We Are Like Him

On the wall in our family room hangs a picture of my paternal grandfather, who died before I was born. Every time I go by the picture, I stop for a moment. Hard as I try to discern my father’s face in the face of my grandfather, I can’t do so. Apparently my father resembled his mother, who was so superstitious that she would never allow anyone to take her picture. I favor my father’s side of the family and apparently also look like her. Alas, I will never know whether I do or not, at least on this side of the grave. On the other hand, I once saw a picture of one of my father’s cousins. Although I had never met him, I knew him immediately as a member of my father’s family. By the same token, anyone meeting our younger daughter would know immediately that we were mother and daughter. Our older daughter and son? They tend to favor Jack’s side of the family.

It’s a favorite game, isn’t it, especially among extended families, and especially at family gatherings, or when we look through old photograph albums. Who is like whom? Who favors whom? Is that Uncle Phil around the eyes? From which family member did he inherit his musical talent? Is she as good an athlete as Aunt Phyllis was? Who will the baby favor when he is grown?

Our readings for today invite us to look at resemblances in another way, to look through a different lens. Besides our natal families, as Christians, as human beings really, we are all members of a much larger family. As baptized Christians, we are members of Christ’s family – we are his brothers and sisters – and we are also members of the human family, all children of God. Our texts invite us to see ourselves through a different lens, not the photographer’s lens but God’s lens, to see a different kind of resemblance among us, and to see that we might resemble someone else besides Grandpa Jim or Aunt Louise.

Our first reading from the Book of Acts continues the story we have been hearing throughout Easter tide of the outward expansion of the fledgling Christian community. Besides giving us a flavor of some of the issues faced by the early followers of Jesus, the book depicts the various missionary journeys of Paul after his encounter with the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus. Now we are in the second half of the book. We catch up with Paul as he is preaching on Mars Hill, the place where many famous philosophers, including Socrates, expounded their ideas. An outstanding speaker himself, here Paul notes that the Athenians are a very religious people and worship many different images. He then suggests, through his allusion to the Unknown God, that the Athenians already sense that there is a deeper truth underlying their usual forms of religious practice.

Paul also quotes from the Athenians’ own philosophers, suggesting that they already know that, “In him we live and move and have our being.” Echoing the assertion in Genesis that God created humanity in God’s own image, Paul then reminds the Athenians that “we too are his offspring.” The implication is clear: we are God’s children. We are loved, treasured, and valued, and we live by the grace of God at work within us. Most important, unlike the Greeks, who believed that the gods were fundamentally different from humankind, Paul asserts that we resemble God in the core of our being. We are like God, and we all have what Quakers call “that of God” in us.

Today’s psalm also points to “that of God” in us. Speaking for those who have experienced the wilderness, the psalm reminds us that God is not distant from us but, rather that God upholds us, God “holds our souls in life.” More important, for the psalmist, God listens to us and hears our prayers, not from an unbridgeable distance, but from within. Since God is within, we can express both our gratitude for God’s deliverance from trouble, and, what is more important, our deep sense of being heard and known by God. As the psalmist says, “God has heard me, he has attended to the voice of my prayer…. He has not rejected my prayer nor withheld his love from me.”

Our reading from the first letter attributed to the apostle Peter gives us a different lens through which to see ourselves. We have been hearing portions of this letter throughout Easter tide, because the letter states so well the impact of the risen Jesus on the early Christian communities. The letter was probably written in the late first century by a disciple of the apostle in order to offer consolation to a Christian community that was facing persecution at the hands of the civil authorities.

Here, the writer invites his hearers, and, by extension us, to adopt a “theology of identity,” i.e., to know ourselves, by virtue of our baptisms, as members of Jesus’ family. If we are members of his family, then we are invited to perceive our intrinsic value and worth to God. We are so valuable, the writer assures his hearers and us, that Jesus was willing to die for us. Because we are valuable to God, because we are members of Jesus’ family, we can let go of self-pity and doubt, even in the face of suffering. We can be assured that we are growing in our capacity for love and in our ability to live as Jesus lived, and that, with Jesus as our guide, we can even forgive those who persecute us.

The Gospel according to John was also written for a persecuted community. Written in the late ‘90s, the gospel was addressed to a community at odds with the wider Jewish community and its leadership. These were people who were wondering whether they had made the right choice in following Jesus. Through Jesus’ words at his last gathering with his disciples, the evangelist provides the reassurance that we all need to hear. Jesus reminds his friends that, although he is leaving them, they will always have him with them. Through the gift of the Holy Spirit he will always be inside them – and not only he himself, but God the Father as well. He will be in them, he tells them, as a kind of “organic indwellingness,” working from within them, through their own spirits. This is really the good news in a nutshell: even though Jesus is physically no longer present to us, the Holy Spirit is within us, making Christ present to us from within, enabling us to live as he lived, and continuing to remind us of our membership in his family and our resemblance to him.

If we are God’s offspring, if we are valued and loved by God, if God’s Spirit dwells within us, if we resemble Jesus, then what are we called to do? If we turn back to the letter of Peter, we hear the writer contrast those who did not “obey” with Noah and his family members who did “obey.” Noah, you remember, after the flood, was the first human being with whom God made an everlasting covenant.

So, first we are called to “obey.” Now, that is a word that gets a bad rap in our culture for anyone past childhood. The word “obey” equals “follow blindly” for us. We can’t help remembering, for example, the Nazi soldiers and officers who were only “following orders.” However, the word we translate as “obey” means, in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin to “listen closely,” in order to deepen one’s trust in God. Some of you know that I am training to be a spiritual director. Spiritual direction is a listening ministry, in which one person helps another listen more closely to God. Zalman Schacter tells us that “a nun once told me so beautifully that ‘spiritual direction deals with only one thing: how to reduce our resistance to God.’” We are called to listen, in spiritual direction, in prayer, in contemplative reading of Scripture, in calming our mind through the use of Anglican prayer beads, in any way that will enable us to open our ears, to hear God, to remain connected with God, and to trust God.

And then we are called to do what Jesus commands: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” What does Jesus command? That we love the Lord our God with all our heart, and soul, and strength, and that we love our neighbors as ourselves – actively. And here is the good news: because we resemble Jesus, because we are members of Jesus’ family, because we have God’s Spirit within us, we can live in confidence and hope that we can be and do all that God asks of us. We can evangelize, we can endure hardship for God’s sake, and we can love and serve all those around us.

O God the Holy Ghost …
Evermore enlighten us.
Thou who art Fire of Love,
Evermore enkindle us.
Thou who art Lord and Giver of Life,
Evermore live in us ….