A Fourth Church Sermon by Carol J. Allen

July 23, 2000 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

God’s Saving Face

Carol J. Allen
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Ephesians 2: 4-10
Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

“He had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.
Mark 6:34 (NRSV)

The church’s confession is that saving faith, which is confidence in God through the perception of a parentlike goodwill in all the events of one’s life, is the gift of God given in the presentation of the New Testament picture of Jesus Christ.

B. A. Gerrish
Saving and Secular Faith

I was standing at the sink absentmindedly washing dishes this week and words of a song flitted through my mind. I think maybe it was written by John Lennon and sung by the Beatles, or maybe the Monkeys. (Well, that tips my hand about the era in which I came of age). I’m sure it’s a love song. All I remember are these words: “Oh, I saw your face, now I’m a believer.”

Winifred Gallagher, a behavioral science reporter, wanted to understand believers. She set out to research religion in this new millennium. She approached her work as a well-educated, thoroughly modern skeptic. She shared the yearning of many of her peers for something deeper than a materialistic culture can offer, but was suspicious of religion as nothing more than belief in the unbelievable or just another bureaucratic institution. Gallagher decided to test these assumptions. She went about interrogating conservative Judaism, Zen Buddhism, New Age, and her own heritage as a Christian with questions of meaning like: “What’s true? What matters? Why is there something instead of nothing? Is this all there is? Who am I? What should I do?”

In her book Working on God (Random House, 1999), Gallagher describes how her scholarly project became a personal story. An unexpected spiritual experience became the touchstone of her quest. On one hot morning in Jerusalem, after she had visited the legendary Christian sites and was trudging with little feeling through the large shrines that cover over the alleged grounds of Jesus’ last days, Gallagher stopped to rest outside the Garden of Gethsemene. She writes, “In this olive grove, Jesus spent the night before his death racked by a massive . . . panic attack, from which he emerged still trusting in God.” The site’s official attraction now is a “chapel reminiscent of late 1950’s tail-fin automotive design; I preferred to stay outside.” “As I stared dully through the tour-bus fumes and iron fence at the garden’s ancient trees, the hair on my arms suddenly stood up. From nowhere, tears boiled down my cheeks. Embarrassed, I slunk into the hideous but dark church. For a few more minutes in a back pew, I was overcome with a kind of tidal wave of compassion: an intense, highly unusual awareness not only of the suffering of that great soul so long ago, but of all creatures. I felt what. . . Cardinal Newman called ‘heart speaking to heart.’ Different traditions use different terms, but because of its strong outward focus, I know this was a religious experience. Because it had to do with Jesus, I call it a Christian one.”

Gallagher concludes her book with her sense of having arrived at a place that she and other skeptics can call home, a place that transcends denominational boundaries and embraces modern realities. For her, the context of this homeplace is the inquirer’s pew of a church in the tradition in which she was born. There she must struggle to hold together her experienced-based type of Christianity with elements of Judaism that engage her intellectual bent and certain Buddhist concepts by which she reflects on her perceptions of things. This synthesis has helped to expand her sense of the sacred. This union of the sacred feels to Gallagher “both familiar and new, complex and right.”

“As I inch across the George Washington bridge toward my secular city,” she writes, “I consider the most important question I had hoped to answer. I believe religion is right. Even if it’s not, it hasn’t deprived me of any good thing and has given me many. In the age of anxiety, religion replaces narcissism and fear with compassion and. . . straining toward mystery. It says you should do the best you can right now—pay attention to what’s most true and kind—and trust, like the great souls of blessed memory, that somehow, everything will be all right. If there’s a better way to live, I don’t know of it. I intend to keep working on God.”

Deserts, mountaintops, sanctuaries, monasteries, silence, order, calm, light, serenity—aren’t these the things many of us think of when we think of spirituality? They conjure up time out from the ordinary, a detachment from the messiness of life and therefore, the theory goes, they bring a person closer to God. Bradley Wigger, writing on spirituality and parenting, offers a rationale for this point of view. Good Calvinists, he says, have worried that attachments can become a form of idolatry—that is, the “turning of something in the world into a substitute for God.” Yes, Wigger says, attachment may lead to idolatry, but there is another kind of danger—it’s called ‘detachment.’ Detachment can lead to a kind of “fear of getting too close, a phobia about caring too much. . .” Both attitudes can be dangerous. But, he points out, “Running from life and caring and commitment is far too tempting. . . Fear of stickiness, fleeing attachments. . . is a spiritual danger. . . if. . . market values are not tempered by the stickier non-market values such as love, care, compassion, or wisdom, we produce a nation of self-serving greedmongers.” Wigger suggests there is another way to think about the spiritual lifecone that moves in the direction of attachment. We need, he says, ‘a theology of stickiness’ (J. Bradley Wigger, “Face to Face: A Spirituality of Parenting,” in Family Ministry, vol. 14, no. 2, Summer 2000).

