Transcending Ourselves

December 14, 2008

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11
Luke 1:47-55
I Thess. 5:16-24
John 1:6-8, 19-28

When I was seven years old, my family attended the Calvary Baptist Church in Oswego, Indiana. I don’t clearly remember why, but during that time I attended youth group before the Sunday evening service with my sister who is five years older than me. For a period of a few months that year this group memorized the first ten verses of John 1, from the passage I just read. I clearly recall feeling my youth, because I was at a complete loss about what the first five verses of this passage meant. Since we didn’t read the first verses of this chapter, I will recite them for you:

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shineth in darkness and the darkness comprehendth it not."

And neither did I comprehend it. As a seven year old, I was not yet able to think abstractly, and these metaphors of Jesus as the Word and the Light didn’t make much sense to me. I couldn’t picture these concepts in my mind, and I remember just striving with all my might to get all the words in the right order in the unique cadence of King James English.

In contrast, when we got to verse 6 and to the much more concrete part: “There was a man sent from God whose name was John. The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all through him might believe.” – this I could understand. I could picture a regular man, of course he wasn’t a shining light or a walking word, but he could tell people about Jesus, so that everyone could be saved.

Similar to my experience as a child, our Scriptures today help us to gain a sense of our timeless and transcendent God, who is so abstract that it’s challenging for us to even comprehend who He is. Yet, our God enters the world both literally and figuratively through ordinary people through whom He works His eternal purposes. Recognizing God’s transcendence within these passages isn’t enough, though. Rather, I believe God challenges us through these Scriptures to also transcend ourselves, to become someone bigger through His Spirit than who we think we are. Further, God demonstrates through these passages how we can do this holistically – how our whole selves (body, mind and spirit) when devoted to God can become something more than what we could ever imagine.

No better example exists of an individual becoming so much more than they had ever thought they could be than in the person of Mary, the mother of Jesus. In Luke, we see Mary, who was probably between 12 and 16 years old, recognizing the degree to which God has brought something incredible to pass – He has honored her, a young lady of humble station, who was otherwise just fulfilling the customary role for girls her age. Marrying young was expected of girls, as their primary roles in Jewish society were maternal and domestic.

Mary’s Song (as it is commonly called) reminds me of the words of Anna Julia Cooper in the nineteenth century. Cooper, who was born an American slave, achieved the highest level of education of any in her generation. Prevented because of her gender from studying for the doctorate in America, she achieved this distinction entirely in French at the Sorbonne. Still, in Jim Crow America she was painfully aware of her degradation as a black woman in American society, but she carried this mantle with pride, saying “When and where I enter, the entire race enters with me.” Thus, as a woman, she recognized she carried the potential of all future generations. Similarly, Mary recognizes she is not only, mysteriously, carrying the Son of God; she is carrying the promise for all generations to come. It is a privileged position for an ordinary woman. We don’t know why she received this honor, but we do know that she seems to have been equal to the unique set of joys and sorrows it presented. She seems to have handled difficult situations with poise; even while despair must have been so close. She was the woman for that moment, and in her is revealed a truth of our relationship with God, and that is – sometimes, He simply wants us to be ourselves. By us each just being His child with the unique set of strengths and abilities He has given us, God can make us more than we could ever imagine.

What happens to Mary in a physical sense parallels what happens to Isaiah in an intellectual way in Isaiah 61. Isaiah 61 opens with these words: “The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me because the Lord has anointed me . . .” This terminology is very close to the words the angel Gabriel used to explain to Mary the conception of Jesus. There Gabriel said, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.” Commentator Dennis Bratcher suggests this phenomenon of having the Holy Spirit come upon someone happens through that person’s openness to taking action that will accomplish God’s purpose in the world. In Isaiah the prophet is called to consider transcendent ideas that make the normal person step outside their usual contexts and consider his or her place in a larger world. Isaiah says the results of receiving God’s anointing are specific transcendent things: the poor will receive a good word, hearts of the brokenhearted will be mended, captives will find freedom and those who are in dark prisons will be released.

Most often I have heard this passage applied in a spiritual way to the ministry of Jesus, as if Jesus’s ministry totally fulfilled this prophecy. However, as followers of Jesus, we are all called to follow in His steps. Thus, we have to intellectually consider what it meant for Jesus to serve the poor, the brokenhearted, the captives and the prisoners, and what it means for us. What does this mean in a practical sense? A clue to its meaning is available further in the passage. In verse 8, God through the prophet offers an explanation for why these actions are important to Him. He says, “For [or because] I, the LORD, love justice.” God’s love of justice actively propelled Jesus to pursue just actions, and it must propel us to do the same. What is justice? It is fairness – in a social sense it means that every person receives a fair amount of the world’s resources, receives fair treatment by authorities, fair consideration in decision-making. Fairness requires us to step outside of what is optimal for us and think about what is fair for all. For all to enjoy justice, it must be our active, relentless pursuit.

