Seek My Face

The events recounted in this morning’s Gospel reading are usually referred to as the "call" of Simon Peter and Andrew and the "call" of James and John. We use that word "call" in the church to refer to God’s offer to designate our future for us. Jesus’ call to Simon Peter and Andrew and James and John is Jesus’ offer to define and direct the future course of their lives. There are many call stories in the Bible, in both the Old and New Testaments. God calls the people out of Egypt, calling the whole people from a life of slavery to new life in the promised land. God calls the young lad Samuel to be a prophet. God calls upon Mary to offer her the vocation of mother to God’s Son. A call. God’s offer to designate or define our future for us. We can always refuse the offer or pretend we didn’t hear. Those stories don’t generally make it into Holy Scripture. But we can always refuse. So it is that we pray in this morning’s collect that we will have the grace not to refuse, but to answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ when it comes to each of us.

But remember that this is Epiphany season. And Epiphany is all about recognition. Epiphany is about recognizing… as we say in the proper preface for this season… recognizing the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Recognizing the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Which is what has to have happened for Simon Peter, Andrew, James and John. They looked at Jesus and they saw God. That day they were all doing just what they always did, fishing. We don’t know if they had heard of Jesus or had ever met him before. We don’t know if they had been praying for the coming of the Messiah or even whether they were particularly religious men beyond the cultural expectations of their time. But that particular day a man walked up to them on the shores of the Sea of Galilee and as they looked at the face of the man Jesus of Nazareth, they recognized God. And when God offered to redefine the future of their lives, they said "yes."

One line in today’s psalm reads: "You speak in my heart and say, ‘Seek my face.’ Your face, Lord, will I seek." I will seek your face, Lord. Would you like to see what Peter and Andrew, James and John saw? To really see what they saw? To come, literally, face to face with the full glory of God? Would you, with the psalmist, seek the face of the Lord?

In a sermon entitled "The Hungering Dark", published in 1969, Frederick Buechner tells this story. Buechner is an ordained Presbyterian minister and author.

"About twenty years ago I was in Rome at Christmastime, and on Christmas Eve I went to St. Peter’s to see the Pope celebrate mass. It happened also to be the end of Holy Year, and there were thousands of pilgrims from all over Europe who started arriving hours ahead of when the mass was supposed to begin so that they would be sure to find a good place to watch from, and it was not long before the whole enormous church was filled. I am sure that we did not look a particularly religious crowd. We were milling around, thousands of us, elbowing each other out of the way to get as near as possible to the papal altar with its huge canopy of gilded bronze and to the aisle that was roped off for the Pope to come down. Some had brought food to sustain them through the long wait, and every once in a while singing would break out like brush fire—"Adeste Fideles" and "Heilige Nacht" I remember especially because everybody seemed to know the Latin words to one and the German words to the other—and the singing would billow up into the great Michelangelo dome and then fade away until somebody somewhere started it up again. Whatever sense anybody might have had of its being a holy time and a holy place was swallowed up by the sheer spectacle of it—the countless voices and candles, and the marble faces of saints and apostles, and the hiss and shuffle of feet on the acres of mosaic.

"Then finally, after several hours of waiting, there was suddenly a hush, and way off in the flickering distance I could see that the Swiss Guard had entered with the golden throne on their shoulders, and the crowds pressed in towards the aisle, and in a burst of cheering the procession began to work its slow way forward.

"What I remember most clearly, of course, is the Pope himself, Pius XII as he was then. In all that Renaissance of splendor with the Swiss Guard in their scarlet and gold, the Pope himself was vested in plainest white with only a white skullcap on the back of his head. I can still see his face as he was carried by me on his throne—that lean, ascetic face, gray-skinned, with the high-bridged beak of a nose, his glasses glittering in the candlelight. And as he passed by me he was leaning slightly forward and peering into the crowd with extraordinary intensity.

