Good morning, everyone. Thank you so much for being here, especially if you're new. We're so glad you're here.
Have a couple announcements this morning. First of all, happy fall break. Many of you have it this week, next week.
have a little bit of break from programming. We have no youth group tonight or Field of Friends. Wednesday, we'll be off from Sunshine, and also the church office will be closed this week. Coming up on October 27th...
is our annual fall festival. We'll have a barbecue dinner, some backyard games, and a costume parade. Bring your own lawn chair, and you can sign up for that online.
We're coming up on the Christmas season here pretty soon, so we're going to get a choir together. The first rehearsal is on Sunday, October 27th, right after worship. Lunch is provided for that.
Come talk to Will if you'd like to find more information. And finally... Finally, we'd love to pray for you. Submit your request or reply to the email you receive every Sunday morning, or there's a portion on the back of the bulletin that you can fill out and drop in the offering plate. Now let's take a moment to prepare our hearts for worship.
Join me in our opening prayer. O Almighty God, who pours out all who desire it, the spirit of grace and of supplication, deliver us when we draw near to you. From coldness of heart and wanderings of mind, that with steadfast thoughts and kindled affections, we may worship you in spirit and in truth. Through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
Let's stand and sing together. together. Our shield and defender, the nations of days, A billion and slender and girded with grace. Oh, tell of His might, oh, sing of His grace, Whose road is the light, whose canopy space is The bountiful care, what tongue can recite? It breathes in the air, it shines in the light.
It streams from the hills, it descends to the flame, And sweetly distills in the dew and the rain. Children of dust and feeble as frail, In need do we trust, nor find need to fail. Thy mercies, our tender, our firm to the end, Our raker, defender, redeemer, and friend. Join me in this call to worship from Psalm 89. I will sing of the steadfast love of the Lord forever. With my mouth I will make known your faithfulness to all generations.
For I said, steadfast love will be built up forever. In the heavens you will establish your faithfulness. You have said, I have made a covenant with my chosen one.
I have sworn to David my servant. I will establish your offspring forever and build your throne for all generations. Let the heavens praise your wonders, O Lord, your faithfulness in the assembly of the Holy Ones.
Be Thou my vision, O Lord of my heart, Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art. Thou my best thought, by day or by night Waking or sleeping, Thy presence since my life Be Thou my wisdom and Thou my true word I ever with Thee and Thou with me, Lord Thou my great Father I Thy true son Thou in me dwelling and I with Thee one Riches I heed, none more man's empty praise Thou my inheritance, now and always Thou and always I sleep my heart, my King of Heaven, my treasured hour. I sleep my heart. King of heaven, my victory won May I reach heaven's joys, O bright heaven's sun Heart of my own heart, whatever befall Still be my vision, aurora of all Oh Lord, you know me and search me up, my habits and thoughts, my secret doubts, my dreams and I... The words of my mouth in you Oh Lord, I am found Oh, in you Oh Lord, I am found I'm on a, on a And my, my wandering soul, my sleepless eyes, I long for you, but from you I hide.
In you, oh Lord, I am found. Oh, in you, oh Lord, I am found. Oh darkness covers my hope and sight and night overtakes my troubled mind in darkness Before my birth you composed my frame, you gazed in my eyes and knew my name, you roared with me.
From your love so deep, so boundless and strong, so rich, so free, no high nor dead can separate Let's pray. O Lord, our God, ruler of the universe, there is no one like you. You know the number of the grains of sand in the ocean, recall the stars and distant galaxies by name, and judge every passing thought in the minds of men.
There is nothing that can escape your sight. Lord, we tremble for fear at this raging world, but you sit on your throne and laugh. You laugh with the joy of a father who delights to reassure.
our anxious hearts. But we scorn your tender care. We see ourselves wise in our own eyes, able to take care of ourselves. We believed the lie that our eyes would be opened by disobeying you, but we were only left blind. Lord, thank you that you opened the eyes of the blind.
You lift up those who are bowed down. You saw our filth, and rather than leave us, you sent your willing son Jesus to rescue us. But Lord, your salvation is not yet fully realized. See us while we wait. Lord, see those devastated by the hurricane.
See your persecuted church. See those struggling with silent illness. See those with broken families. See your people. Have mercy.
