Seeing into Being Seen

 

Here ya go. This one will (should?) kick your butt: Luke 6:12-26

Marni George* had us all wrapped around her beautifully manicured finger. Her mom let her get a perm. She wore bright white K-Swiss tennis shoes. She was the first to get a Hypercolor T-shirt and the first to double up her neon socks. She knew all the jumprope chants, even the ones with the naughty lines about judges and babies and k-i-s-s-i-n-g. She knew how to shave her legs and wear eye shadow. And every day at recess, she would decide who was allowed to follow her around, and who wasn’t. 

We fifth grade girls did all kinds of nasty things to get on her good side. We’d snitch that Beth told Megan that she didn’t like Carol’s hair, and then Carol would whisper to Katie that Beth still didn’t wear a bra, and then Katie would tell Marni that both Beth and Carol like sausage on their pizza and still watched Disney movies on their VCRs. 

And then, Marni would choose. 

“Tie my shoe!” She shouted to Beth, and if Beth accepted, if she bent down and tied Marni’s shoe, she’d get to follow her around the parking lot, cluster in a tight circle, and then menacingly giggle at all the girls who weren’t allowed to join Marni's group. 

If we got to tie her shoes long enough, if we could convince our parents to get us a caboodles, and if we could somehow keep from getting run over by the gossip truck, then maybe, just maybe, we’d get invited to Marni’s house to swim in her backyard. And her pool had a slide. 

If you were lucky enough to escape random and superficial critiques long enough, you just might get seen by Marni George. And being seen by Marni George meant everything. It meant you might get a note passed to you in Social Studies. It meant you’d have someone to sit with at lunch. It meant that your self-deprecating jokes were funny and not embarrassing. It meant that you were cool. It meant that you belonged. It meant that you were someone.

No matter that Marni could remove her blessing just as quickly as she bestowed it. This was the social structure that we accepted. This was the culture we chose. The contract we signed. This was the game we decided to play. But to choose otherwise meant being ostracized, social suicide, no slumber parties, no trips to hang out at the mall, a fate worse than death for any eleven year old girl. So we played her game. 

We did everything we could to attract the Marni George gaze. Even if that meant that we lost sight of ourselves. 

Everyone talks about how awful these preteen years are. Middle school just sucks, there’s no doubt about it. But, I wonder, as I grew older, as I stopped worrying about hiding my secret preference for mushrooms on my pizza, as I finally stopped stooping down to tie Marni’s shoes, did the culture ever really change? Are things really any different now than on that playground back in 1990? We were just living in to a culture that was already existing all around us. We were just acting out a contract that we’d seen our siblings and our parents and our grandparents sign. We were playing the game that everyone else was playing, and we still play it even now, even today. 

Maybe now I’m just a little bit better at disguising my need to belong. Maybe now I’m a little bit better at hiding my embarrassment when I don’t fit in. Maybe the only difference now is that, with a little practice, I’m better at playing the game.

Well, you’ve heard me preach long enough to not be surprised when I tell you that Jesus comes to disrupt the game.

And in Luke, it’s a real, concrete, high stakes game. Matthew’s "Sermon on the Mount" lifts us up into the ethereal a little bit. We can all find ways to be blessed and  to belong up here on the mountain where things get a little more spiritual, a little more qualified. 

I mean, we can all find ways that we are poor in spirit. We can all find ways that we are hungry for righteousness. In Matthew’s sermon, it only takes a little bending, a little twisting, in order for us to find ourselves among the blessed. But in Luke’s gospel, we’re on the plain, we’re down on the ground, we’ve descended from the mountaintops and here we are among the weak and fevered and coughing and desperate. Here, on the plain, we can’t hide our full bellies or our soft, white collar hands. Here, we can’t deny our two car households and our full refrigerators. Here, on the plain, we don’t want to admit that we’ve been able to staunch our weeping with therapy or golf or cable tv. Here on the plain, though, where Jesus is, the game doesn’t work. Here on the plain, Jesus doesn’t care if you’ve ever tied Marni’s shoes. 

Woe to you who’ve been invited to the slumber parties, you’ve had your taste of belonging. Woe to you who remember your last meal, hunger is coming. Woe to you who are laughing at Sara because she cut her knee shaving and still wears her hair in braids and believes in Santa. Your turn for shame and estrangement and unbelonging will come. 

Jesus comes down from the mountain with his chosen group of disciples, the ones who’ve been told they belong, who’ve been handpicked to be part of Jesus’s in-crowd, who would bow down and tie his shoe if only he’d ask, and he rewrites the narrative, he tears up the social contract, and turns the values of a culture completely upside-down. 

What’s up is down now. What’s cursed is now blessed.

But he doesn’t just do this with his words. He doesn’t just do this with a lecture or some pithy slogans. He does this by completely rewiring the human gaze. 

