Do
you ever look back on work you did in the past? Maybe you still have that
cardboard box full of old schoolwork from when you were eight or eighteen.
Maybe your mom saved all of it in folders and delivered it to you at 30 years
old—not that I can relate. But it doesn’t matter whether it’s schoolwork, or
handiwork, or work-work—whatever—most people look back on occasion at their
work and marvel at how they’ve improved or not.
When you’ve looked back, perhaps you’ve had this experience—where
you’ve read something you wrote—or looked over something you made—and thought,
“Huh, that was PRETTY TERRIBLE.”
I suggest you do this every once in a
while. I have this wonderful pleasure of preaching on the same scripture every
four or so years, so I can always look back, and when I do what I mostly see is
not very pretty. I mean, I used to use Garamond font. What. A. Child. I. Was.
You’ll be happy to know I’ve progressed to Georgia sometime in the last four
years. When I look back, I notice that there are some metaphors that are
universal: the perpetual suffering of Vikings fandom, Lutherans’ particular allergy
to change, and children pretty much universally being better at this
Jesus-following thing than we are. But the particulars change.
Looking back isn’t really about
marveling at how much smarter you are now. We should get older wiser. Rather, we should be looking back to remain
humble, to realize that because we were not so smart then, probably we are not
so smart now, and so that we might gain some valuable clues about where we are
going.
The Psalms are forever moving from the past to the present
and the future. “I waited patiently for the Lord” begins Psalm 40, and “he drew
me out of the desolate bog.” “He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise
to God.”
The Psalm begins in the past tense for a moment before
abruptly changing, saying, “Many will see and fear, and put their trust in the Lord.” And then from the past, to the future, it returns
abruptly to the present, saying, “Happy are those who make the Lord
their trust.”
And so it continues—past, present, future—all folding in on
one another. You can’t know the present if you don’t understand the past, and
you can’t see the future if you don’t know where you stand. How can you hear
the promise of the Gospel—a promise that supersedes time and space, a promise
of a future with hope, like it says in that oft-quoted verse from Jeremiah—when
you have no clue where you are standing right now? If you don’t understand your
own self, you will have no clue what a promise of future hope even means.
We have no idea who we are most of the time.
I mean, sure, we know our names; we know our families, a
bit of our history, or maybe even a good deal of our history, but that’s only
part of the picture. Who are you underneath your history? What is your deepest
desire? What is your most honest fault? Have you really considered your
mortality? Have you allowed yourself to really consider who you are on the
inside—the way God sees you?
The Psalms beg us to look deeper, because at the core of
your being is something true, and since we know from the Gospels that Jesus is truth
(cf. John 14:6), so it is that we find a seed of faith right in the heart of
our being. You have nothing to fear from looking inside of you. You might be
afraid to discover your brokenness and your mortality, but there is something
deeper than all that. Of course, if you truly look inside you will discover how
limited you are, and you will find that you have failed to live up to
everybody’s expectations, least of all your own, but that is not the bedrock on
which your life stands. Dive deeper and you will find that Jesus is the ground
of truth that is obstructed by sin and death but standing firm in spite of it
all.
It’s easy to skate by on the surface-level. And most of us
are skeptical of people who claim to live in that deeper place where God moves,
because the truth is they’re usually trying to sell us something. But our recognition of others' hypocrisy does not excuse us from the task before us. You don’t need to become
some yogi and retreat into the wilderness somewhere past Caribou, or grow out
your hair, or drive your John Deere into the river and start growing organic, or maybe you
should—I dunno—do what you’re called to do. The Psalms simply beg for
introspection. Please, please, please, look within.
Then, having looked within, we are called out of ourselves.
And when you emerge from that place inside of yourself truly knowing yourself
better, then you’ll discover that the things you love you love for a reason, and
the people you love you love for a reason, and the people you despise you
despise for a reason, and that reason is usually that they represent part of
you that you despise. So, we stereotype them and assess them like a scout, or like
your own personal Tinder app deciding to swipe left or right (If you don’t know
what that means, ask somebody under 30).
That’s how we judge before becoming introspective
ourselves. That’s how we act when we have never considered who we are.
If we never consider who we are, then our relationship with
other people is nothing more than a series of transactions. You give me
something that makes me happy, and I give you something that makes you happy,
or worse, I’ll just take from you whatever I please. It is only when we know
ourselves deep enough to understand our shared humanity that we see our
relationships not as a series of transactions but as a partnership where one
lifts up the other. Bishop Michael Curry (whom you probably only know if you
have an obsession with the British royal family, since he is most famous in
non-church-nerdy circles for preaching at the royal wedding) has often preached:
You treat every man you meet as your brother, because he is your brother, and you treat every woman you meet like your
sister, because she is your sister.
We lift each other up, because that is exactly the
relationship that God has with us.
You cannot have a transactional relationship with God. You
can try. Lord knows we all do. We pray:
“Lord, I’m going to be good today, please give me a Play
Station.”
“Lord, I’ve been super faithful to you recently, please
give me a girlfriend (or a boyfriend).”
“Lord, look how much better I’ve been, please fix my acne
and make me six inches taller.”
Every one of those is a transaction that fails to
understand the ground on which our relationship with God is founded. You are
not rewarded for being good. You are not punished for being bad. Instead, you
are created co-creators in the world, free to shape your life on this earth as
one that seeks after God or free to turn in on yourself and live in fear.
You will not be rewarded with wealth by practicing a life
of humility. You will not find that perfect relationship because you have been
so faithful in the past. You will not be blessed how you want or even with what
you assume you need. And that doesn’t mean that God has failed you, though it
does perhaps mean that you have a pretty narrow view of God if your faith
requires God to give you nice things when millions of people in history have
been murdered, held in concentration camps, led into slavery, or succumbed to
disease—millions of children of God, many of whom were actually children, who
didn’t deserve what they got. Millions in this world today struggle through
life and die in poverty or under the thumb of empire, even under our own which
claims to strive to live up to higher ideals in principle but so often fails in
practice. Who are you that you deserve better?
We do not have a transactional God; we have a
transformational God. We have a God who meets you in the darkest pit not with a
reward but with truth. That truth is two words: (1) The harsh reality of your
sin, the penalty of which is death; and (2) the only true freedom that comes from
Jesus, who died not so that you can live in extravagance here but so that your
life will be fulfilled by what comes next—a promise in and through death,
running over into new life.
This transformational God will meet you in that darkest
part of your soul, because after all that’s where Christ goes—headlong into the
dark—and God will flick on the light that will guide your next footstep. And
that’s all you’ll get. Psalm 119:105 says, “Your word is a lamp unto my feet,
and a light unto my path.” This ain’t a floodlight! In the ancient world, lamps
were little more than candles, small and fragile. They didn’t last long. They
didn’t overpower much darkness. All they gave you was the next step, which was
sufficient to get you to the one after that and the one after that.
That’s all any of us get. But having been transformed by the
love of God made known to you in Jesus, that is also all you’ll need, because
this light is small but persistent; it is a light that will not be consumed as
other things are. It is not a transaction that requires you to keep feeding the
meter. Rather, it is a light filled by grace that never runs out, and it is
yours freely. Best of all, death can do nothing to quench it.
All of this is
connected: The past, present, and future; looking inside yourself; building a
relationship with God that is not transactional but transformational; and
following the dim light that shines over your next footsteps. The Psalms
recognize that we are so loved by God that even our present circumstances and
even the dark nights of our soul can’t begin to put out that light.
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