(For an audio recording of this sermon, click here.)
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Human beings are good at hiding.
We have had a lot of practice. We have been hiding almost as long as we have been human. We first went into hiding at the time of the evening breeze, when the LORD God walked through the garden calling out, “Where are you?” We are so good at hiding, we even know how to hide from ourselves. The longer we lurk behind our masks, the more likely we are to mistake those masks for our true selves. The LORD God is never fooled by all of this, but we often are.
We hide shameful things that we don’t want ourselves or others to see—our failures, our dreadful feelings, our smallness, our lesser selves. One of my favorite masks to hide behind is the mask of achievement. If I do all the things and do them well, others will not see the real me, who is really just an ordinary person, a person raised by decent folks, sometimes grouchy, sometimes scared, sometimes selfish, often lonely.
But we humans also try to hide our beauty, our gifts, our strengths. We pretend that we do not know things, or are not good at things. We are afraid that if someone sees the good things, any number of bad things might happen. We might simply be disliked. Or we might be called upon to use our gifts for the good of the community, and if that happens, we might make a mistake, or look foolish, or reveal that we are not quite as good as they expected. Or maybe someone whom we love will find out how deep our feelings run for them, and that kind of vulnerability can be painfully embarrassing.
It is safer, or at least it feels safer, to hide, to hold under a jar even the light of Christ that shines within us. By doing so, we cast a sad shadow on our community. And that is the highest cost of all this self-centered hiding.
This morning, our Lord Jesus, who sees us clearly for exactly who we are, tells us that our little jars, smeared with our anxious fingerprints, must hide his light no longer. He is encouraging us. Courage: a word related to the word ‘heart.’ Courage is, for Jesus in Luke, very Greek, very Hellenistic: it is a Greek ideal of stout-hearted valor. All this material about hiding light under jars—Luke takes it from Mark, but he puts it in a different place in his Gospel. It doesn’t follow a rejection experience, which is how Mark presents it. No, in Luke, Jesus and his followers are doing fairly well when he encourages them in this way. Their movement is enjoying success. Jesus wants to encourage them, to strengthen their hearts for all that is to come. He had just proclaimed the parable of the sower, and he had explained the parable carefully to his close followers. “But as for [the seeds] in the good soil,” Jesus had said, “these are the ones who, when they hear the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patient endurance.”
They “hold the Word fast in an honest and good heart.” And we, too, are encouraged to do this.
And who are we? Who are you? Maybe you are a professor on tenure track, or a student anxiously memorizing Hebrew vocabulary, or a staff member managing a busy campus under construction. Maybe you are ten thousand miles away from your home and your family, or you are married to a seminarian and having trouble fitting in on campus, or you are a child who misses her friends who moved out this past spring… Whoever you are, hear this Good News: all you need to do here is hold the Word fast in an honest and good heart, and let Christ’s light within you shine brightly. That’s it.
You may find it hard to believe, that the real you, the one with flaws and fears, the one radiating God’s glory, the one you fear is incomplete, or unacceptable, or needs to hide—the real you is the only version of yourself that Jesus has ever had any interest in, and the only one this community needs.
We need you, we fellow pilgrims who are about to circle this table with you. We need the light of Christ that shines within you. Won’t you take that jar away, finally? We want to see you. For when we truly see each other, then, with a rush of glad recognition, then we will see Jesus himself.
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Preached as a senior sermon at the morning Eucharist, Virginia Theological Seminary, Alexandria, Virginia, September 23, 2019.
Luke 8:16-18