Dedication:

Please pray with me:

Will you let me be your servant? Let me be as Christ to you? Pray that I may have the grace to let you be my servant too. Amen

‘TILL WE HAVE FACES:
“OUTWARD BOUND” ON THE ROAD TO EMMAEUS

Su-Lin, Charmaine, Siew-Chin; Stef; Shin, Zoe, Juliet, and, on occasion, Susan: the women of EZER, my first friends in FCC.

I call the names of the EZER women, and their faces pop up before me as I begin the process of sorting and sifting ideas for this message. Their particular expressions I imagine, expressions I know from our late-starting, noodle-slurping, sometimes contentious, often hilarious, Wednesday night Bible study sessions. I see the listening tilts of their few faces, as I imagine myself standing up here, facing your many faces, delivering this message.

Mary Magdalene; Johanna; Mary; Martha; Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist; Mary, the mother of James; Mary the mother of Jesus: names of the women who tended to Jesus.

It’s challenging for me to pronounce and remember your Chinese names and faces, not that I am unwilling, but the abstract qualities your names denote are often culturally-closed to me. Faces I concretely associate with actual persons: your behaviors, sensitivities, preferences, our interactions, your stories. The word, your name, literally is made flesh for me by your face, embodying my human need to know you “in the flesh.”

Physical presence is best conveyed by touch and voice; in fact, I’ve read that, for most, our earliest memory is the particular texture of our mother’s hands, her aroma, and the individual timbre of her voice. We yearn, demand even, to see and interpret the fully physical signs of presence on the beloved’s face, even though the face is more mediated by the mind than touch or voice and thus perhaps less sincere. Still the face is most precious to us as a representation of the whole self. The face of a person and its expressions integrates body and mind, sensation and thought, and is both reality and mystery.

The story of Jesus on the road to Emmaus with his disciples has a central irony: The disciples grieve the disappearance of the one who is walking in their very midst. Earlier the women, Mary Magdalene, Johanna, and Mary, the mother of James, had gone to the tomb with their embalming spices and found no body. Two men in shining garments, angels we presume, admonished them: “Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here. He is risen.”

They, the women, as the scripture says, “remembered.” They conveyed belief in the risen Christ to the male disciples, but they shed that belief with every footstep away from the tomb, traveling the road to the village of Emmaus to perform an unspecified errand.

It’s easy to understand why the disciples doubted, although the women displayed a more intuitive disposition to believe – perhaps it was the face-to-face encounter with the angels or maybe they just needed to add a few tough-minded dykes to the mix – yet we have to wonder why Jesus continued to cloak his face on the journey, encouraging the disciples to recount their story of loss while he remained incognito.

My text this morning is this question, to which I have no answer, several questions actually: Did Jesus have a purpose in speaking with, listening to, and even sharing food with, his seekers, all the while withholding the showing of his face until he finally caved in, discerning that they would never “get it” on their own?

Why must we humans wait to see Jesus? Why can’t we, if we believe, have the comfort of seeing the well-pleased expression on Jesus’ face as he sees us looking at his? Is all this mystery necessary – or -- could this be the essential challenge of our faith, not to be able to see and to be seen, but to believe that we have -- and will?

Donna, Mary, Sandy, Carol; Betty, Isabel, Chrissie;
and Susan, still missed: women I have loved and who loved me. “There’s something about the women in my life.”

I have challenged others to speak from this pulpit of ourselves, we women particularly, as desirous human beings, desiring intimate same-sex connections with one another that are intensely emotional and sexual – and “hets,” don’t be put off, this message is for you too; it’s just that your desire is not usually so hotly contested. When we desire one other so ardently, what – or rather whom -- do we actually desire?

I have credentials as a woman crazy-in-love, not even so long ago, willing to do anything to behold once again the beautiful face of my beloved.

I was a very young woman with very young children, living in a remote industrial town where my husband’s work had taken us. My “best friend” Donna and I helped one another with our respective children -- six daughters between us – no boy children, although I’ve rectified this with my six grandsons, one newly born.

Donna was – and is – a prodigious musician; I began to write poetry – to her, of course -- and she set my words to music, giving them back to me as song. I joined her folk music group, too outclassed by their talents to do more than transcribe song lyrics and hum the chorus. One night, instead of her customary quiet accompaniment and harmony (She preferred to mastermind the music, not star.), Donna lifted her head and in her beautiful contralto voice sang directly across the room to me, “The first time ever I saw your face, I felt the stars move in the skies.”

Of course, I have another story from this chaotic period of recriminations, accusations, threats of losing property and children, how we could possibly live together Donna’s husband transferred the family to another state, and I felt impelled to enroll in a university a few hours commute away.

I had taken Donna to the airport to house hunt with her husband (Don’t ask me why I drove them there.); we had made love for the first time the night before; I was driving home from enrolling myself in a degree program in literature. In my exhausted heady hallucinatory state, I wanted to create a life with Donna, I wanted to explore my potential as an academic and writer, I wanted a real psychoanalysis, and to be a different sort of mother – in short, I wanted the potential of myself and all I envisioned I could be, at whatever if it took the rest of my life – and it has.

This isn’t just reminiscence; this is testimony. So who should come down my personal Emmaus highway walking toward me with the hugest smile on his face but Jesus, welcoming, embracing, I now understand, my desire for myself. I experienced my own desire for self fully at the time as a desire to be with Donna because she could so richly reflect it back to me, but I had known it before and would know it after as the desire to be in that state of possibility with Jesus.

I speculate that the disciples needed to “get out of Dodge” to get over their trauma, to figure out just what they expected of themselves now that Jesus had disappeared on them.

