American editor and author, Tom Masson, who for the first many years of the 20th century was the literary editor of
Life Magazine, once humorously noted that “about the worst advice you can give some people is to ‘be yourself…’” Haven’t we known folks like the ones he describes? Who, when they are themselves, bring havoc and chaos in their wake; who turn others from hope to fear or from peace to war or from love to hate? From time to time, haven’t we even
been ones who fit Masson’s quip? I recall once many years ago, while at the bedside of a dying parishioner, noting to the family surrounding the bed that at death, people often reveal their true selves. One of the family members started chuckling, then blurted out, “Well I hope that’s not true in this case…” then looking down and gesturing toward the so-called loved one lying helpless in the bed, “because he was a real jerk!”
Be yourself…or as Rev. Dr. Forrest Church writes, “be who you are…” Those of you who were able to be in worship either of the first two Sundays of January may recall that Dr. Forrest Church is a Unitarian Christian minister who is currently living with cancer.
Living with cancer has brought to this preacher, prophet, and pastor a new mantra for living.
It is this:
Want what you have,
Do what you can,
Be who you are.
Today, we conclude our exploration of this three-part mantra, by focusing on the third phrase:
…be who you are.
“Being who we are,” writes Dr. Church in his book entitled, Love and Death, “helps us reject the fool’s gold of self-delusion…[and] it demands integrity—being [honest] with ourselves and with one another.”Friends, as we review the scripture lessons for today, we see that the stories are filled to the brim with people being who they are. Here we see Jonah, Jesus, Simon, Andrew, James, and John being who they are. We even see God being who God really is.
Here, first, is Jonah with God. Jonah is a man for whom the glass—if there even is a glass!—is always half empty. And we see him repeatedly being the best pessimist he can possibly be! When commanded by God to preach repentance to the people of Nineveh, Jonah haughtily replies, “perhaps, God, you failed to notice, that the people of Nineveh are a bunch of jerks! They are stubborn, sinners, who will throw me and the God I ride in with, right out of their little den of iniquity. Want to rethink this plan, God?” God does rethink, and with annoying repetition, commands Jonah two more times to go to Nineveh and preach for them to turn around and face in a new direction. God is being who God is, by always hoping, always giving another chance for change, always loving even the best sinners into something better. Meantime, Jonah eventually condescends, and in the little snippet we read this morning, he preaches his fear-filled message: “You’d better watch out, you’d better not pout, God is coming to town!” Or, in the words of scripture, “Forty days more, and Nineveh will be overthrown!” Some of the best negative preaching, designed to bring about change by literally scaring the hell out of the people…Jonah is a fine example of being who he really is!
And what happens when Jonah is himself? Surprisingly, the people of Nineveh do turn around. They begin to look in a new direction; they see beyond their enticing temptations to embrace a God who loves them without any strings attached. As scripture reports, “…the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth. When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed [God’s] mind about the calamity that [God was to] bring upon them; and [God] did not do it.” Here, among other important lessons, there is Jonah being who he is; there are the people of Nineveh being who they are; and there is God being a God who loves, who flexes, who even changes direction from intended destruction to loving embrace. Be who you are…the story of Jonah assures us that such integrity can bring much more than personal satisfaction…being who we are can, in point of fact, change the world.
Moving to the story from the Christian scriptures, we see a similar lesson being shared in the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. Be who you are—Jesus calls to the four fishers of fish—and God will infuse those gifts to change the world.
When we take a look at this story of the disciples’ call, we often put ourselves in the place of these four individuals on the shore. We marvel that they dropped all—nets, fish, responsibilities—and followed Jesus. We ask if we would have been so inspired, so spontaneous. Yet, according to preacher and professor Barbara Brown Taylor, to ask such questions of this passage is to put the emphasis on the wrong syllable! She suggests that this is not so much a story about the disciples or about us, this is a story about God. To focus on what the disciples gave up (and whether we could do the same), is to miss the real miracle of the story. This “miracle story,” as she calls it, is really about “the power of God—power to walk right up to a quartet of fishermen and work a miracle, creating faith where there was no faith, creating disciples where there were none just a moment before.” What we’d best find along the way, encourages Barbara Brown Taylor “…is a full sense of the power of God – to recruit people who have made terrible choices; to invade the most hapless lives and fill them with light; to sneak up on people who are thinking about lunch, not God, and smack them upside the head with glory.”
What does this look like exactly? In the case of the fishers, it looks like fishing, only with people as the new catch. It looks like using one’s God-given gifts, infused with God’s spirit and breath, and through that partnership, bringing positive change to the world. It looks like, perhaps, doing the same things but doing them in a new way, or for new reasons.
