Reborn
Commentary
Tony Campolo once told of a student who came to him in his office at Eastern Christian College. The young man explained to Dr. Campolo that he was going to take a semester off from college in order to travel for a while and get away from all the pressures that were consuming him. He said, “I don’t know who I am anymore.” Because of the expectations laid on him by his parents, his friends, his professors, and his girlfriend, he felt he had to get away from it all and find himself again.
Tony Campolo commended him. “That’s a good thing to do!” he said. “But what if you start peeling away the layers of yourself, like an onion, and when you get rid of them you don’t find anything at the center? What if you get to the heart of who you are, and you find there’s nothing there? What do you do then?”
It is a tough question, one that most of us face at some point in our lives. Albert Camus wrote about that in his novel, The Fall. A respected lawyer is walking the streets of Amsterdam one night. He hears a splash and then a cry for help. A woman has fallen into the canal! He begins to run toward the splashing. But then his legal mind whirls into action: Someone could help her, but should it be him? After all, he had his reputation to think about. What would people say if she were a prostitute, or even another man’s wife, and their names appeared in the newspaper together? Or, worse yet, a picture of him helping her? Would they think he’d been with her? And what about his safety? Maybe some tough guys mugged her. Maybe they were still lingering in the shadows. Maybe they’d attack him, too, if he helped her!
He is deeply involved in his mental legal debate when suddenly he realizes that the splashing has stopped. The cries for help have ceased. The woman has drowned. The lawyer wanders on, still playing the arguments in his mind, deliberating whether or not he should have tried to save her. He stops at a tavern to drink himself into peace and uses the person he can find as a father-confessor. Camus pronounces judgment on the lawyer in two short lines: “He did not answer the cry for help. That is the man he was.”
We are each that person sometimes. Each person is a moral being, caught in the quandary of ethical choices. Sometimes we make good decisions, sometimes we lean toward darkness and evil.
In a parable by Kierkegaard, there was a break-in at a large store, but the thieves didn’t take anything. When the clerks opened the store in the morning, all the merchandise was still there. A diamond necklace was marked $2,000, and a part of leather shoes, fifty cents. A pencil, however, now cost $75.00, and a baby’s rattle was priced at $5000.
Instead of stealing merchandise, the thieves had stolen value. By stealing intrinsic worth, they had stolen identity. When the prices changed, no one knew any longer what the value was beneath the packaging.
Shelley Rodriguez, of Independence, Kentucky, explains the phenomenon this way. She brought her eight-year-old grandson to a farm. He loved the magic of the auctioneer’s singsong voice, yet something bothered him. “Grandma!” he asked, “How’s that man ever going to sell anything? He keeps changing the prices!”
Sometimes that seems to be the power of our society – changing the price tags on us, so we don’t really know the value of things anymore. Changing the price tags of our identity, so we don’t really know who we are. This is the crisis of identity. We’re all trying to pretend, projecting more on the outside than we feel on the inside. In fact, sometimes the thing we’re hiding most is something that’s not even there – the emptiness of our own souls. Each of our passages for today explores some dimension of this quandary.
Genesis 21:8-21
If ever there was a person who might have had an identity crisis, it was Ishmael. Born to a wealthy father by way of subterfuge, he was constantly reminded that he was a nothing, a nobody, and a person who had no stake in his father’s fortune. Ishmael’s mother was a slave, and she had been used by her aging mistress to get pregnant as a surrogate. Sarai claimed the baby was hers. Yet when Sarai herself was miraculously with child some years later, she wanted nothing to do with Ishmael, and hated his mother. Meanwhile, Abram still doted on his firstborn son.
But family rifts got deeper, until Sarai demanded that Abram send Hagar and Ishmael away. Sarai hoped they would die. She did not care about them in the least. Abram was torn, but his marriage to Sarai came first. The true hero of the story, however, was Yahweh, who would not allow this wronged and rejected woman and her son to perish. Yahweh protected them, and one day the peoples of the whole region respected the rejected as their own patron saint.
Fred Craddock told a story that reflects this in a more contemporary era. It was a vacation encounter in the Smokey Mountains of eastern Tennessee years ago that moved him deeply. He and his wife took supper one evening in a place called the Black Bear Inn. One side of the building was all glass, open to a magnificent mountain view. Glad to be alone, the Craddocks were a bit annoyed when an elderly man ambled over and struck up a nosey conversation: “Are you on vacation?” “Where are you from?” “What do you do?”
