Lent 4: The True Mirror

Numbers 21:4-9
From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; but the people became impatient on the way. The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.

John 3:14-21
And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”


How many times do you look in the mirror when you are getting ready to leave home? Actress Nicole Kidman doesn’t like to look in the mirror very often. She says she cares more about looking “healthy” than beautiful. I confess that I have a love/hate relationship with mirrors. I suffer from the usual amount of negative self-image: just enough to make me dread what I’ll see when I look in a mirror, whether at home or out in public where there seem to be plenty of chances for us to gaze at our own images wherever we go. If you’re like me, though, you also can’t resist the urge to look when your reflection comes calling. You suffer from the simultaneous desires to hide from the reality staring back at you and to scrutinize why that reality is so displeasing. It’s a little game that our image-obsessed society teaches us to play early on in life.

There is a brother and sister team in New York who are seeking a patent for a product they have developed called “true mirror.” It is a mirror that is actually two mirrors joined together in a box at a perfect 90-degree angle. When you look into a “true mirror”, you may see things you are not used to seeing when you check out your reflection in the storefront window. Brian Connolly, a New Yorker, who publishes a magazine called “Natural Health and Fitness”, bought one and used it for introspection. "I look into it for five or 10 minutes three or four times a week," he said. "It reveals parts of me I'm very unfamiliar with."
Some people love the true mirror; some people hate it. “Some people have even run away from it screaming," said John Walter, inventor of the True Mirror. "Then there are people who said they didn't see any difference." And to a few come painful moments of self-recognition. Walter recalls a movie actress who took one look into the True Mirror and exclaimed that she finally understood why she was always getting cast in roles portraying ‘tough, hard-boiled women.’ Before that moment, she said, she never could understand why people would see her that way.”+
Part of the journey of faith is discovering some things about yourself that you might rather not know. Just like we do not like to look at our physical appearance in a mirror of any kind, we also shy away from the characteristics and decisions that cause us embarrassment or shame. We’d rather hide our complaints against God for the terrible situations life hands us from time to time than let God see our hearts for all that they are—jealous, petty, and occasionally small. Of all of our relationships, we worry the most about being “perfect” with God—the one who designed us in the first place and knows us in and out, imperfections and all. We’d rather be fooled by funhouse mirror images of our faults and pretend that what we see is just a distortion of who and what we really are. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that the closer we get to God, the more things about ourselves that we discover that would chip away at that relationship, and we hide them in the dark, or as we used to say it in children’s choir, under a bushel.

The Hebrew people had been journeying with God for quite some time. God had found a way to rescue them from Egypt where they were living in slavery after the relationship between the royal family and the family of Joseph had disintegrated. Moses, God’s servant, had led the Israelites against all odds on foot out of the bounds of their captivity. They were free; they could finally worship when and where they wanted. Their children’s children would never remember what it was like to be slaves to someone else. A new life was out there, courtesy of the God who has always come to their rescue when they were in trouble. That’s how much God loved them, and what did they do?

They spoke against God and Moses. They complained, not only about the amount of time it was taking to get to the new life but even about the daily food God was providing for them while they were on the journey. The complained that God had lured them out of their old life, bad as it was, and had led them into this new one that seemed to be worse than ever. Something had to be done to make this relationship right. They had to see the truth.

God showed truth to the Israelites in the desert with the serpent, the symbol we now use to represent the healing of modern medicine. Generations later, when the story of the bronze serpent on the pole had been told to every child of the Hebrews, they still had questions. Remember Niccodemus early in the third chapter of John? Deep into his faith journey with God, he encounters a disruption in Jesus and questions him about being born again. Then John offers us what is now a staple of our faith: the 16th verse of the third chapter: “For God so loved the world…” and the image of Jesus as the light of a world living in darkness. All those generations after the Exodus, we still hadn’t quite caught on to the fact that the journey of faith is not easy, doesn’t always make sense, and still produces hope for new life that we cannot yet even imagine possible.

