Who am I and What am I doing here?

As a huge fan of Saturday Night Live and especially the late Phil Hartman, firmly emblazoned on the walls of my memory banks is a fabulous skit by Phil during the 1992 Vice Presidential Debate where VP Admiral James Stockdale asked the now infamous questions “Who am I? What am I doing here?” Admiral Stockdale’s plan to be clever back fired on him when people actually thought he was asking the audience who what when and why of his own existence. Admiral Stockdale become the poster boy for political senility, making even George H W Bush appear young and energetic. The response people had to the Admiral’s attempt at being clever is indicative of a Western Society bent on self actualization and self awareness. Psychologists and Sociologists of the 2oth century from Freud, to Maslow to Jung and others were determined to understand why it is important for us to reach a place of self actualization, where we are able to reach our own personal growth goals through sheer ability to know and understand ourselves and our lot in life. It is a passion of my own, having read these researchers and many other philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries, to understand my own place in the world. I often ask myself these same questions. I want to know who I am. I want to know why I am here. Do I have a destiny? Do I matter to the world, do I have a reason to be here? My biggest fear is that all of life is random and the only reason I exist is because I was accidentally or incidentally afforded a certain set of circumstances that made it possible for me to be standing here this morning. I’m too much of an Augustinian Calvinist to believe in a random universe. So having a destiny, looking forward to its fulfillment, knowing that I have a reason to exits in this world, keeps me fighting for something bigger than myself. Knowing who I am and knowing that I have a purpose keeps me emboldened and impassioned about life.

Such was the case of the early church as well. When the apostle John wrote his letters of encouragement to those he called “his little children”, he understood their need to know what was going to become of them. Christ came into the world, did amazingly great things in the presence of many people, was savagely defeated by ignorance, greed and the self preservation of those in power around him and mysteriously and miraculously raised again from the dead! I can imagine how many of those in the first century would wonder, will his fate be our own? What will become of us as his followers? Will we be savagely and brutally murdered for living a life of purpose different from those in the status quo? John writes to his little children to reassure them that even if the world in which they live does not accept them or understand them or even acknowledge their rights to exist, they have a higher calling by which they will compass their lives, being called and established as children of God! This existence, this answer to the question, Who am I? gives the readers of this text hope, a reason to want to be active in their faith, to be doers of the word of God and not simple hearers! The world may not accept each of us as we are, some of us may be diametrically opposed to everything the world stands for: those things that seemingly defeated Christ in his earthly ministry: greed, ignorance, and self preservation. Some of us live lives opposed to such things. Unfortunately, then, some of us must live lives in fear of being treated like less than valued members of a society that values conformity, uniformity and submission to hierarchal self preserving traditions that many will use to subjugate and defeat those of us who dare to live a life as Christ did…washing, healing and satisfying the dirty, the broken and the parched of our world! John says to his little children, “I don’t know what will become of us, or what we will be like, but I know this, in the end, we will be like Christ, and however that comes about, we will do so with a holy boldness because we will see him as he is and be made pure!”

So then I have to ask you a second question: What do you have left to lose? If we have a destiny to be like Christ and to share in his defeat then we have also a destiny to share in Christ’s resurrection! Posing this question to you all this morning I am reminded of a song by Willie Nelson titled “Me and Bobbie McGee”. In this song, Willie reminds us that “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to loose”. Paul, the apostle to the gentile church, found that knowing Christ means being free from the burden of injustice, having no longer to fear the ignorance, greed and self preserving ways of sinful people. He wrote to the Greek church in Galatia saying “ It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery”.

So I ask again, what do you have to loose? If we have a great destiny to become as Christ, to be set free from the burden of a slavery to fear of those things which defeated Christ, then we must embrace that destiny, live as if it is our only thought, breathe it in and out each day and make it our only passion, our only thought…Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to loose! We cannot live in fear of this old world, we cannot accept that it has the right to win, we cannot embrace defeat, for although the world thought it defeated Christ, the power of the Holy Sprit, the same power that lives in each of today, brought about a bold and crushing victory to those things that enslave us! The tomb is empty, Christ is risen, the Holy Spirit comes to us shortly, we have a purpose. Therefore we must stand firm, dig in with our heels and brace ourselves for the battle ahead, for we have a great and mighty destiny: one that brings hope to the hopeless, one that brings healing to the hurt, one that brings peace to those in turmoil and one that brings justice to the enslaved people defeated by greed ignorance and self preservation. Who are we? What are we doing here? We are bearers of hope! We gotta give them Hope!

Amen!