The First Question: Who Am I?

"The First Question: Who Am I?"

Hebrews 4:12-16
October 4, 2009

Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword,
piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the
thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him no creature is hidden, but all are
naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account. Since,
then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son
of God, let us hold fast to our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is
unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has
been tested as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace
with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

This Sunday begins a sermon series I’ve been thinking about doing for some time now,
primarily, I think, because it ties in so well with the journey we are taking as a
congregation this year, this Sabbath year that we began a month ago, and is
continuing with our Sabbath Circle and our January Sabbath. You know, it’s a good
thing to rest, to rest and trust in God for at least one day, at least symbolically, to rest
and trust in the God who has made the other six days possible, but who calls us to stop
on the seventh day, just as God did on the seventh day of creation, and be still, and
enjoy what has been accomplished by us on the other six days, and, most importantly,
perhaps, to see what has been given to us by God. But the resting will do us no good,
personally or spiritually, if we’re not willing to burrow down a bit deeper spiritually, and
to ask ourselves for what purpose we have been created, again both as a
congregation, but maybe most importantly, as individuals. Why am I here? Why I have
been created? What is my life’s work, and if most of my years are in the rear view
mirror, what I am to do with the rest of the time given to me?   The irony, of course, is
that none of us really knows for sure, at any given moment, if most of our years are
behind us, because life is fragile, and one simply never knows when we will die. If, out
of all this talk of rest, we don’t come to clearer sense of who we are as a people of faith
and disciples of Christ, then I’m pretty sure we would have squandered our seventh day
as a congregation, we would have squandered this chance to pull back and be still for
a time, and see who we are and what we are to do with the rest of our time as a
congregation and a people of faith.

That is why I think that Wayne Muller’s four questions are so powerful and can be
powerful for us, in particular—they push us to ask the fundamental questions that mark
our lives, that call us to explore that hidden wholeness that Thomas Merton says is
within us all, but that so many of us, including myself, have left unexplored. We have
left the inner journey unwalked, because we have become so distracted with those six—
or even seven—days of busyness, a busyness that we are so often told is the meaning
of our life—if we are busy, if we are employed, if we have the money that comes as a
reward for that employment, then we are whole, it is said, our lives have meaning. For
men, this has been historically one of our particular diseases, because so many of us
have defined ourselves by our work, and ONLY our work, that when we stop and take
our Sabbath, we often find that there is not much else inside. Certainly, it is becoming
all of our problem, of both sexes, in this world fraught with incredible anxiety for our
financial future, because we think the problem can be solved by more work, an extra
job, a bigger raise, wiser investments. For Wayne Muller, and for people of Christian
faith, and, really, people of all faiths, in our better moments, we realize that acquisition
of more, the doing of more, is not the solution, not really, because once we acquire
more, and do more, more and more time will be required of us to take care of all that we
have acquired, all the responsibilities we have now taken on. It just never stops, not
really, not until we decide to stop it, for our own sanity, for our own health, until we
decide to set some healthy boundaries between hard work and good rest, until we
decide to look inward and focus our energies as much on the inside of us, as the
outside of us, on that outside world that calls us to do, and do, and do.

So, Wayne Muller proposes that we ask four probing questions, and they are as
follows: Who am I? What do I love? How shall I live, knowing I will die? And, finally,
What is my gift to the family of the earth? These four questions will be asked over the
next four weeks, and I want to ask for you, if possible, to be at all four sermons, and if
you can’t be, then to go to the internet and read the sermons there or to ask me for a
copy of them. They are questions that interlinked, and they make much more sense as
whole than as separate pieces, and if we use them wisely, they can guide us to re-think
our lives, and our priorities, something that this Sabbath year invites us to do.

