We all spend time
staring at our self-reflection in mirrors.
I find this to be especially true for me after one of my wonderful
children has pointed out, yet again, that
I have some eye-gunk going on or gray hairs heralding my aging process! But I trust most of us do some mirror gazing
at least once a day.
So we examine whatever
part of our physical appearance is calling or being called to our attention. We
examine our hair style and what’s happened to it throughout the course of a day
and the course of a life. The eighties
were poofier years even for me! We
consider the marks and creases of our complexion. We measure how much confidence the show of
our teeth might give us. We review the
new styles or stuck with styles and shifting fits of our clothing.
Through all the year’s
we undertaken this sort of personal inventory of our physical appearance, we’ve
been companioned by our inner voice. This
is the voice of our self-esteem evaluating our identity. It narrate how we are feeling about ourselves
at any given moment and counsels us on what to do to improve ourselves
according to certain standards that we deeply value or feel pressured to
value. So when I’m told about the eye
gunk or gray hairs, my inner voice whispers, “Don’t you feel unclean? Aren’t you embarrassed? Go wash your face!” Mirror gazing is also self-esteem gathering.
There are precious moments
when what we see reflected back at us inspires us to feel positive and secure
about ourselves. These are moments when we feel worthy of being
liked and loved. In this world where being judged and angling
for competitive edge seems to always be in play, such positive self-reflection
inspires us to feel confident and content, open to whatever purposes and plans
life invites us to.
But then there are the
other moments, which I feel and fear
are much more frequent for many of us.
These are the moments I believe we’ve all had throughout our years when
in varying degrees we judge ourselves to the point of self-ridicule and social
exclusion. Our world feels closed in
instead of wide open. Our self-esteem
can only summon us to go back to bed and hide under cover, hoping for a dream
about being a special guest on some personal makeover show. We
feel as though life really is a constant competition to win favor, friends,
love, and status … and we are losing. Our sin-struck selves can’t cope with aging, with
anxieties, with moral and spiritual expectations, and with mortal
inevitabilities.
So mirror gazing can
have a positive and negative impact on your psychological and social well-being
and your sense of purpose in the world. Now, I have a deeper question for you to
consider. How does it influence the way
you see and understand your identity as a Christian? Does standing and starting at your
self-reflection help or hinder your ability to understand and securely accept
God’s unconditional love for you? Does
it help or hinder your sense of place and purpose as Jesus’ follower and friend
ministering to this sin-sick world?
Does your mirror ever invite you to moral and spiritual self-reflection,
to consider how confident you are that in God’s grace others just might see the
face of Christ in the world through you?
The Book of James has
a clear, strongly worded, and possibly uncomfortable answer to this deeper
question about whether or not we should be standing around staring at ourselves
in the mirror as a means of evaluating our Christian identity.
It is widely concluded
that James -- the voice we hear mingled with our own when we read and hear this
text -- was the brother of Jesus and the pastor of the first generation church
in Jerusalem. His words therefore had
a particularly great deal of authority to those baptized in Christ he was
addressing. And the style of his
writing – the strength of his preaching voice -- suggests James knew his clout. It is
continuously and unapologetically direct, very energetic in tone, and preaches
wisdom with a similar weightiness as the Old Testament book of Proverbs.
There sure seems to have been a big problem
facing James’ faith community. Too many
professing believers seem to have been stuck standing and staring at
themselves. Too many had succumbed to
being self-absorbed, suckered into the predominant self-improvement
philosophies of the prevailing pagan culture they lived in. With
the focus narrowly on their own faces instead of being the broad face of Christ
in world, spiritual apathy and immoral behavior had lots of room to grow.
James unapologetically
speaks out against this sinfully myopic mirror gazing. He is clear that our identity in Christ is
not to be primarily measured by gazing at ourselves and keeping our faith as
some private, self-improvement tool. We have to see and identify ourselves at all
times reflected in a much broader view than what is provided in a single mirror’s
closed frame. We have to see ourselves actively
living out our faith in all the wide-open spaces of this world that God is
unceasingly loving and redeeming in Christ.
James proclaims that anyone
who hears what Jesus preached but doesn’t go out into the world to do it is
like someone who forgets what they look like, who they truly are, the moment
they step away from their self-reflection.
They deceive themselves. They become
very vulnerable to sordid thoughts and behaviors and the “rank growth of
wickedness.” But every believer who hears the voice of
Jesus and goes into this sin-reflecting world as a doer for the sake of the
liberty He offers will be blessed and be a blessing. They, we,
will be “first fruits” representing all creatures before God.
As I mentioned, the
Book of James is considered to be wisdom literature, but this does not mean it
is esoteric. I love that is it is
bluntly practical and able to be embraced by everyone. It clearly communicates that everything good
that happens in our lives and in this world is a gift from God, whose goodness
is unchanging and forever flowing. It empowers us to keep ourselves constantly
open to receiving and re-gifting this. It
reminds us that our faithful willingness to do so gets shut down when we become
sinfully self-absorbed, too focused on what we feel we must do to satisfy worldly
expectations about our appearance, our security and status and such. Living in a closed system of the self leads
to such folly as rash reactions and speech … whereas being openly, outwardly
focused on love of our neighbors can enable us to be quick to listen, slow to
speak, and slow to anger.
Being doers of the
Word is never a solitary affair. It is always sustained through faithful
community, where we receive with faithful meekness God’s “endless bestowal of
gifts” and “infinitely renewable resources.”[i] To
quote Jon Foreman, one of my very favorite singer-songwriters, this is how we experience
our place in God’s “economy of mercy.”
We don’t walk away and
forget who we are as Christians when we consistently gather together for
worship, for mission work, for faithful fellowship and Bible study. But neither should we forget and allow our
loved ones to forget our identity and calling in Christ when we are not engaged
in specifically church-related events.
God’s constant goodness and reconciling purpose is at work everywhere,
all the time, and by holy grace is revealed through our faithful understanding
in action “in our homes, places of work or volunteering, our schools and
communities and more”[ii]
… in all the open spaces beyond the closed frames of our mirrors. Amen.
[i]
New Interpreter’s Bible commentary on James
[ii]
David Lose, www.workingpreacher.org/dear_wp.aspx?article_id=614
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