The Rev. Derwent A. Suthers
St. Martin’s
- January 16, 2005 – Epiphany 2 – A

FAITH AND SIGHT

Some years ago when my son, Dan, was learning photography, he sent me a Christmas card featuring a picture he had taken of a snow scene. It wasn’t the usual snow scene of a farm yard in winter or a sleigh and horses, or even of trees laden with snow. It was snow, period. A photograph of a snow bank. And you know what snow looks like. It is white. There was a faint shading across the middle where there was a turn or ripple in the snow, but essentially it was a picture of white. And for my aged father, which had also received a copy, my son had written inside, “Grandad, this picture may be hard to see, but it represents peace to me, and peace in this world, which is everywhere, is also hard to see.”

Dad wrote my son and said his greeting card reminded him of the child in Sunday School who responded to the assignment of drawing the people of Israel crossing the Red Sea by presenting a blank piece of paper to the teacher. “But, Johnny, where is the sea?” asked the teacher. “It has parted,” said Johnny. “But where are the Israelites?” “They have gone through.” “But then where are the Egyptians?” “They haven’t arrived yet.” But to the mind of Johnny it was all there. That’s what you call taking a picture on faith.

In the Gospel today two men respond to John the Baptist’s words expressing faith in Jesus, by following along after him. Jesus turns and says to them, “What are you looking for?” And, wanting to know him better, they say, “Where are you staying?” And Jesus says, “Come and see.” And in the reading from Isaiah it says, “I give you (Israel) as a light to the nations,” and “Kings shall see.”

Somehow the message today is all about seeing, for we are in Epiphany, the season of the “showing-forth” of Christ, to the Wise Men, at his Baptism (last week), to his first disciples at the lakeside (next week), and finally on the Mount of the Transfiguration.

There is an old Latin prayer for Epiphany that prays, “Mercifully grant that we, who know you now by faith, may be brought to the contemplation of your majesty by sight.”

Let us think about what this means. It talks about a contrast between faith and sight. St. Paul in II Corinthians (5:7) makes this contrast when he says, “For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I am known.” And in the words in the first letter of John (3:2): “We shall see him as he is.”

But Christian faith is not primarily other-worldly. It is first and foremost this-worldly.

We can say that the full vision of God is to be expected only in the fulfillment of all things at the end of history. But such a statement has no meaning in itself. No one can possibly know what such a “full vision of God” would be, nor can possibly want such a vision, unless we have, in some sense and in some degree, already seen God in our present life.

One of the actions of Jesus was to bring sight to the blind here in this life now. One instance was the blind man of Bethsaida (Mark 8:22-26). Jesus “took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village; and when he had put saliva on his eyes and laid his hands on him, he asked him, ‘Can you see anything?’ And the man looked up and said, ‘I can see people, but they look like trees, walking.’” It was a blurred, kind of half-sight. “Then Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again; and he looked intently and his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly.”

It is perhaps no accident that that passage in Mark is followed by the spiritual opening of the eyes of Peter at Caesarea Phillipi, when Jesus asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” And their response again was like that man’s half-sight. They told him, “John the Baptist” or “Elijah” or “one of the prophets.” They knew there was something special about him, perhaps he was the reincarnation of one of the great figures of the past. But it was left to Peter to answer him, “You are the Christ – the Messiah – the one our people have waited for.” Or as John the Baptist proclaims in the Gospel today: “Look, here is the Lamb of God.” “This is the Son of God.”

The Christ is not just some future figure they would meet some day at the end of history. Here he is, said Peter, says John, in our lives right now. He is before us; we can see him. Can we have in any way this experience of Peter? In the words of the old prayer, can we who know him now by faith, be brought to the contemplation of his majesty by sight?

To contemplate God’s majesty by what we can actually see, today in this church, or any day, on any street in Atlanta, or in any of our homes, or on our jobs – that makes sense. It is at least an exciting possibility.

The prayer makes sense, too, because we realize right away that such contemplation is not our daily experience. We know God now “by faith.” That is, we have heard of God in the Bible and in the language of the Church; and we know God, more or less – sometimes more, sometimes less – in our prayers and meditations; and we have, more or less specifically, undertaken to trust and obey God in thankfulness for what He has done for us in Christ. We know God now by faith.

But the collect implies that we “may be brought to” something more; and in praying the prayer we ask that God will bring us to “the contemplation of (His) majesty by sight.”

Now what can this mean for us? I can study an art book, read about the life of a great artist, look at the reproductions, learn about his technique. And that is all very helpful and interesting in my understanding of his art. But if I have a chance to go to a museum and see the originals, that is something else. To see a Monet with the shining ripples of water, just as he painted it. To see a VanGogh, as I did at the High a few weeks ago, with the brilliant colors and thick swirling pigment. To see a Cezanne with the apples you just want to pick off the canvas. That is a whole different experience. I stand there transfixed, just taking it in. My appreciation of the artist has moved from faith to sight.