When he discovered that Fred taught in a seminary, the man suddenly had a preacher story to tell. “I was born back here in these mountains,” he said. “My mother was not married, and her shame fell upon me. The children at school called me horrible names. During recess I would go hide in the weeds until the bell rang,” he told Fred. “At lunchtime I took my lunch and went behind a tree to avoid them.
“Things got worse when I went to town. Men and women would stare at my mother and me, trying to guess the identity of my father. About seventh or eighth grade, I started to go hear a preacher. He wore a clawhammer tailcoat, striped trousers and had a face that looked like it had been quarried out of the mountain. He frightened me in a way, and he attracted me in a way. His voice thundered.
“I was afraid of what people would say to me, so I’d sneak into church just in time for the sermon, then rush out quickly when it was done. One Sunday, some women had cued up in the aisle and I couldn’t get out and I began to get cold and sweaty and was sure that somebody would challenge me, `What’s a boy like you doing in church?’
“Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked out of the corner of my eye and saw that beard and saw that face. The minister stared at me, and I thought, `Oh, no. Oh, no. He’s gonna guess.’
“The minister focused a penetrating glare at me and then said, `Well boy, you’re a child of ah . . . You’re a child of ah . . . Ah, wait.’ The preacher paused dramatically, getting ready to announce the horrible revelation to the church. Then he said, `You’re a child of God! I see a strikin’ resemblance!’
“He swatted me on the bottom,” said the old man, “and then told me, `Go claim your inheritance, boy!’”
Fred Craddock looked more closely at the old man and asked, “What’s your name?”
As the gentleman got up to wander on, he proudly replied, “Ben Hooper!” Fred remembered his own father telling him about the time when for two terms the people of Tennessee had elected an illegitimate governor named Ben Hooper. The outcast had survived. The shamed had succeeded. The boy of infamy was transformed into a man of fame and stature.
Those who look back on the life and legacy of Ishmael would agree.
Romans 6:1b-11
As parents, we want to influence our children. One pastor I know moved his family seven different times. During each of the last five moves, he left one or two children behind. Now, as he retires, he is trying to figure out what has become of his family, and what impact his life has had on his children. He mourns that the center is gone. They have no place to call home.
Parents make choices that affect the manner in which their children form their identities. Harry Chapin put it well in his song “Cat’s in the Cradle.” When he was a young father, he was too busy making a living to take time with his son. When he was finally old enough to enjoy time with the family, his son in turn had learned to be too busy for his dad.
Of course, parents can have a positive influence, too. Maurice Boyd remembered one incident that sealed the impact of his father on his life forever. His father worked in a shipyard in Belfast, Northern Ireland. During the Great Depression, work dried up. Times were tough, and for three years his father was out of a job.
Then one of his father’s old bosses at the shipyard approached him. The important man would find work for Mr. Boyd. He would guarantee it, no matter how much worse things got. All Mr. Boyd would have to do would be to buy a life insurance policy from the man. It would work to their mutual benefit: the boss’s income would increase, and Mr. Boyd’s work income would be guaranteed!
It was a great deal except for one thing: it was illegal. Maurice Boyd remembered his father sitting at the kitchen table with the whole family surrounding him. There at the table his father counted the cost. He reviewed their desperate financial situation. He ticked off the outstanding bills and the money he would be making, ought to be making, if only he’d say yes to his boss.
His father wrote it all down on a sheet of paper: the gains and the losses, what he could make and what he could lose. Then he wrote down a category that Maurice Boyd will never forget: integrity. What did it matter if he gained the cash to pay the rent, but lost his ability to teach his children right from wrong? What did it matter if he gained the dignity of a job but lost it each morning when he looked at himself in the mirror and knew that the only one reason he could go off to work instead of someone else was because he cheated?
His father declined the job, and the family groveled through several more years of poverty. Yet, of his father, Maurice Boyd said, “He discovered that no one can make you feel inferior without your consent, and that one way you can keep your soul is by refusing to sell it. He realized that whatever else he lost … he didn’t have to lose himself.”
This is why Paul describes entering into Christian faith is a rebirthing experience. Those who let the corruption stain their souls will defile their lives. But those who find themselves renewed in Jesus are raised again to life with a new identity in a new family.
