WHO ARE YOU?
A number of years ago, a little girl on the East Coast made the following statement. She said, “My name is Martha Bowers Taft. My great-grandfather was President of the United States. My grandfather was a United States Senator. My daddy is an ambassador to Ireland. And I am a Brownie.”
Perhaps we could say that little girl was very fortunate in that she knew exactly who she was. If life’s most important question is, “Who’s in charge?” then perhaps life’s second most important question is this: “What is your relationship to the one who is in charge?” In other words, “Who are you?”
As you hopefully know by now, we’ve been doing a sermon series on discipleship. A couple of week ago the question was asked, “How can we identify a healthy disciple?” The following criteria were presented:
1. Who is your Lord? In other words, when everything is said and done, whose agenda are you truly following? Last week we discussed how Jesus made the ultimate sacrifice for us, and how we ought to be willing to make some sacrifice for him. And don’t think for a minute that it doesn’t matter.
2. Who are you? At the beginning of each day, do you wake up thinking you’ll have to go out and win your own share of security and significance, or can you truly say that those are priceless gifts you have already received?
3. Who is your Barnabas? Barnabas spoke up for the Apostle Paul and was something of a mentor to him. Who is your spiritual mentor, the one from whom you are learning how to follow Jesus Christ?
4. Who is your Timothy? Paul was something of a mentor to Timothy. Who is your apprentice – the one to whom you are passing along the life lessons that God has entrusted you?
5. Where is your Antioch? Antioch, to Paul, was a safe haven where the call of God could find him. What small group of friends is your safe haven…that is helping you to discern the will of God in your life?
6. Where is your Macedonia? Macedonia was a field of ministry for Paul. What field of ministry is most closely aligned with God’s call on your life, and hauntingly stirs your deepest passion?
Our focus this week will be on the second criterion of a healthy disciple: Who are you? In other words, at the beginning of each day, do you wake up thinking you’ll have to go out and win your own share of security and significance, or can you truly say that those are priceless gifts you have already received? Or, perhaps better put, do you feel you have to prove your worth on a daily basis, or has your value been bestowed by God already?
I guess the place to start is by asking what matters most to us in life. Think about it. What are our essential needs in life? Perhaps no one has described better what our basic needs in life are than psychologist Abraham Maslow. He developed what we call Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The first things we need to consider are our physiological needs. We need oxygen, food and water and, as he puts it, “a relatively consistent body temperature.” As human beings, I suppose it’s quite obvious that those are our basic needs.
Once our biological needs are met, then we can consider our safety needs. We want a safe place to live, a secure environment for our families – that sort of thing. Then we need love and affection and a sense of belonging. If we can satisfy those needs – if our biological, security and sense of belonging needs are satisfied – then we deal with our self-esteem. Humans, so says Maslow, have a need for a stable, firmly based, high level of self-respect AND respect from others. This is the one that hangs us up, as we’ll see in a moment. And finally, if all our other needs are met, we have a need for self-actualization. In other words, we seek out a way to do what we feel we were born to do. There you have it, our basic human needs in a nutshell.
The one we seem to have a problem with is the need for self-esteem. We seem to think we can gain our self-esteem by way of material splendor. The more we have, the happier we seem to be. And better still if we have more than the next guy. As someone once put it, “Some people want the front of the bus, the back of the church, and the center of attention!” But listen to this. Lillian Daniel addresses this issue in an article she wrote in The Christian Century entitled, “Affluent Christians.” She writes:
David Myers, a professor of psychology at Hope College, believes that we – as a nation – are growing more unhappy and depressed. Myers writes about the bad side of affluence. Apparently too much money may buy a supersized case of the blues. Today’s youth and young adults have grown up with much more affluence, slightly less overall happiness, a much greater risk of depression and a tripled teen suicide rate. Never has a culture experienced such physical comfort combined with such psychological misery. Never have we felt so free or had our prisons so overstuffed. Never have we been so sophisticated about pleasure or so likely to suffer broken relationships.
Wow! What does that say about our current American culture? Obviously, something is missing. Obviously, having more and more things is not the answer. Maybe the answer to the question, “Who are you?” is not, “I am a consumer.” Perhaps we can look to the passage we read from the gospel according to Luke to find the answer to who we really are.
You know the story. It’s the story of the prodigal son. It seems a man had two sons and the younger of the two came to his father and said, “Father, give me the share of property that falls to me.” In other words, “I want what you’re going to give me anyway when you die.” How’s that for an endearing conversation starter?
We are not told how the father felt about his son’s request, we are only told that he did as he was asked. So the son took the money and went to another country. He squandered everything on what we might call “loose living.” Just let your imagination run wild. In the end, he had nothing left and wound up feeding pigs, yet even the pigs ate better than he did.