"Through the thick lenses of his glasses his eyes were larger than life, and he peered into my face and into all the faces around me and behind me with a look so keen and so charged that I could not escape the feeling that he must be looking for someone in particular. He was not a potentate nodding and smiling to acknowledge the enthusiasm of the multitudes. He was a man whose face seemed gray with waiting, whose eyes seemed huge and exhausted with searching, for someone, some one, who he thought might be there that night or any night, anywhere, but whom he had never found, and yet he kept looking. Face after face he searched for the face that he knew he would know—was it this one? was it this one? or this one?—and then he passed on out of my sight. It was a powerful moment for me," Buechner concludes, "a moment that many other things have crystallized about since, and I felt that I knew whom he was looking for. I felt that anyone else who was really watching must also have known."

Buechner goes on to talk about how, of course, we do see the face of Christ often around us. We see the face of Christ in one another as we reach out in compassion and service. In eyes that long for love and souls that long for peace we see Christ’s own sacrifice reflected. We meet Christ as we enter deeply into the restless need of our own souls or share another’s need. The peace of the Lord be always with you. The Body of Christ keep you in everlasting life. We encounter Christ as we share these words and actions together in worship.

And yet, as significant as these experiences may be for us, I think we must admit that they are not the same sort of encounter that Simon Peter, Andrew, James and John knew. They are not the encounter that the old Pope sought. We see Christ dimly, as a reflection in an old tarnished mirror, to paraphrase Saint Paul. We see an image, an idea of Christ. Like catching the familiar scent of cologne of someone who has just left the room. These diffuse, fleeting, second-hand sightings of Christ are real and they are worth more than anything else in our lives. I expect for most of us, they are the most we will see of Christ this side of the grave. Hang on to them.

But I also wonder if these diffuse, second-hand sightings are not really all we want to see, at least this side of the grave. Do we really, with the psalmist, seek the face of the Lord, or not? Do we really want to see what Peter, Andrew, James and John saw? Really? Because as long as our recognition of the glory of God in our lives is diffuse, second-hand or imaginative, then our response can be, too. Diffuse, fleeting, secondary is how most of us follow Christ, how we answer his call.

Can you imagine what those unremarkable fishermen Simon Peter, Andrew, James and John actually saw in the face of Jesus? Can you imagine a world where a singularly misguided Pope might actually encounter the glory of God born shining into the world in the face of some pilgrim from France, maybe, in Saint Peter’s on Christmas Eve? Buechner again: "There was madness in the face of that old Pope that gaudy night with Hitler’s Jews on his conscience maybe and whatever he died of already on its way to killing him. There was anxiety in his face, if I read it right, and weariness, and longing, longing…. Because I suspect that he hoped that Christ himself had come back that night as more than just the deepest humanness of every man’s humanity… [he hoped] that Impossibility itself [–the full glory of God] stood there resplendent in that impossible place."

Can you imagine Christ himself… the full glory of God… recognized in a face not a foot away from yours? Impossibility itself resplendent in the impossible place of your own unremarkable, muddled, sinful life. God speaking to you. Come. Go. Do unto the least of these. Peace. My own peace I leave with you.

Even if that experience that Simon Peter, Andrew, James and John knew never happens in our own lives… it didn’t in the life of Pius XII… even if it never happens, if we can even begin to imagine, to believe, to hope that it could, it will change our lives. This diffuse, second-hand practice of faith becomes much more serious business. The voice that speaks from the face of God does not invite us into a future vocation of casual worshippers. God’s voice calls full time disciples.

Within the realm of Christendom, the Rev. Will D. Campbell is cut from a pretty different cloth than Pope Pius XII. Evidently he describes himself as a bootleg preacher. He is a white Southern Baptist minister from Mississippi who raised hell for economic justice and racial equality in the South from the late 50’s on. Now 84, in a recent interview in the Christian Century, he was asked what gave him the greatest satisfaction as he looked back on his career as a minister, author and activist. He replied, "Just trying…. I was no hero in the civil rights movement, but I was there. If anything in our faith were taken literally, it would be so revolutionary that we wouldn’t recognize it. We don’t live by our own preachments. If we did, everything would change."

Your face, Lord, will I seek. If we can begin to imagine what it was really like for Simon Peter, Andrew, James and John to recognize the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ…. If we can just recognize the potential for such an experience in our own lives, then maybe we can do better at living by our own preachments, and begin to change our own lives and the lives of others.