My older son Amos is kind of the peacemaker in the family. And if you know my smart-aleck younger son Aaron—which many of you do because he worked as your youth and family minister last year—you’d know why we need a peacemaker in the family! Amos is also a very good designer: he’s done a lot of the graphic design for Trinity. But he’s very low key about his skills, because, well… peacemakers don’t generally draw attention to themselves. But it would be a mistake to ignore him, because Amos is really wise. About people as well as about design.
A few nights ago Amos was hanging out at the house with my husband John and I, talking about the greenhouse that John has been building in our back yard. It’s a been his labor of love over COVID: John’s build it all by hand, often using recycled building materials. But now that it’s almost done, he’s fretting about the flooring. Should he use recycled bricks, which require a lot of careful fitting, or just leave the gravel he’s already laid? Amos listened patiently—as is his style—and made another design suggestion. A pretty good one, too. But he could see from his Dad’s face that he wasn’t quite ready to hear it. So Amos smiled bemusedly, and—responding like the millennial he is—quoted a phrase made popular by rapper Funkmaster Flex. “OK Dad,” he replied. “You do you.”
I am who I am. That’s a breathtaking revelation of God from the Exodus lesson. And it recurs throughout our Scriptures whenever God reveals Godself, including in Jesus in his famous seven “I am” statements on John’s Gospel. I am the Bread of Life (John 6:35), I am the Light of the World (John 8:12), I am the Door (John 10:9), I am the Good Shepherd (John 10:11,14), I am the Resurrection and the Life (John 11:25)I am the Way and the Truth and the Life (John 14:6), I am the Vine (John 15:1,5) So God says it, and that settles it. Right?
But… does that mean you are who you are? I’m serious about that second question. How do you actually do you? To put it on the terms of this morning’s Gospel, if you were a tree, do you know what kind of fruit you are supposed to bear? That’s one of the more serious questions any of us ever ask of ourselves.
The biblical “I am” statements, in both Hebrew and Greek, function both as verbs and nouns. “I am” is used on its own as a name—as Moses hears it in Genesis—and also as a descriptor of identity. That is to say, God’s doing and God’s being are completely integrated. God is fully realized: there is no inconsistency in God. “You do you” is always what God is doing. But for most of the rest of us trying to lead lives of integrity, we’re still figuring it out. Sometimes our being and our doing don’t actually align all that well, and we do what we don’t want to do, as Paul famously complained in his letter to the Church in Rome.
Which is why we are disciples of Jesus. That is, students. To learn from Jesus is to draw closer to the integrity of God’s great I AM. And in the process, to become truer to ourselves as well. You heard how that happened to Moses. Once he knew that he was standing barefoot in the presence of the God who is, he ceased his nervous questions and became willing to do what God called him to. This is the process of spiritual formation. Transformation, really. Through which we become who are—and do what we’re supposed to do—because we know whose we are.
We don’t always have to desire evil, as Paul reminded the Corinthian Church. We can repent and change when we need to, as Jesus asks us to do in the Gospel. And gives us time to do so, as I understand the parable of the fig tree. And in God’s good time, we can actually become like the Psalmist, who said “O God, you are my God; eagerly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you… your loving-kindness is better than life itself.”
It is the patient and persistent love of God that makes our transformation possible, and inspires us to love like God does, in return. None less than Saint Augustine of Hippo, one of the great theologians of the western church, preached “Love God and do whatever you please: for the soul trained in love to God will do nothing to offend the One who is Beloved.”
Love God and do whatever you please… imagine the freedom and joy in that. It’s the ultimate expression of “you do you,” and the invitation is there for all of us. But it does come with the expectation that we are ever loving God more deeply and more courageously, and—through that practice—we find our authentic vocation. After the examples of Moses, of Paul, and of Jesus himself. And because it is Lent, I do want to remind you that to do as we please—out of love for God—is not always pleasant.
I’m not suggesting we all put on camel hair shirts or anything of the sort, this Lent or ever. Although none less than our own Thom Mayer recently reminded me that camel hair sweaters can be very soft. Which is true when it’s combed and spun and woven, but John the Baptist—for reasons known to him and God—was clearly called to wear the scratchy version. And he’s not the only one whose authentic “you do you” might have been very uncomfortable. Jesus himself was called to the hardest imaginable expression of integrity in his inexorable journey to the cross. It was the “you do you” that nobody would ask for, but Jesus’ pleasure—born out of God’s Trinitarian love—could do no other.
There’s a lot of ways to think about what Jesus accomplished on the cross. Substitutionary Atonement—that is, that Jesus died in our place order to satisfy a just God’s need for punishment—is not the only one. Nor frankly, the one most widely held in the history of the Church. I’ll be talking more about this as we approach Holy Week, because I want to affirm that there is a diversity of opinion about Jesus’ faithful work. Honestly, I don’t believe that we need to have just one theology of the cross: our longing to be reconciled to God takes many shapes. But here’s what I pray with you every week in our Eucharistic Prayer. “He stretched out his arms upon the cross, and offered himself, in obedience to your will.” So whatever that reconciling “perfect sacrifice for the whole world” means to each of us, we pray in common that Jesus accepted the cross in obedience to God. It was integral to his great I AM; it was, in that moment, the integrity of his being and his doing.
Discipleship—that is, our own faithful doing and being—sometimes comes with a cost. And, at the same time, discipleship is our deepest pleasure. In just a few short weeks, we’ll be delving into Jesus’ passion, death and resurrection. And in the meantime, during every week in Lent, we’re exploring a different aspect of Jesus’ journeys in our Wednesday adult education. I am also available for conversation and prayer and rites of reconciliation, if something is weighing on or worrying you. I really hope you take advantage of all that. Not just because it teaches us about the cost of discipleship—although it does—but because it teaches us about God’s love for us; a love that knows no limit, not even the limit of death. And because it teaches us about Jesus Christ, in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.
