Snow White is a lot older than she looks! Versions of this fairy tale date all the way back to the Middle Ages. Around 1800, the Brothers Grimm gave us the story line we know today and of course the characters have been polished by the modern Disney machine. But consistent through the centuries has been the wicked stepmother’s vanity. Day after day she boldly, but with a hint of paranoia, stepped before her magic mirror to admire herself and ask, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” And every morning that magic mirror concurred with the fair queen that the image reflected upon it was in fact the most beautiful in the kingdom.

Then one fateful morning the queen got the shock of her life. Instead of answering her question, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” with the usual “You are, my queen,” the mirror replied instead, “Snow White.” The wicked queen’s own image had not changed – but now her perception of herself had. With her fallen self-image the step-mother turned from narcissistic to down right nasty and ordered the death of her beauty pageant competitor.

Very few of us ever feel like rushing to the mirror first thing in the morning. There is something about a good night’s rest that instead of making our faces look like a million bucks, makes them take on the “face value” of $1.25! One person quite close to me reminds me regularly that “natural beauty takes time and money!” Even though mirrors usually show us a version of ourselves that we’d rather not see, it’s almost impossible to walk past a reflective pane of glass without at least giving it a glance. Like the wicked queen in Snow White, we are drawn to our mirrors. We become mesmerized by what they say to us and about us.

Unfortunately for most of us, what we think we hear our mirrors telling us is far from being “fairest of them all.” Instead, we hear a thousand judging voices from our early childhood through adolescence and adulthood telling us we are Charlie Brown blockheads or Ugly Bettys. It’s hard to get away from the mirrors at any stage of life.

We still look in the mirror of our childhood and hear it say accusingly, “You? Look at you! You can’t do that! You’re scrawny, your ears stick out, you hold your pencil wrong and you’re too shy to speak up in class. Who’s going to pay attention to you?”

We still look in the mirror of our teens and hear it say judgmentally, “You? Like, forget you! Look at your zits; look at your braces; look at your weight; then look at everyone else who’s perfect. No one is going to love you.”

We still look in the mirror of adulthood and hear it lamenting, “You? What a joke. You’re only a shadow of what you used to be. Wait until they catch on to you….”

We create in our mind’s eye a tawdry carnival like “Hall of Mirrors.” You know the ones with all concave and convex and curving surfaces that offer grotesque reflections of reality? The real danger comes when we start to believe the warped images our distorted mirrors show us and we risk making that surface vision of ourselves real. We see this vicious cycle acted out all around us. An abused child looks in the mirror and sees a mother who uses her own child as a punching bag. A bullied teen looks in the mirror as he loads a gun and walks into a school with a loaded gun and opens fire in an ultimate act of bullying classmates and teachers. A “cats in the cradle” girl looks in the mirror only to see herself becoming an overcommitted workaholic. A drug addict looks in the mirror to see a dealer who starts selling to minors creating another generation of addicts who will support his own habit. Young men and women in the Middle East who have seen only strife and war their entire lives look in the mirror as they strap explosives to their bodies and indiscriminately destroy property, soldiers and civilians alike. Tragically, the narcissistic step-mother of Snow White whose mirror turns her into evil incarnate isn’t just a fairy tale. How do we break the cycle?

What we often call a one-way mirror is really a mirror with a reflective coating applied in a very thin, sparse layer – so thin that it’s called a half-silvered surface. The half-silvered surface reflects about half the light that strikes its surface, while letting the other half go straight through. One-way mirrors are often used in interrogation rooms and observation rooms. The room in which the glass looks like a shiny mirror is kept very brightly lit, so that there is plenty of light to reflect back from the mirror’s surface. The other room, in which the glass looks like a transparent window, is kept dark, so there is very little light to transmit through the glass. So from one side you can see completely through while from the other side you can see only the surface reflection. As we look both ways at our Old Testament and New Testament readings for today, God looks through the one-way mirror and beckons us to look from God’s side as well.

When Samuel sat reviewing the parade of Jesse’s sons, he was just using the standard mirror of selection criteria for a new king. Samuel thought he knew the telltale signs of leadership, that he could discern the power of a man by taking the measure of his pecs, abs and triceps. He judged a person’s fitness in the weight room as a measure of his fitness for the throne-room. The first seven boys looked good from Samuel’s line of sight, but not from God’s. Using a whole different set of standards, God proclaims to Samuel, “The Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (v.7). “Are all your sons here?” (v.11) asks an exasperated Samuel. Jesse’s mirror demeans his eighth son: He is “the youngest, the weakest, and the one left keeping the sheep.” But he is also the one whom God sees as holding the greatest potential for leading the nation of Israel. And the little ruddy David is selected as the successor to King Saul. God reminds us that the divine perception of reality differs significantly from our limited human view.

Our gospel story from John is about a man “blind from birth.” But as the story unfolds it’s interesting that the physically blind man sees far more clearly than the sighted people around him. When Jesus heals the blind man the disciples look only for the sin that they assume caused the blindness in the first place. When Jesus heals the blind man, the neighbors fail to recognize him; they never before looked at him beyond his handicap. When Jesus heals the blind man Pharisees overlook a miracle and focus only on Jesus’ unlawful work on the Sabbath. When Jesus heals the blind man, the blind man begins seeing the world through God’s side of the mirror, while the religious folk continue to stare at the reflection of their own preconceptions. Jesus’ words complete this scene, summing up the ironic message of this whole episode – those who were blind will see, but those who already see may plunge into darkness.

Author James Michener made his mark in the literary world by producing massive historical novels such as The Source, Hawaii, Centennial, and Texas just to name a few. Michener’s style drew its strength and beauty from characters fleshed out with extensive genealogies and deep cultural roots. Yet ironically, he himself was a man without a birth certificate. Abandoned as an infant, raised as a foster-son in the Michener family headed by a widowed woman, James never knew his biological parents. Despite his generous spirit and kind nature, Michener’s accomplishments raised the ire of one of his adopted relatives. In a rage of jealousy, mean-spiritedness and sheer nastiness, some anonymous relative, self-signed only as “a real Michener” - felt impelled to write hate-filled, hurtful notes to James whenever his name gained fame or publicity. Even after his Pulitzer Prize, this poison-pen writer charged Michener with staining the good Michener name and chastised, “Who in hell do you think you are, trying to be better than you are?” The final letter he received from his unknown relative came in 1976 after President Ford had presented James with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The acidic note read, “Still using a name that isn’t yours. Still a fraud. Still trying to be better than you are.”

In his memoir entitled, The World is My Home, Michener testifies that the words of that cry burned into his soul. But Michener turned that negative self image into a life-challenge. Michener acknowledges his nit-picking kinfolk, and admits to missing the nasty letters when his relative presumably died: He was right in all his accusations. Michener confesses, “I have spent my life trying to be better than I was, and am brother to all who have the same aspirations.” One of our roles as the church is to heal people from the damage their old mirror-images keep inflicting upon them. To help each other be more than the world sees us to be, but all that God sees us to be!