Read closely. Look for where Jesus looks. And then listen for whom Jesus is speaking. It’s two different places. Jesus looks up to his disciples, but he speaks of the crowd all around him. Jesus is down with the crowd, but he’s speaking up to his chosen ones. Jesus is saying that this group of broken, desperate, lonely, hungry and weeping people are blessed, even as stands below with them, even as he knows that soon he will be one of them. He will be poor, and hungry and weeping and hated himself. By looking up at the disciples, but by naming the crowd below them as blessed, he gives the disciples new eyes to see, new ears to hear, new hearts to understand. Jesus looks at the disciples, really looks at them, and tells them to look, to really look, at who is blessed. 

We are peopled by our gaze. We listen each other into being,

How someone looks at us determines how we look at ourselves.

And how we look at ourselves determines how we look at others. 

We meet one another by looking at one another. Not just with our eyes of course, but with the deep or shallow looking of our hearts. It’s only in the seeing of each other that we exist for one another. And if we see each other as a pawn in the game, then that is who they will be for us. Buber calls these “I/It” relationships. They’re relationships of convenience, relationships where we possess one another, but where we don’t truly become alive for each other. In I/It relationships, one of us is the subject, the other the object. I only see you insofar as I can get something from you. You are a part of the game. One of us is the shoe-tie-er, the other is the one with the fancy shoes tied. One of us is blessed. Woe to the other. But no true seeing, no true hearing, is really happening in an I/It relationship. You can't really see someone, truly see them, when they're busy bent down tying your shoe.

In I/It relationships, we aren’t experiencing each other; instead, we’re sizing each other up and trying to figure out how to use each other so that we can get further in the game. And well, if you think you’re somehow exempt from the game, if you think you’ve somehow found a way to be innocent of treating others as an it, then I gotta ask you, who made the clothes you’re wearing, who changed your oil, who picked those tomatoes from the field that you’ll enjoy on your salad for lunch? We can’t help it. The game is rigged. We’re all doing the best we can with what we have. 

But Jesus calls us to a different way of seeing, and he does this by first seeing us. He looks up at us, wherever we stand, and he shows us the humanity of those whom he’s blessed - all those folks down there, hanging out with the Son of Man, "The Human One."

Jesus looks at the disciples, really looks at them, and sees them into being, and he does this by describing what he’s heard from the moaning, desperate, anxious, noxious crowd around him. He has listened the crowd into being, and as he looks up, he is gazing his disciples into a new way of being. He is, what Buber calls, enacting an I/Thou relationship. He is seeing himself as fully himself, and seeing the disciples as fully themselves. He’s telling them that they don’t have to play the I/It game anymore. They too, can see this crowd as a bunch of thous, full, human, blessed beloveds, just like he does. He humanizes the disciples by showing them the humanness of the crowd. 

Through relating to others, through really seeing them, not as an it, but as a real, live, full thou, in their fullest, completest, most whole, thou-ness, we can come to realize who we are, we can come to see ourselves, not as an it, but as a real, live, full thou. We don’t become fully human by possessing each other. We become fully human through experiencing one another. 

Woe to us still up on that mountain, still trying to play the game, still trying to find acceptance and belonging from what we can get from each other, not from who we truly are.

And if I've lost you in all that, maybe we should just remember: not much grows on the mountain. The plains are where we’re fed.

Fast forward thirty years from that little girl on the playground, and I’m visiting a very dear professor from college. To say he was my poetry professor is to both perfectly and inadequately describe who this man is for me. He has me questioning the value of words like “best” and “hope,” and finding life in words like “presence,” “still,” and “with.” Everything I strive to be as a pastor was first given to me by Jack. And I’m trembling a little as I knock on his door for a visit after so much time has passed, so much has happened. He invites me in, offers me a drink, even though it’s hardly noon. He is smiling. He’s lived too much life for pretense or posturing, so I really believe him when he says how good it is to see me. He invites me to sit in a rocking chair with afghans and pillows in a bright sunroom. 

He lets me warm up with some small talk, but he knows that’s not why I’m there. I’m there to tell him what has happened. I am the penitent. He is my confessor. I take a deep breath and I tell him the whole story, all of it. The despair and the impulsivity, the defiance and the professional misconduct. I tell him about the shame and the lack of resources, the terrible choices, the victims left behind, the heartbreak of it all. I’m crying by this time, of course, because this whole time, he’s sat there with me, he’s relived it, with me, he’s been present for it all. And then, I get to the very worst part. And I tell him what I’ve done. I can't even look at him. And he says, without hesitation, “Of course you did.” 

“Of course you did.” 

Which didn’t mean absolution. 

It didn’t mean easy forgiveness or a sweeping under the rug.

It simply meant, “oh yes, I see you. Here you are. You. Fully you. With all your brokenness and failures and mistakes and flawed attempts to play the game. I am looking at you. I have listened you into being.” 

It meant, “Woe to you. And how blessed.”

Thanks be to God.

Who has seen you into being? Tell me your story.

*not her real name. bonus points if you guess where the name inspiration came from...