Yet it isn’t a formula that we can play out in our lives through some program or recipe. Robert Coles, child psychiatrist and Harvard University professor, tried at one time to figure out why we do the things we do. In his book The Call of Service, Coles reflects on people who try to make a difference in life. People who seek to reform themselves, even when sinful tendencies oozed like tentacles through their inner marrow. People who attempt to better society, in spite of the fact that it stubbornly refused the challenge.
Why do they do it? Cole asks. The people themselves often have a hard time defining what makes them tick. One young teacher in an urban school gets challenged all the time by street-smart students. Weary of self-righteous do-gooders, they ask, “What’s in it for you?” And he really can’t say.
But all these compassionate volunteers have one thing in common: earlier in their lives, each of them ran into a crisis situation that tested their identity and their willingness to do something about it. In that crisis situation, each of them encountered someone who put his or her life on the line and taught them the meaning of service. Someone who gave of themselves in a way that bucks the trend of selfishness and of self-preservation. And the influence of that someone else made it possible for the person they helped to be greater than each of them had previously thought they could be.
Paul would agree. In the crisis of his life, he met Jesus on the road to Damascus. Everything changed. He was reborn. And he says the same happens to all who are fortunate to meet Jesus in any other crisis of existence.
Matthew 10:24-39
The fragmentation of our lives makes us less than we should be, less than we could be. It makes us less than the people God made us to be. This is certainly Jesus’ message in today’s Gospel reading.
There is a powerful scene in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for all Seasons reflecting Jesus’ teaching. The story is about Sir Thomas More, loyal subject of the English crown. King Henry VIII wants to change things to suit his own devious plans, so he requires all his nobles to swear an oath of allegiance which violates the conscience of Sir Thomas More before his God. Since he will not swear the oath, More is put in jail. His daughter Margaret comes to visit him. Meg, he calls her, with affection. She is his pride and joy, the one who things his thoughts after him.
Meg comes to plead with her father in prison. “Take the oath, Father!” she urges him. “Take it with your mouth, if you can’t take it with your heart! Take it and return to us! You can’t do us any good in here! And you can’t be there for us if the king should execute you!”
She is right in so many ways. Yet her father answers her this way. “Meg, when a man swears an oath, he holds himself in his hands like water, and if he opens his fingers, how can he hope to find himself again?”
You know what he means, don’t you? When our lives begin to fragment, it’s like holding our lives like water in our hands, and then letting our fingers come apart, just a little bit. The water of our very selves dribbles away. We may look like the same people, but who we are inside has begun to change.
“Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul,” says Jesus, and we know what he means. We are all of a piece. There’s no separation in us between the impulse of the heart and the thought of the mind and the word of the mouth and the action of the hands. Somehow, everything that we are is integrated. That is the meaning of the word integrity, isn’t it?
But integrity is easily lost on us when we allow the shadows and shades to consume the unadulterated light of divine goodness within. Notice again what Jesus says about living in heaven’s light, and the love of our true Father. After every “dark night of the soul,” it is only in the dawn of God’s grace that we are reborn at morning’s call.
Application
Our lives reflect the struggles of choices made and often choices regretted. Think of Corrie ten Boom, who tells her story in The Hiding Place. During World War II, her family hid some Jews to keep them from the gas chambers. She and her father needed to find a safe place for one Jewish mother and her very young child.
One day a local clergyman stepped into their watch shop. They decided to ask him if he would take these two frightened ones into his home. He refused, however. Corrie couldn’t believe it at the time, so she impulsively ran to the mother and grabbed the little baby from her arms. She brought the child to the pastor and tried to thrust him into the pastor’s hands.
Again, he refused. “No!” he said. “Definitely not! We could lose our lives for that Jewish child.”
Who could blame him? How could he help others, if he himself were dragged away to the concentration camps? That was his decision as he wrestled with himself in the gray area of his circumstances.
Father ten Boom gathered the little one in his arm and said to the pastor, “You say we could lose our lives for this child. I would consider that the greatest honor that could come to my family.” Another self. Another choice. You and I wrestle with such choices every day of our lives.
Think of the things we say:
We think we are making our way in life. We think we know the self that is best for us. We think we can find a way to swim outside of the ocean, a way to fly without looking up to the heavens or to grow without digging deep. But we can’t, can we? We cannot, till love wrestles us in the night and gives us a new name. For in the end, God must wrestle with us as he did with Jacob many generations before. God must wrestle with us, or the choices of our hearts will lead us astray.
