(85) Transparency

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for Transparency, originally shared on January 28, 2021. It was the eighty-fifth video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   Have you ever passed off a fault as a feature? Have you ever made a virtue out of a necessity? Today, we’re going to look at living a transparent life, and why it’s useless to do anything else.

   It’s an odd time in the pandemic. We have a vaccine, but we don’t have a vaccine, at least not enough. The governor of Florida has placed taken steps to discourage vaccine tourism, though I would think Florida would welcome tourism right now. I guess economic needs are overcome by survival needs there. We are weighing the same pros and cons of reopening, with some restrictions, some of our businesses.

   Our political leaders, the people in the arena right now, are trying to balance economic needs with survival needs, and it’s easy for the Monday morning quarterbacks to be critical. It remains to be seen how much of the state-wide allowances will be allowed in LA which very recently was the most infected urban area in the United States. I guess the best we can hope for is transparency in the making of those decisions for the greatest good for the greatest numbers of people.

   Transparency is a value that is expected of us in our culture. To be transparent means to say, “I am what you think. I have nothing to hide”.  If we say to someone, “I can see right through you.”, it means that the person being spoken to does have something to hide, but their hypocrisy is transparent to us.

   Transparency is a value in the Christian life, as well. Only we hope that people will see God when they look through us. Then again, maybe it’s more accurate to say that we are mirrors. Who we are is transparent only to a point. It’s what’s behind the transparent part that reflects the light of God to the world.

   You have probably wondered about my voice. Some have said it sounds tired, like I’ve been screaming at the big game and gargling with drain cleaner, it’s just what I have come to think of as the product of allergies. I’m doing what my ENT doctor has prescribed, and I just sent for a book on voice development. I’ve also begun to think of my voice as “gravely”. It’s not a problem. It’s a feature! Making a fault into a feature is not part of a transparent life. It’s deflection, unless one is resigned to their circumstances or has just given up.

   The same can be said of making a virtue of necessity. Should I feel virtuous that I’m not going doing something when I don’t actually have a choice. Our if I have to do something good that I don’t want to do, should I call that a virtue?  It is not being transparent when I seek to “virtue signal” when in fact I have no choice.

   King Duncan, one of my favorite preachers, once told the story of the night Michael Jordan scored 69 points in a single game. Stacey King, a rookie for the Chicago Bulls, was called off the bench near the end of the game and went in, got fouled, and scored one point. He later told reporters, ““I’ll always remember this as the night that Michael Jordan and I combined to score 70 points.”

   Our transparency as Christians comes from our belief that it us useless live any other way. The one relationship that defines who we are is our relationship with God. Can we hide anything from God?

   We are utterly transparent before God. The good thing about this is that we don’t need to hide anything. We bring everything we are before God as an offering, or as an area in need of repentance and reform.

   Here’s the story of how King David, ancient Israel’s greatest King, an ancestor of Jesus and the model for the Messiah that many expected, was selected and anointed by God, acting through the prophet Samuel:

*1 Samuel 16:1-13

   I’ve been working on a podcast version of these videos. I’ve recorded the first 40 or so of the 84 videos we’ve done and expect to be caught up by the end of February. The audio recording software I use is called Audacity.

   I record each podcast in segments. Audacity has a button you can click on that will compress all the segments onto one screen, so that you can get the big picture.

   It also has a feature that allows you to expand the segments way out so that you can see just a few seconds of audio on the screen.

   I thought that seeing the whole thing in one page is kind of the way God sees our lives. God sees us in the context of our entire life all at the same time.

   But then, it occurred to me that God is also with us in every millisecond of our lives and sees every little thing about us.

   God sees everything about us, our most authentic selves, everyone in the whole human race. Everyone who has ever existed, exists now, and will every exist. Everyone.

   All we can do is to live authentic Christian lives, not Church lives or culturally acceptable lives or people pleasing lives, but authentic Christian lives filled, empowered and led by the Holy Spirit, God’s personal ongoing presence for good in the world, the streams of living water. Christians, as the bumper sticker says, aren’t perfect, just forgiven.

   All we can do is to live so that we will not be ashamed before God to live transparent lives, because that’s the only lives we can live before God.

   And, God loves us, and came to be with us as fully and human and fully divine. God came to suffer and to die for us in all our authenticity, all our inauthenticity, all our honesty and all our illusions, all of our sinfulness and all of our saintliness. All of it.

   King David, anointed by God, who saw his heart and sees ours, is credited with writing most if not all of the Book of Psalms, in the 138^th, beginning at the 13^th verse, we find:

*Psalm 139:13-18