BECOMING TRUE TO YOURSELF AND TO GOD

Most of us are quite familiar with the story of the wise men, or magi, as they are frequently known. Some even refer to them as kings, as in the hymn by John H. Hopkins, Jr., “We Three Kings”. They, too, were important players in God’s drama of redemption, doing what God asked them to do, and avoiding the sinister plot of King Herod to do harm to the Christ child.
We know about their long journey across desert sands, following a brilliant star to the place of his birth, their joy when the star stopped, and their reverence in bowing before him to offer gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Each part of the story holds a degree of mystery and wonderment. These great men represent a learned, wealthy class, who appreciated the good news of salvation as much as the poorest shepherd in the land. In spite of all their learning and experience, they were open to further revelation and, indeed, sought to discover even more through risky journeying to a foreign land to verify the rumors they had heard of a child born “king of the Jews.”

A very striking aspect of this visit is the personal change the magi must have undergone in having seen the fulfillment of prophecy. The last part of the story reveals that they, “having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, … left for their own country by another way.” The suggestion is that they simply took another route home, avoiding King Herod and his army. However, some readers see in these words the idea that they went away from this experience entirely changed, their lives never again to be the same. They went home “another way.”

This latter interpretation is speculation, but certainly the kind of speculation that makes a lot of sense. How could anyone be a witness to God’s incarnation and ever again be the same? Encounters with God turn people around in powerful ways to discover their own true selves and the purposes for which they have been created! The church from the time this story was first told has interpreted it as a mission mandate. It is assumed that the magi carried the news of what they had experienced back to their homeland, which was foreign territory. This could well be seen as the first mission to the gentiles, though we have no physical records to substantiate what actually happened. It would be hard to imagine that the magi would have kept such an experience to themselves, but rather would have told it with excitement and conviction because their lives had been changed!

Powerful experiences impact lives forever, whether positively or negatively. The birth of a baby is a miracle that completely changes the way young couples view life. Their priorities change in a blink. One look at your own baby does something to a young parent that normally brings out the best in that person. You see the miracle of birth and suddenly realize, and accept, the responsibility for a little life that is depending on you! It can be scary, but wonderful all at once.

Just as powerful are experiences of tragedy, such as the tsunami that struck the Indian Ocean shoreline of eleven Asian and African nations this past week, wiping out tens of thousands of lives in a moment, and promises yet more devastation from disease. The scale of this disaster is beyond anything the world has seen in recent memory. In a moment life has forever changed for hundreds of thousands of people in most of those countries.

When tragedy of this magnitude occurs one is forced to stop and ponder the awesome forces of nature, knowing that this kind of phenomenon is rare, but natural. An earthquake at sea set into motion a wall of water traveling 500 miles per hour, bringing disaster to virtually everything in its path. American seismologists noted the huge earthquake, measuring 9 points on the Richter scale, and tried to warn those in the path of the tidal waves that were generated, but the communication networks available simply were inadequate to the task.

Now the world’s attention is focused on the staggering human misery left in their wake. The need for response is so great, one would think, that all wars would cease, hostility would abate, and everyone on the planet would say, “What can we do to help?” Unfortunately, wars continue, hostilities persist, but thank God, many actually are saying, “What can we do to help?” And relief is flowing in, though dispersing it is a problem. Thank God for relief agencies, private and governmental, and the generosity of millions at home and abroad. Our church is already involved through the United Methodist Committee on Relief. The mechanisms are in place for each of us to make monetary gifts that will help. We hope everyone will be generous and that these efforts will do something to humanize the world through compassion for those thousands who have experienced nearly insurmountable loss.

It was compassion and love that caused the magi to avoid the evil that was brewing in King Herod’s court. The incredible manifestation they had seen of God’s love in Bethlehem motivated them to become part of something wonderful and good, so much so that they defied King Herod. They could not kneel before the manger and be party to political treachery. They had to do the right thing. They went home another way.

Yet another way lives are impacted is the experience of going off to college. Many of us have lived through the emotions of sending our children off for the first time to experience the world of academia and the social life that accompanies it. We send our young adults off in the knowledge that they are going to be challenged in many different ways, many of which we wish we could control, but know we cannot. We just have to trust that we have done the best we could during their growing up years. Now they are pretty much on their own, even though the bills may still belong to mom and dad.

Tom Wolfe has written another best selling novel entitled, I Am Charlotte Simmons. It is based on extensive research on college and university campuses looking at all aspects of college life as it is being lived today. There is a lot of profanity in the book and a range of activities that Tom Wolfe claims are common on college campuses today. While offended by the barrage of crude language, I did read it because I wanted to get a better idea of campus life today. Overall, some of it was shocking and I hope what he portrays is not the norm for most of our young people, but if you read closely you begin to realize Wolfe is saying that every student is not alike, even though all are subject to powerful peer influences that are almost unavoidable.

The story is about a poor mountain girl from a small town in remote western North Carolina. She is quite a girl, very intelligent, religious, and pretty. She wins a full scholarship to a prestigious university in the northeast, which is full of sophisticated young men and women, many of whom are rich, smart, socially adept, and many are found to be members of fraternities and sororities that sometimes invite the worst social behaviors. At first she is treated like a country bumpkin. Her rich and snobbish roommate makes her feel pretty terrible, but it is only a matter of time before she is noticed for her intelligence and beauty. But she is naïve and falls prey to the very things her mother most feared in her moving away from home. The biggest athletic star on campus brings her into his world, a world that reveals to the reader the unseemly side of college athletics. Charlotte is enjoying her newfound status, but predictably she ends up in a very compromised situation that brings untold shame and grief.