We die a little or a lot each time the darkness grips our souls. But in the light of God’s grace, we are reborn.
Alternative Application (Romans 6:1b-11)
The story of God’s righteousness as grace and goodness begins with Abraham, according to Paul. This is a great place to connect our Genesis and Romans readings for today.
God has always desired an ever-renewing relationship with the people of this world, creatures made in God’s own image. Paul describes God’s heart of love in Romans 3:21-31, using illustrations from the courtroom (we are “justified”—3:24), the marketplace (we receive “redemption”—3:24), and the temple (“a sacrifice of atonement”—3:25). Moreover, while this ongoing expression of God’s gracious goodness finds its initial point of contact through the Jews (Abraham and “the law” and Jesus), it is clearly intended for all of humankind (3:27-31).
This is nothing new, according to Paul. In fact, if we return to the story of Abraham, we find some very interesting notes that we may have glossed over. “Blessedness” was “credited” to Abraham before he had a chance to be “justified by works” (4:1-11). In other words, whenever the “righteousness of God” shows up, it is a good thing, a healing hope, an enriching experience that no one is able to buy or manipulate. God alone initiates a relationship of favor and grace with us (4:1-23). In fact, according to Paul, this purpose of God is no less spectacular than the divine quest to re-create the world, undoing the effects that the cancer of sin has blighted upon us (Romans 5). It feels like being reborn (5:1-11). It plays out like the world itself is being remade (5:12-21). This is the great righteousness of God at work!
Then Paul gets very practical. Although we might think that we would jump at the opportunity to find such grace and divine favor, Paul reminds us that our inner conflicts tear at us until we are paralyzed with frustration and failure (Romans 6–7). Sometimes we deny these struggles (6:1-14). Sometimes we ignore these tensions (6:15-7:6). Sometimes we grow bitter in the quagmire of it all (7:7-12). And sometimes we even throw up our hands in despair (7:13-24).
Precisely then, says Paul, the power of the righteousness of God as our bodyguard is most clearly revealed. It is God who comes to us in the struggles and dying of our living lives, and empowers us to be reborn into a new life that matters.
Tony Campolo commended him. “That’s a good thing to do!” he said. “But what if you start peeling away the layers of yourself, like an onion, and when you get rid of them you don’t find anything at the center? What if you get to the heart of who you are, and you find there’s nothing there? What do you do then?”
It is a tough question, one that most of us face at some point in our lives. Albert Camus wrote about that in his novel, The Fall. A respected lawyer is walking the streets of Amsterdam one night. He hears a splash and then a cry for help. A woman has fallen into the canal! He begins to run toward the splashing. But then his legal mind whirls into action: Someone could help her, but should it be him? After all, he had his reputation to think about. What would people say if she were a prostitute, or even another man’s wife, and their names appeared in the newspaper together? Or, worse yet, a picture of him helping her? Would they think he’d been with her? And what about his safety? Maybe some tough guys mugged her. Maybe they were still lingering in the shadows. Maybe they’d attack him, too, if he helped her!
He is deeply involved in his mental legal debate when suddenly he realizes that the splashing has stopped. The cries for help have ceased. The woman has drowned. The lawyer wanders on, still playing the arguments in his mind, deliberating whether or not he should have tried to save her. He stops at a tavern to drink himself into peace and uses the person he can find as a father-confessor. Camus pronounces judgment on the lawyer in two short lines: “He did not answer the cry for help. That is the man he was.”
We are each that person sometimes. Each person is a moral being, caught in the quandary of ethical choices. Sometimes we make good decisions, sometimes we lean toward darkness and evil.
In a parable by Kierkegaard, there was a break-in at a large store, but the thieves didn’t take anything. When the clerks opened the store in the morning, all the merchandise was still there. A diamond necklace was marked $2,000, and a part of leather shoes, fifty cents. A pencil, however, now cost $75.00, and a baby’s rattle was priced at $5000.
Instead of stealing merchandise, the thieves had stolen value. By stealing intrinsic worth, they had stolen identity. When the prices changed, no one knew any longer what the value was beneath the packaging.
