Year B, Easter 3
I went to an Indigo Girls concert
Friday night. They played with the
Virginia Symphony which was beautiful but far different from the various venues
where they typically play. As I sat
there listening to them with the symphony accompanying them, I remembered the
first time I saw them live. It was an outdoor festival that featured a ton of
female artists. I was in college with my
best friends from high school. It was a
perfect day full of music and friends except for the torrential downpour. I barely remember the music because I just
wanted the music to end so we could go home and put on dry clothes. Since then I have seen them four different
times, each time spread out over a couple of years. I saw them right after college, then in
seminary, then just a couple of years ago.
Each time it was with an entirely different group of people. It made me realize that no matter how much
things change, there are constants in life.
The Indigo Girls have been this rather bizarre constant following me
from place to place…meeting me at completely different points in my life.
That said, the Indigo Girls, or any
group, person or place is an artificial constant. They change just as the rest of the world
changes. In college, sitting there in
the mud with 1000s of people, had you told me I would be watching them play
with a symphony in a quite dignified setting, I would have told you that you
were crazy. I would imagine that we all have these artificial constants in our
life. They might be a place or a
person. It might even be the
church. When I say artificial, I don’t
mean these constants are inauthentic or fake.
That is far from the truth. But
they are not true constants. No person,
no band, no place lasts forever. It is
only God, the one true God who lasts forever.
God is our only true constant.
That’s all fine and good, but
sometimes God seems to be more of an elusive mystery than a constant. A lot of the people writing the Bible had
personal encounters with God. Either
that or they knew people who had those very personal encounters. I imagine that I would be a much more
credible source if I could tell you that I had seen Jesus in the flesh. It would be even better if I could tell you
that I sat down and ate a meal with the resurrected Jesus. That is what all these resurrection accounts
that we have been hearing are emphasizing…that this really happened.
Last week, Thomas touched the scars of
the resurrected Jesus. This week, Jesus
appears to the disciples and eats with them.
It seems an odd detail to mention the broiled fish. I mean, who really cares what they were
eating or how it was made. But it did
matter because it puts Jesus (Jesus back from the dead) in the real world where
people cook and eat. Not only that, but
he ate the food. He sat down and picked up
pieces of the fish. He spat out the
little bones on the ground beside him.
Afterward his hands smelled a bit like fish. It all happened.
But I wasn’t there. I didn’t sit down and eat a meal with Jesus
and neither did any of you (at least not that I know of). That may make it difficult for God or even
the love of God to be a constant for us.
Even if we are able to summon the faith to believe in a God who we have
not seen or touched…is that faith enough to make Jesus a real constant in our
lives? A constant is more than just a
memory or an emotional touchstone, it is something that defines who we
are. Is Jesus then real enough to take
precedence over our friends, our family and our jobs…those things that seem to
define us?
That’s really up to you. If I could define each one of us I would
define us as children of God. I know
that has become a little trite. When
John wrote this in his letters, it was anything but trite. In that time period the world was all
oriented around the human father. The
father was who defined you. I have a
father who I love and respect, but even I would not choose to be defined exclusively
by my father. In that time it had even
more confining ramifications because it relegated women to 2nd class
citizens. If they were not defined by their father, they were defined by their
husband or brother. And if God forbid
they did not have a man in their life, then they were nobody. So when we are proclaimed children of God,
we are given a new identity, an identity that frees us from narrow expectations
about who we must be.
While that gives us freedom, it also
gives us responsibility. One of the
things that John was frustrated about was that the Christians in his community
were not acting like Christians. They
weren’t even trying. They were satisfied
with being Christian. It gave them a way
to access and worship God. But it did
not affect the way they lived. In his
letter, John wrote, “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not
yet been revealed.” That is both
comforting and frustrating. It is great
that we are God’s children now, but what about our identity tomorrow? Where is the constant? How can we know that we can depend on God
when what we will be is not yet revealed?
John goes on to say, “What we know is this; when he is revealed, we will
be like him, for we will see him as he is.”
That means that our identity is in God, the God who created us, the God
who loves us, the God who demands that we love him back and in doing so that we
love our neighbors.
Seeing the Indigo Girls made me
realize how much I have changed and how much I have stayed exactly the
same. I was about the same age as our
celebrities when I first heard their music.
We talk about you becoming women and men, and you are in that process of
moving from childhood to adulthood. Yet
I worry that sometimes the way we talk makes it seem like you don’t have an
identity yet, as though you can’t possibly know who you are at this age. I bet people have told you that. I know
people told me that. But if you have God
as your constant, then you have an identity.
You have an identity that will carry you the rest of your life. Your friends will change. Your school will change. Your relationship with your parents will
change. You will change! Some of that
change will be heart breaking. When you
go through that, I hope you will depend on God as your constant. Never forget that with that gift comes
responsibility. That is true for all of
us. We are all children of God now.
If we are to one day be like God as John says we will be, then we need
to start acting like that…now. That is
how we claim the identity that has been given to us.
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