Lord, and give us eyes to see and help the needy. Lord, above all, guide us to the day when our faith will become sight, and we will behold your beaming face gazing at us right next to your beloved Son, King Jesus. who taught us to pray. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen. You may be seated. As we receive an offering in song, let us consider how we might return to God a portion of His great generosity towards us. You can do that a couple of ways.
You can put it in the offering plate, or you can scan the QR code on the back of your bulletin. And it's because of your generosity that we get to continue ministry here at St. Patrick. I will build my house, whether storm or drought, on a rock that does not move.
I will set my hope in your love of God. And your faithfulness will prove you are steadfast. Steadfast.
By the word you spoke and the sorry host I'll call out thy name each night In your watchful care I will rest secure As you lead us with your light You are steadfast You are steadfast Step fast, you are step fast Step fast I will not trust in the strength of kings. All your promise I will send. I will shout for joy. I will raise my voice.
Alleluia to the Lamb. You are service. In the moment of emptiness, all was fulfilled In the hour of darkness, your light was revealed In the presence of death, your light was affirmed In the absence of holiness, you are still God You are steadfast Thank you guys. And now let us join our confession with this one. With the church across time and space, let us stand together and remember what we believe with the words of the Apostles'Creed.
Church, what do you believe? I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only Son. Our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried. He descended into hell. The third day he rose again from the dead.
He ascended into heaven and is seated on the right hand of God the Father Almighty. From there he will come to judge the quick and the dead. I believe in the Holy Ghost. the holy catholic church the communion of saints forgiveness of sins and the resurrection of the body and life everlasting amen praise god from whom all blessings flow praise him all creatures Praise Him, above ye heavenly hosts.
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen. Welcome again to St. Patrick. Here we are striving to embody Christ in the everyday as we make disciples who love God, love people, and love life. And if we do that, we believe that God will saturate our neighborhoods with feasting families who tell a better story of God's grace by setting tables for the lonely.
If you want to learn more about being part of this amazing group of God's children here, come talk to us at the Connect table. Right in the north X to the right. And now, brothers and sisters, take a moment to greet one another. Good morning, friends.
Welcome. Adding my welcome to Luke's. We're so glad that you're here this morning. We're continuing in this series in the 13th chapter of 1 Corinthians.
Very familiar passage and relevant, not just as a part of wedding ceremonies, but as we investigate what God has for his church. I want to make a couple of apologies first here by way of the fact that you're going to hear a lot of C.S. Lewis today, and that's me saying that. You always hear C.S. Lewis from me, but this week we were talking about this passage, and Greg asked me very nonchalantly, he said, well, so, I mean, obviously you're going to use till we have faces, right?
And I was ashamed, because I'm the guy who's like working on a degree in C.S. Lewis, and it had not occurred to me. occurred to me early in my study that it would be a perfect book to talk about this text alongside. And so I probably went a little bit overboard.
And well, you know, we're going to do this together. So here we go. This sermon is going to be called Till We Have Faces.
We're going to look, I'm going to read 1 Corinthians 13, starting in verse 9, but we will just really focus in on verse 12 today. For now we know in part, and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child. I thought like a child.
I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall know fully.
even as I have been fully known. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let's pray.
Father, we know that all of our flesh and glory are grass and flowers which fade and fall, but your word flourishes forever. So find us hidden here where the frailty of humanity dwells with the fullness of divinity in Christ Jesus. our Lord, and send your spirit to open our eyes that we might seek your steadfast face.
Amen. We have this line, for now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. We live in a world that's actually saturated with the language of the King James Version.
So you've probably heard this before as through a glass darkly. And if you were like me as a kid, you heard a lot of phrases, didn't know where they came from, what they meant, but they sort of charged your imagination. And so if I heard a phrase or it came to mind, through a glass darkly, I would think about maybe peering through a glass orb at some other magical world that I can't quite get at or into. I had no idea of the origin. I certainly wouldn't have thought that it had anything to do with love, which at that point...
was still a very icky concept to me. It was all about the mystical, magical, mysterious other world. But that was when I was a child.
