May 3, 2009 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Why Am I Me?

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 23
Psalm 2
1 John 3:16–24

“And by this we will know we are from the truth.”

1 John 3:14 (NRSV)

Be with me in my reaching
so I will be touched,
this time,
by a grace, a warmth, a light,
to unfold my life to a new beginning,
a fresh budding,
a spring within as well as around me.
O Lord, you have sketched the lines of spring.
Be with me in my reaching.

Ted Loder

A few months ago, when the great American author John Updike died, I finally picked up one of his novels for the first time. Updike had a gift that that all preachers hope to have: he could find, in the mundane and the everyday, real and deep connections to who we are, where we come from, what makes us tick. A New Yorker tribute to Updiketalked about the mystery and truth found in his characters’ smallest acts. The New Yorker noted that Updike’s religious faith was so compelling because it was linked with a simplicity of feeling that connected him to the common experience of the country (New Yorker, 9 February 2009). In Updike’s characters, we see humanity at its purest, endlessly grounded in the realities of life in the world while reaching, stretching, yearning for a taste of divinity. And Updike presented it all in language so deceptively simple, so direct.

The novel I read, Rabbit Run, follows the life of a young man—nicknamed Rabbit from his years on the basketball court—just out of school, married, with a young child, trying to come to terms with his life. Tragedy strikes Rabbit and his family: they lose a newborn child in an accident. Rabbit’s grieving process is described with striking realism, all of his internal monologue laid out on the page for the reader to see. On the day of the funeral, as the family walks down the street, Rabbit seems almost to step outside of his body as he asks questions about his life. Walking along that street, Rabbit notices things that he doesn’t usually see. Updike’s words:

The gutter along Potter Avenue where the slime-rimmed ice-plant water used to run is dry. The houses, many of them no longer lived in by the people whose faces he all knew, are like the houses in a town you see from the train, their brick faces stern in posing the riddle, Why does anyone live here? Why was he set down here; why is this particular, ordinary town for him the center and index of a universe that contains great prairies, mountains, deserts, forests, cities, seas? This childish mystery, the mystery of “any place,” prelude to the ultimate, “Why am I me?” reignites panic in [Rabbit’s] heart. Coldness spreads through his body.

And in a way, at the moment I read that question, a chill spread through my body. What a deceptively simple question: Why am I me? What question could be more simply stated and yet so wrapped up in the deep and high and broad mysteries of God?

I have been haunted, perhaps in a good way, by that question over the past few weeks. I know that I’ve asked the question, in my own way, since childhood. I can remember an early fantasy, going about my day as a child and suddenly thinking, Is all of this real? Maybe everyone else—my brother, my parents, my friends—maybe they’re all robots or aliens, and everyone knows about it but me. Are they all watching right now? Is all of this being done just for me? Why me?

Outside of my own childhood, the first thing that occurred to me about this question—Why am I me?—is that most of us probably ask it, like Rabbit, in the desperate times of our lives, times when we almost step out of our body and view with a sense of disconnected horror the scene that is in front of us. The loss of a loved one, a broken relationship, the end to a job, the loss of savings, or the onset of cancer or some other serious illness—any one of these things might cause us to step back and ask, Why, God, am I me? Why is this my life?

Then it occurred to me that the question is broader than one of our own suffering. We can also ask it when we realize that we have it rather good. I returned from Guatemala a week ago. I was there on a mission trip with a group of health care workers. Mission trips throw us off our normal rhythm. That’s actually one of the points of going. People are away from their jobs or are doing them in a different context. They are away from their families, living among a new group, often in close quarters and confronted with realities they’ve never seen before. When a group of Chicago doctors and nurses meet a four-year-old girl who has traveled twenty hours for a hernia operation, when they operate on thirty-six patients in a week, when the heaviest full-grown adult weighs 151 pounds, when there an orphanage connected to the hospital shelters children whose parents have left them because it’s the only way to find work—when we see these things, how can we not, with a confusing sense of our own good fortune and the tremendous hardship faced by others, step back and ask, God, why am I me?

