Seeing and Seen

Psalms 139:1-14 and John 7:53-8:12

For years, artfully, mysteriously crafted and comprised postcards arrived at an unassuming mailbox on Copper Ridge Road in Germantown, MD, just miles from our church.  They were responses to an invitation:

“You are invited to anonymously contribute a secret to a group art project. Your secret can be a regret, fear, betrayal, desire, confession or childhood humiliation.  Reveal anything – as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before.  Be brief. Be legible. Be creative.”

The invitation was first extended in November of 2004 by Frank Warren who had a vision for a community art project. He began printing 4000 self-addressed blank post cards to distribute. Today, the blog site that curates submissions has over 825 million lifetime hits. Each week, a curated selection of postcards received are featured on the blog.

The secrets submitted run the gamut – affairs, abortions, covetous thoughts, petty crimes, secret addictions, unrevealed diagnoses, fears.  Not all secrets are what we would judge as “bad,” but they have been held closely, unrevealed.  Not exposed to the light. And even now, only anonymously.

Nearly 1 billion hits. A robust twitter following. Several Ted Talks. People are fascinated by these revelations.

When the project first began, Warren was lucky to receive enough to share 10 viable secrets a week.  The most recent estimate I find suggests the project now receives more than 200 a day, nearly 16 years later, which must make curating 10 a week a hard decision.  The sheer volume of responses since 2004 reveals how deeply we want to be able to name our hardest, darkest thing, how we want to expose it to light.

And to still be ok.

Today, we begin our journey on the path of being a disciple of Jesus Christ here –

A disciple is a person who experiences the forgiveness and acceptance of God.

Let’s begin in an “easy” place, if you will.  Let’s begin with acceptance.  We’ll look more deeply at “forgiveness” next week, because they go hand in hand.

Today’s text from the gospel of John does not occur in the lectionary – the three year cycle of readings used by a lot of protestant churches.  I won’t spend a lot of time speculating, but I do think it is because it is hard and addresses something that even today feels taboo. It is rooted in patriarchy and rules about who is in and who is out that we are unwilling to revisit often today.  And it is also possible that it opens the door to the wideness of God’s grace. Let’s face it. Some prefer for God’s grace to not be quite so wide.

In this story, the scribes and Pharisees have shown up with a woman “caught in the very act of committing adultery.” That has a specific connotation in our society today – but let’s not forget that a woman, once married in these ancient societies, was considered adulterous even for having a relationship with another man once she was widowed. Or if her rightful husband had abandoned her. And without a man, a woman had little ability to survive in ancient economies.

Throughout John’s gospel, the Jewish authorities seem pretty set on catching Jesus in tricky conundrums.  This one seems cut and dried – she committed adultery. We caught her in the act. The law says we can stone her. What do you say?

Jesus bends down and begins writing in the dirt. Our modern texts don’t say much more than that…he wrote with his finger on the ground…but other ancient versions of this text have a few more words.  “And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground the sins of each of them…” 

Or…another possibility lies in the chapter that proceeds this in John.  Jesus has been teaching about living water during the festival of the Tabernacle where the Jewish authorities would have also been present and teaching.  And certain festivals focused on certain texts and during the festival of the tabernacle, the text of Jeremiah 17 was taught.  Specifically at verse 13 and 14 which reads:

O hope of Israel! O Lord!

    All who forsake you shall be put to shame;

those who turn away from you shall be recorded in the underworld,

    for they have forsaken the fountain of living water, the Lord.

Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed;

    save me, and I shall be saved;

    for you are my praise.

Or in more common Hebrew,

All who forsake you shall be put to shame, those who turn away will be recorded in the dust…

Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed; save me and I shall be saved.

So as the authorities are waiting to see how Jesus might judge this woman, he instead begins writing names in the dirt –the names of the very authorities trying to catch him up in blasphemy.

Jesus not only doesn’t condemn the woman brought to him, but he “sees” the brokenness of all those who bring charges against her as well.

And really, the end result is that no one gets stoned. No one throws stones. He assures the woman that he does not condemn her, and sends her away telling her not to sin again.

Then in a scene change, Jesus is gathered with the disciples, sort of debriefing the last several key events. “I am the light of the world.  Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.”

We know that light dispels darkness. Light makes things visible. Light facilitates seeing.

In Jesus’ light, we are fully seen.

And when we are willing to look with Jesus’ eyes, we see in full light others around us.

Light dispels shame.

The sociologist Brene Brown reminds us that “Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.”

She teaches that shame keeps us from living fully into our abilities, our relationships, our gifts. She teaches that shame causes us to wear masks that not only hide our flaws but project instead some perfection for others to see.

I can’t help but hear the results of her years of qualitative research that gathered information from a wild array of people and situations, and hear the truth of the Gospel – You are worthy of being seen. God’s love is bigger than the worst thing that you do.  God’s love is for us NO matter what.  God who creates us also sees us fully – our bumps and our bruises, our warts and and our scars, our deceptions – even those we are not able to see ourselves.

Because all of that being seen actually matters to your well being and to the wholeness of society.  Maybe folks who cannot receive that from the scriptures can receive it from a scientist who is doing well-respected work.

So…our willingness to lay aside our shame, expose our flaws – not necessarily to the whole world, but certainly to the God who loves us – and then live differently because we know we won’t get stoned actually changes us.  And the way we move in the world. And the world.

We are on this journey, a journey where we are seeking a place to belong, ways of becoming closer to God and one another, ways of believing in the power of God at work in the world right here and now – so that we can be part of that work.

Part of the journey for us must be letting ourselves be seen.

Part of the journey for us must be knowing that God sees us fully.

Part of the journey for us must be knowing that the God who sees us fully loves us so.

Light dispels darkness. Light makes things visible. Light facilitates seeing. In Jesus’ light, we are fully seen. And when we are willing to look with Jesus’ eyes, we see one another in full light.

That has to make the journey richer.

May it be so.

Amen.

Sources:

Postsecret.com – please note that this blog site includes material that some may find inappropriate or offensive.

Rob Bell, What Is the Bible?: How an Ancient Library of Poems, Letters, and Stories Can Transform the Way You Think and Feel About Everything, Harper One Publishing, 2017

Learn more about Brené Brown’s work at brenebrown.com.