And when I became a man, I put away childish things, and I got back into fairy tales, which is where the real truth is. And you start thinking about things like Alice's looking glass, which, incidentally, is a mirror. It reminds me of the... 1800s astronomer Percival Lowell, maybe you've heard his story before, he was looking at Venus through his telescope and he kept seeing these spoke-like features and he was like, this is amazing, this is maybe even evidence of, you know, another society on the planet Venus.
It looks like there's canals and all kinds of like maybe even city streets. He was blown away and he was very excited. And so what you do when you're a scientist is you have to bring in other people and you have to repeat what you've seen for someone else. So it did not pass peer review.
Everybody else started looking up in their telescopes and they didn't see Jack. That's when he realized that actually he had been, the way that he had tuned his telescope actually turned it into an ophthalmoscope. Which means that he was looking at a picture of his own eyeball.
out there, okay? And so all of those spokes were just the veins in his eyes. Now, he's not the first person to look out at something and to end up seeing himself. That's exactly what we see in this passage.
It's what happened with Alice, who thought that she was peering into an alien world and even going into a wonderland, but what she discovered was herself. This is confusing, right? Are we talking in this passage about knowing the love of God, or about knowing others, or about knowing ourselves?
And the answer is, of course, yes. And so we're going to see, our outline is just going to follow the text here. Knowing partly, then knowing fully, and finally being fully known.
He says, now I know in part. Now, A mirror suggests that what Jim was talking about last week, the school of charity, actually starts with seeing ourselves. We want to be loving other people, but now he's saying the way we start in the school of charity is we begin to see ourselves. This is not a new idea.
The ancient Greek philosophers would say things like, know yourself and the unexamined life is not worth living. This is where we begin the process in contemplation of our own souls, and then that makes us into better people. It's carried on. Even modern American philosophers have picked up on this.
For example, the one who said, I'm starting with the man in the mirror. I'm hoping, I'm asking him to change his ways. That was Michael Jackson. He's a phenomenal philosopher. If you listen through, especially his early albums, he's...
delving into what it means to know yourself. And he says, I'm bad. He gets that.
But he's moving on. He's trying to change his ways. How does focusing on yourself help you love God and others? Isn't love primarily about self-denial? Yes, but it's also true that we love the ones we love the most, we hurt the most.
There are very few people who are crying in their therapist's office about their bank teller. Most of the time, it's the people that are closest to us, the people who have the most access to us that are hurting us, and we're hurting the people who are closest to us the most. They need us to be better.
And love demands that we try. In your most heated arguments with your closest loved ones, they're trying to get you to see yourself the way that they see you, and hopefully to make some adjustments, right? Not just fine-tuning, like some coarse adjustments. Now, what we'd like to do is maybe go and be by ourselves and sort of fix ourselves and then be in relationship. Wouldn't that be nice?
But we can't, because we actually, well, first of all, we can't survive without relationships, and second, we can't see ourselves unless we see ourselves through the eyes of other people. We only actually know ourselves as part of a complex relational system, and so we need other people to help us see ourselves. And just like Pinocchio, we start to learn that there's real danger in avoiding school.
We need to be a part of this school, which means we need to be in relationship with one another, which means that we are going to be hurting and even harming one another, hurt and harmed by one another. The mirror is the kind of self-image that we create through the eyes of other people, people who are willing to tell us the truth about ourselves. And knowing ourself helps us to grow into more loving.
and encouraging, and healing, and upbuilding people, which is great, right? That's what we want. Right now, we know ourselves partly, but we're moving toward something.
Now, what keeps us out of the school is a level of immaturity that keeps us from looking in the mirror, and then makes us remain unloving. C.S. Lewis, surprise, surprise, said there are basically two kinds of people. There are those who by unselfish mean that you are very caring and helpful to others, and then those who think that unselfish means leaving other people well enough alone, okay? And both of those people are actually at risk for the extreme versions of their position, which are great errors.
We can't help causing damage to other people no matter which approach we take. leaning in to be helpful or leaning out to avoid causing damage. Childishness leaves each of those positions prone to the extremes because either we end up smothering people thinking that we're helping them or we end up abandoning them thinking we're giving them space. Either extreme is a failure of love. Both extremes are a kind of isolation, a kind of unwillingness to actually see ourselves and where we would actually be of service to another person.
