Why Are We Here?
Isaiah 6:1-8; John 3:1-10
May 31, 2015
Over the past 25 years or so, I have turned often for
insight, inspiration, and agitation to a collection of Wendell Berry’s essays
entitled, What Are People For? Unlike
the Westminster Divines, Berry never attempts a direct answer to the question.
Our 17th-century forebears from England phrased the question this
way: “what is the chief end of man?” Their answer? “To glorify God and enjoy
God forever.”
I posed the question my own way – “why are we here?” –
because I am so often at a loss when I go wandering and find myself some place
most unexpected. Moreover, I think place is important when you’re trying to
sort our what people are for, or what the chief end of humankind amounts to.
That is to say, people on a baseball field may have a
different end or purpose than people in a protest march or people at camp or
people in a classroom. Context matters.
At least, context matters when we try to live out our
purpose in the world. Even if we take the Westminster Catechism as our guide,
the way we glorify and enjoy God in a hospital room is probably different than
the way we glorify and enjoy God in a boardroom.
What Berry reminds me, though, is that while context matters
greatly in sorting what I am here for, in a larger sense, I am wherever I am to
experience the grace of engaging the world, the gift that opens upon engaging
creation and community.
In an extended prose poem that is the first section of What Are People For?, Berry writes these
lines:
Good work finds the way between pride and despair.
It graces with health. It heals with grace.
It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.
By it, we lose loneliness:
We clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands
of those who come after us;
We enter the little circle of each other’s arms,
And the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a
dance,
And the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out
of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear
hears it except in fragments.[1]
Listening for the fragments of the vast symphony is key to
discerning our vocation, our calling, our own individual responses – in our
given time and place and situation – to the question Berry poses: what are we
for?
It’s the question Isaiah begins to sort out as he imagines
the great dance of the seraphs in the midst of their song: ‘Holy, holy, holy is
the Lord of hosts; the earth is full of God’s glory.” Isaiah hears a fragment
of the great symphony, and in its strains he discerns the voice of God asking,
“whom shall I send?”
Berry might answer his own question – what are people for –
by simply saying, “to do good work,” and one could be forgiven for jumping to
the conclusion that this is some kind of “works righteousness” unless one
recalls that, elsewhere, Berry also writes that “good work, done kindly and
well, is prayer.”
God, after all, presumably sends Isaiah out into the world
to do something, to engage the world
– in other words, to do good work, work that heals, work that makes the world
more whole, work that builds up the commonwealth, work, that is to say, that
saves or, that at the very least, participates in God’s unfolding work of
salvation.
Which brings us to the reading from John’s gospel. If we’re
paying any attention at all, we recognize the incredible richness and challenge
of this particular passage and, what’s more, we know what’s coming next.
God’s unfolding work of salvation, John’s gospel insists,
involves being born again from above.
At some point or another in many of our lives we have either
been personally confronted by the question – “are you born again?” – or we’ve
witnessed people wielding the question like a cudgel on someone else. It’s
become such a trope of the conservative evangelical world that it’s difficult
to hear in it any fragment of the great symphony Isaiah heard.
But let’s see if we can look at this story afresh. After
all, it’s a story. Let’s pose some questions to the story. A guy – a faithful
religious leader, the story tells us – comes to see Jesus at night.
Why at night?
Why come at all? That is to say, what do you suppose
Nicodemus wants to learn?
What would you want to learn from Jesus?
The story, of course, doesn’t answer these questions, but
John’s gospel does offer us another glimpse of Nicodemus much later, for
Nicodemus brings a hundred pounds of burial spices to wrap Jesus’ body in after
the crucifixion. I can’t help thinking that something profound happened that
first night when Nicodemus met Jesus.
Jesus touched his life such that Nicodemus made a risky and
extravagant offering. The gospel is silent on it, but I believe Nicodemus loved
Jesus and his life was transformed by love.
That’s what love does. Love changes lives.
The great pattern of scripture, underscored in the texts
we’ve just read and repeated with remarkable frequency, is as simple as it is
clear: love compels transformative action. Put even more simply, in scripture,
the faithful are sent into the world to love the world.
