Series: Who Am I? Part 1 – “Fearfully and Wonderfully Made”

“Fearfully and Wonderfully Made”

A Sermon for Lent 1 (C)

February 25, 2007

A brief exercise to prepare for reading: “Write down three things you hate about yourself, and three things you love about yourself.”

Read Psalm 139

 

We are in the season of Lent. It seems like it was only a week or so ago, when we were celebrating the New Year and the beginning of Epiphany season by baptizing three girls who have made a decision to follow Christ in their lives. Lent always sneaks up on me.

Maybe it’s because Lent can be such a dark season. For centuries, Christians have recognized that it’s not enough just to celebrate a certain event in the year – Christmas, or Easter for example. They have recognized, and still recognize, that we must be prepared to celebrate those events. Just as we saw at Advent (or at least, I hope you saw), the way we prepare to celebrate the birth of Christ can make all the difference in that Christmas Day. If we anticipate Christmas, think about the specialness of that birth, look forward to it, even ache for it as children do sometimes… then we can truly appreciate and enjoy the day that is Christmas – the wonderful birth of our Savior.

But Lent is another matter. Like Advent, it is a preparation. It is a preparation for a holy event – Easter, the resurrection of Jesus. But we all know what resurrection means: It means that death must come first. We can talk about our own resurrection from the dead, our entry into eternal life with God… but most of the time we’re struck, if only silently, by the fact that we must die first in order to get there.

And that’s why Lent is hard for us to observe. If we are preparing to celebrate in Advent, Lent almost seems like preparation for mourning. If we feel the joy of new life at Advent, then at Lent we feel the weight of our own death approaching. That’s why we start Lent with the Service of the Ashes that we celebrated Wednesday night – a reminder of what Lent’s all about.

For as long as Lent has been practiced, it has meant (for many Christians) a time of looking more closely at ourselves – a time to acknowledge our sinfulness and to try to repent. Some people took pilgrimages or retreats during Lent, trying to follow the footsteps of Jesus or some other Saint, hoping the “holiness” might rub off. Others have taken on vows of various kinds: not eating meat, not having desserts, not drinking. In these ways, we hope that in our desire for the things given up, we can find a new desire for God, and to learn – if only in a small way – some of the suffering that Jesus endured on our behalf.

But the uncomfortable part of all that is not the outward rituals. We can handle taking a few days off from television, or not having chocolate. The really hard thing is to look at ourselves, to see ourselves as we truly are. Because, truth be told, most of us don’t like what we see there. We’d rather not look there – not look back at all the failures we feel we’ve made. We’d rather not remember our weaknesses that often get us into trouble.

We’d just rather not look too closely in the mirror, for fear of… what? Despair? Seeing that we haven’t changed much? I’m not sure. It’s different for each of us. But the fact is, most of us don’t like to look at ourselves too closely.

 

God Loves Human Beings

And this is where scripture steps in and gives us a somewhat different message. It’s true that when we look through the scriptures, we see how sinful we are. We see where God is warning us against unfaithfulness, urging us to live lives of discipline and compassion.

But the overwhelming message of the Bible is LOVE – God’s love for these strange creatures he’s created.

In the beginning, God made all the things we see around us – the deep blue oceans and the sandy beaches; the kind of starry sky you can only see on a cold clear night; the moon, soft and mysterious; brilliant red and orange sunsets; peaceful and quiet sunrises; snow-covered meadows; wildflowers; horses, whales, giraffes, birds.

All the beautiful things we enjoy on the earth, God made before human beings were created. There were peaceful cool evenings before there was ever a person to enjoy them. There were majestic mountains before there was ever a person to climb them. All these beautiful things God made, and said “IT IS GOOD.” But it wasn’t good enough.

Creation was not complete until God had made a man and a woman. He made them in his image, man and woman together in relationship. He made them to care for his world, to love his creatures, to love each other and to make more human beings to do the same. He made them to love and enjoy God himself – to enjoy a relationship with God unlike any other.

Creation was not complete without human beings. We were made for this universe, and the universe for us, in a way. That’s LOVE. God loves us as human beings.

The whole story of the Bible is the story of human beings trying to figure out how best to relate to a God who REALLY loves – who loves us not in a way that just allows us to do whatever we want to do, that leaves us alone. God loves us in a way that desires for us to change – to change so that we can love each other, so that we can love God more perfectly. To change in a way that will set us on a path for eternity.

