Who are we?
First Congregational Church of Evanston
June 3, 2007 (Trinity Sunday)
Psalm 8
Rev. Dr James E. Roghair, Interim Minister
Psalm 8 (NRSV)
1O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens.
2Out of the mouths of babes and infants you have founded a bulwark because of your foes, to silence the enemy and the avenger.
3When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established;
4what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?
5Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor.
6You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet,
7all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field,
8the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.
9O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
Dad’s Pliers
What are human beings that God is mindful of us? Who are we?
The Morning after we buried my father’s ashes and had a grand send off for him in the church in Oregon where he and my mother had worshiped nearly 50 years, my brother who lives in California dug under the seat of his pickup truck and brought out a pair of fencing pliers. He gave them to me. He said he had two pair, and he didn’t know for sure which pair had belonged to our Dad and which to our Grandfather. They were alike. But he wanted me to have one of them.
I am not sure I will use this pair of pliers very much. They are made for doing a job I never do. They have a wire cutter, a the hook for prying staples out of wooden posts, a hammer for putting staples in, a hollow place for holding a wire you are bending. I do very little of these things in my current life. Although, as I learned from my parents who came through the depression, They may come in handy sometime!
But these pliers are a silent testimony of a continuing question in my life, reminding me where I came from, and constantly raising the question, now: Who am I, really?
On the Birth of the First Son
About 18 years ago, I wrote down some thoughts in my sort of random journal. When I wrote, we were living in the Arctic. But I began to reminisce about the experience of the birth of my oldest son fifteen years earlier. Here is a part of what I wrote:
I was there in the delivery room when this skinny baby was brought forth. He sure looked like one of my family. As I completed what I was supposed to do and left the room, a sense of joy, fear and awe came over me. I was joyous to have a son. I was filled with awe at the responsibility fatherhood presented to me. I was fearful because our frailties can so easily let us down. So many things can harm such a little one!
And I prayed a deep and yet incomplete prayer. I made a vow to God that if this little one reached the age of 21, I would give special thanks to God. The prayer was incomplete because I didn’t state the form of that thanksgiving ...
It was a Sunday, and I cried in worship that morning as I took my place. It was all so overwhelming. A sense of sadness welled up in me as I anticipated bringing up this baby in surroundings I did not really know nor deeply understand.
As a white pastor working in an inner city black church, I was in a strange culture (although I had been there before). We were living in a middle-class neighborhood – mostly Black but with some Jews – a short distance from the inner city.
But I was a farm boy. My values were formed on the wind-swept prairies. I had always enjoyed the outdoor work of the farm. As a child I had most cherished those jobs which I could do with my father – those times we were out together building a fence, or those times we were working together making hay or harvesting wheat.
How was I to provide for my own son those opportunities for working intimately which for me were so dear? Our setting was so different! How will I be a parent? Who am I?
Different Times for the Question
There are different ways and different times the question wells up in us. Who am I? It swept over me then. It sweeps over me now from day to day as I remember my Dad. It sweeps over me as I move in and out of churches as an interim pastor. Who am I? When do you ask that question? Who are you?
Bonhoeffer
Dietrich Bonhoeffer facing his coming execution at the hands of the Nazi’s penned a poem that we find in his book the Cost of Discipleship:
Who am I? They often tell me
I stepped from my cell’s confinement
Calmly, cheerfully, firmly,
Like a squire from his country-house.
Who am I? They often tell me
I used to speak to my warders
Freely and friendly and clearly,
As though it were mine to command.
Who am I? They also tell me
I bore the days of misfortune
Equably, smilingly, proudly,
Like one accustomed to win.
Am I then really all that which other men tell of?
Or am I only what I myself know of myself?
Restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,
Struggling for breath, as though hands were
compressing my throat,
Yearning for colors, for flowers, for the voices of birds,
Thirsting for words of kindness, for neighborliness,
Tossing in expectation of great events,
Powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance,
Weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making,
Faint, and ready to say farewell to it all?
Who am I? This or the other?
Am I one person today and tomorrow another?
Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
And before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still like a beaten army,
Fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?
Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am Thine! (March 4,1946)
(http://www.religion-online.org)
And You?
Who are you? When do you ask the question? Is it when you stand in line to receive a diploma – ready to launch out into a new world? Or when someone you love stands there? Maybe it is at a birth or a marriage or a grave. Or at the loss of a job or the beginning of a new one.
