The Last Sunday after Epiphany - Seeking God's Face

The psalmist (Ps. 27:11) wrote: “You speak in my heart and say, 'Seek my face.' Your face, Lord, will I seek.” 

Sunday after Sunday, week after week, year after year—for all our lives long we have a reminder on Sundays of our Lord's resurrection.  Sometimes we are in church worshipping, sometimes we are sleeping, sometimes we are watching or playing a sport, sometimes we are working, sometimes . . . we can add to this list, making it quite long.  But whatever we are doing on a Sunday, we will always know it is the day of  Christ’s resurrection.

This week we will enter the season of Lent—for 40 days, starting this coming Wednesday.  Our prayerbook urges us to observe a holy Lent “by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God's holy Word.”  It's a penitential season Monday through Saturday each week, but not on Sunday—always a feast day—except, of course, in Lent we mustn't sing or say “Alleluia!”

So whether we are feasting or fasting, we are reminded by the psalmist to listen and look for God: “You speak in my heart and say, 'Seek my face.' Your face, Lord, will I seek.”

What does it mean to seek God's face?  When Jesus speaks to the Samaritan woman at the well in the 4^th chapter of John, he describes God as “spirit.” The Common English Bible translates what Jesus said this way: “God is spirit, and it is necessary to worship God in spirit and truth.” 

So although we often talk about God's relationship with us being a “personal” one, we shouldn't mistake the metaphor of seeking God's face as looking into the face of a person with whom we have a deep and loving relationship.  Rather seeking God's face means searching for the spirit of God, seeking the truth of God's divine and transcendent nature.

For Elijah that meant being forthright to God about his precarious situation and his fear of being murdered.  He had been “zealous” in declaring God's Word against idolatry to the powerful elite.  Now he was on the run, hiding in a cave.  In seeking God, Elijah encountered God's presence in “a sound of sheer silence.”  Entering into that divine and transcendent silence with his face covered, Elijah encountered the Word of God, which pointed him forward to his next tasks as God's prophet.  For Elijah, then the face of God was “sheer silence.”

For Peter, James, and John, the face of God was the dazzling glory we call “transfiguration.”  Jesus walked up the mountain with them as a person—although Peter had previously claimed he understood that Jesus was the Messiah of God.  But on that mountaintop, the three disciples encountered something very different from anything they had ever seen or known before.  God's spirit infused their vision of the two great men of their faith, Moses, the law-giver, and Elijah, the greatest of all the prophets of ancient Israel.  And with Moses and Elijah was the man who just walked up the mountain with them—all transfigured—changed by the radiance of God's glory.  The face of God was the glory that surrounded and transfigured Moses, Elijah and Jesus.

Then came the cloud overshadowing them and the voice from the cloud—just as God had manifested God's self at Jesus' baptism.  Except this time, the command was to listen to God's Son, the Beloved.  The face of God's glory becomes the Word of God:  Listen—to Jesus!

To seek the face of God means to seek a relationship with the divine.  To seek a relationship with the divine involves listening to God.  And listening to God means listening to Jesus!

So how can we listen?  The track record of Jesus’ disciples in listening wasn't that good.  Just a few verses after those we heard this morning the disciples were arguing about who would be the greatest in the coming kingdom. And this argument came right after Jesus had explained that following him meant suffering:  “All who want to come after me must say no to themselves, take up their cross, and follow me.” (CEB)

So “listening” to Jesus might well involve doing what our prayerbook commends for keeping a holy Lent: “self-examination and repentance; . . . prayer, fasting and self-denial; and . . .reading and meditating on God's holy Word.”

Yes, God, often we don't do much better than Jesus' headstrong, self-centered, rather clueless disciples.  But we ask for your help as we try once more to listen—really listen—to Jesus and to keep a holy Lent.