The Bible is a story of how God loves us enough to make ways for that to happen. Of how God would bring his plan of redemption to completion by coming down himself, by living as one of us, by becoming one of us for a while. He suffered as one of us, learned what it was to be one of us. Then he died on our behalf, so that we would not have to die.

All of this for human beings! It’s no wonder the writer of Psalm 8 would ask:

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,

what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?

You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.

You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet:

all flocks and herds, and the beasts of the field,

the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas.

O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

(NIV)

The Bible is a story of love – a God who made these creatures, made them in his image in some mysterious way, and loves them completely enough to give them freedom to make our own decisions.

 

God Loves ME and YOU

But the message of love doesn’t end there, and if we let it we’ll miss the most important point:

 

God loves YOU. Not “all of you.” You, right there. God made you. GOD LOVES ME.

 

When we can truly see ourselves as we are, brokenness, sinfulness, failures, weaknesses, illnesses, prejudices, hate, anger… when we truly see ourselves this way, we CAN fall prey to despair, to hopelessness.

 

But the balance, for the Christian, for the one who knows God, is the flip side of this coin: GOD LOVES US ANYWAY. God loves you and I more than we can comprehend. For us, it is this central truth that keeps us anchored.

 

The psalmist uses beautiful language to describe God’s love and craft. He uses the illustration of a weaver. In ancient times, a weaver who made clothing and other fabric items had to do all th work themselves. They had to gather the wool – there was no Hancock Fabrics to get the materials or pattern! They made the wool into string, then planned their work carefully – there were no patterns, or sewing machines. You had to do it right the first time. Then finally, when everything was ready, the final product planned out – then the weaver could begin to knit.

Now, I don’t consider myself an artist. I dabble in both music and painting. But whatever kind of artwork I’m doing, it takes a long time to get ready. Tanya will tell you that when I’m doing a painting, I can be planning and sketching for a month before I ever put brush to the paper. I draw vague ideas, try out different arrangements, experiment with colors. It usually takes more than a week of evenings for me just to get the sketch done that I will eventually color in.

 

And then, once I start, I still work carefully, practicing my brush stroke on another piece of paper to get it just right.

 

Now I have this painting on the wall in my office, that I painted of the church more than a year ago. I love this painting. When I see it, I don’t just see the pretty colors and the arrangement – I think of the sketching I did, the experiments with colors, the places I had to fix when I went overboard with the paints! I think of the hours I spent getting ready, and the new ideas I had even while I was painting.

 

I’ve done a few paintings like this, and I love them all. I don’t say, “I like this one more than this one,” because to me, even if they’re pretty low-grade work compared to professional works – they’re all different, unique and special. Because I MADE THEM.

If you look closely at my paintings, or listen closely to my songs, you can learn about me. I put myself into those things that I create – lovingly and carefully. So that even though I didn’t paint a picture of myself here – my fingerprints are all over it!

 

In this same way, God made you and me. God has made you, and you are fearfully and wonderfully made! There’s not some heavenly mass-production plant with an assembly line that cranks out the same person over and over. Each one of us – like that weaver’s cloth, like the painting or the song – is unique, one-of-a-kind. We are planned with careful and loving thought, every attention give to our personality, our circumstances… right down to the hairs on our head.

 

Loving Ourselves and Loving Others

 

So as we talk about identity this Lenten season, about what it means to be you and me, we must start with this fundamental fact: God loves us, JUST AS WE ARE. He has made us, has stamped us with his image, and loves us as only a Father, only an artist can.

 

Why dwell on this? Because I think it is a problem that SO MANY of us struggle with. How easy was it to write down the things you dislike about yourself? How hard was it to write down the stuff you love?

 

At some point, I think we all struggle with our own self-image, our self-esteem. And I think we come back to it over and over again. And we need to hear this message:

 

God loves you more than you can imagine. How can you not love yourself?

 

We try so hard to gain our identity through other things – the place we work. The positions we have at work or in church. The places we’ve been, the things we accomplish. We look at our successes and failures, and then we look at someone else’s – and we compare. We compare two things (ourselves and someone else) that were never meant to be compared.

 

We’re like apples and oranges, you and I. God has made us unique, each and every one, and he loves us deeply. And this HAS TO BE the foundation of our identity. Otherwise, we’re building a house on sinking sand. We can place our identity on our jobs – we won’t have them one day. We can’t place our identity on money, because all the money in the world will, one day, be useless to us. We can’t place our identity in our successes or failures, because one day they will all be forgotten. We can’t place our identity on other people around us, because you weren’t made to be ME, but to be YOU.

 

No, God’s love is the only thing worth placing our identity on, because it will NEVER CHANGE.

 

And if you’ve ever wanted to change the way you are, if you’ve ever been fed up with your own faults and failings, the first step is NOT hatred. As an addict who has been in a recovery group, or a Christian who has been significantly changed. Most often, the path to real change comes NOT through hating ourselves, but through LOVING ourselves.

 

This truth has other important consequences as well, because when we see how much God loves us, we begin to see how much God loves everyone. It doesn’t matter what they’ve done, and we can’t judge that. It doesn’t matter what color their skin is, what language they speak. God loves that person you despise just as much as he loves you. When we see others in this way, I think it changes how we act toward them.

 

If God loves him or her just as much as God loves me, how can I not love them too?

 

Let this truth sink in. You are important and valuable because God created you, and God loves you. Stop allowing other people, stop allowing your past – terrible though it may be – stop allowing these other things to give you your identity. Let GOD give you an identity, and I think we’ll start to see ourselves and other people in a different way.

 

Moving Forward

 

In this season of Lent, I’ve committed myself to looking at ME more closely, failings and all. And I’m committing myself to start seeing myself through God’s eyes and not my own. Lent is a time when people make commitments, when we allow God to draw us closer to him. What kind of commitment will you make this Lent?

 

And one of the best ways we can learn about God and his love for us, is to look at ME more closely. What does it mean that God has made me in his image? How am I unique? How am I the same as others? What things does God desire to change in me – not because he hates me or wants to punish me, but because he loves me and wants me to be more like him?

 

I’m going to give you some tools this Lent to begin looking at yourself, if you’d like to make use of them. First, this week I’m giving you a copy of a personality test – a little test to help you discover more things about yourself, and why you do things the way you do. Take this little sheet home and fill it out. It’s very basic, just front and back. Next week, I’ll have a sheet that will help you figure out what all these letters mean, and how they can help you learn more about yourself.

 

And the next few weeks, we’ll continue the journey inward. In the coming weeks, we’ll look at:

Who Am I?

• Part 1: Fearfully, wonderfully and individually made
  • Look at what makes us distinct – personality traits
• Part 2: Broken, but loved anyway! (Jeremiah’s potter, Romans 5:8)
• Part 3: Worth taking care of
  • Get personal and open about health issues – mental, emotional, physical, spiritual
• Part 4: Made to live in community and communion
  • Theology of community… what it means to live as self in trinity: God, self, others.
• Part 5: Gifted for service

Who Do You Think You Are?

(Feb. 2007 Church Newsletter)

I read an interesting story in a magazine a few years back about a dog that belonged to a certain family in the Midwest. When this poor little puppy had been born, his mother was very sick and died just after delivering her litter – and this poor puppy was the only one that survived. The family knew that the puppy had little chance to survive without a mother, so they turned to books and local veterinarians for advice on how to care for it. Despite their best efforts, the puppy refused to eat from a bottle, and it seemed he might not make it.

Help came from an unexpected place. The family who cared for the puppy also had a cat, and by a strange coincidence this cat had a litter of kittens just a day or two after the puppy was born. This mother cat, whether by maternal instinct or simply by confusion, took the puppy in as one of her own. While she could not feed the puppy, she acted as a mother to it and treated it just like one of her other kittens. The puppy, now sensing a mother’s love, began to eat and received the nutrients it needed to live and grow.

The writer of the story wanted to show just how powerful this “adoption” had been. While the puppy had learned some instinctually “doggy” habits like scratching himself with his hind leg, in many ways he seemed to believe he was a cat. He cleaned himself carefully like a cat, preferred cat food to dog chow, scratched on furniture, and loved to sit in the sun of a low window sill. In short, the puppy acted just like the other kittens, his “adopted” brothers and sisters.