Life, you see, is a dynamic “call and response” in which, in every moment and with each decision, we are invited to creatively respond to God’s call. Being who we are, honestly and with integrity, even if our response is seldom “perfect,” allows God to inject us with positive values that contribute to the healing of persons and communities all around us.
In a sermon delivered just after the terribly devastating fires here in southern California in the fall of 2007, Dr. Forrest Church wrote that,
“Being who we are means embracing our God-given nature and talents. I, for instance, loved my father.” As an aside, you may recall that Forrest Church’s father was the senator from Idaho, Frank Forrester Church, III. Son continues, “I still love my father. I honor and admire him. Once, however, I wanted, more than anything, to borrow his ladder to the stars. I had more confidence in him than I did in myself. I wanted to be like him, not like me. Then the moment of reckoning arrived. Halfway through my doctoral work, I was handed a political career on a platter. In 1976, at the age of twenty-seven, I had run my father’s presidential campaign in Nebraska, a primary he won against Jimmy Carter. After the primary season ended, the Carter people invited me to head up their Nebraska effort that fall, sweetened by an offer from Nebraska’s lieutenant governor to remain in the state as vice-chair of the Democratic Party, with the promise of standing for Congress two years later if everything worked out. I might very well have done this,” writes Forrest Church, “but [for the fact that] my father interceded. He called me a quitter. Finish your doctorate, he said. Then go ahead and do whatever you wish with your life. So I persevered. And, in persevering, I found my calling. Two years later, I was installed as the ninth minister of All Souls [Church in New York City]. For almost thirty years I have been privileged to serve this congregation, fulfilling not my destiny—I don’t believe in destinies—but answering a call that was mine, not someone else’s. To envy another’s skills, looks, or gifts rather than embracing your own nature and call is to fail in two respects. In trying unsuccessfully to be who we are not, we fail to become who we are.”
In another message, delivered several years earlier, and also recapped in the same book, Dr. Church talks about the deaths of Princess Diana and Mother Teresa, passings that occurred within days of each other in late summer of 1997. He notes that each of these remarkable women offered their gifts freely to others, but more than gifts, their very personalities were conduits for their incredible service to humanity. To quote Dr. Church, “…the deaths and lives of these two women [were] so very different save in this: each was thrust into a caste system—Windsor and Brahman—and each refused to be governed by it. Instead they let their humanity shine through by embracing the constituency of the rejected.” Both were bigger than life humans; both reached across natural barriers to touch and change the lives of others for the better. Yet Princess Diana is the one most can relate to. Why? Perhaps because, as Dr. Church muses, her sense of unworthiness translated into something redemptive as she made connections with others. She found a way to invest her pain in other people’s hope. In other words, though she was not perfect, not by a long shot, Diana’s personal pain became an avenue by which she traveled to reach the hearts and minds of others, so that, little bit by little bit, something painful could be redeemed, transformed even, into a gift of hope. Dr. Church concludes this description of being who we are with these words,
“[At Princess Diana’s funeral] Earl Spencer said that his sister didn’t need a royal title to ‘dispense her own form of magic.’ Neither did Mother Teresa, not even a title from the church. Neither do we. We don’t need to be titled, beautiful, or successful. We don’t even have to have a sense of worthiness. All we have to do is help others: to see our tears in their eyes, to recognize that the same sun sets on each of our horizons, that the mortar of mortality binds us fast to one another, that we are one.”
Being who you are, you see, is not an end in and of itself. Being who you are leads you to accept the behaviors and activities of other people as evidence of their integrity, just as your behavior is evidence of yours. Being who you are changes the world, even as it changes your particular view and interpretation of that world. Being who we are, invites us to see others with the same respect as we see ourselves, to honor the integrity of the neighbor, and eventually, to connect us, one to the other, in the family of God.
A few weeks ago, at the beginning of the new year, our Interim Conference Minister, Jane Fisler Hoffman was writing to inspire us pastors of the Southern California Nevada Conference of the United Church of Christ. She noted that we are serving in a time fraught with national and international crises, and she quoted poet Marianne Williamson whose poem was popularized by Nelson Mandela in his inaugural speech in 1994. The poet’s words echo the stories of personal integrity we’ve read this morning and they heartily invite us each one to be who we are. The poem is entitled, Let Your Light Shine.
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness,
That most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I
To be brilliant, gorgeous,
Talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking
So that other people
Won’t feel insecure around you.
We were born to make manifest
The glory of God that is within us.
It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone.
And as we let our light shine,
We unconsciously give other people
Permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates others.
[Names…] Be who you are. Loving. Grumpy. Honest. Human. Creative. Hopeful. Willing. Be who you are. And our scriptures assure us that God will be who God is. Loving, honest, creative, hopeful, always hopeful. God will, as God has done from the beginning of time, God will call you and God will fill you and God will use you being you to change the world.