To begin with the first question, Who am I?, I want to start by sharing a story that the
well known Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield often shares with his disciples:

There is a tribe in Africa where the birth date of a child is counted—not from when they’
re born, nor from when they are conceived—but from the day that the child was thought
in its mother’s mind. And when a woman decides that she will have a child, she goes off
and sits under a tree, by herself, and she listens until she can hear the song of the
child that wants to come. And after she’s heard the song of this child, she comes back
to the man who will be the child’s father, and she teaches it to him. And then, when
they make love to physically conceive the child, some of that time they sing the song of
the child, as a way to invite it. And then, when the mother is pregnant, the mother
teaches that child’s song to the midwives and the old women of the village, so that when
the child is born, the old women and the people around her sing the child’s song to
welcome it. And then, as the child grows up, the other villagers are taught the child’s
song. If the child falls, or hurts its knee, someone picks it up and sings its song to it.
Or perhaps the child does something wonderful, or goes through the rites of puberty—
then as a way of honoring this person, the people of the village sing his or her song.
And it goes this way through their life—in marriage, the songs are sung, together. And
finally, when the child is lying in bed, ready to die, all the villagers know his or her song,
and they sing—for the last time—the song to that person. (Muller, How Then Shall We
Live 6)

So, the question must be asked: what is our song? How do we name ourselves, how do
we tell our stories and what kind of stories do we tell about ourselves? Of course, I
know that the concept of “self” is a fluid thing, and what our song may have been as a
child might be different than it is now, and, though on one level, one can say that there
are no songs being sung to us, no tradition of being born before our birth date, there is
still, for some of us, songs that some have given to us, descriptions of ourselves that
are good and whole, and yet there are others songs, songs we have put into our
repertoire, our song books, that others have handed to us that were never really our
song, though it was how they wanted to see us, or mistakenly believed us to be. There
is a German folktale that tells of a “man whose ax was missing, and he suspected that
his neighbor’s son had stolen it. The boy walked like a thief, looked like a thief, and
spoke like a thief. But one day the man found his ax while digging in his valley, and the
next time he saw his neighbor’s son, the boy walked, looked, and spoke like any other
child. (Muller 15) Perception is huge, isn’t it, how people see us, and self perception is
probably even bigger.

But the most important thing is not what THEY think about us, but what WE THINK
about who we are. I’ve often said in this pulpit something that many of you have heard
elsewhere, but probably needs to be said over and over again, lest we forget the truth
of it. We must always pay attention to the way we answer the question of “who are
you?” because it doesn’t just form other people’s perception of us—it actually helps to
form our self-perception, who we think we are. If we always see ourselves as a victim, if
the only story we tell is the sometimes-true, sometimes not-true, story of what has been
to us, the injustice that has been done to us, all we will ever tell is a story of crucifixion,
and never a story of resurrection, and the irony is that we will miss our own resurrection
because we are obsessed with telling the story of what we think has been done to us. If
someone asks us who we are, or we even just ask ourselves, and the only thing we can
share are stories and descriptions of the horrors we have gone through, or stories of
what has been overcome in our lives, we’ve need to roll back that tape a bit and listen
to those stories, and think about whether or not they are completely true, whether or
not we are telling the whole truth about our lives, whether or not we are forgetting to tell
the stories of the good as well as the bad. Now, having said that, please know that
there are others who do the opposite, they only tell stories of resurrections, without
mentioning the crucifixions, and those kinds of self-descriptions are as incomplete as
those who speak only of crucifixions.

But how does one know how to tell a true story of oneself, how does one answer the
question, of “who am I?” that honors both the reality of crucifixion and resurrection, the
bad and the good, and perhaps, sometimes, the ambiguous moments of our lives?
Well, first, we gotta be honest with ourselves, we’ve got to name the demons we’ve shut
away in the closet, we’ve got to be able to name them for what they were…but to also
make sure that in naming them we don’t make them MORE than what they really are.
We’ve got to come clean with the family secrets, because the secrets will kill us, will eat
us up alive, and if we don’t name them and deal with them, they will always loom larger
in the closet than they really are in the clear light of day. In my own extended family,
secrets have loomed large, and effected the way we dealt with the painful things, and,
especially for my good mother, the painful burden of carrying the family secret of a
murderous conflict between my great grandfather and my grandfather, has been
horrible—the secrets we hold, the ones we carry with us can kill us, and if we are not
allowed to integrate them into our descriptions of ourselves, in the way we answer the
question of who we are, they will ultimately do deep spiritual and emotional damage.
We must be honest with ourselves, about both about the bad and the good, in our
lives, before we can authentically answer Muller’s first question.