Shelley Rodriguez, of Independence, Kentucky, explains the phenomenon this way. She brought her eight-year-old grandson to a farm. He loved the magic of the auctioneer’s singsong voice, yet something bothered him. “Grandma!” he asked, “How’s that man ever going to sell anything? He keeps changing the prices!”
Sometimes that seems to be the power of our society – changing the price tags on us, so we don’t really know the value of things anymore. Changing the price tags of our identity, so we don’t really know who we are. This is the crisis of identity. We’re all trying to pretend, projecting more on the outside than we feel on the inside. In fact, sometimes the thing we’re hiding most is something that’s not even there – the emptiness of our own souls. Each of our passages for today explores some dimension of this quandary.
Genesis 21:8-21
If ever there was a person who might have had an identity crisis, it was Ishmael. Born to a wealthy father by way of subterfuge, he was constantly reminded that he was a nothing, a nobody, and a person who had no stake in his father’s fortune. Ishmael’s mother was a slave, and she had been used by her aging mistress to get pregnant as a surrogate. Sarai claimed the baby was hers. Yet when Sarai herself was miraculously with child some years later, she wanted nothing to do with Ishmael, and hated his mother. Meanwhile, Abram still doted on his firstborn son.
But family rifts got deeper, until Sarai demanded that Abram send Hagar and Ishmael away. Sarai hoped they would die. She did not care about them in the least. Abram was torn, but his marriage to Sarai came first. The true hero of the story, however, was Yahweh, who would not allow this wronged and rejected woman and her son to perish. Yahweh protected them, and one day the peoples of the whole region respected the rejected as their own patron saint.
Fred Craddock told a story that reflects this in a more contemporary era. It was a vacation encounter in the Smokey Mountains of eastern Tennessee years ago that moved him deeply. He and his wife took supper one evening in a place called the Black Bear Inn. One side of the building was all glass, open to a magnificent mountain view. Glad to be alone, the Craddocks were a bit annoyed when an elderly man ambled over and struck up a nosey conversation: “Are you on vacation?” “Where are you from?” “What do you do?”
When he discovered that Fred taught in a seminary, the man suddenly had a preacher story to tell. “I was born back here in these mountains,” he said. “My mother was not married, and her shame fell upon me. The children at school called me horrible names. During recess I would go hide in the weeds until the bell rang,” he told Fred. “At lunchtime I took my lunch and went behind a tree to avoid them.
“Things got worse when I went to town. Men and women would stare at my mother and me, trying to guess the identity of my father. About seventh or eighth grade, I started to go hear a preacher. He wore a clawhammer tailcoat, striped trousers and had a face that looked like it had been quarried out of the mountain. He frightened me in a way, and he attracted me in a way. His voice thundered.
“I was afraid of what people would say to me, so I’d sneak into church just in time for the sermon, then rush out quickly when it was done. One Sunday, some women had cued up in the aisle and I couldn’t get out and I began to get cold and sweaty and was sure that somebody would challenge me, `What’s a boy like you doing in church?’
“Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked out of the corner of my eye and saw that beard and saw that face. The minister stared at me, and I thought, `Oh, no. Oh, no. He’s gonna guess.’
“The minister focused a penetrating glare at me and then said, `Well boy, you’re a child of ah . . . You’re a child of ah . . . Ah, wait.’ The preacher paused dramatically, getting ready to announce the horrible revelation to the church. Then he said, `You’re a child of God! I see a strikin’ resemblance!’
“He swatted me on the bottom,” said the old man, “and then told me, `Go claim your inheritance, boy!’”
Fred Craddock looked more closely at the old man and asked, “What’s your name?”
As the gentleman got up to wander on, he proudly replied, “Ben Hooper!” Fred remembered his own father telling him about the time when for two terms the people of Tennessee had elected an illegitimate governor named Ben Hooper. The outcast had survived. The shamed had succeeded. The boy of infamy was transformed into a man of fame and stature.
Those who look back on the life and legacy of Ishmael would agree.
Romans 6:1b-11
As parents, we want to influence our children. One pastor I know moved his family seven different times. During each of the last five moves, he left one or two children behind. Now, as he retires, he is trying to figure out what has become of his family, and what impact his life has had on his children. He mourns that the center is gone. They have no place to call home.