Did Jesus intend them to struggle with their disappointment and desire both individually and collectively? Did Jesus expect them to learn about their inner selves through beholding one another’s hopes, dreams, and inadequacies? Is this how to learn to spiritually companion one another along the way, given his necessary invisibility? In this last sighting, did Jesus want to convey to them the unseen but quite durable demands of an intimate relationship in which all secrets are known and no desires hid?

Carolyn, Melinda, Michael, Rick, Jorg – my Western friends, who love this church; Jaime, Kenny, Sharon, Jael, Reverend Yap, Mrs. Yap, Clarence, Peter, Nathan – new friends with whom I have worked or listened within this church.

Why is it forbidden to look upon the face of God?

I ran a thread on the topic of faces on Bible Gateway.com. and categorized biblical images of faces. Here they are: Category #1. Shutting the door to the kingdom of heaven on late repenting faces Category # 2. Falling down on the face in reverence to God or covering the face in shame Category #3. Creating forbidden idols with human faces and Category #4. Unveiling the face of God (merely two references)

I need to tell you the origin of my meditation on faces. Several years ago I was riveted to developments in the story of a French woman who received the first face transplant. Tragically, she had taken many barbiturates in a moment of despair, hoping to die, but her large German shepherd dog with his barking saved her life. In the process, thinking her dead, he also destroyed her face. The operation was a gruesome attempt literally to “save face,” by borrowing from a cadaver.

I watched this woman after her surgery struggle to speak at the news conference to which she had consented, realizing as I watched her stiff unworkable mouth, uncontrollable tongue, and unlubricated eyes, how very difficult it is for us humans to work our faces, to present on our faces what we perceive the world wants to see, how deep is the imperative to hide our suffering from one another and how shameful not to be able to.

I have friends from my church MCCDC who have gone before. Joe Houle died five years ago on April 2, my granddaughter Charlotte’s birthday. I got news just about a year ago today that Dan Shelhorn, a gay businessman who lived with HIV and helped many others with HIV, had died of pancreatic cancer; I told him goodbye on Easter Sunday just before I left for Singapore. My friend Cheryl Spector, a Jewish woman, social activist in the community, succumbed rapidly to non-Hodkins lymphoma and another beloved church member Jeannine Baker to brain cancer after a three-year struggle. A woman in transition, Alexis, took her own life.

I’m not going to talk about the resurrection, although my friend Joe’s sister reported at his “Going Home Service” that in his last hours he kept repeating, “It is hell, hell.” Then she caught the tune; under his breath he was whispering his favorite hymn, “It is well, it is well, with my soul.”

What I do want to say is that when I pray for my friends – you among them – I pray that I or another person will bring the tender, patient, understanding, even witty, Christ-presence into that airplane, office, or hospital room – or the streets the women walk in Geylang -- the face of Christ that we think we glimpse, whether actual or not, for just a moment of lightness and relief. Before and after the Sacrament of Communion, I say the name and behold the face of each family member and friend, asking that I or another may bring the Christ-presence to them in their need.

How can we be the “Christ-light” for one another, the light that illumines the path to the desired self for another? My personal watchwords are: “Listen, listen, listen.” “Forgive, forgive, forgive.” And meanwhile, sing.

Courtney, Jennifer, and Brooke, my daughters, none of them gay. Women at home who have shared my life, several spiritual but not Christian: Jackie, Jane, Judy, Charlotte, Kim. Men friends I have come to treasure, all three Jewish: Doc, Richard, Danny. My sons-in-law, Andrew and Billy. My spiritual companion, the Reverend Reg Richburg, a male-identified woman.

One last theological unraveling from the Emmaus story: I am quite fascinated with the details of the cloak Jesus used to hide his face, a hooded cloak, I surmise. When I think of that cloak, I am reminded of the scripture, loosely quoted: “In my mansion are many rooms.”

I imagine Jesus’ cloak as a commodious cloak, probably drawn from the time I saw the ballet of the Prodigal Son danced by the great dancer Edward Villella. The son in his abasement crept across the stage on his belly using fingernails for traction, each inch a painful gain, but the father did not dance. He stood instead with opened cape, his only movement when the son arrived, in a single motion, to kneel down, lift him up, and surround the son in that most commodious familiar family-smelling enormous cape.

The women I have seen in Nigeria, Africa, where my daughter Jennifer lives and works, have colorful all-purpose shawls that perform many functions, yards of hemmed material that, as a matter of course, come with the dress. These shawls adorn heads that carry baskets; disguise pregnancies and cover breast-feeding babies; they become umbrellas, tabled cloths, aprons, diapers, and an amazing array of skillfully tied baby carry-alls. I brought a Nigerian dress complete with shawl home to my six-year-old grand daughter, Ann Elisabeth. Bissy, as we call her, knew just what to do with the shawl. Immediately she wrapped up her doll with the cloth, lashed her nonchalantly onto her back, and, unbothered by pretend child-care, continued with her sewing project.

I deconstruct the cloak that Jesus wore on the road to Emmaus as an ordinary, versatile, commodious garment that allows him -- and us – to do our spiritual work on ourselves selectively. In its expansive folds and fissures, the cloak can contain all that our desire for self asks of us, even if it is different each day, even when overly and unruly-ly full. Flexible and fluid, this cloak can continuously shape itself anew, and according to need and readiness, alternately shroud or reveal to ourselves and others the faces of our desire.

Closing:

We are pilgrims on a journey. We are trav’lers on the road; We are here to help each other. Walk the mile and bear the load.

I will hold the Christ light for you. In the night-time of your fear. I will hold my hand out to you. Speak the peace you long to hear.

Alleluia, Alleluia, and Amen