Two modern day examples of how we avoid looking in that mirror. One, I read in an article this week in an online magazine called Aeon. I don't know how to pronounce it. It's one of those hipster things that, you know, people in New York read, and somebody sent it to me, and I read it, and what I started to realize was that this chick from Brooklyn knows what she's talking about, all right? She says this.
She's talking about a phenomenon that we call main character syndrome. You may have heard people talk about having main character energy, right? This person who walks into a room and everyone is like, oh, I am now a side character in that protagonist's story.
That's the person that this room is all about. She says this, MCS, as she calls it, is a tendency to view one's life as a story in which one stars in the central role with everyone else as a side character at best. The kids call those people NPCs, non-player characters. Only the star's perspectives, desires, loves, hatreds, and opinions matter, while those of others in supporting roles are relegated to the periphery of awareness.
Main characters act while everyone else reacts. Main characters demand attention and the rest of us had better obey. Now, if you recognize that, what I want you to do is I want you to put that in the bucket of childishness.
Because if you want to see that up close, go visit the nursery this morning. And you will see that every child believes that they are the main character. And they want you to believe that as well. And adults who behave that way are behaving childishly. When I became a man, I put away childish things.
And it was hard. I actually became a man first. Then I had to figure out how to put away childish things. I was a man-child for a long time. In a lot of ways, I still am.
Ask my wife. She continues, we must see others as fully human and be engaged with each other as moral beings to understand who we are and who we are in relation to others and to the world. She is spitting scripture here.
But the main character narrative denies all these possibilities. It is destructive to views of human beings as fundamentally relational and interdependent and poses a threat to two important experiences of being human. The first is connection to others.
The second is love. And so these people who are surrounded by other people are actually isolated. They're not experiencing connection. and they're not experiencing love, even though they're surrounded by other people. They're isolated.
Now, there's another way. That's sort of the leaving people well enough alone approach. This would be more of the trying to be helpful and caring approach.
There's another way that we mess this up, and it's by something called masking, all right, which is isolating in plain view. Maybe you don't think you're the main character, but you don't want anyone else to know what character you are. And so you have several different characters that you play. The psychologist Chip Dodd created this little structure called the paradigm of recovery, and it looks like a little funnel, okay?
What you've got at the top here is addiction, anxiety, depression, these sort of ways that we cope, and that's what's on the outside. That's sort of how we naturally engage our lives. But underneath that is always a sense of codependency, all right?
And codependency is basically where I'll be whatever you need me to be so that you are okay because I'm not okay unless you're okay, all right? And so my insides are determined by your outsides. How you're presenting yourself is going to determine how I feel.
And so then I'm going to sort of position myself so that you feel good, so that I feel good, and then we can feel good, okay? And a lot of folks are under the impression that that's what love is, and it's not. That is a childish way of relating to one another.
But it's a very natural way in a very unnatural world to cope with life. Now, where did that come from? Well, originally, that came from a sense of abandonment.
Somebody told you that however you actually were wasn't okay, and that made you feel bad. toxic shame. Let's go down. You can see down at the bottom, that was yourself. You presented yourself.
It wasn't okay. You felt shame about that. And so you put in on a mask of whatever they did like, and then they liked that. And then that made you feel good.
And then that taught you codependency. And then you had to live a whole bunch of different lives and you didn't feel integrated and you didn't feel at peace and you didn't feel healthy. And then you discovered addiction or anxiety or depression.
Do you see how that? works is sort of the iceberg of your whole life going all the way down. And so what's keeping you from seeing yourself and keeping is that you're not showing others yourself and you're not showing others yourself because you think they won't approve of you. And then that keeps you childish.
All right, now here's the truth. I'm not a psychologist, okay? These people who have written these things, they are, and I've seen enough in my work to corroborate the story that they're telling about how we work.
But I am a literature guy, and C.S. Lewis wrote a fantastic book about Psyche, Psyche and Cupid. He's retelling the mythological story of the marriage of Psyche and Cupid through the eyes of Psyche's sister, Orwell, okay? Now, Orwell is, well, she tells her life story from her perspective.
And it's a compelling story. And it is, I mean, it is full of tragedy and heartbreak. And finally, what she does, she lives her whole life to be able to get and to write this little journal, her version of the story, to tell the gods what they've done to her and to sort of present her case against them. And her case is eviscerating. It is brutal.