Parents make choices that affect the manner in which their children form their identities. Harry Chapin put it well in his song “Cat’s in the Cradle.” When he was a young father, he was too busy making a living to take time with his son. When he was finally old enough to enjoy time with the family, his son in turn had learned to be too busy for his dad.
Of course, parents can have a positive influence, too. Maurice Boyd remembered one incident that sealed the impact of his father on his life forever. His father worked in a shipyard in Belfast, Northern Ireland. During the Great Depression, work dried up. Times were tough, and for three years his father was out of a job.
Then one of his father’s old bosses at the shipyard approached him. The important man would find work for Mr. Boyd. He would guarantee it, no matter how much worse things got. All Mr. Boyd would have to do would be to buy a life insurance policy from the man. It would work to their mutual benefit: the boss’s income would increase, and Mr. Boyd’s work income would be guaranteed!
It was a great deal except for one thing: it was illegal. Maurice Boyd remembered his father sitting at the kitchen table with the whole family surrounding him. There at the table his father counted the cost. He reviewed their desperate financial situation. He ticked off the outstanding bills and the money he would be making, ought to be making, if only he’d say yes to his boss.
His father wrote it all down on a sheet of paper: the gains and the losses, what he could make and what he could lose. Then he wrote down a category that Maurice Boyd will never forget: integrity. What did it matter if he gained the cash to pay the rent, but lost his ability to teach his children right from wrong? What did it matter if he gained the dignity of a job but lost it each morning when he looked at himself in the mirror and knew that the only one reason he could go off to work instead of someone else was because he cheated?
His father declined the job, and the family groveled through several more years of poverty. Yet, of his father, Maurice Boyd said, “He discovered that no one can make you feel inferior without your consent, and that one way you can keep your soul is by refusing to sell it. He realized that whatever else he lost … he didn’t have to lose himself.”
This is why Paul describes entering into Christian faith is a rebirthing experience. Those who let the corruption stain their souls will defile their lives. But those who find themselves renewed in Jesus are raised again to life with a new identity in a new family.
Yet it isn’t a formula that we can play out in our lives through some program or recipe. Robert Coles, child psychiatrist and Harvard University professor, tried at one time to figure out why we do the things we do. In his book The Call of Service, Coles reflects on people who try to make a difference in life. People who seek to reform themselves, even when sinful tendencies oozed like tentacles through their inner marrow. People who attempt to better society, in spite of the fact that it stubbornly refused the challenge.
Why do they do it? Cole asks. The people themselves often have a hard time defining what makes them tick. One young teacher in an urban school gets challenged all the time by street-smart students. Weary of self-righteous do-gooders, they ask, “What’s in it for you?” And he really can’t say.
But all these compassionate volunteers have one thing in common: earlier in their lives, each of them ran into a crisis situation that tested their identity and their willingness to do something about it. In that crisis situation, each of them encountered someone who put his or her life on the line and taught them the meaning of service. Someone who gave of themselves in a way that bucks the trend of selfishness and of self-preservation. And the influence of that someone else made it possible for the person they helped to be greater than each of them had previously thought they could be.
Paul would agree. In the crisis of his life, he met Jesus on the road to Damascus. Everything changed. He was reborn. And he says the same happens to all who are fortunate to meet Jesus in any other crisis of existence.
Matthew 10:24-39
The fragmentation of our lives makes us less than we should be, less than we could be. It makes us less than the people God made us to be. This is certainly Jesus’ message in today’s Gospel reading.
There is a powerful scene in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for all Seasons reflecting Jesus’ teaching. The story is about Sir Thomas More, loyal subject of the English crown. King Henry VIII wants to change things to suit his own devious plans, so he requires all his nobles to swear an oath of allegiance which violates the conscience of Sir Thomas More before his God. Since he will not swear the oath, More is put in jail. His daughter Margaret comes to visit him. Meg, he calls her, with affection. She is his pride and joy, the one who things his thoughts after him.
Meg comes to plead with her father in prison. “Take the oath, Father!” she urges him. “Take it with your mouth, if you can’t take it with your heart! Take it and return to us! You can’t do us any good in here! And you can’t be there for us if the king should execute you!”
She is right in so many ways. Yet her father answers her this way. “Meg, when a man swears an oath, he holds himself in his hands like water, and if he opens his fingers, how can he hope to find himself again?”
