“Our Confusion of Face”
The Reverend Tom Steffen
21 February 2010

Readings: Daniel 9:1-8

Luke 4:1-13

In a collection of writings known as “The Wisdom of the Desert,” we read of a young man named “John the Dwarf,” who prayed for God to remove his passions. He thought that if he were unmoved by difficulties, without feeling toward those who attacked him and unable to be swayed by devils, he would be alive to God. So, John the Dwarf asked God to remove temptations from him. And being gracious, God answered John’s prayer. By an act of God, John the Dwarf ceases to feel – anything. He became passionless. Then, in his new condition, he went to see some older men in the desert community and told them that he was at peace, completely, “for God has removed all temptations; nothing, now, moves me.”

“Well,” the wise men said, “you had better hurry back to your cell and pray that God command some struggle to be stirred up in you, for the soul is matured only in battle.” As you might guess, he was surprised by this counsel, but he respected and obeyed the instruction and returned to his desert hut. There he asked God for something to struggle against, for something to test him. And, gracious that God is, it was granted, and many temptations came hard and fast. But John the Dwarf never again asked for these strange companions to be removed. Though he struggled with many things, he had been enlightened. From that time on, John simply prayed: “Give me strength to get through.”

The words of the prophet Daniel (Daniel 9:1-8) that Anne read a moment ago address the struggles, temptations, and failures of his own people. We are told that he spoke these words while wearing sackcloth and ashes. Sackcloth was worn by shepherds, because it was inexpensive and durable. But prophets wore it as a symbol of repentance. Things were not going well within the faith community of Israel. And today’s Gospel reading refers to a difficult struggle in the life of Jesus, a wilderness experience, a lonely desert like confrontation with the devil of raw temptations. We may have so divinized Jesus that we fail to understand his days in the desert as an authentic battle, the kind that you and I experience. But it was, I suspect, regardless of his ability to quote sacred texts.

Tiger Woods recently addressed his struggle with raw temptation and his demons. Did you hear his statement? He referred to “the benefits of wealth and fame” that lured him away from an earlier life and practice of restraint and self control. Why is it that a serious and disciplined, heretofore straight shooter (pun intended) can succumb to a shadow way of life to which one can sell his or her soul? Well, the wisdom from the desert suggests that life is real, and real life is a struggle through which the soul can mature. But the struggle is a given, and it is necessary, and is confusing. Confusing? Yes, and Daniel the prophet says as much: “To us,” he says, “belongs confusion of face.”

Consider the fact that I am looking at your faces right now. I see in your faces varying expressions of attention and inattention, of expectancy and sometimes glazed resignation, and nearly every Sunday I wonder to myself: What is really going on behind those faces?

And the same can be said by you. Looking at my face or, say, the faces of the choir, you may be confused as well. You could easily be asking: “Is he, is his heart really in what he is saying?” “Are they, are their hearts really in what they are singing?” And if not, then in what are their hearts? And it is not just that your faces confuse me and that mine and the choir's probably confuse you. We are often confused by our own face.

There’s a silly little jingle that I once heard: “My face I don't mind it, for I am behind it. It’s the people out front that get the jar.” But it is not just “the people out front,” for if we are often confused by our own face, we can get the jar, the shock, too. Most every morning, you look at your face and I mine in a mirror and in effect we say: “Well, there it is again, the same old face I saw yesterday and will see again tomorrow; no better no worse, or if so, not all that much.” But sometimes, the times we find ourselves starring into the mirror, there is a question that is heard, yet rarely spoken: “Is that really me? Am I my face?” The answer is “Yes,” of course it is. And, the answer is “No.” Do you follow me? I am my face, and I am not.

Confusion of face; it is a very strange business. Another way of stating it is to say that beneath the face there are layers of self, and the deepest layers are for the most part hidden from us. For both Daniel reflecting on the failures of his people AND for Jesus, in that defining moment of struggle in the desert, the struggle had to do with deciding who they would be, with what face would they emerge from their wilderness experience. Would Israel be a people of fidelity and faithfulness to God? Would Jesus, this young prophet and agent of God, find His true face to show the world?

This church has a face too, and so does our denomination, as does this country and our world. Most of the time, we avoid looking at these faces, avoid really looking, and maybe it is fear that our looking might turn us to stone. But ever so often, we are forced into looking. Daniel pointed to wickedness and corruption. Jesus had to choose between personal fame and prestige and power or doing the will of God. And for us? What about this local church and our beloved denomination? Or our nation? Well, we must decide what face we will show our community and our world. And this is a bit confusing and not immediately self evident. A nation must ask “What is just and fair for every citizen, or at least just and fair enough so that the rich don’t decay from abject greed and the poor die of abject poverty?” But for a faith community it is even more complicated. We must discern what face God wants to reveal through us and discern if it is a face that we will embrace as our own and figure out a way to reveal it into the future.

I’m grateful to members of our Strategic Planning Team for leading us in our current discernment process. On the 23^rd of November, I charged them “to design and execute a process that will lead to the reestablishment of St. Peter’s as a ministry and place of ‘divine spaciousness,’ a center for learning, serving, and restoring that can flourish in the future.” And I believe it will happen, God willing, it will happen.

Confusion of face. It moved the prophets of old to tears and to speech. It will bring us to our knees, if we dare enter in it, if we dare go deep enough into the layers of self, known to all of us, some of them unknown to us.

As we move into a time of prayer, consider this moving poem by a Japanese poet named Yagi Jukichi (,1898 – 1927): “I first saw my face in a dream on a night when my fever had been high for some time. I had gone to sleep praying to Christ, and a face was revealed. Not, of course, my face nowadays, nor my face when I was young, nor the face of the noblest of angels as I always picture it in my mind. It was a face surpassing even this, and I knew at once it was my own. About the face was a gold-tinged blackness. The next day when my eyes opened, the fever raged no less, but in my heart was a strange calm.”

Let us pray that God will gift us such an awakening this Lenten season, that as we go deeper – blessedly, savingly – the face, in time, will look as though it is tinged with gold, tinged with light. And in that light you begin, I begin, we begin to see, as in a dream at first, our own true face, the face of Love, one that resembles the face of the Christ. Amen.

I am grateful to Reva Allington, friend and member of St. Peter’s UMC, who edits my sermons.