Or think about a building project, like the school. Eight years ago we just had some drawings on paper, and then we had a groundbreaking ceremony to celebrate something we couldn’t see, except in those drawings. Then as time went on and trees came down and we saw a great hole in the ground and a mountain of red clay, and then something gray began to shape itself in that hole, and started to grow upward: concrete foundations and walls of a building that was coming into being, and then the red bricks, and all the rest. In all this project, we were building on faith, weren’t we? We planned for it, we supported it, in the faith that it was something we needed here for the school and for the parish, and that it would be useful, and maybe even beautiful. And now we see it, and all those wonderful children are now using it. We moved from faith to sight.

Similarly in human relationships. In this parish we pray weekly for a list of people who need our particular concern. And the Daughters of the King and others of us in the parish remember many more of you in our prayers during the week. This is an expression of our faith that God is operative in the daily lives of each one of us, from little children up to the great grandparents. And yet we know that prayers need to move toward personal involvement. No one is aware more than I of how imperfect and spasmodic has been my (and our) involvement with so many of you. It is partly the problem of the size of our parish. And yet there are times in your homes, or at a lunch table, or by a hospital bed, or at a meeting in my office, when I have caught a glimpse of the majesty of God at work in your lives. Not that we talked about God necessarily, or religion, but I saw that God was there, at work. These times of personal involvement are some of the most precious times in the life of a priest – as they are in the life of any person. Our faith expressed in prayer must move on to the sight, which is personal involvement.

So it is with all life, especially when we start something new; when we move to a new situation; when we start a new job; when we get married; when we have a child. Whatever new phase in your life you may be starting this year, this may be your prayer: “Grant that we who know you now by faith in this new endeavor, may be brought to see your glory, your majesty, face-to-face in this new situation.”

Now that is a rather bold statement, isn’t it? That God’s majesty might be seen in some simple worldly thing as a project completed, a Habitat house built, a move to a new job, a change into retirement, the beginning of a new relationship with someone? Even learning how to live alone!

But I stand by it. I would suggest that this contemplation of God’s majesty must be a very worldly – a very earthy – exercise. The first men and women who were brought into it from the Jewish life of the time of Jesus were recapturing the earlier Hebrew vision of life as simply and entirely interesting to God. For by the time of Jesus, religion had become a specialty with many laws and observances, and people had begun to think that God was interested only, or at least mainly, in religion. Jesus and his coming had the effect of calling ordinary people back to what their own forebears had known - but what had been forgotten – that God had to do with all of life.

Isn’t it true that also in our own generation we find most people thinking that God is involved in only that small part of life where his Name is specifically mentioned? We associate God with church and certain moments of family togetherness at meals or on an occasion when a prayer may be said. Beyond that, for many people, God is something they do not experience much apart from those rare occasions when they are faced with sickness or danger, with death or guilt – something that is beyond their capacity of working out, and they look for an answer, an assurance, a forgiveness for a pain they cannot themselves conquer. But other than in these “boundary situations” where human help gives out, most people look for God in the small realm of church and Sunday worship and that is about all.

But Jesus came to change all this, and the Church is here to change all this, to help all of us to see that God is involved in all of life – in our working, in our playing, in our politics, in our love-making – not just when we go to church or when our strength gives out, but when we are living to the full. The Church is here to help all of us to discover and accept that free obedience in trust which is everyone’s calling. The Church is here to ask that we and all people be brought to contemplate God’s majesty in our common life by sight.

As we involve ourselves, in faith, on behalf of the persons and the issues for which we are concerned in this very mundane world, we begin to see something of the meaning and the glory of life, and of that power that is behind life, which we call God. Not just here in the church in the glory of worship, but out there in the worldly and the earthly pursuits of our daily lives we begin to catch a glimpse of this goodness and majesty that is at the heart of the universe. When Martin Luther King, whose birth we celebrate tomorrow, said, “I have a dream,” he was foreseeing a movement from faith to sight on how the races can some day learn to live together in this country, a journey on which we still have a long way to go.

There is no limit to the places and forms in which God’s majesty may be contemplated by sight – or rather, the places and the forms are limited only by where people are, and what they are seeing in the daily course of their lives.

This, I take to be the good news of Epiphany for all people – not just church people, but what Isaiah calls “the nations” or “the gentiles” – those whom we may think of as outside the fence. They, by their committed involvement in God’s world, may be closer to the true and operative Majesty than we who know the proper forms and prayers.

Let us pray, then, that we may move from faith to sight, from prayer to personal involvement, in our Church, and in the pursuits and human causes of our daily world, that we may show forth Christ to the nations, as Isaiah says to us today, beginning with those folks in our immediate vicinity.

Jesus said to the disciples, “Come and see.” O Lord, we come in faith. Open our eyes to how you are at work before our eyes! Mercifully grant that we who know you now by faith, may be brought to the contemplation of your majesty by sight.

(From the kernel of a sermon preached at Parishfield, Michigan by the Rev. Roger Barney on Epiphany, 1963)