Christ's Borrowed Faces--January 1, 2021

 Christ's Borrowed Faces--January 1, 2021

"This [the grace of God] you learned from Epaphras, your fellow beloved servant. He is a faithful minister of Christ on your behalf, and he has made known to us your love in the Spirit." [Colossians 1:7-8]

When I think of how to make dinner rolls, I picture the church matriarch who taught a kitchen full of learners her recipe with all of her own color commentary as she went, not just a cookbook recipe.

Whenever we clean up a big church dinner (and yes, there will come a day again when we have those), I picture the exquisite and elegant lady who used to fold the blue and white check tablecloths with near military precision, and how we think of her still every time we set the church social hall for pancakes or spaghetti.

Whenever I am called upon to enter a room where death has visited recently, I picture the dear saint, whom I loved very much (and who occasionally cussed with a surprising fervor for an octagenarian), who allowed me as a very new pastor to clumsily offer words of comfort and pray with her in her living room when her husband died.

And whenever I am afraid of what the future holds, but feel that it is rushing toward with unstoppable momentum, I picture the kind man who first welcomed me to a one-room church building, to kneel at the altar rail with him and pray when I was first called to serve as his pastor while he served as council president.

And whether I recognized it at the time or not, I have now come to see that in each of these moments, Christ was borrowing these faces to meet me... and I dare to believe that at the very same time Christ borrowed my face for them, as well, even if he had to work in spite of me, too.

This is how it is among the followers of Jesus.  This is how it has always been--Christ borrows our faces and comes through us, through our ordinariness, and very very human-ness, to bring grace to light among us.  We don't learn Christianity in the abstract. As much as this year's surge of online communications has led us to find ways to connect on screens and in phone calls, in video worship services and virtual gatherings, God's good news still come to us through people.  There are no anonymous golden tablets or carved stone monuments--there is always the story, the love, the teaching, the encouragement, that comes through other people.

Your list of names and faces through whom God's love has come to you will be different from mine, of course.  Your story with all its twists and turns has brought different people into your life at different moments, and in different ways--from Sunday School teachers and pastors to random strangers, friends, confidants, and family members.  Some will be people who were in your life for a very long time; others will have spent a season intersecting with your life and then be gone.  But don't miss the connective thread running through all of them--Christ has been at work in all of them, loving you through them, speaking to you in them, shaping you with their words, their presence, their time, and their love.  They may come and go as their path weaves in and out with your own, but it is worth being thankful for having had them in our lives for as long as we were given.

And for whatever list of faces and names come to your or my mind when we look back at those who have accompanied us on our life's journey, it is worth considering that for twenty centuries now, disciples of Jesus have been learning and sharing and loving and working together, so there are a lot more faces Christ has worn than any of us can count.  For the early church in Colossae, one of them was this fellow the apostle mentions, named Epaphras.  As the letter we call Colossians goes on, we'll learn more about him, just as other letters in the New Testament highlight other figures who were leaders, helpers, and teachers in those early days--names like Timothy and Titus, Stephen and Silas, Barnabas and Epaphroditus.  We don't necessarily have a lot of details about any of them, but we do know what it it like to have people like them who are instruments of the living God--faces that Christ borrows--to be with us and shepherd us along the way.  They are the people who, as Fred Rogers would say, "have loved us into being."  And again, like I say, while I never had the chance to know this Epaphras that the Colossians knew, I know the faces and names of those whom Christ has used in my life, and I can be thankful for Epaphras just as I am thankful for the people whose witness, love, and time directly touched my own.

The turning of a calendar year is a good time to remember these folks, these names, and these stories.  Their faces in our memories remind us that there are really no clean breaks in this life, and maybe that is the way it must be.  We are always the collection of experiences and memories that have brought us to the present moment. And we never quite leave the old year behind when we start a new one.  So even though I know we are all hoping for much to be new and restored and fresh and changed in the year that starts now, it is also worth being thankful for all that will remain constant through the turn of years.  Those who have loved us into being still are at the core of our identity.  Those who have taught us how to be decent and honest, those who wept with us when our hearts were breaking, those who cheered for us when we tried new ventures, and those who helped our minds to understand maybe even just a smidge more clearly the Mystery of the God who is love--they haven't left us, but they continue to be a part of us as we step forward into the new.  Far back in that chain of saints are faces we never met, like Epaphras, and yet his love and care affected people whose story rippled out into the lives of others who eventually touched the lives of those who directly touched our own.  All of them stand in the background as people through whom Christ loved people... and has loved us, as well.

For whatever new things you and I are hoping for in the new year, it is worth a moment here to be thankful for those faces Christ has borrowed in our past to make us the people we are... and to know that Christ will continue to be up to the same work in the new year as well.  He will be borrowing more faces this year to touch your life.  He will borrow again some of the faces you have seen him in during the year we are leaving behind.  He will come to you in new faces you did not expect (and which may surprise you at first when he appears wearing them!).  And he will again borrow your own face to meet someone else who will need the gifts you bring--the words, the ears, the love, the serving, the time.

And then one day--one day in glory, alongside those other faces who come to our minds with tears in the corners of our minds--we will all be gathered around Jesus' table and will tell the stories of how Christ appeared among us over and over and again, as the poet says, playing in ten thousand places.

Until then, keep an eye out for Christ and his many faces today.

Lord Jesus, come among us in the human faces of those through whom you love us into being--and let us be your faces for others as well today.