He said, "Oh, no, you have never met me at all, but a long time ago I worked with your father. I was a close colleague of his and when I saw you across the aisle of the store, I said to myself, `I'd know that face anywhere.' You are the very image of your father."

For several weeks after that, I would sometimes be going down the street, and maybe come around a corner, and catch my reflection in a store window. If that has ever happened to you, you know how you can be startled. You almost see yourself with the eyes of someone else. It is not like looking into the mirror in the morning. I would come around the corner, catch that reflection and I would think, "That's Henry Troeger." All of a sudden I would be seeing how I bore the image of my father.

Then, of course, as the weeks went on, it faded away and I very nearly forgot the story. But, you know, this story comes back to me every time I read that beautiful passage in the beginning of Genesis where it says, "The Lord God said, `Let us create human beings in our image. Male and female, God created them.'"

This passage was written at a time when the community of faith had a very negative self-image. They had been hauled away from their homeland to Babylon. They had suffered terribly; they had lost their sense of power and strength and identity. A very great theological, spiritual writer -- we do not know his or her name; we just call this writer, "The Priestly Writer" -- wanted to remind people that they bore the image of God in their very being. "And the Lord God created them, male and female."

In a way, what the passage is saying is, "I'd know that face anywhere. You are the very image of the one who has birthed you, who has made you, who has nurtured you." Consider, just briefly, what this would mean for our society, a society that is always trying to sell us on the image that we need in order to be acceptable -- the number of catalogues you get; the number of commercials on TV always telling you how you have to look; what you have to achieve in order to be somebody. What this passage says is that you are already someone very special. "Why I'd recognize that face anywhere. You are the very image of God."

Think of what this means if you are a young person who is attracted to gangs, or worried that you aren't acceptable. You don't have to worry about that. You already are somebody of unique and wondrous value. You are somebody who bears the image of God.

Think, if you are a woman who has been, or is currently in, an abusive relationship. I think here of a very dear woman friend who had a husband who told her she was stupid, dumb and unattractive whereas she was really one of the most beautiful people I ever knew, not just a surface beauty, but the deep beauty of a keen mind and a wonderful soul. This passage says to someone like her, "You are the very image of the one who made you."

If you are somebody who is growing old, very old, and you have lost the strength you once had -- maybe your hands are gnarled with arthritis, maybe you don't have the energy you once had -- you think back to when you were a youth. You see how this society loves youth as though that is the only way to be. This passage says, "You bear the very image of God. You are as valuable and as precious now as you were the day you were born."

To bear the image of God is to see ourselves differently, but not just ourselves. It is to see everyone else differently as well. Sometimes this is very difficult for us. We see someone who is really different from us and we think of them as the stranger, the alien, and we become very frightened by them. Maybe it is their religious differences; maybe it is their ethnic or their cultural differences, but they bear this image of God just as unmistakably as we. It is not always because someone is just different. We may fail to see how even those we love are the very image of the God who made them.

I think of a story in my own life. I had gone through kind of a tough patch, great sadness and great personal crisis in one year. My wife stuck with me through it all and at the end of the year, I wrote her a brief poem. I share this poem, not just because it is about her and me, but because I think it is about the discovery of the image of God in another person. 

I hope you don't wait for crisis and tragedy to see the image of God in those around you, in your spouse, in your friends, and your neighbors, because it is there and you need to celebrate it. As a matter of fact, it is not just knowing about the image of God and seeing how it changes, how we see ourselves or how we see others, it does something else as well. It brings a change in how we act and how we treat one another.

If I think of you as the enemy or the other, that makes it impossible for us to have a creative or a reconciling relationship. If I see that you are the very image of the one who created you, just as I also am, then think of what that does for each of us. Our life becomes a way of drawing forth all that is best from each other's heart, all that is best in each other's gifts.

This is why the early church, particularly the writer of Colossians, said of Jesus, "He is the very image of the invisible God." What they meant by that is when we look at Jesus and we see Him feeding the hungry, we see the image of God in action. When we look at Jesus and see Him healing somebody who is broken and in need, we see the image of God in action. This very deeply beautiful idea of the image of God in action is not by any means confined to those of us who call ourselves Christian.

In the Hebrew bible, in Genesis, in the same book where we get this idea of the image of God, we read in a later chapter a very moving story of where the image of God is present in someone. As you may recall, Jacob and Esau were brothers. Jacob was a cheat and a scoundrel, and he had cheated his older brother Esau out of the birthright and inheritance which was his. Then Jacob had gone off and lived away for many, many years. He had raised a family; he had become a wealthy man, and he returned home to meet Esau. He was very frightened, very scared, of how Esau would receive him.

