Luke 24:38-41; I John 3:1

Seen for who we are

To some degree we are all fictional characters.  We construct a story of ourselves that others might be impressed with and that we can live with.  We also construct a story of others that we can live with. Today’s passages deal with this question.  Jesus appears to the disciples and demonstrates that He is not a ghost.  This does not fit in the story they have come to terms with, the story that Jesus was great and now He is gone.  Ghosts don’t ask people for food.  And the text gets very specific.  He eats broiled fish. Just fish is not enough, how it was cooked matters.  It makes it tangible.  Friends, for Jesus it was very important that the disciples recognized Him as real.  We all want to be seen as real.  

There is a commercial with Mindy Kaling, an Indian-American actress walking around and showing the viewer that she has always been invisible to people.  So she walks right in between people and no one responds to her, but they are really just busy.  They can actually see her just fine. And at the end of the commercial she realizes that she is not invisible.  The point is perhaps that she is famous now.

In I John the author tells his audience that they are children of God.  They are children of God because God loved them, but the world cannot really recognize them, because they have not recognized Jesus the Christ.   So in our texts both Jesus and His followers are not seen for what they really are.  We can relate to that.  When someone says:”I am Christian,” people will have all kinds of reactions, whether they verbalize it or not.  “But are you a real Christian?” “Oh, you are one of those,” and then they will assume your political views and your values.  What will almost certainly happen is that they will not see you for who you are;  at least not completely.

Friends, I think you and I are ambivalent.  We want to be seen for who we are on the one hand, but we don’t want to be seen for who we are on the other.  It would be so freeing and liberating to be completely ourselves around people, but we are not comfortable with that because what if people disapprove of us?  So we hold back and put on our best face.  Of course we show a lot of our real self, but not all of it.  So: seen for who we are, yes and no.  And I think this is the journey of reaching maturity for us: having who we are at our core and how we present ourselves come together.  The bigger the gap between the two, the un-easier and queasier we are.  Vernon Broyles III says that often we “mar the Image of God in ourselves” (Presbyterians Today, April 2015 p. 56). This is what we fear, that the person God wants us to be is not even close to the person we are.

Society teaches us to put on a brave face of course.  It turns out David Brooks the journalist  just wrote a new book about character. Charlie Rose interviewed him last week.  Rose quipped to Brooks that it seems that when Brooks writes about the inner human life it resonates a lot more with people than when he writes about politics, maybe because he is supposed to represent a certain political position.  Brooks’ book is about how we are prepared for a career and for a resume self, but we are not prepared for a eulogy self.   Resume tells people what your brand is, how you want to present yourself on the basis of your experience.  A eulogy self is the one that people talk about after a person is gone: was she or he kind, did he or she have courage, was she or he good.  More and more these days kids are having to be prepared for resumes and in those resumes they are supposed to be good people too, or at least prove they have done some good things.  Michelle Jarvie-Eggart (Presbyterians Today, April 2015, p. 52) writes how she and her husband wrote a mission statement for their son’s baptism.  This is somewhat unusual perhaps.  They want to raise him for a eulogy self you could say. This is what they wrote:” Our mission is to raise a man who follows Christ’s example of inclusive love toward all. We will show you how to be gentle and kind. We will teach that forgiveness is a gift to receiver and the giver. …We will teach you that God is live, and that when we help and accept each other, we move closer to God.  We will count our blessings with you, teaching you how to be grateful. We will teach you that God does not promise us an easy life, but through Christ, show us to fully live.  We will admit our doubts, so that you may see how doubt and faith can coexist. And we will raise you on a community of believers, so that you may be inspired by others to be a disciple of Christ.”

Friends, let us strive to have who we really are come as close together as how we present ourselves.  May we love fiction, but try to live less of a fictional life.  May we in the lives we live be more interested in whether we are good than that we were successful.  May we have a kind of mission statement of the life before us.  May we be grateful that God sees us exactly for who we are and loves us just the same.  Thanks be to God!