Mirror, Mirror

Sermon

Who is your mirror? Who is in your mirror?

The loved ones in our lives are often the best mirrors. I recall when my oldest son was young enough to be restricted to the car seat in the back. As I drove us around, he was like a sponge, taking in all my actions and words. One afternoon, on the way home from preschool, a car pulled out abruptly in front of us and then crept along, exasperatingly slow. Suddenly from the backseat came the burst of a sweet, angry, little voice: “What is WRONG with that idiot, driving so slow like that?” I gulped. He was mirroring the behavior of me and his dad. I vowed to change what he was seeing. I needed to control my anger when driving.

Who is your mirror?

The Letter of James was written for the early Christian communities dispersed from Palestine. It stresses the importance of the concrete practice of love. Packed into today’s reading are some practical ways of loving: Be quick to listen and slow to speak. Be slow to anger. Don’t just hear the Gospel but do it. And we read an interesting metaphor: If we hear the word of God but don’t do it, we are like someone who looks in the mirror, but when she goes away, she immediately forgets what she saw.

Now, we are in the time of the Great Mirror. The pandemic and the civil unrest resulting from the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor have caused us to look nationally, and privately, at our assumptions and what some of us have taken for granted. Painful as it is, we are seeing blemishes and flaws in our nation that we didn’t want to see. When we are on the other side of crises—and we will be, at some point—we don’t want to forget what we look like.

In the midst of pandemic, hurricanes, fires, explosions, oppression, civil unrest, and politics, where do we see God’s face? How do we point out God’s good news in this topsy-turvy world?

But this passage also challenges us on a personal level. A few months ago, after a Zoom meeting, I spoke to one woman who admitted that she is very uncomfortable with Zoom. She doesn’t like the way she looks and is almost mesmerized with seeing herself onscreen. For better or for worse, we are in a graphic age. Now, relying upon Zoom, FaceTime, and Facebook, we are ever more concerned with how we appear to the world.

Who is your mirror?

(I don’t know how this happens, but it seems every time I have the opportunity to preach, the subject of anger keeps coming up!) I want to be clear that all feelings are part of being human, and anger is one of those feelings. Jesus himself felt anger (expressed in angry words at times, and turning over the money changers’ tables in the temple). Anger that propels us to make good change can be a gift. But often we are quick to anger because it is our default. And it is easier to be angry at someone else than to listen and learn what in our own behavior needs changing.

This week, during one of our noon prayers, we prayed for someone who was about to speak to her grandson with whom she had opposing political views. The grandmother was fearful that talking about these issues would create an angry confrontation, but she is persevering. Too often in our civic dialogue and in our own families, we have let anger drive us apart. Persevering in a relationship instead of angrily leaving demonstrates the peace of Christ and the movement of the Holy Spirit to bring real change and new life.

When we look in the mirror, we are looking into an image of God. That may be difficult to see and to believe. Yes, we will see flaws. But the mercy of God is from everlasting to everlasting. One of the reasons we are overcoming technical obstacles to worship every day in noon prayer and on twice on Sundays is that as the body of Christ, we remind one another of God’s mercy and forgiveness, with us and in us.

There is another mirror metaphor in scripture, and that comes from I Corinthians 13:12: “For now, we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now, I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

Imagine that, the reality of Love is the mirror that shows us who we are, in our true being: all the imperfections that need healing in order to be love others, and also that which shines, full of grace and truth.

How would seeing ourselves that way change what we do today?