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The Epistle of James is about spirituality and action, prayer and service, love and works. James’ teaching could be summed up in the United Church of Christ motto: "To love is to care; to care is to do." In the First Chapter of the Epistle, the writer summarizes this teaching in an interesting way. He writes:

But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves. For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like.

What a striking idea! Whether you are a doer of the word, and not just a listener to the word, has a lot to do with what you see in the mirror. What is James getting at here? When we look into a mirror we see an image of ourselves. How do we feel about that image? There are a lot of jokes about getting up in the morning and groaning at what the mirror presents you with. I know people who just try and avoid looking in the mirror right away. I seem to remember a scene from the movie Lost Weekend with Ray Milland coming to after an alcoholic binge and looking in the mirror. Ugh! On the other hand one can behold one’s own image with a kind of narcissistic fascination. As I kid I remember watching a man sitting in a barber’s chair getting a haircut, and how he seemed beguiled by his reflection in the big mirror opposite him, gazing raptly into his own eyes. How about you? I suppose it depends on how you look on any one day, and, of course, how you are feeling about yourself. Having just turned sixty-one, I would confess that aging is a factor also. A guilty conscience may make it hard to look into a mirror. The poet W. H. Auden wrote simply, "Mirrors are lonely." Most people, says James, take a look at themselves, and then walk away and forget about whatever they saw. But, whether you are a doer of the word and not just a hearer, depends not only on what you see out there in the world, or find in the headlines, or hear on the morning news. It depends on what you see in the mirror.

One of the most powerful yet puzzling biblical concepts is that we are created in the image of God. What can that really mean? And we are told that Jesus is the image of the invisible God. God, Jesus, you and me, and everyone in the world – one image. One image. The Apostle Paul says this in 2^nd Corinthians:

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.

The mirror needs to be true, not like a twisted one from a funhouse, and we need to look without any masks or make up on (unveiled faces, as Paul would say). And we need to trust that, if we are in the Spirit, we are looking directly into the face of God and the face of our neighbor.

Now, of course, we are dealing with metaphorical language here. But the metaphor encompasses the literal. James goes on to say in this same passage: "But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act - they will be blest in their doing." Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom, there is liberty (the perfect law), and that is what we behold when we look into the image of God – whether it be our own faces, those of our neighbors, or the face of Jesus – it is the same face.

Spiritually speaking, we could say a place to start is by beholding the face of Jesus, the image of God, in the mirror. Through our own unveiled faces, the light of God shines. Mirrors show the truth, and despite how bad we may look (even whether hung-over or with guilty consciences), what is there is, in fact, beautiful. God’s light can shine through whatever darkness may be in us. Created in the image of God means that there is nothing lacking in you. You have everything you need to love and care and do. If you don’t behold that divine reality in yourself, it’s not because it isn’t there; it’s because of poor programming blocking the truth. But if you don’t come to see and appreciate the divine in yourself, how beautiful the face in the mirror really is, you will be pretty much useless to others, and possibly even destructive. Either your self-hatred will immobilize you, or it will be masked with self-righteousness. In any event, you will experience yourself as separate from, rather than connected to the rest of the world, and to God. The Dalai Lama simply says that we experience compassion when we realize that everybody is the same; we are not different from one another.

And the goal, of course, is to be doers of the word, to be vessels of compassion and justice. We observe Labor Day this weekend. It should be remembered that the modern labor movement grew out of the activities of many Christians in response to poor working conditions, child labor, low wages, and unscrupulous leaders of industry. Such innovations as the minimum-wage, child labor laws, work place safety, the right to strike, and collective bargaining are a direct result of the passionate engagement of Catholic and Protestant alike. And such involvement at the time was branded by many as communist and anti-American. The gap between the upper classes and the working class was huge. In many ways it was a gap between white anglo-saxon protestants and immigrant communities – Italians, Irish, German, and Eastern European. And it would be at least another generation before Americans of African descent would begin to see signs of hope from the movement, through the leadership of people like A. Philip Randolph. The contributions from Christians (including a papal encyclical and the social gospel movement) were to proclaim the commonality of the human family, because we are all God’s children, and the truth that the Gospel means little unless it has an impact on society. To be doers of the word and not hearers only is both spiritual and practical. Jesus said, "What you do unto the least of these, my sisters and brothers, you do unto me." Your face, my face, the face of the lowliest and most forsaken of God’s creatures, and the face of Jesus himself, are one face, one image.

And what of the world today? The world seems more hurting and dangerous than ever before. The powerful, who ought to be humble, are filled with arrogant self-assurance. The poor and oppressed seem voiceless and powerless. All that seems to have changed is the level of danger to the planet. Never before has action from spiritually grounded people been more needed. James says we should not be like people who distractedly look into the mirror and walk away, but like people who look and see the face of the Divine. Our faces must be unveiled and the mirror must be true and beautiful, not ugly and distorted. I would like to close with the words of Andrew Harvey, an eloquent exponent of the common spirituality of the great world religions. He recently wrote this:

In our time, the Divine stands before us, nakedly offering us two mirrors in which we can see two contrasting destinies. One is a black mirror in which the last tree of the last forest is being burned down as the last whales and dolphins die in finally polluted seas and the entire planet becomes, in the environmentalist David Brower’s words, "a vast stinking hospital of the dead and dying." The other is a golden mirror, in which we can also see clearly, if we dare to look at what our inner glory and divine power and beauty could create with divine grace, wisdom, and a transfigured world, a mirror of Love and Justice,…It is our tragedy and our magnificence that both destinies should now be possible and within our grasp…Which of our fates will be choose?

Amen.
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