Faces in the Crowd

They scarely get a nod in scripture but somehow we got their name. There are a number of Jims, Marys, Josephs, Zacks, Erastus, Linus', Demas', and Aris but little else is known. Good guys?  A few bad apples? In some cases not even a name is listed but just a description: a jailer, a whore, a beggar, a thief, a businessman, a woman caught, a man forgotten, even a Samaritan. No, not too many ever noticed these folks in their day.

But God did.

Each was just another face in the crowd, the kind you pass by every day in the grocery store, at the gas station, in the mall or at the table next to you in Applebys. Come on, why would you notice them? Better question is why did Jesus? Why did their name or their description get in His book? And if God noticed maybe we should too. Maybe in those faces in the crowd He saw something that drew His attention, His compassion, His dying interest. Maybe in some way He saw you and me and everyone else who thinks they are just a face in a crowd and He noticed. God saw, God noticed, God knew. There was no reason but God in Christ has His own reason. He knew what it was like to be noticed. He knew that from the time He was twelve in the temple confounding rabbis. He knew what it was like to go unnoticed, just asked who knew anything about Him when He as twenty-six and sweaty in the back of a hot carpenter shop. Imagine that, the creator of the world sanding down a stickey door for the Cohens. His own prophet described Him in Isaiah 53 as having no beauty or majesty to attract us to Him, nothing in His apprearance that we should desire Him.  Through it all He seemed to know what it was like to get attention for the wrong reasons (Luke 2: 41-51) and to be shunned when He should be noticed (John 6:60-68).

What does He see in your face? Does He see past the smile to a broken heart? Does He trace a line etched  deeply into your forehead by stress just like a stylus does to marble? Does He see pain? Despair? Lonliness? Fear? Disappointment? You know what He really sees? He sees what is there. He sees what parents, coaches, teachers, lovers, kids, friends, illnesses, divorce, affairs, jobs, choices and time have put there. He also sees something else---the things that He, and He alone can put on that mug of yours. He sees the hope, the health, the joy, the reunions, and eternity that He can add to those lines and what love and forgiveness  can do for tired eyes faded by lights that aren't eternal.

So look around you. See those faces in the crowd at Wal Mart and the game next Friday. Look around some more and see if you can see what He sees. He's betting that you can and that you will respond in some way like He did when He picked your face out of the crowd. Better yet, look in the faces of all those people around you and I'd bet you will see something else. Look closely, beyond the things people try to hide behind.  Yeah, there it is... in that little baby, in that old couple helping each other along, in that fifty-seven year old that still feels a spark when he sees his wife, in that  little boy, that girl, that teenager with piercings and that twenty-something with  twelve tats and four rug rats....yeah, now you see, it's something Holy. He saw it too when He picked your face out of the crowd and decided to love you. What will you do with those faces in the crowd?

Cos

PS: For White Bluff Chapel attenders, the next sermon series will be "Faces in the Crowd" starting Sept 18.