Mirror, Mirror
John 14:8-17, 25-27
I spend at least 30 minutes on the treadmill every morning, except for Sundays. It is good exercise for my heart, if not so much my waistline. My treadmill sits in a corner, facing a blank wall – which is not a very exciting view. To help pass the time, I set my iPad on the control panel, put on my headphones, and I watch videos on YouTube.
Over the years, I have watched black and white science fiction movies from the 1950’s, humorous clips from “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” and the Tonight Show, and lots of hymns. This past couple of weeks I have been watching clips from the television show “Fool Us”, featuring the magicians Penn and Teller.
The premise of the show is that other magicians appear to do their best illusion, and if they fool the hosts on how it was done, they get to appear with Penn and Teller in Las Vegas.
There are card tricks, disappearing acts, mentalism, psychic surgery, and the other assortment of illusions you might expect to see from magic acts. After the illusion is done, Penn and Teller are given a few moments to figure out the trick, which they almost always do. While this figuring is going on, the guest magician is interviewed about their influences and inspirations in coming up with the tricks. And sometimes, the interview is the best part of the show.
In one of the interviews, the magician said that a good illusion is like a winning chess game. You have to be thinking 12 steps ahead while the audience is still thinking one or two steps ahead, if you want them to fall into your trap. And while that is a fine strategy for winning a game of chess or for creating an amusing illusion for entertainment purposes, it can be a harmful approach when it is used to fool or deceive persons for other reasons.
And yet we see it all the time. In particular, we see it in politics and law, with the reframing of issues used as a way to get something else entirely different done or undone. But lest you think I am picking on the evil world out there, I should point out that I have even seen it done at church conferences. We were asked to do one thing which in theory was to be open-ended and discerning, but which I recognized from my communications theory background as a manipulation to get us to agree with what the bishop wanted us to do all along.
But this isn’t anything new, of course. As long as there have been people who have wanted to get their own way, there have been people setting elaborate traps to fool others. By thinking several steps ahead, they manipulate people into thinking that they have freely agreed to do something they would not have otherwise freely chosen to do.
There is a classic example of this found in the Apocrypha. It is a story that is included in the Book of Daniel in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles, but which is not included in the versions used by Protestants. We don’t include it because it seems to clearly be an addition based only on the hero of the story being named Daniel. The language is different, the style is different, the actions are different, and the purpose of the hero is different from the Daniel in the rest of the book in our Bible.
But the story itself is pretty good. It is a wisdom story called “Bel and the Dragon.” I want us to look at the first half, the Bel part, of the story.
Bel is the name of the preferred god of the Babylonian king. The king believes Bel to be a living god because, even though it is made of clay overlaid with bronze, the idol eats all the food offered to it each night. And it is a lot of food -- "twelve great measures of fine flour, and forty sheep, and six vessels of wine." Surely, as the king declares to Daniel, this is proof that Bel is both living and a god.
Daniel, however, declares that Bel is nothing more than a fancy pile of garbage, though perhaps a little more politely than that. Not only that, Daniel then offers to prove Bel is fake beyond a reasonable doubt. The king accepts the challenge to be the guest magician. Daniel gets to be Penn and Teller.
That evening, the king brought the usual food and wine offering to the temple and placed it before the statue. The king allows Daniel to inspect the room, to make sure there was no one hiding, and then the king locked the door and marked it with his official seal. The next morning the seal was broken, the door was unlocked, and the king showed Daniel that the food was gone. You can almost hear the magician’s TA-DA!
But Daniel had already figured out the illusion. Before he had left the room the night before, Daniel had scattered fine ashes on the floor around the altar. The ashes revealed how the illusion was done. Daniel pointed out to the king the footprints in the ashes, which led them to the secret door used by the priests and their families to enter each night to take the food to their homes.
The king, who had actually believed that Bel was real, feels like a fool for believing this hunk of clay and bronze was nothing more than a ruse to take advantage of his generosity and willingness to believe. In his anger, he has the priests and their families put to death.
As a Bible story, it does nothing to lift up the God of Abraham, Moses, and Elijah. Daniel was clever, yes, but cleverness is not the same thing as holiness or faithfulness. There are lots of clever people who are not holy. You don’t have to believe in God in order to be clever, as many people today are more than willing to point out to you. And that may be the best reason we don’t find this story in our Bibles.
If there is a moral to this story, it is that there are consequences for trying to fool people into chasing after false gods. The ruse may seem to work to your advantage in the short run, or for as long as you can maintain the illusion, but when the truth comes out, it will have terrible consequences for everyone involved. And while those consequences may not be death, as it was for the Babylonian priests, it can be something much worse.
The consequence may be the loss of faith, which can keep someone from believing in God. The consequence may be the loss of hope, which makes trusting others, much less God, that much more difficult. The consequence may the loss of love, which makes any talk about the kingdom of God inauthentic.
