Who We Become--September 4, 2020"Lead me in the path of your commandments,
for I delight in it.
The more I spend time in the Scriptures and listen to these ancient poets and pilgrims, the more I am convinced that the meaning of our lives is found, not in having the right stuff, getting the right job, fitting the right mold of others' expectations, and not even in finding the right romantic partner, but in being a certain kind of person.
The voice praying here in Psalm 119 certainly thought so--he prays for God to actively lead him away from seeking after more stuff, and instead to be made into a person whose priorities, whose choices, and whose character reflect the character of God. He prays to become a person in whom God's love, God's truthfulness, God's generosity, God's justice, and God's faithfulness can be seen--not for more money, a bigger house, an ideal spouse, or a position of power. It's about character. It's about who we become.
And even more significant is that the psalmist here doesn't pray to become this sort of virtuous person as a means to getting something else--he doesn't say he's hoping for a ticket to heaven as a reward for being a decent person, or to rack up more stars in his crown after death because of his good deeds in this life. He is just praying that God would shape him, would shape his character, to be in line with God's ways, as though being that sort of person is an end in and of itself. Because it is. In fact, it is what we are made for.
This is something I think we church folk often get wrong, and we get it all kinds of wrong. At some point in church history, the conventional thinking was, "We should be godly, decent, and moral people--in order to be judged righteous enough to get a spot in heaven." Well, that's like getting it partially right--it's good to be a decent human being. In a time like ours that seems literally hell-bent on bringing out the worst and the most rotten sides of us, I hope that much is clear. But we made it about earning something else--we turned "be more like Jesus as you are drawn closer and closer to him" into "be good enough in your behavior and Jesus will reward you with a spot in the afterlife and a chance to meet him in heaven." And in truth, that's really just a religious way of being selfish, isn't it? It's about seeking your own interest and just being willing to jump through religious hoops to get it. Well, something seems fishy about that.
Well, along comes the Protestant Reformation (you can tell I'm being pretty fast and loose with my church history here, but this will do), and folks like Martin Luther said, "You can't earn God's love, and you can't win a spot in heaven by your good deeds," which was true. It still is true, and part of my tradition as a younger sibling in Christ to Luther is to insist that my saintly behavior doesn't make God love me more, and my sinful and stinky behavior doesn't make God love me less. It's all grace, baby, beginning to end. God loves me because God has a thing for loving us as we are. But over enough time, we got sloppy with that, too, and came out sounding like, "You can't earn God's love or a spot in heaven by your behavior, so as long as you believe the correct facts about Jesus or identify nominally as a Christian, that's all there is to following Jesus." So being like Jesus, loving like Jesus, and having our character made to be like Christ sometimes gets left behind or set aside, all in the name of avoiding the mistake of thinking that it earns our spot in heaven.
So once again, you end up with a way of glorifying self-centeredness--Jesus is still just a means toward an end. Instead of acting like Jesus to earn a spot for myself in heaven, it's believing the correct facts about Jesus to get my halo. But those are really two sides of the same coin. And both of them still allow my self-interest to fester, rather than being made into the likeness of Christ.
And that means we now have all sorts of religious-sounding voices in our day, and a great many give the impression that character is important mostly as a way of "earning" something from God, or that it's not really important at all, as long as you talk in the right religious jargon. And you end up with voices that say a person's basic decency, truthfulness, or empathy are unimportant as long as they say that God is important (or the even more vague "faith") or promise power or influence to other nominally religious people. You end up with a transactional way of seeing the world--where you only talk in the language of faith or use the appearance of religiosity as a way of getting something else for yourself. In other words, God gets treated merely as a means toward an end... and we stay the same, unchanged in the deep-down-who-we-are sense of our character.
So back to these words from Psalm 119--they offer an alternative to the different ways we dress up our Me-and-My-Interests-First selfishness in religious vestments. These few verses call on God to change us--to reorient our focus, away from self-centered gain, away from crookedness, away from the fleeting things that don't last, and instead to lead us on a different path. These verses ask God not merely to make us "look" religious, or to memorize the correct "head knowledge" to qualify for heaven, but to direct our steps, to lead us in a course of our whole lives, and to shape the sorts of people we are. It is a prayer to change who we become.
The voices of the Scriptures are a lot more interested in what kind of people we are than we usually recognize--not just that we avoid breaking a rule here or escape punishment through a loophole there, but that we come to be people whose lives look like Christ. And the biblical writers are definitely not interested in helping us just to get richer, find romance, or impress our neighbors, or get a particular political party into power. They are convinced that the meaning of our lives does not arise from our net worth, the closing number of the Dow Jones, your relationship status, your number of followers on social media, or even if we give the impression of being religious. Our lives find their purpose in becoming more fully like Christ--that is, in being more and more fully alive by becoming people who are generous, truthful, decent, compassionate, just, and faithful. All the other variables can come or go in life, but the kind of people we are, deep down--what we sometimes call our "soul"--this is maybe the only thing we can really call our own. And the biblical writers seem to think that we experience life in its fullest when our hearts love like Jesus, when our voices sound like Jesus, and when our feet walk in Jesus' steps--on their way to dinner parties with the not-good-enough crowd, headed into the Temple to overturn the tables there, standing up to protect the victimized, and getting branded a troublemaker by the powers of the day.
Focusing just on getting more for myself isn't enough. Chasing after the stuff that doesn't last isn't worth spending a lifetime on. It's character that counts--I'd rather spend my life becoming more like Jesus.
Lord God, turn our eyes away from the things that don't matter, and shape us into the likeness of Christ that we might be more fully alive.
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