“Who
Tells You Who You Are?”
John
15:12-17
First
Presbyterian
The
Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
May
16, 2010
Easter
7
Last Sunday night at our senior high
youth gathering, I posed the question, “Who
tells you who you are?” Leo
Tolstoy once said that certain questions are put to us not that we should answer
them but that we should spend a lifetime wrestling with them.
“Who tells you who you are” is
one of those “certain questions” about which Tolstoy was talking because it
is one we need to consider at every age and stage of our lives.
Like our lawns that need to be mowed again next week, it is a question we
need to ask ourselves over and over lest we wake up some day and find that we
have no idea who we are or why there is a haunting emptiness in us where joy
should be.
“Who
tells you who you are?” More
to the point, to whom do you listen? Who
will tell Greyson who he is along the way and to whom will he listen?
(Note to web readers:
Greyson is an infant boy being baptized today.)
Derek Walcott has a poem that talks
about the danger of allowing someone else or something else to define us, to
tell us who we are. Called “Love After Love,” it seems that someone had permitted a love
interest to tell him who he was and, so, when the relationship comes to an end
he is devastated, lost. Or it could
be a woman. Walcott doesn’t say.
The poem takes the voice of a wise friend offering some adroit counsel.
This sagacious friend says,
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread.
Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
I love the lines in which Walcott says,
“You will love again the stranger who
was your self. Give wine.
Give bread. Give back your
heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you
ignored for another…” Do you
remember that great sentence right in the middle of the parable of the prodigal
son? The prodigal, having listened to a myriad of voices not his own telling him
who he was and then landing in desperate straits because he believed them, takes
stock of his life or, in the fabulous way Jesus put it when he was telling the
story – “he came to himself…”?
When we are able to escape the tyranny of tempting or troubling
voices trying to tell us who we are and come again to ourselves and return to
our own hearts and listen to “the still, small voice” within us, it feels
sacramental. Give
bread. Give wine.
Listen again, because the poem has
another level of meaning, too, I think.
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread.
Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
Perhaps we also can say that the poem
is about finding again our true self after it has been obscured by our quest to
feed our ego, or false, self. For
the purpose of our question – who tells
you who you are – a “what” is also a “who.”
Our work, for instance. Do
you let your work tell you who you are? How
about your bank account? Your status
or standing within the company or the community?
Students, do you let your grades tell you who you are?
Or the schools into which you gain acceptance?
Artists and musicians, do you let audience response and reviews tell you
who you are? Athletes, do you let
your statistics tell you who you are? Parents,
do you let the way your children turn out tell you who you are?
Do you let your health or illness tell you who you are?
Do you let your enemies tell you who
you are? Or your enmities?
Or the causes you support? Do
you let the “shoulds” and “oughts” of polite society tell you who you
are and what to do? Or do you
resonate more with
You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
(from
his poem “Sweet Darkness”)
Do you let anything or anyone that does
not bring you alive tell you who you are or what you must do?
Do you let your childhood or what has
happened to you in the past and along the way, good or ill, tell you who you
are?
How about what religion calls sin?
Do you let your sins tell you who you are?
Does guilt or a poor self-perception define your life?
(If your answer to either question is “yes,” I want you to know that
there is more mercy in God than there is sin in you.)
I have to tell you that, for me, the
question I am asking today – who tells
me who I am? – to put it in personal address,
is not simply grist for a sermon. It
is the great struggle of my life not to let my worth and identity be determined
by what other people say about me or think of me.
It is the great struggle of my life not to let other peoples’ opinions
tell me who I am. But I find
myself, much of the time, on the losing end of it.
That great line in one of Mary Oliver’s poems – what are you going to do with your one wild and precious life? – is
a great challenge to me because more than I care to admit my answer is more a
whimper than a bang: too often I give others the power to tell me who I am by
yielding to other peoples’ expectations and in doing so make my life smaller
than otherwise it could be.
So, it may not surprise you when I tell
you that my sermonic conclusion today is that I think our lives would be better,
mine included, if we let God tell us who we are.
Many of us do not, I think, love ourselves enough as Christ’s love
command bids us to do. That makes it
harder both really to love other people and to live joyful and satisfying lives.
In the forty-third chapter of Isaiah, God says, “I
have called you by name and you are mine.”
That establishes our worth in the world.
God does not love us because we are valuable; God’s love makes us so.
Our value is a gift that comes before any and all attempts to achieve it.
It is not dependent on our making something of ourselves.
It is not dependent on our moral rectitude.
It is not dependent on our rank or class or grade in life.
We do not have to prove our worth. We
already are accounted worthy and thus the privilege and work of our lives is to
live authentically into our own life rather than to live a life we look to
others to authenticate. Mary Oliver
says in her poem “Wild Geese” that
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves…
Whoever you are…the world offers itself
to your imagination.
She doesn’t mean that we need to have
no accountability in our lives nor that we never need to amend our ways.
But she does mean that we are to live our
lives, the ones we imagine. God
already loves us before we do anything. That
is one of the reasons why I always have loved and supported the baptism of
infants for in so doing we are not baptizing a life already resplendent in
accomplishment. Rather, the child
being baptized a priori has God-given
value and worth, as indeed all lives do, and baptism is a sacramental sign of
it. What a difference it will make
in Greyson’s life if his parents and his church can help him to attend to that
deep truth.
The other thing God says to us comes
through the voice of Jesus saying to his disciples, “I
do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the
master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you
everything that I have heard from my Father.”
In The Bible, being a
servant or a slave is usually a good thing.
At one point Jesus obviously thought of his disciples as servants since
here he says he calls them that no longer. Remember
how Jesus on his last night with his disciples and took a basin and towel and,
in the mode of a servant, washed the disciples’ feet?
To be a servant of God is a title of honor.
But now Jesus calls his disciples and followers friends,
a term of intimacy, affection, and steadfastness.
Friends stand by friends no matter what.
Friends, as Jesus suggests, get to go deeply into one another’s life.
“I have called your friends,
because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.”
Maybe that is why John Calvin insisted so adamantly that knowing God
and knowing ourselves go hand in hand. One
cannot happen in any depth without the other.
Will you let these words of Jesus tell you who you are?
Will you consider yourself a friend of God’s and let that be the
defining feature, the defining adventure, of your life?
Who tells you who you are makes all the
difference in your life.
Who
tells you who you are? If
it is not God, can it be?
Amen.
Copyright © 2010 First Presbyterian Church