The words describe the pattern, and it’s clear in the most
famous words of all Christian scripture – indeed, the words that John writes as
the conclusion to this night story of Nicodemus: for God so loved the world
that God sent Jesus into the world in order to transform it, to make it whole and
healthy, in other words, to save it.
Now this sounds all sweet and light and nice. God loves the
world. Jesus saves the world. Neat and tidy, seal it with a bow. But we don’t
have to look very far to understand that there’s more to it. Indeed, most of the
time, for me, anyway, I don’t really need to look beyond the mirror to know
that my own salvation is incomplete. I can look around my own neighborhood to
understand clearly that the salvation of my own community is incomplete, and a
cursory look at the news tells me that the salvation of the world is far from
accomplished.
That’s the truth that Nicodemus confronts in the midnight
hour – in order to live into wholeness, healing, community – that is to say, in
order to live into salvation – one must be born again … and again … and again.
Confronted with this phrase that has far too often been used to beat folks over
the head, we have two choices: ignore the phrase and be done with it
altogether; or, wrestle with it.
To ignore it concedes the field of Biblical interpretation
to those who want to beat folks up with it, so I choose to wrestle, and I’ll
make it a tag team effort by calling again on Berry.
Though he doesn’t make this claim explicitly, I think it’s a
perfectly fair reading of the third chapter of John and of What Are People For? to find in Berry’s words this definition of
“born again”: the practice of a proper love and respect for the creatures of
God.[2]
To be born again in the spirit means to practice a proper
love and respect for the creatures of God.
That is what we are for; that is why we are here: to
practice a proper love and respect for the creatures of God.
Now one could hear in that something almost a sweet and
light as God so love the world that God sent Jesus into the world in order to
transform it, to make it whole and healthy, in other words, to save it, until
we remember that the work of saving the world put Jesus on a cross.
There’s a great deal of money and power tied up in
maintaining the profoundly broken status
quo – that was true when the status
quo was defined by the Roman Empire and it is equally true now that it is
defined by the American Empire. Truth be told, there’s a great deal tied up in
maintaining the broken status quo of
our own lives as any addict knows well, but as most comfortably affluent folks
– that is to say, most of us – so urgently and persistently deny.
Again, I’ll turn to Berry’s essay to make this point clear,
and in terms that the church – that is to say, us – stand condemned by. Berry
writes,
Like any other public institution so
organized, the organized church is dependent on “the economy”; it cannot
survive apart from those economic practices that its truth forbids and that its
vocation is to correct. If it comes to a choice between the extermination of
the fowls of the air and the lilies of the field and the extermination of the
building fund, the organized church will elect – indeed, has already elected –
to save the building fund. The irony is compounded and made harder to bear by
the fact that the building fund can be preserved by crude applications of
money, but the fowls of the air and the lilies of the field can be preserved
only by true religion, by the practice
of a proper love and respect for them as the creatures of God.[3]
This does not mean that we ignore our responsibilities to
steward the resources we have been given. We take care of our homes and improve
them, just as we do our community’s space. But we do this appropriately when we
do so as part of the practice of
proper love and respect for the creatures of God.
That must be the chief measure of our various economies –
remembering, crucially, that economy
– in its Greek roots – means the ordering of the household. In other words, we
order our households in order to practice the proper love and respect for the
creatures of God. We make home improvements to improve our practices of love
and respect, and we do so in community because the community is so much better
at holding us accountable than we are by ourselves.
Imagine, if you will, convening a prayerful discernment
group before taking out a six-figure home-improvement loan – not a group to
help determine if you can afford it, but a group to bring me to a deeper
understanding of the motivations behind the expenditure, knowing that money
spent in one place is unavailable to be spent in a different one and
understanding that my chief purpose, my reason for being here, is to practice
the love and respect for the creatures of God.
If I am in the world to change the world, if I am in the
world to participate with God in the ongoing project of transforming the world,
then the salvation of the world must be part of the calculus in the way I spend
my money and the way I spend my time.
If that is not the true meaning of being born again in the
Spirit, then the phrase is empty and meaningless and has no hold on me. If,
however, such being born again … and again … and again does entail such
practices of love then it means everything, and it answers the only question
that ever really matters: why are we here? To save the world by loving it as
God’s own. Amen.
posted by David Ensign at
7:47 AM
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