Rev. Jon Jordan: Mirrors are everywhere. Some people love them, some people don't. Some people spend a lot of time in front of them, others don't. I'll let you guess which one is mostly true for me, but I'll give you a hint, it doesn't take me long to pick out an outfit or do my hair in the morning. Sometimes mirrors accurately show us who we are, sometimes they don't.
Objects in mirror are closer than they appear. Mirrors fill the popular imagination too. In the ancient world, narcissist dies staring into a pond that had become as still as glass. More recently, we have enchanted mirrors from the mirror mirror on the wall to Alice's looking glass to Hogwarts Mirror of Erised. And mirrors often get a bad rap.
They can be associated with things like vanity or image obsession or selfishness. But we need them, don't we? Sure, some of them can be enchanted or misused or obsessed over, but they also offer clarity. They show us, by and large, who we are. Or like in the aptly named Netflix series Black Mirror, they show us what we will become if we continue down our current path.
That series aims to show us what will become of our current obsession with technological advancement, and it takes its name from the shiny black mirrors that we carry with us everywhere. I broke a rule of mine to have my phone in my pocket while I preach to you just for that. So I hope you enjoyed that moment. Right? When the four cardinal virtues, temperance, fortitude, justice, and wisdom are portrayed artistically either in a painting or in a sculpture, it's easy to spot Lady Wisdom.
She is always holding a mirror. This morning in our collect, we asked God to grant us the spirit to think and do always those things that are right. We asked God for an increase of wisdom. And wisdom, the embodiment of thinking and doing always those things that are right, is herself constantly seen gazing into a mirror. Not because she is vain, but rather because growing in wisdom requires us to know ourselves, who we are, and how we are living out that calling.
Which is why you may have noticed our collect this morning continues after asking for this increase of wisdom. We also ask God that we, who cannot exist without you, may by you be enabled to live according to your will. It's only by understanding ourselves as those who cannot live without God that we are increasingly made by God into the sort of people that can live according to his will. So we are beings who cannot exist without God. We draw life and love and truth and goodness and beauty from him, the source of all these things, which means that we are the sort of beings who must be united to him if we are to become who we are called to be.
We can only do that in communion with God himself, which presents a real problem to us based on our history. In the Garden of Eden, humanity believed the lie that we can exist apart from God, that we can grow and thrive apart from our creator. That is the core of our first parents, first sin. And from that time forward, humanity has been in exile. We have been wandering, disconnected from the God who made us.
So first we were exiled from the garden, then Abraham is called by God into the land of Canaan and it isn't long, only a couple of generations before God's people are in exile again, this time in Egypt. They are strangers in a strange land as the King James puts it. Centuries later after the time of King David and Solomon, God's people are taken away yet again into exile by the Assyrians and then the Babylonians and then the Persians. And even though by the end of the Old Testament, a remnant of Israelites were allowed to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the city and the temple, by the time of Jesus, God's people found themselves living even in their own land as exiles under the Roman Empire. We are beings who cannot exist without God, and yet the default position of our heart is exile from him.
So why all this talk about exile? In chapter 10 of the book of Romans, Paul quotes quite a bit from the end of the book of Deuteronomy. You probably noticed all all the quotation marks in the reading. Towards the end of his life, Moses delivers this final word from the prophet. Prophet.
It is his last lecture. And Deuteronomy ends with that final word from Moses before telling us of his own death and burial. And the summary of Deuteronomy, which itself is a summary of the first five books of the Old Testament boils down to this. God promises Israel a life of blessing, not one without hardship but one that is marked from beginning to end by blessedness If Israel walks with God in the way of his commandments, if they recognize their dependence on him for all things, if they align their individual and communal lives with the moral grain of the universe God created for human flourishing. But if they didn't, if they responded to the grace of God in their lives and instead chose to walk in their own ways, then they would experience exile.
Now that's Deuteronomy twenty eight and twenty nine. And at the tail end of that, Moses looks out as his people as he's delivering this message and having spent forty years with them, he gives them a pretty stark warning. I just said if you go this way, you will have abundant life, and if you go this way, you will experience exile. I know you. You're going to experience exile.
But then in Deuteronomy 30, the passage that Paul quotes in Romans 10, Moses has one final encouragement to share after sharing this daunting news. You see, when Israel goes into exile, they might suppose that everything is over, that things are beyond repair. But God himself through Moses promises them that if they turn back to God even while they are in exile, he will redeem them. More specifically, he promises to transform them, to change their hearts so that they can at last keep his law the way it was always intended. It won't be a matter of people needing to climb up to heaven to get at this new law.
They won't have to go across the sea or into the depths of the earth to find it. It will find them. Then the exile will be over, the curse will be undone, and Israel will be saved. Then Moses dies and the book ends. This chapter of Romans in our lectionary this week is written by Paul specifically to those who grew up hearing this Old Testament.
This part of Romans is specifically to the Jewish community. It was written to a community that had a dual reality embedded into their consciousness. First, we are now living in the exile promised long ago. And second, we are holding out hope that God will make a way to reunite us to him. Or at least we're trying to hold out hope.
And Paul's message to that specific community in Romans 10 is this, you have been longing for a rescue. God has now provided it. If exile is a disconnect with God, a fracture in that relationship, then Jesus is the cure for exile. He is the salvation promised since before the days of Moses. It is through him that you are reunited with your maker and finally set on the path to a life with God.
But as we just read, Paul shares this news with the Jewish community with a shocking twist. This promise of a new heart, of transformation rooted in being connected again to the source of everything good, it is not just for the people of Israel. This transformation is for everyone. Because of the work of Jesus, the door to God's family is wide open. So regardless of who you are or what you have done or where you are from, do you believe in your heart that Jesus is Lord?
Do you proclaim with your lips that he was raised from the dead and he stands now as the way to a life with God? Then you're in. This transformed life is your life because you are now in communion with the source of life itself. This believing in your heart to the extent that you can say it with your words, this is the great realign that God's people needed if they were to begin to walk the path of righteousness. And this is in a sense the mirror of wisdom for us this morning.
We have been rescued from exile. We have been reunited in Christ with the one who made us. We have called upon the name of the Lord, and we will be saved. And because all of this is true, we can with boldness ask God to increase our desire and ability to live in his ways. Not to earn merit in his sight, not so that we can stand out in a crowd, not out of a sense of guilt or shame, but rather in response to the gift that we have been given in Christ.
We are home from exile. We have been reconnected with the God who made us, and so we want to live as though this is true. Now the chances are you know all of this already. Right? It's the sort of thing that makes sense to talk about in a room that looks like this, gathered with people that look like this.
But what about on a Monday morning or a Tuesday afternoon or a Friday evening? I'll close with a deeply practical and very achievable takeaway. Redeem the mirrors in your life. Write a passage of scripture on your bathroom mirror. Tape a note card nearby to remind you of these things every time you look in a mirror.
And once you have accidentally memorized that passage, move on to the next one. I stole this idea from my wife who does this whenever our kids have a passage to memorize, so she should get the credit. She probably stole it from someone else too. This is how these things work. But another idea, choose a background for your own black mirror that reminds you of these things.
It could be a verse from scripture that you set as your wallpaper or a piece of artwork. Could be a picture that you took and you know what it means to you. Whatever it is, let this wallpaper that you encounter hundreds of times a day remind you of who you are and who you are called to become. Do this, and like lady wisdom, you will find that the mirrors in your life can begin to serve as mirrors into your heart also. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit.