This is the text version of a sermon I gave last night at the Open Door - minus any impromptu comments. Gen 1: 26 Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."
27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
Gen 2:7 the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
Matthew 22:34 Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. 35One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question:
36"Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" 37Jesus replied: "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' 38This is the first and greatest commandment. 39And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' 40All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."
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As you allow these verses to sink into your heart, I invite you to close your eyes. Breathe. Notice your breath as it comes in and out. Notice how you feel. Are you tired? awake? angry or sad? happy or content? about to fall asleep because your eyes are closed?
Now imagine that inside your chest, instead of a muscle called the heart, you have a garden or a plot of land. Imagine that in your ribs, there’s a little door. Open the door and look at the garden inside your chest. How does it relate to what you feel? Is it desert-like? Or green and luscious and bursting with color?
Do not pass judgment on the state of your garden. Simply notice it. Notice how it is today.
You may open your eyes whenever you wish. If your garden just told you that the most spiritual thing you can do right now is sleep, snore away. The point of my sermon tonight is going to be that there is something inside you that you can trust. An inner teacher called You+God. Or, as Thomas Merton calls it, the Inner Self. Parker Palmer calls it the True Self. Capital T, Capital S. My role tonight is simply to bring you a touch closer together.
And I don’t stand here as an expert on the True Self or as someone who has it all together on this topic. Studying the Inner Self is more an obsession of mine because I have a notoriously bad relationship with my Inner Self, and it won’t let me stay there. It keeps vying for my attention.
If I’m honest, the state of my Inner Self is that of a garden that’s been frozen in time, hidden from the sun, slightly wilted and in desperate need of rejuvenation, attention, and water.
It’s hard to separate who we are from what we do. I once thought that it was my calling in life to work with high schoolers. I tried being their teacher, being their friend, being a combination of teacher and friend – all in various official capacities. With every professional switch, I thought that my new role would give me more time to write. Think about that for a moment – I thought it was my calling to work with high schoolers, but I hoped that every new role with them would give me more time to write. The more I look back on that logic, the more I think I was crazy. The dividedness that I felt in my heart was killing my spirit. I was miserable trying to work with high schoolers and wanting to write.
I felt that dilemma and I am standing here today because of a paradox in the teachings of the Christian faith. It’s a paradox I feel acutely in my own life – and it’s not the high schoolers versus writing dilemma. Remember – a paradox is when there are two truths that are seemingly opposite. The paradox that I’m talking about is this: Jesus tells us that we are to die to ourselves – and to do this, we must have a self.
Often in Christian circles we hear about the sacrifices that we must make to honor God. We hear about putting others first and ourselves last. I grew up in Calvinist circles, and internalized the doctrine of Total Depravity: man is born evil. There is nothing good in us, and Jesus is the only thing that can save us.
Now, I’m not here to say that these things aren’t true. We were born into sin. But as Genesis says, we were created originally in the Image of God. And God called us good. There is something in us that is in the image of God. Something in us that needs to be honored and taken care of. That something was disfigured by sin – but that doesn’t mean that it’s gone.
My thinking here has been largely influenced and freed by the writings of Parker Palmer. I’m going to share a passage from one of his books,
Let Your Life Speak, tonight. It’s lengthy, so I’ve broken it up into two parts and put it on Power Point.
“Vocation does not come from a voice ‘out there’ calling me to become something I am not. It comes from a voice ‘in here’ calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God.
“It is a strange gift, this birthright of self. Accepting it turns out to be even more demanding than attempting to become someone else! I have sometimes responded to the demand by ignoring the gift, or hiding it, or fleeing from it, or squandering it—and I think I am not alone. There is a Hasidic tale that reveals, with amazing brevity, both the universal tendency to want to be someone else and the ultimate importance of becoming one’s self: Rabbi Zusya, when he was an old man, said, ‘In the coming world, they will not ask me: ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me: ‘Why were you not Zusya?’’” p10-11
“We find our callings by claiming authentic selfhood, by being who we are, by dwelling in the world as Zusya rather than straining to be Moses. The deepest vocational question is not ‘What ought I to do with my life?’ It is the more elemental and demanding ‘Who am I? What is my nature?’
“Everything in the universe has a nature, which means limits as well as potentials, a truth well known by people who work daily with the things of this world. Making pottery, for example, involves more than telling the clay what to become. The clay presses back on the potter’s hands, telling her what it can and cannot do—and if she fails to listen, the outcome will be both frail and ungainly. Engineering involves more than telling materials what they must do. If the engineer does not honor the nature of the steel or the wood or the stone, his failure will go well beyond aesthetics: the bridge or the building will collapse and put human life in peril.
“The human self also has a nature, limits as well as potentials. If you see vocation without understanding the material you are working with, what you build with your life will be ungainly and may well put lives in peril, your own and some of those around you. ‘Faking it’ in the service of high values is no virtue and has nothing to do with vocation. It is an ignorant, sometimes arrogant, attempt to override one’s nature, and it will always fail.
“Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic selfhood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will not only find the joy that every human being seeks—we will also find our path of authentic service in the world. True vocation joins self and service, as Frederick Buechner asserts when he defines vocation as ‘the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.’" I don’t know what you saw in this passage that touched your Inner Self, or rang a chord deep within you. I know that while I was growing up, Biblical leaders like Moses, Paul, Abraham, Mary, Ruth… they were all held on pedestals – “be like this person.” That’s not a bad thing. But most of all, we need to be like Zusya – we need to be like ourselves.
This fall at the Open Door, we’re talking about what it means to be an Image-Bearer. What it means to be, as the writer of Genesis says, “made in the image of God.” In Greek,
Theotokos. Theo – God,
tokos – bearer. Mary, Mother of Jesus, is known as Capital T
Theotokos. She actually bore God into the world.
We do too. Genesis also says that we have the breath of God keeping us alive –
ruach, in Hebrew. Which literally means “life-breath.” All of us are alive because of the breath of God. And in us, something is made in the image of God. God lives inside us.
In my last official role working with high schoolers, I heard a pastor say in the middle of a sermon – I don’t remember anything else about the sermon: “If you are trying to be someone you are not, you are wasting the breath of God.”
“If you are trying to be someone you are not, you are wasting the breath of God.”
Note that I am not saying that we are God. This is a big difference between most Eastern and Western faith traditions. Eastern traditions will say that when we look deeply inside us, we discover that we are God. The Christian tradition says that when we search inside, we find God living inside us. There is a unique way each of us reflects God – and when we are most fully ourselves, we most fully reflect God.
Father Thomas Ryan has a couple of diagrams that help me comprehend this. The first shows the “True Self” – the “Inner Self.” At our core, who we are.
Then there is the ego – or our False Self – the Shell or Self we present to the world:
This false Self is the Self that Paul talks about when he urges us to “die to self.” It’s our pride. It’s our ego. It’s those things that we think we are.
Recognizing who we are and who we are not and which of those things is temporary is part of the spiritual journey, I think.
One of our members, Melody, would like to share a bit about her journey in this discovery.
Then Melody shared about her experience with World Christian Discipleship, Brennan Manning's book Abba's Child, and identifying the Impostor (False Self).
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