The night before they were to meet again, Jacob sent his household and a procession of gifts to his brother, maybe hoping to soften him up a little bit. Then he lay down by the side of the Jabbok River, and he wrestled with the angel of God. The next morning, he came face to face with his brother. What did his brother do? His brother came up to him, embraced him, kissed him, and welcomed him home. Jacob did not become a sterling character, but he had a wonderful moment at this time. He said to Esau, "Truly, to see your face is like seeing the face of God for with such favor have you received me."

Imagine a world where all of us looked at everyone and said, "Why, I'd know that face anywhere. It is the very image of the God who made us all."

Floyd Brown: Tom, thank you very much for a very, very fine talk. It is so relevant and so much in line with the thoughts many of us have. In particular, you relate to young people out there. They are made in the image of God. They are already somebody. They don't need to tie into a gang for an image if they just think in the way that you talked about. I like your approach because you are making religion relevant to our daily lives and how important it is to us to have this sound foundation.

We discussed it earlier, and you told me some of the interesting work that you are doing. You are writing poetry; it is being set to music, and it is going into hymnals. I want you to recite the hymn about the abused woman.

Thomas Troeger: Yes. I will be glad to do that. Before I do that hymn, let me just say a word or two about what you have picked up and what I am trying to do. I think it is important for our viewers to know that in theology schools this is one of the really great, exciting, intellectual times in the history of the church. We have really begun to absorb the impact of Third World theologies, that is, believers from countries other than the very wealthy countries, have begun to look at how religion is liberating in their lives, how it gives them an image of being people who can challenge the structures and the economics and all the things that may oppress them.

Another thing that has been very exciting is the large advent of women in theological seminaries and the rise of so-called feminist theology, which has helped us appreciate how this image of God which I was speaking about is not just the male image but is, as the bible says, male and female as God created them. Before I recite that poem, I wanted to give a little bit of the ferment, the intellectual, theological ferment, that is going on. Many people I know are often threatened by this. They think, "Oh, is it the end of the tradition or the end of the gospel?" Far from it. I think it represents a very exciting development because it is going to help people claim in new and spirited ways the fullness of who God made them to be.

With that as background, let me say that a theologian named James Poling, who has worked with many women who have been abused and also worked with abusers, came to me one day and said, "You know, I need to do a worship service about abuse. We are becoming more and more aware of it, but there are no hymns on this. Could I commission you to write one?"

So, I wrote the following verses. I will not necessarily recite the whole thing, but I will do the opening refrain and the first stanza to give people a feeling for it. It opens with a refrain:

A poem like that does not represent simply my own creative gift. What it represents is the coming to consciousness in the church and the culture that we need to address these pressing issues which sometimes have been blocked from our awareness by the tradition and the past.

Brown: Talk a little bit about that, the tradition and the popular music today -- the two approaches. We discussed it a little bit earlier. Why is it so necessary for us to maintain the traditional music as opposed to going all popular or all traditional?

Troeger: As I pointed out to you, I think there are two solutions which people try which I do not think will last long term. One is to stay only with the tradition. The other is to throw off the tradition altogether and try to do only what is current, only what is popular. What I would point out is that one of our obligations as a religious community is to remember the past. When we sing the hymns, the music of the past, when we offer the prayers of our forbearers, we remember the suffering, the sacrifice that they went through to pass the faith on to us. At the same time, tradition can become something of a noose around us if that is all we do, because tradition includes things that were cruel and wrong. For example, the leaving out of women from positions of ordained leadership in many of our churches. We need to correct that. Also, every age has to be able to express its faith in its own idiom. That is why I am open to the use of the popular music as well.

Just this last weekend, I led a youth retreat with 300 young people, teen-agers, up in the Rocky Mountains. They had a marvelous song leader there. These kids got into these songs and really enjoyed it but at the same time, we did some of the great old traditional hymns of the church. We were doing a special simulation game revolving around the birth of Christ and it was very moving to hear them sing, for example, some of the great old carols that they themselves would not want to lose. I'm interested in the transformation of a religious consciousness, the way we hold faith in our hearts, so we want to preserve everything that is best in the tradition. Whatever has been blocking off what needs to be taken care of, justice for all people, the recognition of the full image of God in every human being, that we want to reach out to.