It is what she would call very honest. and a good case against the gods. The truth is, what Lewis says, is that she had no face. And he clarifies, I've said that she had no face, but meant she had a thousand faces. I've got this face for this situation.
I've got this face for this situation. I've got this face for this situation. And I don't know who I am, and you don't know who I am.
I don't have really a sense of self. It led... John Steinbeck to say, I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen. I'd say the vast majority of them, especially the one we look at in the mirror.
We don't know ourselves, and it makes it hard for us then to love. That's knowing partly. That's kind of like the bad news. Let's talk a little bit about the good news. Knowing fully.
See, now I know in part, then I shall know fully. Who's talking? Paul.
Paul is like Saint Paul, like the Apostle Paul. Paul's a good dude, all right? And he's talking about he's not there yet. He's still striving. He's still working out that salvation in him, even though he recognizes that it's the Lord who's working in him.
to bring it to completion, he's still working and striving and trying to make it happen. You ever thought about how a mirror works? We look at a mirror and we see how many images. You would think naturally, I see one, unless you've got double vision or something. I look into a mirror and I see one image and it's me.
But that's not entirely true. We actually see two images. We see what our eyes are seeing, but then we also see with our mind's eye what we want it to be.
All right, this is an ideal. And so if I've got a little bit of hair in my face and I look in the mirror and I'll brush it aside, right? Because I also have this mind's eye picture of what it should look like. A mirror doesn't do us any good with just one image. We can't just know what we do look like.
We have to know what we ought to look like. And there's a distance between those two things which makes mirrors useful because we're conforming the image we see to the image we desire, the ideal. There's the image we see and the ideal standard we want to move toward. We've got a pretty cloudy image of God that we're looking at, but we also get the perfect imprint of him in Christ, who is revealed in Scripture. So let's think about the ideal in terms of love.
What ideal does Jesus give us in love? Well, John... tells us that in 1 John 3, verse 16, by this we know, love, that he laid his life down for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. But if anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him? Okay, the standard, the gold standard for love is that Jesus laid down his life for us.
All right, but it's actually worse than that, because Matthew 5 also says, Jesus says, you have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. He actually, I thought this was the ideal, but actually he's escalating it.
It's actually much harder than you thought. That's the ideal. So what's the image?
Well, we see ourselves when we compare our relationships to his relationships. His relationships were he laid down his life for the brothers. He loved those who persecuted him.
He died for his enemies. Now let me look at my relationships, all right? I have covenantal relationships, the brothers, right? There are things that people that I'm close to tell me that I see.
And I agree with them, and I couldn't see it without their eyes, and I'm grateful for it, okay? That could be something as banal as, buddy, you got some spinach in your teeth, all right? People who love you will tell you things like that. People who don't love you will just let you just walk around like a moron, okay? Because they don't love you.
I'm sorry, they don't. But then there are also things that your loved ones know about you that they can't tell you yet. Because, like, you're, you know. They're Jack Nicholson. You can't handle the truth.
They know that if you were to hear the thing that's true, you would just lose your mind. And so they're waiting for like the perfect moment, like, when do I tell him that, you know, this is a really unacceptable behavior? And we're just walking on eggshells around each other. But we can see it.
There's all of those things that are dynamics in our close relationships, the relationships where we know people aren't gonna leave us. They're just going to kind of be with us. And then that forces them to kind of go, I don't know if I can live with this for the rest of my life.
I think I'm going to say something, right? And that's a good thing. But there's tension there.
And when we compare that to how Jesus deals with the brothers, we begin to see my love is not like his love. I've got a lot of codependency I'm dealing with here. I've got a lot of main character energy I'm bringing to this conversation.
And it's not being very helpful or very loving. But it's not just the brothers, it's also the others, the outsiders, the enemies. See, we also begin to see through a glass more clearly when we widen our gaze from the people that are sort of in our set, you know, the people that we like, the people that we've chosen, the people that we're used to, to others, other ethnicities, other epochs, like, of history.
other experiences, people we feel like we can't relate to, and now we're supposed to, like, love them as well? They're weird. And then we see ourselves in a mirror a little bit more clearly. It's hard to love what you don't understand, and so we try and make other people like us so that we can love them. It's called a Pygmalion project.
