Hide not your face from me

Two weeks ago I began teaching a course on the life of the 16th c. reformer, Martin Luther. It is a course I love to teach for Luther was a human being marked by failures, recoveries, anxieties, and surprising joy – someone with whom I, and perhaps you, can identify. Certainly I want my students to understand his reform project and why it remains so significant in the history of the west and western Christianity. But I also want them to think about this: the ways in which a person’s biography, their life experiences, shapes a person’s experience and understanding of God [humanity and the world].

When I teach this course, I invite Stephen Crippen, a therapist and member of this parish, to lecture on Luther’s psychological biography. To say the least, the students are entranced as he leads them to see how a therapist would view the reformer. Here is some of what we discuss in this class. As the son of German peasants, Luther, the infant and toddler, experienced considerable hardship. Not only was his family dirt poor, his parents were remote and harsh with their children. Luther recalled that when he was a toddler, his mother beat him until he bled simply because he had taken a nut off the kitchen table and had eaten it without her permission. He knew well the sting of his father’s belt hitting his back and bottom – many times unaware of what he had done to merit such punishment. He experienced what it is like to live with a capricious parent who one day might wake up a friend and the next, a monster.

It was Erick Erickson, the Harvard developmental psychologist, who claimed that one of the first challenges facing every new-born child and toddler is the need, the almost desperate need, to have a mother or father come to the child when the child cries out and show the child their face in the light. For it is in knowing that a parent will come when one cries out in need, that the human capacity, yes, our capacity to trust another begins to emerge. Should a parent fail to respond repeatedly to the child’s cry or come but show a scornful face, speak in a harsh tone, shake or hit the child, the ability to become a trusting person of others will be sorely hampered, a relational disability that will play out, to a greater or lesser degree, for years to come.

Erickson, who studied Luther’s life for many years, points out: there was Luther, the vulnerable toddler, wondering if his mommy or his daddy would come when he cried out for help. And, if they came to him, would they come in darkening frustration or in comforting love? And then there was Luther, the young adult, searching anxiously for God, sometimes feverishly for God in a church that knew much about the wrath of God and too little about the mercy of God. Yes, there was the child in the adult, desperately trying to make himself acceptable to his parents, his peers, and God by the sheer number of his many accomplishments, believing, so sadly, that if he did all these things, he would at last gain their favor, that at last he would see a shining, loving face.

“Your face, LORD, will I seek,” prays the psalmist, “hide not your face from me, nor turn away your servant in displeasure. Do not forsake me, O God of my salvation. Though my father and my mother forsake me, the LORD will sustain me” (Psalm 27:11-14). Is it any wonder that the words of this psalm, the psalm we recited/sang only a few moments ago, would resound deeply within Luther’s life and the life of any person – any one among us today – who longs to see the loving face of God, who longs to experience mercy rather than condemnation or ridicule? While sharing a meal with allegedly disreputable people, and thus being counted among them as a disreputable person, Jesus says to his religious critics: “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’” (Matthew 5:13). I desire mercy, not sacrifice. “O God,” says the collect prayed at the beginning of today’s Mass, “O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: be gracious to all who have gone astray from your ways.”

And so one wonders: how many lives would be different today if the shining face of love, the shining face of mercy were the face that greeted a young child whenever he or she called out for help or attention? How many lives would be different today in a city and a country where trust in each other is in short supply? How many lives would be different today if we saw each other, if we recognized each other, with eyes of mercy?

It is the beginning of the second week of Lent. We are given this much-needed season of joyful sobriety to consider at least one question: What in your life, what in my life, needs to be exposed to the merciful light – let me say that again – to the merciful light of God? What experiences, what vexing condition, what fear, what troubling question, what failure may obstruct or hamper our growth as God’s beloved women and men? For what does the child in each of us yearn?

As any therapist or confessor worth their salt will tell you: when we can speak the fear, the question, the fault, the failure, the unspoken yearning in the presence of another who holds unconditional regard – unconditional regard – for us, who sees the troubled soul with the eyes of love, both our truthful speaking and such profound love by another for the burdens we bear begins to unravel the power of the past over our lives in the present.

O God, your glory is not to sit in some far away heaven with a shining crown on your head. Your glory is always, it is always, to have mercy in and for us, for a city, and for a world that knows too little of it. Your glory is our growth, our growth, as mature and merciful human beings.

When he finally discovered that the God revealed in Jesus of Nazareth did not speak with the voice of his angry father and abrasive mother but rather with the gentle voice of love for a vulnerable and frightened child, Luther was able to say that he was “born again,” that he had entered through an open gate into paradise itself, that, at last, he had begun to experience the resurrection of his own life. And so I wonder: is that not what we also desire to experience: the transforming power of the resurrection in our lives?
To say the least, it is no easy work to face the unsettling truth, to recognize the failure or limitation, to forgive our own past and those implicated in it, to ponder the troubling question – to ask what may hamper our growth as God’s beloved creatures, as Christ’s beloved body, his only presence, in this world.

And yet, we do so here, surrounded by brothers and sisters. We do so here in the presence of the One whose face can be seen in the light, a face which shines with more grace and mercy than we could ever imagine imagine.

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