Then again, maybe it is at a scene of natural wonder that you are filled with awe. You stand at the rim of the Grand Canyon, or at the foot of the Canadian Rocky Mountains, or on the shores of the Pacific Ocean. The Psalmist stood looking into the grandeur of the night sky, and the questions came tumbling out: “Lord ... how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens ... When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them (Psalm 8:1, 3-4).”
Who are we? God has given us an identity that far exceeds anything that we mortals could ask for. God has given us the intellect and the power to be right up there beside God. And yet we are always lower than God. The creator of the earth has given us dominion over the earth. It is the care and stewardship we are given – like God’s. Not the opportunity to plunder and destroy. We are to be in a healthy relationship with the earth. That’s who we are.
Native American Theology
In Native American theology, the earth and everything in it are a unity. Native American Christian theologian, George Tinker wrote, “Prayers are most often said with the community assembled in some form of a circle – the circle being a key symbol for self-understanding in these tribes, representing as it does the whole of the universe and our part in it...There is little sense of hierarchy ... even of species, because the circle has no beginning of end. Hence all the “createds” (two-leggeds, four-leggeds, winged, and living, moving ones) participate together, each in its own way, to preserve the wholeness of the circle...the formation of the circle is itself prayer, a prayer for harmony and balance of creation, and in some ceremonies no words need be spoken (George E. Tinker, in The New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. 1).”
It is when that circle is broken that the evils break forth – the rapid disappearance of species at human hands, pollution of the earth, global warming. Things are out of balance. Human beings have forgotten who they are – that they are a part of the circle. “O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth! ... You have made [us] a little lower than God.” But we are a part of the great circle of life.
Yuuyaraq – the Way of the Human Being
A Yup’ik Eskimo, whose name in English is Harold Napoleon, wrote an essay which was published in a little book called Yuuyaraq: The Way of the Human Being (Fairbanks: Center for Cultural Studies, 1991). He wrote the essay from inside a prison. He says he was there “as a direct result of my alcoholism.” He was convicted of causing the death of his own son. And so, he tried to understand the disease and its causes which have afflicted so many of his people.
As he looked back into the history of his people, he learned that they had lived by an unwritten, but well-known code called Yuuyaraq – the way of the human being. “The Yup’ik people believed that all things, animate and inanimate, had iinruq. Iinruq was the essence, the soul, of the object or being. Hence, a caribou was a caribou only because it possessed a caribou iinruq, a caribou spirit.”
The spirits, “were indestructible, unlike the bodies in which they resided. And in the case of men, fish, and game, death was the spirit leaving the body. This is why the Yup’ik prescribed respectful ways of treating even dead animals. They believed the iinruq would ... take another body and come back, and if it had been treated with respect, it would be happy to give itself to the hunter again.”
The Yup’ik Eskimo knew that he or she was a part of a harmonious circle of life in the world – a circle which included both spirits and living things and even the rocks and the ground. They lived in respect to each thing.
But then came white people who had not the least understanding of the way of the human being that they lived in. They also brought diseases that neither the white people nor the Yup’ik understood, and whole villages were wiped out by the influenza epidemic of 1900. The Yup’ik world of the way of the human beings was turned upside down. And the people who survived suffered from a cultural posttraumatic stress syndrome, that played itself out in an epidemic of alcoholism – from one generation to another.
They were confused. They had forgotten who they were. It is a sad story. But by telling it, Harold Napoleon found out who he is. And his little book has been helpful not only to him, but to countless others, both in his community and even to those from the outside world who would try to understand.
Conclusion
It is important to all of us to find that place to stand – that place when we are forced to ask, “Lord, who am I?” Whether it be in holding the old fencing pliers that belonged to your dad, or suffering in a prison for standing up for truth, or finding the way of the human being in a world which has forgotten that way.
Who are we? Our neighbors and the children may not even know the Lord God who offers us an identity, “just a little lower than God.” For we live in a world that is as upside down much as the one in which Harold Napoleon grew up. Old beliefs and old ways are not known any more. And people are still looking for the new ways.
To find those new ways, may God give us the gift to look out into the night sky and to recognize, “‘O Lord,’ you are ‘our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!’” Amen.
Last Updated: Wednesday, February 6, 2008