Or maybe more recently, maybe you saw the movie My Fair Lady. Or more recently than that, the movie Her with Joaquin Phoenix. It's this idea that in order to make other people more palatable to us, we need to make them more like us.
If you would just load the stinking dishwasher the way I do, I could finally love you. It's just hard to love somebody who doesn't do the laundry the way that you do it. That's hard.
It's hard to love somebody who doesn't drive the way you would drive. And so we try and make them like us so we can love them. That is childish.
That is a failure of love. And James, Jesus'brother, says this, For anyone who is a hearer of the word, who sees the exact thing, and not a doer, doesn't adapt his life, is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. Now just think about how this manifests itself in our close relationships. When we go and we try and apply that, what do we see?
When I get called on my unloving behavior or what makes me unlovely, I will often try really, really, really hard until one or both of us forgets how painful it was. And then I'll slide back into whatever it is that I was doing that is unloving or unlovely. We forget the shame of it, or the other person does, and then we go back to isolating or masking.
Because it's hard to live in shame. Now, you shouldn't live in shame. Actually, shame can be a gift that teaches us some humility that's not self-hatred.
It's just an awareness of who we are. And that's a good thing, because when you know your limitations, and you know the size you are and what you can and can't do, then you're able to present yourself to other people in a way that's actually loving. But as long as you have your main character energy, or you think you're a lot more helpful than you actually are, you're not going to be able to love very well.
Oruol, that character, Psyche's sister with the terrible sob story about her life. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces? Remember, she has multiple faces. She doesn't know her face yet, and so she can't bring it to what she thinks are the gods in order to bring her case.
She's pagan. She doesn't know the true God, but she's starting to know a little bit more about herself. And maybe you know people like this too.
They learn more and more about themselves through the kind of unavoidable things like pain, suffering, and loss. They don't know God, but they're starting to know themselves, and it makes them bitter and hard and sad. Because when you learn the truth about yourself, you see the desperation of your situation. You start taking masks off, and you start realizing that what's underneath the mask is not very comely.
It's not very beautiful. It's not very glorious. Lewis elaborates in Mere Christianity when he says the real test of being in the presence of God is that you either forget about yourself altogether, or you see yourself as a small, dirty object.
Now, Presbyterians read that and they go, yeah, and you should see yourself as a small, dirty object. Worms, scum of the earth. Not exactly. That's truer than believing you're all that, okay?
But it's not the whole truth about you. It's better to be self-forgetful. Humility is a healthier response than toxic shame. But God has a gracious answer to both, because both are starting to see something. And this is where we conclude our passage.
I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. You see, one thing Paul has been doing this whole time is exhibiting a little bit of main character energy. I will know.
I will know. I know in part. I will know fully.
But then he reverses it at the end here. I am fully known. He goes from being the active to the passive receiver of the action.
Ah, now I'm closer to where I belong. My son plays flag football. It takes up the majority of our week these days. four days a stinking week. That's like when you do something most days a week, that's what you do.
Okay. And so what we do is we watch football and man, I can tell you this happens every once in a while. And I've come to recognize it when, when the offense is in the huddle and then they break. If he looks at me, I know that his play has just been called. I know he's going to, he's about to run his route.
He looks at me to make sure I'm looking at him, because I am a distracted person when it comes to sports. I am not keyed in, okay? I am fantasizing about other worlds.
But he makes sure that I'm looking at him for this, because he wants me to see, because he's actually designed for me to see. Kurt Thompson, in his book, The Soul of Shame, says, we are all born into the world looking for someone looking for us. And that we remain in this mode of searching for the rest of our lives.
You're still looking for people looking for you. And others may forget or fail to look or not have eyes to see, but not God. God knows us completely at every moment.
This is a reformed doctrine we call Coram Deo. We live our lives before the face. of God, every bit of it.
The psalmist, which we sang this verse this morning, Psalm 139, verse 15, my frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came.
to be. He sees every bit of it. He never turns his gaze away, not for any reason. We want to be seen, but we're afraid to be seen.
And we've got all kinds of strategies for figuring out how not to be seen in our various states of undress until we are a little more presentable. And there are plenty of times where I'm really grateful that we do that. But there are lots of times where we need to be seen and we're hiding, but we're not hiding from him.
