and circumspect, and you offended the king, you could end up being executed in some surprisingly creative ways.
James takes that classical wisdom teaching about respecting the power of authority and puts a different spin on it. Throughout his writing, he describes the relationship of the Christian to something he calls, alternately, the “royal law” and...as we heard in verse 25 today...the “law of liberty.”
That law is defined by James in verse eight of chapter two. It is, simply, that we are to love our neighbors as ourselves. The royal law, for those who claim God as the only authority, is the law of love. The core of the Christ-centered practical wisdom in James is that you cannot claim to be truly compassionate unless that compassion manifests itself in your life.
And here we human beings encounter a challenge. Our view of ourselves can be distorted by a narcissistic ego, or warped and poisoned by the dark narcissus of depression and self-loathing. But we don’t just struggle with really seeing ourselves. Those same interpretive lenses that make it so hard for us to come to terms with our identity also make it doubly hard to see the reality of the people around us.
I mean, there they are, right in front of us. We can see them clear as day.
And yet more often than not, what we see in them isn’t what they really are, but a something that has more to do with us than it has to do with them. We see them as a projection, an idol formed with our own hands, and not as the actual being that was created by the same Maker who formed and shaped and loves us.
As self-aware as we claim to be, we often deal with the beings around us as clumsily and painfully as if we were a bird, spending all of its energy attacking itself, struggling all day long with something that it doesn’t really understand.
Into this awkwardly inescapable reality, James tells us that we should not be like those who are incapable of real self-examination. The truth of a wise existence, he tells us, is that the deepest possible reality is love. We need to see both ourselves and others in that reality. More importantly, we need to insure that our every action is governed by that love. We may struggle to see it. But that requires us to look harder, to embrace the movement of the Spirit within us, and to let it guide us even when we find ourselves forgetting and struggling.
Human beings are great at self deception. We are wonderful at looking right into a mirror and not seeing ourselves, and even better at looking at others and not seeing them at all.
But in the truth that is God’s nature, and the truth that is God’s love, we find both who we are, and who others are. Let’s turn our hearts and our minds towards seeing that, and our hands towards living it. Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
No comments:
Post a Comment