"The Lord opens the eyes of the blind. The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down; the Lord loves the righteous. The Lord watches over the strangers; he upholds the orphan and the widow, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin." [Psalm 146:8-9]
A child's face caught my eye this morning as I stood up at the altar, lifting the bread of Christ and retelling the story of Jesus laying down his life for a world full of such children.
His eyes were piercing, but not hostile at all--they were just looking right through me. And, as it happened, those eyes were staring into me through the glass of the small windows in the doors that lead from the church's narthex and entryway into the sanctuary. Those inner doors were shut, but there were his eyes, the rest of the door obscuring his face and mouth so I could not tell if the boy was smiling or serious from where I stood.
For a moment, I had a hard time processing what my eyes were seeing. Our congregation is of such a size that I know just about everyone on a given Sunday, both their name and their families, and can often at least guess about who visitors or new faces have come with. But I didn't recognize this boy, and I didn't see any other adults with him. All I saw was the face, separated from me by a closed church door. I was "in" and he was "out," and, after all, I had important things to do at the moment, and preachers are so scatterbrained anyhow.
Well, it was, as I say, just a moment before my brain could put all these facts together, and I realized that the face looking at me so intently through that little window in the sanctuary door was actually the face of a child on a poster that had just been put up in the narthex of the church. There was no young boy in our church entryway--there was only the picture of a child. But, as it turns out, he was a homeless child. The poster was a notice about National Family Promise Week, a celebration and recognition of the ministry to homeless families (also formerly known as Interfaith Hospitality Network) which we and numerous other congregations in our county support and in which we participate in different ways. And in that moment, the cup of wine now lifted up into the air in my hands, I felt the power of what I was seeing. The face of a homeless child was peering into our sanctuary through closed doors, but his eyes were still staring into mine, as if to remind me that what happens at the altar cannot in the end be separated from the faces of children in the window.
I am glad, strangely enough, that for a moment the poster fooled me and I thought I was looking straight into the gaze of a homeless child. Because it forces me to ask whether our doors are open, or will be open, when the child is really there, and the faces are actually in the room. And it pushes me to see that in the Bible at least, the faces in the window are not ignored, but welcomed in as the beloved of God.
The book of Psalms in the Bible is basically a hymnal--a collection of poetry and songs gathered over a long time that the people of God have used to sing their way through heartaches and triumphs, changes of leadership and times of great fear, praise and lament, and those bittersweet moments of life that are all of the above at once. And when the many song-writers, poets, and lyricists of Israel's past made a list of reasons why they believed their God was great, so often it was because the first saw that God is good. That is to say, they looked to the promise and character of the God who cares for the faces in the window--the face of the stranger (which is what the Bible calls immigrants), the child, the orphan, the widow, and the poor. The reason God is worth praising, these old poets say, is that God's priority is on caring for those who have been forgotten, those who found the church door closed, those who have been turned away, those who look on in need and stare right through us while we try to get along on our way with other things we call "business."
If we are going to talk about how grace heals the world and actually mean anything by those words, we are going to have to follow the pattern of those ancient songs in the middle of your Bible, and see that our worship of God is intrinsically connected to the face of the homeless boy who stares through the window of our sanctuary door. We are going to have to see that "healing the world" does not just mean "MY world," or the "tiny universe I enclose around myself when I shut the door," but it includes all the people, ALL the people, all the PEOPLE, who find themselves on the outside looking in, and whom we are all otherwise likely to reduce to numbers or groups or statistics or not to notice at all.
It may have been accidental that the door in the church was closed yesterday morning. It may have just been some good faithful steward in the church thinking we didn't want to waste energy and heat on a chilly October morning by letting a draft in from the front porch. And it may have been just sheer random coincidence that placed the poster with the formerly homeless boy and the windows of the sanctuary door right in line with my eyes up at the altar. But the God of the Psalms, and of the Bible in general, is not above using seemingly random coincidence to smack us upside the head and get our attention.
Today, let us indeed praise the living God for the divine commitment to graciously healing the world... but then let us open our eyes in the midst of our great thanksgiving to see the faces in the window who are looking to us to show the character of the God whom we praise exactly for caring for such faces of children and widows, of outsiders and immigrants.
Lord Jesus, open our eyes to see your face and the face of those whom you especially care for, right in our path on this day.
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