This experience almost destroys her, but bit-by-bit she reemerges as her true self. The name of the book tells the reader a lot. It is as though she ends up saying, “I am beaten and bruised, humiliated and embarrassed; I have shamed myself and my family by letting them down and everyone who ever believed in me back home. I will never be what I once was; I can never go back and re-do what I have done, but ‘I am Charlotte Simmons’ and I still know who I am. I am wizened and aware; I know how far I have fallen, but I am finding my way up again, and I will be what I will be.”

These are my words, but what I think she is saying is that she has made mistakes; she has fallen into the muck, but has learned from it, grown from it, from being an awkward teenage girl to a woman with confidence to make it now and in the future with better choices than were made in the past. She is like a Phoenix bird rising.

In some ways her experience is every maturing person’s experience. How many of us sitting here have made some poor choices along the way, things we wish we had not done, things that stay in our memory bank for a lifetime, yet things that have caused us to grow and to think, and make better choices in the future.

Our college students make us proud in so many ways, but we know that their quest for knowledge does not end in the classroom. It carries into the dormitory room, the dining hall, and the fraternity house. It goes down to the “rathskeller” and the blanket party at the beach or the ski trip in winter. The whole experience has to do with coming of age. We want to shield our young adult children from things we know are lurking out there, but we can’t, so we trust them to work through the things that are difficult, disconcerting, the binge parties that have sometimes led to tragedy, the manipulation of athletically talented students that has sometimes let them be used for a season then tossed away like so much refuse.
I am speaking obviously about the excesses of college life, which are always the danger points of college life. Events at those danger points can hit like a tidal wave. Our hope is that such points can be seen ahead of time and marked with warning signs. On the positive side, however, these same years expose young adult children to the world of great literature, the marvels of science, the thrill of discovery, the joy of friendships, the marvel of love and so much more. Would we want to deny any of this to our children? The rites of passage are pregnant with possibilities of success, while fraught with the dangers of tripping and falling from time to time.

Through it all, our young adult children are searching for their own true selves, that which is original within them. Finding the original in ourselves is the most important thing we will ever do, and once it is found it will govern most of what we do for the rest of our lives. College time is a testing time, not only of new ideas and experiences, but the old ones, as well. It is a time of testing what we were taught growing up. Some of what we have learned may be cast aside for a season; some of it will be refined and come forth in new ways, but in all of this every piece of knowledge is being tested, every friendship is a learning situation, and every invitation to violate what our conscience tells us is a chance to reinforce our sense of Christian morality.
These are the years that shape us intellectually, morally, socially, and vocationally. We come to college, or other young adult pursuit, including joining the military or going directly into the work force, searching. We are following yonder star, looking for that magnificent encounter that will give meaning and purpose to our lives. The magi were looking for a child and they met the Christ. Our students are looking for truth in all things, including and especially, faith. We trust that among their various encounters that they will encounter the living Christ. College will test faith profoundly, disconcertingly at times, but this same environment can also provide experiences that will prove faith in affirming and comforting ways. The search for meaning and purpose cannot avoid Christ because he is as much on the campus as he is in any other part of the world, even in disaster zones; indeed, especially in the deeply troubled places of life.

He is in the questioning and in the answering, the living, the thinking, and the doing. The encounter with Jesus Christ is the most important encounter of all. What we do with that encounter is everything! It will shape every future decision and guide every future act. The wisdom and truth of God are in that encounter. At some point the student will leave the halls of ivy, armed with a good bit of knowledge, even wisdom, but will continue searching because all of life is a search. We search for why tsunamis happen, causing the innocent suffer. We search for why one class of people puts down on another class, feeling peculiarly superior. We wonder about the politics, profit motives, and religious fervor that drive war machines, while at the same time giving thanks for those who look for alternative ways to solve the world’s problems, and for those who do risk their lives to protect freedom and innocence. We question why God lets evil things happen, such things as “the slaughter of the innocents” in Judea just after Jesus’ birth.

We are on a journey to know more. We are on a journey inward and outward toward civilization, but more importantly, toward God. Sometimes we fall back into barbarity, what some have called the ethics of distress, then after a season, lose our taste for it, confess it as less than human, and reconnoiter to find our way, perhaps painfully, again. As we Christians begin the New Year, we are looking for ways to live in this troubled world. It helps tremendously when we understand that we live in a world within the world, known as the kingdom of God. Our life in God’s kingdom has everything to do with the secular world in which we live.

When we live true to ourselves and to God, life takes on a majesty and purpose. We find ourselves engaged meaningfully as disciples in the very ways God created us to be, sharing Good News, heading off dangers, finding cures for illness, making music to lift the heart; finding ways to feed the world, and building understanding among people of every faith and political persuasion.

I am glad for the powerful experiences that shape us, that sometimes shake us, but which help us discover who we really are, who we are meant to be, and become that person. We come into these experiences one way, but we come out of them another way, because Christ has spoken to us in the midst of it all, something good and true, saving and sure, which claims and helps each to become a very unique ME or YOU!

Prayer: Thank you, God, for creating us individually and uniquely. Help us to find the original within ourselves and be what you have created us to be. Help us find that meaningful sense of self that can perceive your image within ourselves and within our neighbors, and together build up the life of your kingdom on earth that abundant life will come for all. Amen.