John’s right, you know: we love darkness. We love it because it hides all those things we’d rather not see or know about ourselves. And we think that if we can’t see them, then no one else can, either: especially not God. It’s like not looking in a mirror: if I don’t have to see what I actually look like, I can imagine my reflection to be whatever pleases me at the moment. When we avoid seeing our own image, we don’t have to confront the disappointment that God must feel at how far from God’s own image ours has turned out to be. We don’t have to feel shame when we don’t live up to the full potential God has given us or when we don’t use the gifts God has given us for the good of others or at all. We don’t have to be embarrassed at the decisions we’ve made in life that have hurt us or people we love…or even people we don’t know. We don’t have to think about the canyon between who we are right now and who we are called to be. It’s just so much easier to walk by the mirror and look in the other direction.

But every now and then we encounter a true mirror: one that shows us what other people see when they look at us. It sheds light in the dark places of our lives that we’d just as soon not show to the rest of the world, least of all to God. That true mirror reflects the judgment we pass on one another based on income, professional accomplishment, even the streets we live on; the racism we say is in the past until it comes to a question of what schools we’ll send our children to; the sexism we hide behind practicality when we say that there are just some jobs that men do better than women or that there are some places, like the home, that women belong rather than men; the heterosexism we passively participate in by sitting back and doing nothing to help our brothers and sisters in the LGBTandQ community gain the rights due to every human being; or the complacency we practice when we listen to the news and hear about war happening around the world and crime in our own backyards and still think that there is nothing we can or have to do that can stop it.

We just may find ourselves running away screaming from the true mirror, the light that no darkness can extinguish, in the name of shame and disgrace, thinking that the grace of God could not possibly be enough to save us from the poison of the mistakes we have made, the sin we have committed, the lies we have told, the relationships we have broken, the breakdown of community to which we have contributed. We have all been there, some of us finding ourselves there more frequently than any of the other stops along the journey of faith. But then we turn around, and out of the darkness Moses is still coming at us with that bronze snake on a pole, catching the light and reflecting it on us and on our dark lives. But here’s the thing: that snake is saving us. The symbol of our very life and death, it has the antedote for the poison we bring on ourselves when we choose not to let God shine light in our lives. We continue to do evil to ourselves and to one another, and we continue to let the poison travel in our system because we are too afraid to consider the remedy. How is it possible that God could keep trying and trying to help us, to save us?

We are now more than half way through Lent and the journey with Jesus to Jerusalem. It is just starting to come into focus and we know the dark days and hours that are coming. If you were in his shoes, would you want to turn back? Would you imagine that it was better just living in the world that couldn’t figure out how to be in right relationship with God, hoping it would just get better someday? Are you at a place in your faith journey now that seems like to push forward and go deeper into relationship with God is scary and may require more of you than you are willing to give? Are you thinking that it might just be easier to continue to live in darkness because even though it may be bad, you’ve figured out your way around and learning something new might not work out the way you expect?

That’s the hard part about sticking with the journey. It’s not always hearts and flowers. Sometimes it is painful and troubling, especially when we take time to look back and wonder if we are better off for having begun this journey in the first place than we would be had we never considered a relationship with God. But when you take a look into a true mirror that shows you more than a 2-dimensional reflection of yourself, you will see something that is at the very core of everyone of us: the image of God. The same God who created us in the beginning is the God who loves us in the darkest of the middle days and who will gracefully welcome us in the light of the days to come when we finally come face to face with God and who we are. It is the same God who saved the Israelites in the desert and who sent the Son into a world where he would surely have to be eliminated because of the message of his life. And that is the same God who loves you and me enough to keep pursuing us even into these dark days when things seem to be getting worse and worse.

The good news for us today is that God will never desert us, leave us in the dark places of our wilderness forever, but we have to keep going on in faith. We have to believe that God loves us enough to send the Son into the world to save us, to be raised up in glory so that we could be raised up out of darkness and have the chance to live in light—the light of unexpected love, life-long grace and companionship, and the promise of a better life. So look into the true mirror, friends; look at the bronze serpent representing for us the darkest places along our faith journeys. See those places, those shameful places in our lives that pull us away from the love of God, and realize that God offers you a way out. It means confronting the very things about ourselves that we dread exposing the most. But it also means shining light on the promise of what can be—the reality of God’s saving love for us in Jesus, the glory of being forgiven for all of that which we would rather hide, and the promise of the milk and honey of love, mercy, and forgiveness, flowing freely and in abundance. Now that is a reflection I can’t wait to see.

In the name of the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Sustainer. Amen.



+ www.truemirror.com