(59) This Is Not My Life

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for This Is Not My Life, originally shared on October 26, 2020. It was the fifty-ninth video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   We turned on the news this morning and saw the pictures of the Trabuco Canyon fire. It started small and is growing. The Santa Ana winds are blowing and it’s actually a little nippy by California standards. The smoke from the fires wasn’t rising up, it was blowing sideways, flowing through the canyons like fog. Do you feel like you are in a fog? Do you look around and say to yourself, “This is not my life.” Today we are going to consider why you might be right, and that you are not alone.

   One of my favorite parts of the textbook for Biblical Greek, the language in which the original documents of the New Testament was recorded, I’m slowly working through, comes at the end of the third chapter. Here the author, Dr. Bill Mounce, says “You are now entering the fog. You will have read this chapter and think you understand it – and perhaps you do – but it will seem foggy. That’s okay. If living in the fog becomes discouraging, look two chapters back and you should understand that chapter clearly. In two more chapters this chapter will be clear, assuming you keep studying.”  (Basics of Greek Grammar, page 38).

   I found that extremely comforting and encouraging. OK. I’m not the only one. This is normal.

   It seems to me that we, most of us, are at a point in the pandemic where it feels like we are in a fog. Like we are in a fog of anticipation, of disorientation, and spent hopes. Like we’ve become disengaged from our real lives and we’ve followed Alice down the rabbit hole to a world that looks familiar in some ways, but doesn’t make sense.

   We are looking around and saying, “This is not my life”.

   It’s certainly not the way any of us could have imagined it even 6-months ago.

   But then, the world is not the way it’s supposed to be.

   God made the world to be a perfect place, where everything was clean and new, where all living things lived in harmony, where human beings were made, as the pinnacle of creation, in God’s image, that is, for a living relationship with the living God. No conflict, no pain, no want, no death. No work, except to just live in harmony in the garden God had created and pick the fruit off the trees.

   Did you have a favorite doll or action figure when you were very young? And, did that doll or action figure talk to you. I mean really talk to you. Or really sound like it was talking to you, when you’d pull a string or squeezed its tummy and it would say something like, “I love you.” Or “You’re my best friend.”

   Did that doll or action figure love you? Was it your best friend? In your imagination, maybe. But, and I hope I’m not saying anything traumatic here, it really didn’t. It was only programmed to say that. That doll or action figure was only a material thing. It was incapable of love, or of doing anything for which it was not programmed to do or mimic.

   So, when God asked Mr. and Mrs. Pinnacle of Creation, “Do you love me”, saying “Yes”, could have no meaning unless they had the ability to say “No.”

   So, God put a tree in the middle of the garden

   God said that Adam and Eve could do anything they wanted, they just couldn’t eat of that one tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

   And, human beings said “No”. They ate the fruit of the tree, and evil entered the world. Sin, the thing that separates us from God entered the world and our sin separated us from the living relationship with the living God for which we were created.

   In fact, this is not my life. At least it’s not the way it’s supposed to be.

   But, in what we call the Old Testament of the Bible, God is steadfast, and we see a record of the acts of God done to restore that relationship. A flood and a new start, slavery in Egypt, liberation from slavery in Egypt, prophets, priests, kings, the division of the nation of the people of God, 1,000 years of waiting for the Messiah the deliverer, the last 300 of which God went radio silent and there was no word from the Lord.

   We rejected all of them until, finally, God acted unilaterally to restore that relationship at the cross. God entered human history, fully God and fully human being, in Jesus Christ. God proclaims God’s already and not yet kingdom, God suffers and dies on the cross to restore that living relationship for all who accept it, that is, all who believe.

   We who have put on Christ in our baptism, whose sins are covered by Christ, now live as those who have already died. We died with Christ in a death like his and will rise with Christ in a resurrection like his. That promise makes it a done deal.

   We are in the in-between period between final act and perfection. In the already but not yet Kingdom of God. We await its perfection in the coming Judgement, when Christ will be revealed to all.

   It’s true. This is not my life.

   My life, my true life, is hidden, hidden in Christ.

*Colossians 3:1-4

   When I was seminary, after college and the Marine Corps, I had been in school for what seemed to me to be a very long time. I was growing frustrated because it seemed to me like I had only been preparing for life. I was anxious to start living that life for which I had been preparing.

   One day I realized that I was not just preparing for life. I was living it.

   “Right now, anyway,” I thought, “this is my life.”

   Years later, I realized that while “This is my life” may be true, “This is my life” does not really fully describe an authentic life, but a shadow life. “This is not my life.” We belong to Christ. Our lives are not our own.

   What we emphasize makes a huge difference in whether or not we live an authentic life.

*Romans 14:7-8

   Likewise, we may look around today and say, This is not my life. And we may be right, it may not be anything like we could have imagined it even 6-months ago.

   But, when we say “This is not my life”, this is most certainly true.

   Do you feel you are now entering the fog.

   Come out of it, and come into the river, the Streams of Living Water that is the Holy Spirit, working within us the Baptism that has given us new life in Christ, the abundant life given to us at the cross.