“If any are hearers of the word, and not doers” says the letter of James,
“they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror…and on going away
immediately forget what they were like.”
Mirrors are so much a part of our everyday life now we
probably take them completely for granted. Whether we like it or not, we are
bombarded with images of ourselves. We all have mirrors in our homes, and many
of our buildings have huge expanses of plate glass as well. Then there are the
photographs, videos, mobiles that take pictures, CCTV…
But it wasn’t always so. Until quite recently many
people probably never caught more than an occasional glimpse of themselves.
Good quality mirrors were a luxury. Ordinary people probably only saw
occasional distorted reflections of themselves in water or in a fragment of
polished metal. It was easy not to know what you really looked like.
There’s a story told of the people of the remote
island of St Kilda, in the Outer Hebrides. It may be true it may not. The last
permanent residents were evacuated at their own request in 1930. But for many
centuries a small community lived there, isolated from the mainland, living
mostly on a diet of seabirds and their eggs. It was a tough life and many of
them – especially the women – never left the island.
But gradually during the 19th century they
started to build up more links with the mainland. The young men would take
goods to trade there, and return with things the islanders had never seen before.
The story goes that on one of these trips, a man came
back with something completely new to St Kilda – a mirror. He was determined to
keep this marvellous thing a secret – his private treasure. But he had a
sweetheart among the island women and she began to notice that he was behaving
very oddly. She would see him again and again surreptitiously take out
something from under a cushion, look intently at it, and put it back again. She
started to feel suspicious. Was this a picture of some other woman he had met
on the mainland? The more she thought about it, the more worried she got. This
mainland girl was probably beautiful and sophisticated – someone she couldn’t
possibly compete with.
Eventually she couldn’t contain her anxiety any
longer. While he was out, she crept into his house and pulled out the mirror.
She looked at it for a while. Then she put it back, and heaved a sigh of
relief. “Well,” she thought. ”That’s a comfort. Whoever she is, she’s as plain
as a pikestaff – ugly as sin. I’ve got nothing to worry about from her!”
Whether that story is true or not, I like it. It
reminds us of what it was like for most people through most of human history.
You rarely got to see what you looked like, and even when you did it was
probably a blurred, distorted, and fleeting image. Not something you could hold
onto or rely on.
So when James talks about people who look in a mirror
briefly and then forget what they see, his hearers would have all knew what he
meant. Today, we see ourselves all the time physically, but my guess is that
his real point still holds. Because, however clearly we can see our faces, our
view of our souls is often just as blurred, transient and uncertain as it was
then. In truth, we are probably quite content for it to be so. Just as we might
prefer a mirror that showed our bodies in soft focus and took a few pounds off
here and there, I suspect we often prefer a view of our souls that smooths out
the wrinkles and covers up the spiritual blemishes. A really good mirror is
dangerous - it tells us the truth, and that is not always something we want to
face. Self-delusions are often far more comforting.
The Pharisees whom Jesus criticises in today’s Gospel were
obviously very good at seeing what they wanted to see. Pharisees tend to get a
bad press in the Gospels – in reality they were the same mix of good and bad as
the rest of us – but we don’t have to be Pharisees to be guilty of the kind of
behaviour Jesus is talking about here. It could apply to any faith, or any
other group come to that. It’s what happens when we start to think of ourselves
as “insiders”, people who are in the know, who understand the jargon and
control the boundaries, people who have made it to the centre, the place of
power, the place that counts. We become complacent, smug, unthinking. A quick
glance at ourselves, a quick glance at others and we think we know all we need
to know, which is basically just “Are they like us, or not?” The tragedy is
that in the process we usually manage to miss both what needs to change in us-
we looked just fine didn’t we? but also
what is good in others too – the delightful,
surprising joy of diversity, God at work in new ways, new horizons, new
journeys.
One of the great joys of the Paralympic opening
ceremony was its confident message that “I am what I am”, and it invited us all
to ask ourselves what that meant for us.
It confronted us with example after example of the uniqueness of each
human being. There aren’t two categories of people, able- bodied and disabled;
we come in myriad shapes and sizes, abilities and disabilities. The young
Marine, injured in Afghanistan, who sailed down a zip wire into the stadium
carrying the flame didn’t need legs to do so; he needed courage. I have my
legs, but I would never have had the nerve. So who is the disabled one – him or
me? One of the stated aims of these Paralympic games is to get people to look
differently at disability – in fact to question whether disability is a word we
should be using at all. The truth is that we are different, and the skills and
strengths we prize so highly aren’t always the ones we really need.
So where can we find a mirror that shows us ourselves
as we really are, and show us others in their true light too? St James is
clear. Instead of a passing glance at a set of prejudices that reinforce what
you think you already know, you need to look into “the perfect law, the law of liberty”
the law that sets us free. And what is that? It is the law of love, the only
law Jesus ever said really mattered.
This was the law he lived out, the rule he lived by
day by day, every day, whether he was eating with friends or being nailed to a
cross. It was seen in the welcome he gave to those who would never have thought
they could get within a million miles of a teacher like him, as he listened
them and made space for them. People
discovered when they met him that you didn’t have to earn his love or be worthy
of it or fight for it or put others down in order to get it. You didn’t have to
know any secrets to receive it. It wasn’t rationed. It wasn’t about to run out
or in danger of being destroyed. It was abundant – there was plenty to go
round. You didn’t need to be “in” to receive it, because there was no “in”
anymore. It just flowed over the barriers people expected it to observe. Like a
river that had burst its banks, anyone might find themselves ankle deep, knee
deep, completely swept away by it.
And those who had received that love in such
abundance, who had seen themselves anew as they drew close to Jesus and saw
themselves reflected in his eyes, discovered that others now looked different
to them too. If we are not condemned, why should we condemn others? If we are
welcomed and treasured, surely we can welcome and treasure others too. Those
who have seen themselves reflected in the perfect mirror of God’s love, who
live by that law of love themselves will find themselves “blessed in their
doing,” says James.
Learning to see ourselves in the perfect mirror of the
love of God, as those first followers of Jesus did, takes courage and time.
It’s not just a matter of solitary navel gazing, lingering in the stillness of
prayer; it comes through action too, as we meet God in others and seek to serve
them. That’s the thing that usually shines the brightest light on the reality
of our lives, and sometimes reveals things about us we might not like at all. Perhaps
we call ourselves strong, independent, “not suffering fools gladly” – but the
truth is that we are actually bossy, lonely, and intolerant – it’s easy to
mistake the one for the other. Perhaps we think we are modest, humble,
easy-going, but the reality may be that we are just scared stiff of taking a
risk, unwilling to stretch ourselves. Perhaps we think we are insignificant, no
good at anything, but the truth we need to hear is that each one of us has a
light within which the world needs.
Seeing ourselves as God sees us confronts us with
truths that might disturb us, but it also reminds us that God is not scared or
repulsed by even the worst we can do and be. Face to face with God we hear his
challenges loud and clear, but we also hear his voice of love. He won’t reject
us, whatever we have done, whoever we are.
The woman from St Kilda, whose story I started with
was a stranger to herself. She looked at her own reflection and thought it was
someone else. Perhaps that didn’t matter, in fact it was probably a mercy! But
it does matter that we should see ourselves as we really are
spiritually, and that we act on what we see – for our own sake, and for the
sake of others. None of us is perfect, and the changes we want to see in the
world usually begin with changes we need to make in ourselves. As this sermon
ends, I’d like us to linger a bit in God’s presence in silence. Imagine
yourself looking into his eyes – what do you see there? How do you look to him?
What does he say in challenge, and in reassurance, that you need to hear today? Amen
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