Every Face a Sanctuary

Every Face a Sanctuary--January 23, 2019

"Then God said, 'Let us make human kind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.' So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them." [Genesis 1:26-27]

You can communicate "sadness" with a piece of music, or convey "springtime in the country" through a painting.  But you can't convey the concept of the number seven through a smell.  And you probably would have a very difficult time communicating "heartbreak" through a soup recipe.  You can project the shadow of a person onto a screen or a sheet to tell a story, but you can't project the shadow of a song, or of the taste of peaches, onto a screen.  You can get paint onto a canvas--the canvas can bear having a picture painted onto it (and indeed, the canvas was made for just such a purpose)--but you can't put paint on a radio wave.

Some channels just don't work for conveying some messages.

Even using language, some means don't work well.  Morse Code was fine for sending latitudes and longitudes of enemy vessels during naval battles in World War II.  But you couldn't, for example, get across the perfectly-timed deadpan humor of an early Bob Newhart phone gag in Morse code.  You need to see his face, hear the hesitancy in his voice, and his comedic knack for pauses and silence in between the spoken lines.

All of that is to say that it is really quite a powerful statement that the Scriptures make when they say that human beings are made "in the image of God."  For whatever else it means (and we'll get there in a bit), the storytelling in Genesis claims that human beings are capable of bearing some telltale imprint of the person of God.  Human beings are, just in our being, able to communicate something of who God is.  

That really is a profound claim, especially given how vastly different--holy, transcendent, mysterious, and infinite--God is from human beings in some ways.  God is beyond time, beyond space, beyond our tiny frail categories and perceptions of reality, and yet in some meaningful way, Genesis says, you can project the image of God onto the screen of humanity and still get a half-decent picture.  Somehow, to some degree, God's character is evident in human beings.

So in a sense, before we even get to the later New Testament claim that in Jesus we had God walking around in human skin, Genesis has already primed the pump and said that all human beings--every child of every parent in all of human history--already bears the image of God right off the bat.  Before the incarnation of God in Christ, the image of God is already visible in our skin in the face and personality of every one of us.

Maybe this is a little like saying that while you can't convey the smell of the number seven in an aroma, you can convey deep sadness in a song--and you can (or, God can) convey some essential glimpse of God's own being, through... us.

And notice--it is through all of us.  In every permutation, every variation, every one of us.  Him, her, they, them, we, us, me, you, in every shade of color, every subtle difference, beyond the boundaries of whatever categories we tend to put each other in, we bear the image of God in some true and unmistakable way, like when you hear the blues, you know it is communicating heartbreak and sorrow.  In a sense, then, it is no wonder that the story we call the Gospel eventually says that God entered into our humanity in Jesus of Nazareth in some new and definitive way: the opening chapter of the Bible itself was getting us ready for a turn in the story like that by telling us that every last one of us already bears the image of God from the get-go.

Perhaps the question, then, is whether we dare to recognize that image in every person--every person--rather than reverting back to our old instinct only to see the divine in "the ones who are like me."  To be brutally honest, for a lot of the last few millennia, a lot of Respectable Religious people have assumed that God is really male, white, and probably spoke King James English (I have heard more than a few say over the years that they believed the only true version of the Bible is the old King James, on the grounds that "God speaks that way", and forgetting the layers of Hebrew and Greek underneath any English translation).  But if we dare to take the voice of Genesis seriously, then we can't accept the bearded European fellow on the Sistine Chapel as the sole bearer of God's "image."  If we take the storytelling here seriously, then God's image is not reducible to the binary picture of male or female, men or women, and for that matter, God is not reducible to "whiteness", either.  Even the singularity of God is more complicated than it might first appear here in Genesis, since God says, "Let us make humankind in our image."  That suggests that God's own being, God's pronouns, so to speak, cannot be expressed as merely "he" but "they"--and in fact, classic Christian theology speaks of God as a Trinity of Three Persons in One Being who are beyond our categorization of gender, race, or what-have-you.

This is to say that every person you and I see today bears the presence of the divine.  Every human being is, within our own being, holy ground.  Every face is a sanctuary.  And we do not get to pick and choose which faces are worthy of our respect, which faces are deserving of our love, which faces are reflections of the God who is here in our skin.... because they all are.  

Here's a secret: you don't have to go to church to see God.  You don't have to get underneath a steeple or looking at a bearded figure in stained glass to get a glimpse of God's face.  You don't even need to go out into the woods in the peace of nature--although you can sense God's presence there, too.  But right next to you, right in front of you, right around you, every human face is a reflection of God's own image--in our capacity for relationship and love, compassion and creativity, thought and reason and self-awareness.  God has made us to be capable of bearing that image from the very beginning, which makes all of humanity a sort of walking gallery of canvases painted with divine self-portraits.

When we take that claim seriously, it will change every interaction with every person--the bigwig boss at work, as well as the awkward, gangly clerk at the grocery story ringing up your milk and bread, the faces that look like yours, and the ones who are quite different, the stories that resonate with yours, and the lives that have taken very different courses.  It will mean I do not get to cling to the privilege of treating the ones who look more like me as more important, as of greater worth, while sneering and smirking at others whose likeness is not on the Sistine Chapel. It will mean we no longer get to treat some human beings as of more worth, and it will mean that we will honor the image of God in the ones that the world labels as "the losers," "the strangers," the "other," and the ones who do not fit our categories.  

Look for the presence of God all around you today, friends.  Every face is a sanctuary.

Lord God, let us glimpse your image in the presence of others around us, and give us the ability to honor your image in all.