You know what he means, don’t you? When our lives begin to fragment, it’s like holding our lives like water in our hands, and then letting our fingers come apart, just a little bit. The water of our very selves dribbles away. We may look like the same people, but who we are inside has begun to change.
“Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul,” says Jesus, and we know what he means. We are all of a piece. There’s no separation in us between the impulse of the heart and the thought of the mind and the word of the mouth and the action of the hands. Somehow, everything that we are is integrated. That is the meaning of the word integrity, isn’t it?
But integrity is easily lost on us when we allow the shadows and shades to consume the unadulterated light of divine goodness within. Notice again what Jesus says about living in heaven’s light, and the love of our true Father. After every “dark night of the soul,” it is only in the dawn of God’s grace that we are reborn at morning’s call.
Application
Our lives reflect the struggles of choices made and often choices regretted. Think of Corrie ten Boom, who tells her story in The Hiding Place. During World War II, her family hid some Jews to keep them from the gas chambers. She and her father needed to find a safe place for one Jewish mother and her very young child.
One day a local clergyman stepped into their watch shop. They decided to ask him if he would take these two frightened ones into his home. He refused, however. Corrie couldn’t believe it at the time, so she impulsively ran to the mother and grabbed the little baby from her arms. She brought the child to the pastor and tried to thrust him into the pastor’s hands.
Again, he refused. “No!” he said. “Definitely not! We could lose our lives for that Jewish child.”
Who could blame him? How could he help others, if he himself were dragged away to the concentration camps? That was his decision as he wrestled with himself in the gray area of his circumstances.
Father ten Boom gathered the little one in his arm and said to the pastor, “You say we could lose our lives for this child. I would consider that the greatest honor that could come to my family.” Another self. Another choice. You and I wrestle with such choices every day of our lives.
Think of the things we say:
- “I don’t really feel like myself today.”
- “I’m so ashamed of myself!”
- “For a moment there I forgot myself.”
- “I just hate myself!”
We think we are making our way in life. We think we know the self that is best for us. We think we can find a way to swim outside of the ocean, a way to fly without looking up to the heavens or to grow without digging deep. But we can’t, can we? We cannot, till love wrestles us in the night and gives us a new name. For in the end, God must wrestle with us as he did with Jacob many generations before. God must wrestle with us, or the choices of our hearts will lead us astray.
We die a little or a lot each time the darkness grips our souls. But in the light of God’s grace, we are reborn.
Alternative Application (Romans 6:1b-11)
The story of God’s righteousness as grace and goodness begins with Abraham, according to Paul. This is a great place to connect our Genesis and Romans readings for today.
God has always desired an ever-renewing relationship with the people of this world, creatures made in God’s own image. Paul describes God’s heart of love in Romans 3:21-31, using illustrations from the courtroom (we are “justified”—3:24), the marketplace (we receive “redemption”—3:24), and the temple (“a sacrifice of atonement”—3:25). Moreover, while this ongoing expression of God’s gracious goodness finds its initial point of contact through the Jews (Abraham and “the law” and Jesus), it is clearly intended for all of humankind (3:27-31).
This is nothing new, according to Paul. In fact, if we return to the story of Abraham, we find some very interesting notes that we may have glossed over. “Blessedness” was “credited” to Abraham before he had a chance to be “justified by works” (4:1-11). In other words, whenever the “righteousness of God” shows up, it is a good thing, a healing hope, an enriching experience that no one is able to buy or manipulate. God alone initiates a relationship of favor and grace with us (4:1-23). In fact, according to Paul, this purpose of God is no less spectacular than the divine quest to re-create the world, undoing the effects that the cancer of sin has blighted upon us (Romans 5). It feels like being reborn (5:1-11). It plays out like the world itself is being remade (5:12-21). This is the great righteousness of God at work!
Then Paul gets very practical. Although we might think that we would jump at the opportunity to find such grace and divine favor, Paul reminds us that our inner conflicts tear at us until we are paralyzed with frustration and failure (Romans 6–7). Sometimes we deny these struggles (6:1-14). Sometimes we ignore these tensions (6:15-7:6). Sometimes we grow bitter in the quagmire of it all (7:7-12). And sometimes we even throw up our hands in despair (7:13-24).
Precisely then, says Paul, the power of the righteousness of God as our bodyguard is most clearly revealed. It is God who comes to us in the struggles and dying of our living lives, and empowers us to be reborn into a new life that matters.