While today I doubt the accuracy of all the details of this story, I recognize a kernel of truth in how the puppy perceived himself. Having been the owner of a dachshund for a few years, I learned to recognize what some people call the “small dog complex.” Experts say that small dogs, because they have little or no sense of themselves, tend to act as though they are as large as any dog or person they come into contact with. Our little Lizzy, like most dachshunds, was fiercely protective in spite of her size. On seeing a stranger or another dog, she would rush at them full speed, barking and baring her teeth… until she got close enough to realize just how big that thing was. Then, realizing her mistake, she would usually roll over on her back and whimper. If Lizzy had ever really come to terms with her identity, it’s likely she never would have left the house!

So why has my column suddenly turned into Animal Planet? While the magazine story certainly had some interesting parallels to our own adoption as children of God, I was more intrigued by what it says about our identity. That puppy acted like a cat because his only models for behavior were other cats. Lizzy acted like a big dog because she didn’t have a real understanding of her own size. How we act, it seems, is greatly influenced by how we see ourselves.

Sometimes we – as Christians, and as a church – decide to act less on who we really are, and more on how we see others acting around us. As Christians, it’s an easy trap to fall into. We know with our heads that we have been changed by God, but when we look more closely at others around us rather than our true identity, we fall back into old habits of sin and helplessness. We know with our heads that God has called each us to serve and follow Christ, but when we look around and see how others refuse to serve, we fall back and think, “maybe God isn’t calling me to do that after all…” We can only move forward in our walk when we have a proper understanding of our true identity.

As a church we fall prey to this failure of identity as well. We may not say it out loud but it’s the way we think: “We can’t accomplish much, we’re only a small church.” “We don’t need to do that kind of stuff, that’s for big churches.” Sometimes, we talk ourselves into being so small and useless that we feel God has put our church family here for no other reason than to gather and sing songs on Sunday morning. Is that really all we are about?

And are we really a “small church?” Don’t look at other churches for the answer, look at our church: We have a vital and healthy congregation, wide diversity, strong ministry programs, and a rich heritage of music, missions and education. There’s more potential for God’s Kingdom-work here than we realize. Are we really a “small church?” Does size really matter?

Perception is everything. Who do you think you are?

Picking A President

(K-V Dispatch Column, 2/14/07 Edition)

It seems there’s no shortage of folks who want to run for President in 2008. Just in the past two weeks, several have declared they are “in the race,” or that they’re looking into the possibility – which means, of course, that they will be “in the race” soon enough. Why so early? Elections aren’t until next November. We shouldn’t be paying attention until at least this time next year.

Or should we?

I think now is the time to start looking seriously at presidential candidates, because now is the time we’re likely to see who they really are. As the race gets tighter, the candidates will give focus-group speeches rather than talking to the everyday you-and-me. Instead of talking abut their passions and motivations, next year they’ll be telling us what they think we want to hear.

So where does the Christian fit into all of this? We’ve seen more in the past few years that, for better or worse, Christian Americans have influenced elections and policies. But before we jump up and down in victory, we should take a moment to reflect on what it means for us, as the Church, to have so much influence in our government.

Jesus opened up the age-old matter of church-vs.-state when the Pharisees came to him in Jerusalem with a loaded question: “Is it right for us to pay taxes to Rome?” Jesus knew their intentions, and he gave the perfect answer: “Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and give to God the things that are God’s.”

Jesus wasn’t just making a clever turn of phrase, and he wasn’t just trying to outfox the Pharisees. He was making a statement to us about our relationship to our government and society.

As members of a democracy, citizens of our great nation, each of us is responsible to have a voice in what goes on in our communities and our nation. We are responsible for the choices we make – or fail to make. If we elect a leader, then you and I are somehow implicit in the successes and failures of that leader. If we vote for a policy change, then you and I share the consequences that come from that change.

How do we, as Christians, make decisions? How do our decisions impact our nation and world? These are questions each of us can only answer for ourselves. But the fact remains, we have been given a mandate – both by our country and by our God – to take responsibility and action. Help the oppressed, feed the hungry, care for the poor… these are the things God consistently tells us we should do, both as individuals and as a nation.

Sure, it’s another 19 months until we choose our next president. But let’s take our God-given blessings and duties seriously, and begin even now to choose and to pray for our future leaders.