And if we can ask this question in good times and in bad times, if we can ask this question when we feel cursed and when we know we have been blessed, it seems reasonable to assume that we ask it in ordinary times too. When work has become a bit too boring, when there are too many errands to run, when every day is just fine, but one day just sort of blends into the next one, isn’t it the normal reaction to, at some point, turn off the ignition or empty the dryer or hit “send” for the sixty-seventh time that day and sit back and ask, Why this life? Why am I me?

It’s a theological question. It’s about us and God. So eventually I started to think about the Bible and what it might bring to bear on this question. Long ago, at least intellectually, I left behind the notion that the Bible is an answer book. There are a lot of preachers out there who want to comfort people with the idea that the Bible is God’s “Little Instruction Book,” that it functions like a “Frequently Asked Questions” page on God’s website. I’m glad those people want to comfort people; I think they’re wrong about the Bible.

It’s not that the Bible doesn’t address our questions at all, but it seems to me that the Bible is much less a book of specific answers to questions than it is a collection of how real people have struggled with the questions that faced them many years ago and still face us today.

At times scripture might answer a different question than the one we’re asking. This “Why am I me?” question is essentially a question about how and why things are created the way they are, so it stands to reason that we might look for an answer in Genesis. But Hebrew Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann, among others, reminds us that the people who wrote Genesis weren’t really trying to explain how or why creation happened; their concern was to establish that however and whyever it happened, God was the one who created us and that same God calls us to take care of the world. That’s a very different answer than what the creationists are looking for. Why am I me? is a good question, but there’s a chance that the kind of individualism and psychological introspection that goes into a question like that really wouldn’t have been a part of the ancient Israelite worldview, so even if the Bible were intended as an answer book, that question probably wouldn’t be addressed.

That doesn’t seem very helpful, does it? I like to think that I’ve made my peace with the idea that the Bible doesn’t just give me answers, but the truth is that when I can’t get the answers I want, it still frustrates me. One of my fears is that when people assume that the Bible is an old book from a different time that doesn’t have anything to do with them, one good reason to think that way is that the Bible doesn’t always answer our questions. But the Bible does something different than that, and over time I’ve come to think that what the Bible does is actually more helpful than providing answers. In the pages of the Bible, we don’t get answers that apply the same way in every place and time, but what we do get is that in the Bible we meet vivid, particular people, and we see what it’s like for them to struggle with questions they have. And I think sometimes the stories of particular, unique people mean more than answers.

Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about. This past week, the Silk Road Theatre Project was here at Fourth Church to present a staged reading of a new play. Silk Road, as their name indicates, presents plays about places where different cultures intersect; this week’s play was about an American woman’s visit to Lebanon during the Israel-Hezbollah War in 2006. Muslims, Christians, and Jews were all in attendance at the play, which hit on many of the most contentious topics about Israel—or Palestine.

The play, which is still undergoing revisions, was intentionally followed by a discussion with the playwright, Leila Buck, who also played the main character. Now this play was close to being a one-woman show, in the sense that Leila told her story about the war, and the other three actors who were involved were just sort of background voices. They weren’t characters that you learned anything about; they were just generic voices who responded to Leila, prodding her not to neglect the point of view of Zionists, of Hezbollah, of soldiers and pacifists alike. Leila responded to all of them.

When the play was over and the discussion began, it became clear rather quickly that, almost to a person, the audience loved Leila’s part of the play, but not those other voices. One man summed it up for the rest of us when he said something like “the voices had no identity; I didn’t get to know them, so even when what they said made sense, I couldn’t relate to what they were saying. But Leila, I got to know your particular character, so I was really engaged by your story and felt so connected with you. If you really want this play to engage people about the conflict in the Middle East, the audience has to get to know the particular people who are involved.”

When we really want to be engaged about a question or subject that is important and difficult, opinions and answers don’t mean so much. What engages us are particular people.