To know yourself more fully through the eyes of someone who really sees you will result in, as we said, profound humility. Now, if we're not mature, then that does turn into like a toxic shame. And some of us can't handle that.
All of us can't handle that. But it can also turn into the kind of humility that is the very starting place of love. In fact, the way that Paul talks about Jesus's love is...
that he humbled himself, that he descended, that he made himself nothing. He emptied himself. He laid down his life for us. This is the starting point of love.
And it's so patently obvious, it's so written into the fabric of the world, that a non-believing essayist can write this. This is the same lady who wrote about the main character energy and how it's killing us. This is her conclusion. To love is, in a sense, to enter into a mystery, a kind of connection with the other that offers no guarantees, no personal glory, no safe outcomes, and certainly no winners and losers. To love is to face uncertainty about who we are and about who the other might be.
Emmanuel Levinas argued that alterity, the uncertainty born of the otherness of others, is the beginning of all morality. It might also be the beginning of all love. The other challenges us, makes demands on us, and holds us responsible.
The other forces us out of our self-referential solipsism. That's a philosophy that means that I'm the only one that exists or matters in the world. Everyone else is a projection. And into the awe of connection. Look at the other's face.
Levinas tells us, in seeing the face of another, we begin to grasp what it might mean to be vulnerable, to be accountable. This is a million miles from faceless likes, subscribers, or fans. This is why social media is deforming you and me.
This is why the ability to send an email or to yell at customer service on the phone is dehumanizing us. Because you would not say those things to someone face to face. There's a level of accountability of humanity there. And that's how God sees us, face to face.
And she says, this gives us a bit of accountability. Accountability, sure, but to whom ultimately? Ultimately to God. We were designed to reflect the divine image fully, completely, which means what?
Which means that every time people are seen by us, they should be loved by us perfectly. Have we failed? I have, and I'm accountable.
The author of Hebrews says, No creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give... account. So what does that look like? What does it look like to actually stand before God and give an account for how we've treated others?
Well, one young woman found out in John chapter 4, we call her the Samaritan woman. We don't know her name, but we do know a lot about her. We know a lot more about her than she would like for us to know about her probably. or at least would have then.
She would go to the well to draw water in the hottest part of the day because she was trying to avoid other people seeing her, shaming her. It was exhausting because of the series of failures in her life. We don't know where the culpability for that was. We do know that a woman in that period, at that time, in that situation, was more a victim of her circumstances than most of us have ever understood we could be.
But we also know that she has culpability for her life, that she's responsible for her choices and her actions. And whatever it is that is true about her was better kept hidden. And then she goes to the well one day by herself and finds that she is not by herself. that the eyes of the one who created her, who knew her frame before she ever manifested a thought, were looking at her and were asking her for relationship.
And as she leaned into that relationship, she saw that she couldn't dodge him. She couldn't shift the narrative, sort of tell it a little slant. She couldn't change the subject.
Everywhere she went, there he was. She could not go to the depths of Sheol. She could not rise to the heavens and him not be there. And so she stood before him, face to face.
And it was such a transformative experience, it was so life-giving and empowering, that when she left, her testimony was this. So the woman left her water jar and went away into town and said to the people, the people she has spent, she has organized her life around avoiding. She sought them out, and she said, come. See a man who told me all that I ever did, and she reaches the correct doxological conclusion.
Can this be the Christ? It has to be, because he sees me fully, and it gives me life. When I'm exposed to him, I am transformed.
I'm not defeated and deformed. Jesus said of another such young woman, the one who is forgiven much, loves much. The one who has been seen and accepted because of the Christ. And let's be clear, because of the atoning work of that Christ. He doesn't just have warm, fuzzy feelings about you.
He died for you. It's his love that transforms you. It's his love that makes you. lovable and loving.
And when that happens, we begin to love much. That's why one anonymous commentator said, Paul was welcomed into heaven by the cheers of those he martyred. Paul was welcomed into heaven by the cheers of those he martyred. They loved their enemy. And he knew when he wrote this that he was accountable for what he had done in his past life.