When Harvard psychiatrist Robert Coles did the research that led to his book The Spiritual Life of Children, he said that of the 300 children he asked to draw a picture of God, all but 38 of them drew a picture of God’s face. Wigger reminds us that infants are wired to smile in the presence of a face. We are born “to notice, smile at, delight in and thrive in relationship to another. We are born to attach, to stick with others. In a sense, we are made for communion. And this communion generates the deep sense of security that lets us thrive in life.”

“Face,” after all, is a short hand way of talking about what makes us human. We are made for relationship. ‘Face’ reminds us of what religious people call human—“made in the image of God,” a holy mix of earth and the breath of life. Wigger draws our attention to the book of 1st Corinthians where the apostle Paul said, “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face to face” (13:12). Paul used ‘face’ to speak of the fullness of God’s world to come. “Face is an image of God’s presence, God’s attachment, God’s love and affection,” said Martin Buber.

If we could have seen Winifred Gallagher’s face, as tears rolled down her cheeks that day in the Garden of Gethsemene, we would have seen, I believe, a gift of grace, a saving faith, a renewed attachment to the Maker and Sustainer of Life. Her experience of God’s compassion in the person of Jesus Christ sent her back into a community of believers who attempt to make and keep loving attachments with Jesus and with each other within the stickiness of life. “If there’s a better way to live, I don’t know of it. I intend to keep working on God.”

In Mark’s account, the apostles had had a tiring but exhilarating day of ‘working on God.’ They tumbled over themselves to tell Jesus all about it. Joseph Donders imagines the scene this way: “Power had gone out of them. . ., a power they had never expected in themselves. . . They told one another, and him, story after story, [of preaching, teaching, healing, chasing evil spirits away]. They were sure the world was going to change. It had cost them a lot. They dropped their sandals, they brushed their hair, they massaged their tired legs and arms. While they were giving their reports, they were constantly interrupted by dozens and dozens of people who wanted to see him and them, who wanted to be touched, who wanted to draw attention to their sick children. They did not even have the time for a bite. They did not have a second for a drink. [Jesus] [had compassion for them]. He said: ‘Let us go out of here. You need rest. You need some time for yourselves alone.’ He organized a boat and a skipper, and off they went. They left the others—the dozens, the scores, the hundreds, and the thousands—behind. It was so obvious where they were going that the crowd first started to walk and then to run around the lake so they were all there when they arrived, waiting again, hoping to be touched. Jesus took pity on them, and sent his disciples off to have a rest, a drink, and a meal, while he began to attend to that crowd himself.”

We could explore the meaning of this vignette from the perspective of the disciples. They worked hard to reflect the face of a loving God and they found joy in their ministry, even though discipleship cost them time, energy, and self-care. We know the heavy demands of our own work. The text interrogates us, it asks us to consider where our work brings us joy. On the other hand, we could begin from Jesus’ side of the story. Compassion was the moving force of his life and work. Others caught it from him. Whenever we have felt compassion, whenever we have been moved by someone “smashed up, hungry, thirsty, frustrated or miserable,” we have had a sense of what Jesus felt when he was moved by compassion, and how the disciples ‘caught’ compassion from him. The text urges us to consider how we have directed those impulses to care that have bubbled up in us over our life time. What if we begin with the crowds, those who are like sheep without a shepherd, those who yearn for meaning and purpose in the face of suffering, those who hunger for a glimpse of God’s compassionate face.

We know the conventional or usual question asked of suffering. It is: “If God is loving and all powerful at the same time, then why is there so much suffering in the world?” Underlying this question is the assumption that God could, if God would, eliminate suffering. The reasoning follows that “If suffering is not eliminated, then God is either cruel or does not exist.” Christian ethicist Stanley Hauerwas writes that “the earliest Christians did not question God’s existence or goodness in the face of suffering.” “Suffering [for them] was not a metaphysical problem needing a solution but a practical challenge requiring a response.” They did not ask, “Why is there evil and suffering in the world?” They asked, “How shall we proceed to live and cope in the face of persecution and general misfortune?” The early Christians did not separate the question of suffering from their calling to be a people of faith. “Historically speaking,” says Hauerwas, “Christians have not had ‘a solution’ to the problem of evil. Rather, they have had a community of care that has made it possible for them to absorb the destructive terror of evil that constantly threatens to destroy all human relations” (Naming the Silences: God, Medicine and the Problem of Suffering, Eerdman’s, 1990).