But secondly, the next part of trying to answer this important question is to remember
that the good news is that we are not alone in this journey, we have the gift of a fellow
traveler, this Jesus of Nazareth, that is spoken of here from our text today from
Hebrews. If we want to look deep within, if we want to excavate the bad and the good in
our lives, naming both the demons and the angels around us and within us, there is no
better guide, no better fellow traveler than this One. The author of Hebrews, some
person now lost to history, says that the word of God is a tool in that work of looking
inward in our effort to truly discover who we are. Now, just to be clear, the writer is not
talking about Scripture when he says that the word of God is a two-edged sword,
piercing and dividing, joints from marrow, soul from spirit. No, the writer is talking about
the Christ being the word of God, this word that God gives this world through this gift of
Christ—as I’ve said before, if you want to know what God is saying to this world, what
word God is saying to this world, then look both at the words Christ saying and the life
he lived. If we want to explore our inner lives, and our inner self, then one of the best
places to start is with the One who has gone before us on the journey, who knows what
troubles we will see, the joys that must be celebrated, the crucifixions that must be
endured, that must be gotten through. This is One whom we can look towards to help
us get to the marrow of our lives, who can help us separate us from the stories we think
are true, but are only partially true, or not completely true, because this Christ has
walked the road of life better than any who have gone before him. To pay attention to
this life, and the way he lived it, it can be the touchstone before which all can be laid
bare, all can be held and all can be released. There is one who knows who we are, all
of us, and the way to find out who we are, to answer the question of “who am I?” is to
try to answer the question of who he was, and allow the Christ to be a part of the
journey to self because…well, because he has been there before, and I think he
ultimately knows the answers to the questions we are asking about ourselves.

But when we answer the question, hopefully with the help of the One who has gone
before us on this journey, I think the third part of answering the question of who we are,
is actually accepting the answer that we and God give us. You know, it’s obvious that
we sometimes can’t accept what we find in ourselves, in that attempt to sort out the
truth of who we are. We find out that perhaps we are not as self-giving as we thought,
that perhaps our motives for being good and kind are bit more mixed than we had
thought, that our attempts to help others are actually our attempts to manipulate
others, even control those we love. Telling ourselves the truth about our motives,
about accepting our nature, and some of the shadows of that nature, is important. It
doesn’t mean that we should stop work on increasing the light within us so that the
shadows disappear, but if we can’t accept the truth of who we really are, as a mixture of
shadow and light, sin and goodness, then we are never going to be able to
authentically answer the question who we are. We must tell ourselves the truth about
who we are before we can really tell that truth to others.

So, in answering this question about who we are, I invite us to pay attention to the story
we are telling about ourselves, the song we are singing, and then to rely on the One
who has gone before us, who can help us separate the joint from the marrow, the truth
from the untruth about ourselves, and then finally, to accept what we find, both the
shadow and light within us, and to tell the truth about that reality. Now, we must never
forget the truth that Christ says, that the kingdom of God is within us, that we do not
need to be a monk or go to Tibet to find our true selves, or to answer the question of
who we are—we can do it right now, and right here, and if we go elsewhere to find it, we
may find that it is our way of distracting us from doing the hard of work of doing our
home-work, the work that is meant to be done within us, exploring the kingdom of God
within us, the light of the world that is right here.

Jacques Lesseyran lost his eyesight through an accident at the age of seven and a
half. He was not a particularly spiritual child, not especially religious. But years later
he would write about what he saw when he was blind, about the awareness of his inner
self that began to unfold within him. Jacques writes: Barely ten days after the accident
blinded me, I made the basic discovery…[that] I could not see the light of the world
anymore. Yet the light was still here…I found it in myself and what a miracle!—It was
intact. The “in myself,” however where was that? In my head, in my heart, in my
imagination?...The light dwells where life also dwells: within ourselves. (Muller 64-65)
Amen!