That that stuff didn't just go away. That there's something about him that he knows in part, but he will know fully one day just how ugly his life had been. But that also he is fully known by the one who is transforming him into the image and likeness of the one who is perfect.
love made manifest in our world. A commentator on Lewis's Till We Have Faces says this in the end, what emerges then from God's victory over Orwell is not merely a picture of the power of the gospel to win over a recalcitrant opponent, but also a picture of the power of the gospel. to transform that opponent into someone markedly better, to replace her ugliness with a face of beauty. We've got to be able to lean into what Scripture tells us love is and the relationships we have been given to manifest that in such a way that it becomes what Jim called the school of charity that teaches us. how to be beautiful the way he is beautiful.
So I give you this blessing which he gave to us in the very beginning of the founding of a people of God. He said, the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine down upon you and be gracious to you.
The Lord lift up the countenance of his face and give you his peace now and forevermore. Amen. We've seen in a mirror this morning.
As we confess, we see more and more clearly, not just what we need, but what He provides. So let's turn to this corporate confession of sin in your bulletin. Reflect on this for a moment.
Let it reflect your face back at you. Receive the humility. that it's designed to give you and hand that over to the one who sees you perfectly.
Pray together. Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart. We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.
We are truly sorry, and we humbly repent. For the sake of your Son, Jesus Christ, have mercy on us. and forgive us that we may walk in your will and walk in your ways to the glory of your name. Amen. Hear now this assurance of pardon.
In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses according to the riches of his grace which he lavished upon us in all wisdom and insight making known to us. The mystery of His will, according to His purpose, which He set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in Him, things in heaven and things on earth. Scripture calls that uniting of heaven and earth a marriage. This is what love looks like, and it begins here at the table on the night in which Christ was betrayed. When he took bread and he broke it, giving thanks, and he said, this is my body broken for you.
I give my life for yours. Take, eat, and know what love is. In the same manner, after the supper, he took the cup and he said, this is the new covenant poured out in my blood for the forgiveness of sins. Drink all of you from it. The Apostle tells us that as often as we eat this bread and we drink this cup, we proclaim His death until He comes again.
Let us pray. Father, we consecrate these ordinary elements to You. Let them be for us the body and blood of Christ.
That as our bodies and our body here receives this body and blood, that we also in our spirits... are feasting on the real presence of Christ, that we have been ascended and seated on high in the heavenly places because Christ, who is our life, is seated there, delighting in us, shining His face upon us, seeing every deed and misdeed and covering all things in His love. We thank you for this meal today that reminds and changes us. more fully into your image and your likeness.
In Christ's name, amen. As the ushers come and release your rose, you will gather around these tables in groups of 12 to 15 feasting families who come to receive the precious body and blood of the Lamb. This is a table for sinners.
It's a table for people who have confessed that sin, who are believers. This is a confession itself. And so, if you are a baptized believer, member of a local church, this is a meal for you. If you're not, you're still invited to come and to receive the witness.
To see with your eyes people who are being received by the God who sees all. So, would you come as the ushers dismiss your rows. We have...
grape juice and wine and gluten-free options. Hopefully there's something for everyone. Would you come now? Scripture tells us that after they had feasted, they departed singing a hymn, so let us stand and do likewise.
Praise the Savior now and ever, praise Him all beneath the sky. Brought straight lying, suffering, dying, on the cross a sacrifice, victory gaining life. Now in glory He doth rise, Praise the Savior now and ever, Praise Him all beneath the sky. We're filled with Christ's availability, He is all our righteousness, He our Savior has forever served, Earth's free from dire need, distress christ Once ever weirdly levered Christ has bruised the serpent's head And yet no longer is the stronger hand It's up his cap- For His favor breaks forever unto God the Father's Son.
Praise the Savior, praise Him ever, Son of God our Lord. Lord and King. Praise the Spirit through Christ Mary. He doth the salvation bring.
Praise the Savior now and ever. Praise him all, our Lord and King. Amen. Thank you so much for being here with us in worship this morning.
We were transformed by your presence. Thank you for loving us well here with your presence. Hear now this benediction as we depart. And before we do... I want to remind you, if there's anything you would like prayer for, you can make your way up to the front, and there will be someone there to pray for and with you, and we'd love to meet you outside in the narthex to the right, if there's any way we can help you plug into the church.
Until we meet again, let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil. Hold fast to what is good.
Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor. Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit.
Serve the Lord, rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality. To God be the glory in Christ alone. Go in peace.