He began to recall how well his father’s servants lived. He decided to return to his father and live as a hired hand. He would beg for his father’s forgiveness and hope that he would not turn him away. Yet what happened when his father saw him off in the distance? His father ran to him and declared a celebration! He put a robe on him, a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. He even killed the fatted calf – one they were likely saving for a special occasion – and hosted a sumptuous feast.
I think Jesus tells that story to point out how precious each and every human being is to God. God does not want any of us to be lost. God wants us to repent and to return to him. Unlike far too many human beings, God is guided by love, not by vengeance. Again, God is guided by love, not by vengeance.
It reminds me of a poem entitled, “Heaven.” The author is unknown. Listen closely to the words.
I was shocked, confused, bewildered
As I entered Heaven’s door,
Not by the beauty of it all,
The lights or its décor.
No, it was the folks in Heaven
Who made me sputter and gasp –
The thieves, the liars, the sinners,
The alcoholics and the trash.
There stood the kid from seventh grade
Who swiped my lunch loot twice.
By him was my old neighbor
Who said not one thing nice.
Herb, who I always thought
Was rotting away in hell,
Was sitting pretty on cloud nine,
Looking incredibly well.
I said to Jesus, “What’s the deal?
I’d love to hear your take.
How’d all these sinners get up here?
Did God make a mistake?
And why are folks so quiet?
So somber – give me a clue.”
“Hush, child,” he said, “they’re all in shock
At the thought of seeing you!”
Like I said, each and every human being is oh, so precious to God. God does not want any lost, for God is motivated by love, not by vengeance. But there remains the older brother, does there not? The older brother had remained loyal to his father while the younger brother had squandered his inheritance. When he came in from the fields that night, he saw a party taking place in the house. After asking a servant what was going on, he was dismayed to say the least. In fact, he refused to go into the house.
His father came out and spoke to him. He said to him, “All that is mine is yours.” In other words, “Your faithfulness will be rewarded. You don’t have to worry about that.” But he also expressed his infinite joy in having his son return. In spite of what the younger boy had done, the father still loved his son. In spite of what we may have done, the Father loves us as well.
That’s how the story ends. We do not know if the older boy went in to the party, or whether he ever restored his relationship with his brother. If he did, in fact, restore his relationship with his brother, there was one thing he needed to overcome. He needed to overcome his own sense of self.
Ladies and gentlemen, that is the secret to knowing who we are. Each of us is one of six billion people here on earth, each of whom we can presume God loves equally. Yet we are also like an only child in that we are the most precious thing in the world to God. It’s quite a conundrum, isn’t it? Yet in order to be truly reconciled to one another, and in order to be truly reconciled to God, we must overcome our own sense of self. That’s what Jesus meant when he said, “Those who would save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.” We must recognize that God has given us the best that he has to give: he gave us his Son. And we must also recognize that God did so for a reason. He did it that all the world might be saved. We need not worry. Everything the Father has to give to us will be ours. We just need to recognize the fact that God has other children as well.
Once upon a time, in a third grade classroom, there was a nine-year-old boy who wet his pants. There was even a little puddle on the floor. He thought his heart would stop because he could not imagine how it happened. It had never happened before, and he knew that once the other boys found out they would never let him hear the end of it. And once the girls found out, he would be ostracized.
The boy was devastated, so he did the only thing he could think of to do. He said a little prayer. He said, “Dear God, this is an emergency! I need help now! Five minutes from now I’m dead meat!” He looked up from his prayer and the teacher was approaching him with a look in her eyes that said he had been discovered.
As the teacher was walking toward him, a classmate named Suzie was carrying a goldfish
bowl that was full of water. Suzie tripped in front of the teacher and dumped the entire bowl of water in the boy’s lap. The boy pretended to be angry, but all the while he said to himself, “Thank you, Lord! Thank you, Lord!”
All of a sudden, instead of being an object of ridicule, the boy was the object of sympathy. The teacher took him downstairs and gave him a pair of gym shorts to wear while his pants dried out. The other children cleaned up the mess around his desk. But as life would have it, the ridicule that should have been his was transferred to someone else. It was transferred to Suzie. She tried to help clean up, but the other kids yelled at her, “You’ve done enough, you klutz!”
Finally, at the end of the day, they were waiting for the bus. The boy walked over to Suzie and whispered, “You did that on purpose, didn’t you?” Suzie whispered back, “I wet my pants one time, too.”
In a silly story like that lies the key to who we are. When we remember that all of us make mistakes, when we can put ourselves in someone else’s shoes, we can put ourselves aside for someone else’s sake. Therein we just might find our ultimate happiness. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment