Who Are You?

“I can’t believe I ate the whole thing!” Remember that old Alka-Seltzer commercial? “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.” That’s the way I felt last Tuesday after supper. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten so many pancakes and sausage. Mind you, it was all good. The food, the fellowship, it was good. It was Shrove Tuesday at Knox United Church; Fat Tuesday in so many churches. And communities of faith gathered to eat pancakes.

I’ve been asked more than once, “Why do we eat pancakes on Shrove Tuesday?” Well, it has to do with the fact that the next day is Ash Wednesday, the first day in Lent. Lent is traditionally a season of prayer and fasting. It’s a time when we look inward, and see who we really are. The idea is that we allow God to cleanse our souls, so that come Easter we might be more like the people whom God made us to be. Our model here is Jesus. As Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness at the beginning of his ministry, so we are called to spend 40 days exploring the wilderness of our souls. As Jesus rose on Easter Sunday, so we seek to rise to newness of life on Easter morn; the new life of being the person whom God made you to be in the first place. Part of the process of becoming that person is being cleansed; being spiritually and physically cleansed. Prayer helps to cleanse the soul and fasting helps to cleanse the body. A Lenten fast typically means going without meat and eggs. So the tradition was that, on Shrove Tuesday, on that last day before Lent, you used up all the meat in the house. You ground up the marginal meat and you made sausage. You took all the eggs and animal fat around the house – the bacon grease and the lard and whatever – and you made pancakes. And then you stuffed yourself with all that because it was going to be a long way to Easter. You took literally the words of Isaiah 55:2, where the prophet says, “Delight yourselves in fatness.”

Fat Tuesday meant “party time” before the 40 day journey through the wilderness of Lent. There’s a time to party and a time to pray. So you’ve got Mardi Gras in New Orleans; and Mardi Gras, of course, is French for Fat Tuesday. And you’ve got Carnival in parts of the Caribbean and South America. We party on Shrove Tuesday, and then we pray in the wilderness. And while we pray, we try to discern who we really are.

It was in the early 1980’s that I took a big step toward discovering who I really am. And I had to pass through the wilderness to do it. I’m talking about the wilderness of loneliness. I’m talking about the wilderness of depression. I’m talking about the wilderness of despair. Lots of us have wandered in that wilderness. Lots of us have been lost and confused in that barren land. I didn’t really know who I was. I didn’t know what I was meant to do with my life. I mean, I had this sense that hidden somewhere inside me was my true self, but I didn’t know how to find him. It was a time of estrangement; a time of alienation; a time of being disconnected from my true self and consequently disconnected from God; alienated from the One who had made that essential self.

This wilderness experience of alienation is part of the human condition. We all have to pass through it if we’re going to discover the Promise Land of our true selves. It’s like the Israelites when they were slaves in Egypt. As long as they did the work which kept their masters happy, they were fed. But they weren’t free. In order to reach that place of freedom where God was calling them to be, they had to journey through the wilderness. For 40 years they wandered in the wilderness, until they reached the Promise Land. You have to pass through that wilderness in order to journey from slavery to freedom. You have to endure a time of alienation and confusion in order to become who you really are. Being born anew is a painful experinece.

So it’s no wonder that some people choose to stay in Egypt. It’s no wonder that some people choose to remain enslaved to the expectations of others. Lots of people have spent their whole lives trying to please others. And that’s where I was to some degree in my teens and twenties. I’d been kind of a free-spirited little kid who was told by parents and siblings and teachers and so-called friends that it was not okay to be who I really was. I had to be the person whom they wanted me to be. And I tried real hard to be that person. And to some degree I succeeded. But I paid a huge price. I had to hide that free-spirited little kid deep inside me. I created something like a dungeon for him in the depths of my being, and then I slammed shut the prison door; locked it up and lost the key. I got good grades and I made friends and I became a minister – partly because that’s what people told me that I should be. But when someone invited the real me to come out and play again, I didn’t know how to deal with it.

You have to journey in the wilderness in order to become who you really are; in order to become the person whom God made you to be. It’s the wilderness of broken relationships, becomes you come into conflict with the people who have a vested interest in keeping you the way you are. It’s the wilderness of confusion because you’ve made the break with who you’ve been, but you don’t know yet the person whom you’re becoming.

When you’re lost and confused and disconnected from your old social network, it’s easy to get depressed. And when you’re walking away from your old self, it’s like dying a little death. No wonder the wilderness is such a painful place!

I wonder if this is something like the wilderness experience that Jesus had. We read in Mark’s gospel that after Jesus was baptized by John, we spent 40 days in the wilderness. But I suspect that there was quite a bit of time between baptism and wilderness; like months or maybe even years. Some scholars think that Jesus was a disciple of John the Baptist. The gospel writers maybe knew that and were embarrassed by it, and Matthew at least tried to cover it up with John’s embarrassment that Jesus has come to be baptized by him (see Matthew 3:14). But the only way that I know to make sense of Jesus’ submission to being baptized by John is that Jesus at one time submitted himself to John as one of John’s disciples. And I think that Jesus learned a great deal from John: he learned about God’s kingdom, he learned about God’s righteousness, he learned about the fact that those who walk with God are constantly in conflict with the Pharisees and the rulers of the world who would make themselves into gods. But at some point, there was a break. John emphasized the judgment of God, while Jesus emphasized the mercy of God. I mean, they both took seriously God’s judgment and God’s mercy; the disagreement was over where, in the final analysis, the emphasis should be. John emphasized judgment and Jesus emphasized mercy. So there was a break. And Jesus went off by himself into the wilderness, to figure out who he was and what he was supposed to do with his life. He knew who he had been as John’s disciples; he had yet to discern who he was as God’s son.

Who are you? That’s a question that you can only answer for yourself. But I can tell you this: in order to discover the person who you really are, you’ll have to leave behind the person whom you’re pretending to be and wander in the wilderness for a while. If you’re anything like the Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door – not her real face, not her real persona – if that’s you, then you’ll have to leave behind the person whom you’re pretending to be. And you’ll only make that move when it becomes too painful to do anything else. Anne Hines writes in her book The Spiral Garden, “We move when it becomes less painful then staying where we are.” And once you’ve made that move into the wilderness of becoming whom you’re meant to be, you’ll need to spend some time in prayer and fasting. And fasting doesn’t necessarily mean refraining from certain foods. Keeping silence is a form of fasting, especially if you’re like me and you suffer from the vocational hazard of the clergy, which is talking too much.

One day I went to see a colleague of mine in a church north of here. As I walked into his office, he was telling the secretary about his plan to go on a silent retreat for five days. Five days of not saying a word! He turned to me and he said, “Ervin, you wouldn’t last five minutes!” What he didn’t know was that I had been on a mostly silent retreat some years earlier. It was part of those years in the early ‘80’s when I was trying to figure out who I was. Keeping silence can cleanse your soul and help you to see more clearly who you are.

Elizabeth Gilbert in her book Eat, Pray, Love describes her own journey through the wilderness of self-discovery. She also went through a time of not knowing who she was. She also knew the suffering of breaking away from whom she’d been and wandering in the wilderness of self-discovery. Then one day she happened to see herself in a mirror, and she heard her brain fire off this split-second message: “Hey! You know her. That’s a friend of yours.”

Part of following Jesus is becoming friends with who you really are. Because Jesus has befriended who you really are. “What a friend we have in Jesus,” the old hymn says. Well, it’s true. “I know who you are; you’re a friend of mind; I like you,” Liz Gilbert said to herself in that unguarded moment. Which is exactly what God says to each and every one of us. If Jesus wondered who he was as he wandered in the wilderness, the answer came when God said, “You are my beloved Son!” And maybe God said that when Jesus was baptized, but I suspect that Jesus didn’t really hear it until he was in the wilderness. Jesus didn’t really hear it until he’d made his break with John the Baptist and began his journey to discover himself.

Jesus has befriended you. As someone has said, “God dwells in you, as you.” We said last week that in order to know God, you have to risk the impossible. But also, in order to know God, you have to risk being yourself. We know something of God by discovering the image of God within ourselves, and the image of God within you is the real you; not someone whom others tell you to be, but the you whom God made. God delights in you. It says quite clearly in Isaiah 43:4, “You are precious in my eyes, and honoured, and I love you.” God delights in you. Indeed, God delights in you as you. For you are a son of God; you are a daughter of God.

It’s like a poet named Hafiz once wrote in his poem I Got Kin:

Plant
So that your own heart
Will grow

Love
So God will think
“Ahhhhh,
I got kin in that body!
I should start inviting that soul over
For coffee and
Rolls.”

Sing
Because this is a food
Our starving world
Needs

Laugh
Because this is the purest
Sound.

But you can’t just get there overnight. You have to wander in the wilderness for a while. It has been said: “Discomfort is a gift. It’s what compels us to search.” So search a while in the wilderness of Lent. And become the kin whom God made you to be. Amen.


Text: Mark 1: 11
Preached by Bruce D. Ervin
1 March 2009