I thought of all this because this is the echo in our reading. Philip is one of the original 12 disciples of Jesus. He had been a disciple of John the Baptist, so we know he was earnest in seeking an authentic relationship with God. Philip wants to trust that his spiritual leader can connect him to God. He has hope that following God is so much more than measuring the tassels on his robe and counting the number of prayers said each day. Philip, deep in his heart, wants to love the one true God.
We can also make a pretty strong guess that Philip doesn’t like to be fooled. Before Jesus fed the 5000, Philip wanted to know how this would be possible, so that he wouldn’t be fooled into believing something that was false. He didn’t want to be disillusioned when it came to his relationship with Jesus.
Philip wants to know God, and he wants Jesus to be the one who shows him God. He appreciates the teachings of Jesus. He is amazed at the miracles of Jesus. Yet, we can sense some fear in Philip that this is all an illusion. He wants Jesus to be the messiah, but he may be afraid of being taken for a fool when it all falls apart and the secrets are revealed.
So our reading for today begins with Philip saying, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” Lord, show us so we know it really was God at work, and not a trick. Prove to us the healing was divine, and the multiplication of the loaves was real, and the walking on the water was not an illusion. Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.
That is an outrageously bold and dangerous thing to ask. In the arrogance of today, we ask God to prove Godself all the time, but in the Bible this would be a bold and dangerous thing to do. But since Philip is a Greek name, and whenever Philip is mentioned he is the one dealing with the Greeks, we might make the jump to conclude that Philip was himself Greek. This would mean that he was not raised as a Jew, so he may not know the history of persons wanting to see God for themselves.
Genesis 1, the beginning of our story, tells of humanity being created in the image of God. The easy and early syllogism is that if we look like God, then God must look like us. If we looked into a mirror, we would see what God looked like. And more specifically, because of the role of the patriarchy in Judaism, if a bearded older man looked into a mirror, God would look like that.
Many people today still believe that, when they look into a mirror, they are looking at God. Or at least, they are looking at a god made in their own image. Not so surprisingly, they see a god who always values what they value, who always hates what they hate, who always wants what they want, and who always takes their side in an argument with others. Clearly, Biblically, that is not what God looks like.
When Moses led the slaves out of Egypt and into the desert, they received the Ten Commandments. The first rule is that there is only one God, and the second rule is that there is no acceptable image which can be made of this one God – so don’t even try, not now and not ever! Not only are we to never make an image of God, the penalty for looking on the face of God is death. Clearly, Biblically, we can’t limit God to an image, to something we can imagine.
When David came along and was writing hymns, which we call the Psalms, there was poetic license taken to describe God. God is a rock, a shield, a mother hen, a shepherd. These descriptions were about the characteristics of God other than the physical. These images allow us to see God protecting, caring, guiding the people. When we see this happen, we see God at work in the world. Clearly, Biblically, the image of God is love and power at work in the world.
But then there are stories like Bel and the Dragon, which teach us that we can’t always trust what we see. The story teaches us that there might be other reasons, much less than God, which are manipulating how we perceive the world. So, what one person sees as God at work in a new way in the world may be seen by others as an attack on how God has acted in the past. And in both cases, it may be their own reflection in the mirror which they believe to be God.
Philip wants to believe in God. Philip likes what he sees of God in Jesus. Philip wants to be sure that Jesus is not a fraud setting them up for an inevitable failure.
As John would counsel in his first letter, Jesus tells Philip to test the spirit. Are Jesus’ actions consistent with God’s love for all God’s children? Are Jesus’ teachings consistent with God’s power to forgive and redeem? Do we experience the power to love others when we do what Jesus did? Do we find the peace which passes all understanding when we trust God and follow Jesus?
In other words, have we tested the spirit until we can trust the spirit? And that test takes more than a belief in the Bible, or a confession of faith. That test requires a daily walk of faith where we depend on God, conform to Jesus, and have confidence in the Holy Spirit. It takes forgiving others as we have been forgiven by Jesus. It means humbling ourselves as we take up our cross so we can receive the new life in Jesus. It means spending time in prayer so that we can discern the whisper of the Spirit over the clamor of the world.
People are still trying to explain away what it is that believing in Jesus can do for us. That’s why you will hear about studies on the benefits of prayer, or the benefits of small groups, or the benefits of rituals and singing together. It is the world trying to be Penn and Teller, explaining that they know how the trick is done and that this is nothing more than a clever, if not also helpful, illusion.
Philip didn’t know it then, but there was one more proof that Jesus would offer. Jesus would die on the cross for our sins, be wrapped and sealed away in a guarded tomb, and then on Easter Sunday appear to Mary and the others. And this proof of the Resurrected Lord is offered to anyone who opens their heart to receive him as their Lord and Savior. And when we are tempted to forget this, or to think it was all an illusion, the Holy Spirit will remind us of everything Jesus told us – and we will find our peace.
Today is the Day of Pentecost. May we join our voices together to receive the Spirit again!
Hymn “Pour Into Us the Spirit, Lord”