Mark 7: 6,7,8; James 1: 22-27

A bunch of young people are getting settled in a bar and about to order some drinks. One of the guys who usually not that talkative starts a monologue as one of his friends whispers:” listen to him, he is saying what he means and he isn’t even drunk yet.”  There is some truth to that, isn’t it friends? A lot of people need to get rid of their inhibitions before they tell people what they mean. This is what today’s texts are referring to.  The practical book of James tells us that we do not live out our faith.  In the Gospel of Mark Jesus complements this by quoting from the prophet Isaiah and saying:”What you people is not what’s in your hearts.” We could say they are different ways of saying the same thing.  Mary Pipher in her 2002 book about adolescent girls writes:” “The world tells us what we are to be and shapes us to the ends it sets before us.  To men it says, work. To us, it says, seem.” Pipher complains: “The less the woman has in her head, the lighter she is for carrying.” I think that is really true for men also.  Men must “seem” also.  Society asks us to appear other than we are.  We are asked to pretend. Pastors are most at danger of “seeming,” because people expect them to be better people.  However, there is a catch to this: if they actually act like they are better persons, then people will not buy it and be annoyed by their behavior. Mark really zeroes in on our hypocrisy. The words of Isaiah Jesus brings to life say clearly:”these people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far away from Me. But in vain do they worship Me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of people.”  This is often so true of religion: people’s lips are close to God, but people’s hearts are far way.  So Mark makes a distinction between what we say and what’s in our hearts.  James makes the distinction between hearing the Word of God and doing the Word of God. James has this great image of a mirror:” For if anyone is a hearer of the word, but not a doer, he or she is like a person who looks at his or her natural face in the mirror; for once he or she has looked at her or himself and gone away, he or she had immediately forgotten what kind of person he or she was.”  It is as if the moment after we see ourselves in the mirror we have forgotten who we are.  So it is an issue of memory.  Friends, we think that memory problems are limited to people later in life, but we really have memory problems all through our life.  Not only do we forget where we put things, we forget what we said and what we promised and we forget who and what really matters to us.  So maybe we’re not always insincere and hypocritical, sometimes we just don’t see that what we do or say is not consistent with what we believe. We’re just not thinking and checking ourselves. It’s like when we walk out of the house in the morning and we have just combed our hair and we think that by evening time the hair still looks the same. I make that mistake all the time. Actually after half an hour it looks different already.

Friends, there are different ways of looking in the mirror.  Our colleagues and co-workers can be a mirror to us, although they aren’t always accurate.  In one of his monologues comedian Bill Cosby remarks on how, once he reached a certain age, his children began frequently to say to him,” You look good, Dad.” “Strangely enough,” Cosby went on, “the older I get, the more often I look good; and therefore my handsomeness will reach its peak when they bury me.”

So, how come when we look at ourselves, when we get feedback from other about ourselves, we don’t remember? How come it doesn’t stay with us?   One reason could be that we don’t believe what the mirror tells us.  You know how some rooms and have bad lighting so you always look bad. But more so, maybe it’s because we really don’t look carefully and critically at ourselves. Maybe we really don’t see the person in the mirror fully. Maybe we don’t look deep enough past the clothes and the hair to the lines and the wrinkles and the blemishes.

Friends, there is more we forget here. As Christians we forget that society cannot tell us who we are. God reminds us who we are.  God is really our mirror and only if we allow God to be our mirror, can we really see deeply who we are.  If we look in the mirror of society it will tell us when we fall short  financially, physically, in our relationships, like the thirteen-year old girl with the screenname “sgal901” who asks her acquaintances as well as perfect strangers on you tube what they think of her looks.  Now that is truly dangerous.  But even if we treat our friends and family as a mirror then we get a mixed picture at best: part success, part failure. When we use God as a mirror, when we use Christ as a mirror, we will see things we must change about ourselves, but we will also discover a person that is forgiven and accepted and loved as we are, now and forever. Thanks be to God.