History provides so many examples of those who became so much bigger than themselves through their pursuit of justice. Many of these were ordinary people whose names none of us know, people who participated in the American Civil Rights movement and similar movements around the globe. There are so many, but I would like to use a contemporary example, that of Wangari Maathai., a Kenyan woman, who in 2004 was the first woman from the African continent to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, a movement that has provided rural Kenyan women who are economically disadvantaged with employment. These women plant trees. Through their reforestation efforts they earn much-needed income for their families, and at the same time they sustain their own community’s resources. Maathai’s work is grounded in her unfailing sense of each Christian’s responsibility to practice justice. In an interview with Beliefnet’s Mia McDonald, Maathai said, “Christianity has sometimes been marred by people who proclaimed they were Christians but did not practice justice. Nevertheless, my teachers [at her Catholic school] gave me a deep sense of justice and fairness that influenced me to work for human rights, and to desire human rights not only for myself but also for other people.” In the early 1960’s when Maathai was getting her degree in Biology from Mount St. Scholastica College in Atchison, Kansas, she simply was working to develop her gifts and interests. It has been her attention to living a life that actively pursued justice from a Christian impulse that has allowed her to become someone so much bigger than a Kenyan biologist.

When asked how she sustains her passion and energy for her work, Maathi replied, “I’m a very optimistic person. I believe that, ‘Well, you’re here and if you feel overwhelmed, of course you give up. But if you are hopeful you can do something.:” Maathai’s emphasis on optimism brings us to our final passage in I Thessalonians 5 where we are challenged to transcend ourselves psychologically as an act of faith and faithfulness. Sometimes we become our own biggest obstacle to doing great things. Paul tells the Thessalonians here to: “Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.” Later in the passage we are told how in the world it is possible for us to do this, and it is through faith. Paul says in verse 24:”The one who calls you is faithful and he will do it.” Thus, our joy and thankfulness are a result of our absolute faith in God to do what He has promised. Through our faith we are able to practice good mental disciplines that allow us to rise above our humanness and engage in God’s sacred purposes for us.

These imperatives in I Thessalonians 5 about how we are to live come at the end of a chapter that begins by talking about the second coming of Christ. If you’ve been following the lectionary over the past several weeks, you may have noticed that coupled with Scriptures that lead us to remember Christ’s birth have been Scriptures that remind us of Christ’s Second Coming. This juxtaposition between the conception and the culmination of Christ’s purpose is present here again. Similar to other places in the New Testament, here Paul reminds us to simply carry on faithfully because God’s times and seasons are unknowable. Within the context of the rest of today’s passages, it seems that perhaps God’s message to us is that as we become more fully who He wants us to be, not only do we surpass our own imaginations for our potential, we also step into His eternal purposes.

When I was child, I believed that heaven was a place like Disneyland where everyone had a swimming pool. When I was 25, I moved to southern California, and after I had lived there for awhile, I learned that kind of place was pretty good, but it wasn’t probably what heaven would be like. In my more mature years, I’ve come to believe that what we’re doing now is like a warm-up for heaven. In other words, these same concepts of justice and love will prevail; these challenges to know more of God’s purposes and to become more fully in line with His transcendent vision will be what we’re all doing. We enter into that now by practicing the disciplines of our faith, including having a disciplined mind that works against negativity and doubt.

Living with a house full of sprinters, I have learned just how essential the practice of warming up is. It’s truly everything because sprinting is such a strenuous sport that not warming up leads to breakdowns and injuries. Sometimes the warm-up is sort of a drag; but it’s precisely when the sprinter forgets the purpose and becomes lax that injuries occur. Conversely, the best performances occur when the sprinter is warmed up, relaxed and ready to go. In the same way we must always know that as we practice the disciplines of our faith in this temporal world, we are becoming ready not only to transcend ourselves, but also to step into God’s eternal purposes.

I have a hard time getting my head around this idea. Like when I was a child, I can’t picture what it means to be fulfilling God’s eternal purposes. I do know that it’s a fantastic feeling to recognize that in some small way one’s efforts are helping someone and bringing about greater justice in the world. Maybe that is the only way we can now comprehend what it means to be a part of God’s purpose, and to that degree we can say with Mary, “My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior for he has been mindful of the humble state of his servant.”

Praise be to God!