It is important to remember that in Jesus Christ, God did not come to earth as an intangible, mysterious orb of wisdom bringing advice from the heavens. God came as a particular person. Jesus had a name and face, eye color and hair color. He had a gender. He had a family and a job and a religion. He had moments of joy and moments of fear. He experienced times when he felt absolutely connected to God, and times when he cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus was a particular person. Now I’m convinced that God’s purposes would’ve been accomplished just as well if those particularities were different. God could’ve been born in Zimbabwe or Russia, as a man or as a woman. God’s purposes even would’ve been fulfilled if God had come into the world as a White Sox fan.

The point isn’t which of those choices God made. The point is that God did become a particular person. Some people are frustrated, and reasonably so, that our traditional pictures of Jesus don’t look more like them. Theologian Bill Placher once observed that Jesus may not be exactly like you, but if he hadn’t been a particular person, he would be totally unlike you. Jesus was every bit as unique and particular as every one of you. He knew all the ups and downs and uncertainties of human life, and for that reason, it’s my hunch, in some of those trying moments of his difficult life, if Jesus was as fully human as we claim he was, he must have at some point gazed up to heaven and asked, “God, why am I me?”

The Gospels tell a particular story about Jesus’ life that is there to try to help us as we wrestle with the mysteries in our lives. That’s why the Epistle of John I read this morning tells us to believe in the name of Jesus Christ and love one another as he commanded us. That’s why it says to love not in word or speech but in truth and action. John repeats those orders again and again. I’m not sure what to do with those orders all on their own. But those orders aren’t supposed to stand on their own; they’re supposed to hearken back to the way Jesus lived his life and the way he loved. It’s that whole particular story that should intrigue us. It’s in that particular story that we see how Jesus dealt with the unique questions of his human life, and if we know that story, then we can start working on our own story, not because our own story is just like his, but because we know that, just like us, Jesus asked the questions.

I’m sure Jesus struggled mightily with so many of the kinds of questions that plague you and me, but there’s also a way in which Jesus went about it differently than us. Jesus had a special relationship to God. Jesus appreciated his relatedness to God in a way that you and I seldom do. We see this in the way Jesus asked the questions. His questions are inextricably linked to God’s story in scripture. Jesus draws on the Hebrew scriptures when he questions God. When he cries out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” he’s quoting the psalms.

The psalms deal with lots of life’s particular struggles and questions: war, death, poverty, betrayal. If it’s a deeply human question, it’s in the psalms. But the psalms aren’t full of answers. The psalms are poetic. They’re expressive. They’re how we cry out to God about the things we don’t understand and how we give God thanks when we begin to understand.

Because of his relationship with God, I imagine Jesus really knew what it meant to say the words of the Twenty-Third Psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd . . .” He may not have been able to explain to you and me what it meant, but he knew. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. . . . Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me . . .”

I find great comfort in the expressiveness of the psalms, even if they don’t provide me with answers. The psalms were originally supposed to be sung, which we sometimes still do; music can give the words even greater substance.

We read the Twenty-Third Psalm together this morning. During the offertory this morning, you’ll hear a musical setting of it. Leonard Bernstein wrote the arrangement; it’s a favorite of mine. Sung in Hebrew, we hear the words of the Twenty-Third Psalm “Adonai roi lo ecsar” “The Lord is my shepherd”—comforting, welcoming, God wrapping us up and holding us tight. But the really remarkable thing about Bernstein’s arrangement is that interwoven with the peaceful, reassuring message of Psalm 23 is Psalm 2, which we also heard this morning. “Why do the nations rage against us?” The music is percussive and pounding; the Hebrew matches it. “La ma ragashu, La ma ragashu goyim, La ma ragashu.” Throughout the piece, Bernstein plays these psalms against one another. He seemed to know something. Bernstein wasn’t looking for an answer. He knew that the conflicts of life, the conflicts between nations, the conflicts between people, the conflicts within us, they will continue. But he also knew that there is no place, no conflict, no question, where God is not present.

Why do the nations rage and the people plot in vain? I may never know. But the Lord is my shepherd. Why am I me, why do I suffer, why must others suffer, why is this my life? I do not know. But Christ has lived this life we live and calls us to love one another as God has loved us. And the questions will continue. But the Lord is my shepherd.

Amen.