Writing in his Lament for a Son, Nicholas Wolterstorff, breaks out of his self-imposed isolation by sharing his grief and suffering at the loss of his 25-year-old son in a climbing accident. His discovery, he says, is that “Suffering is down at the center of things, deep down where the meaning is. Suffering is the meaning of our world. For Love is the meaning. And Love suffers. The tears of God are the meaning of history, but mystery remains. Why isn’t Love-without-suffering the meaning of things? Why is suffering-Love the meaning? Why does God endure his suffering? Why does God not at once relieve his agony by relieving ours? Wolterstorff does not try to answer his questions. “To do so. . . would betray his helplessness, which he discusses with painful wisdom; ‘I know about helplessess—of what to do when there is nothing to do. I have learned coping. We live in a time and place where, over and over, when confronted with something unpleasant we pursue not coping but overcoming. (We in our affluence often succeed for awhile. Most of humanity has not enjoyed and will not enjoy such luxury. Death finally comes to shatter our illusion that we can make do without coping. When we have overcome absences with phone calls, winglessness with airplanes, summer heat with air conditioning—when we have overcome all these and much more besides, then there will abide two things with which we must cope: the evil in our hearts and death. There are those who vainly think that some technology will enable us to overcome [the evil]. Everyone know that there is no technology for overcoming death. Death is left for God’s overcoming.”

Wolterstorff concludes by admonishing God and his religious community:

“What I need to hear from you is that you recognize how painful it is. I need to hear from you that you are with me in my desperation.” (in Hauerwas)

“Jesus had compassion for them, because they were like
sheep without a shepherd.”

If there’s a better way to live, I don’t know of it.
I intend to keep working on God.”

I remember one particular time in my life when I was skeptical about God’s presence and power. I decided to go where I thought people were suffering the most. If I did not find God there, I could conclude that God did not exist. I went to a shelter for homeless families, and I asked the children there about God. “Is God here?” I asked, and “How do you know?” Kids put their hands on their hips, shook their heads, and looked at me like I was crazy. “You don’t know?,” they said. “Tell me,” I said. I remember especially the reply of one nine-year-old boy. “Well, it’s like this,” he said. “God came into my mother’s mind before I was born and came into me through her umbilical cord. I learned to read. I can run and I can help people. That’s how I know God is here!” I also learned that the children felt safe and appreciated in this particular shelter. Many of them still maintained a tough resiliency, a hope for their future. The children in that shelter took me seriously and witnessed to the faith that had been placed within them. I saw God’s face in their faces and in the faces of the staff who cared for them and their parents, and I came back to the church renewed, ready to join others in helping the church be the kind of saving place in the world that the homeless shelter had been for me.

There is a moral issue here. Whenever we treat someone like an “It,” we are not acting toward them as someone made in God’s image. Wigger reminds us that “A society that mistreats, abandons, misuses, or neglects its children is blind to the image of God. That society doesn’t see the Face of God in the child.” It is blind to the “mystery and meaning of face to face life together.”

I have seen the Face of God in this congregation, in those who sit patiently at the bedsides of dying spouses, siblings, children and friends. In the arms of those who open to comfort another even as they are grieving a loss, in the voices of those who sing hymns and lead prayers to quicken courage, in all of those who keep the covenants they have made, all the way to the end. Spiritual life is, after all, in at least two dimensions: heaven and earth. Life is fragile so we need a sense of a reality bigger than the battles between life and death, attachment and loss, blessing and curse. Worship and prayer, telling the gospel story, remembering God’s covenant and celebrating the resurrection is how we get it that God is bigger than this world. The tangible, concrete presence of other human beings, attachments, relationships, communities, households, and friendships are also visible signs of grace in our lives. Wigger suggests that “Life in the Spirit is life in which we can recognize the connection between the ordinary and the extraordinary. . . a way of picking up God’s rhythms and discovering beauty in the sticky, tangled mess.”

There is a Presbyterian father who checks on his children before he goes to bed every night. He gently places a hand on their heads and says, or sometimes just thinks, ‘God bless you.’ Maybe they hear him. Maybe not. Nevertheless, the father believes there is a connection between this nightly ritual and the children knowing, even in a subconscious way, that they are loved. “Heaven and earth are held together in God,” this father comments. “The life of faith sets the ordinary in the context of Holiness, and this includes the ordinary, sticky, messy faces of children. This includes the worried, watchful, weighty faces of parents. This Holiness includes all the ways in which concerned communities gather in face to face relationships to bring love to a frightened world. Remember, love never ends” (Wigger).

On the cover of today’s bulletin there is a comment by a theologian by the name of Gerrish: “The church’s confession is that saving faith (which is confidence in God through the perception of a parent-like goodwill in all the events of one’s life), is the gift of God given in the presentation of the New Testament picture of Jesus Christ.”

Dear Church, beloved of God, may we continue to be this kind of blessing for each other and for all God’s children whom we meet.

“He had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.”

“If there’s a better way to live, I don’t know of it. I intend to keep working on God.”

Amen.