I finally got the results back from a DNA test to determine the genetic makeup from my ancestors. I was hoping for something exotic, like maybe I’d be 5% Native American. It all came back plain vanilla—just like I expected: 70% England, Wales, and Northwestern Europe and 28% from Ireland and Scotland. My 2% from Sweden is as exotic as it gets.
Instead of these physical markers of family, job, country, if you really trusted the person you were talking to and maybe passed the wine bottle around a while, you might tell them a psychological story of who you are: you might tell them how you think of yourself and what it feels like to be you.
But even together the physical and psychological can’t fully express who we are as a human being. Saint Francis near the end of his life spent time asking over and over: “Who are you O, God? And Who am I?”
What we are less likely to do is to tell our dinner companion what the Bible says about our identity.
IN the first chapter of Genesis we hear God pronounce that everything is good, and on the sixth day, after the animals and humans are created God sees everything and says it is “very good.”
I’ve told before the true story of the Georgia Tech student one Saturday morning in Atlanta has some evangelistic Christians knock on his door and ask him if he were to die today, does he know if he is going to heaven?
To which the young man responds—Of course he is. And when the skeptical callers ask how he knows this he says, “Because it wouldn’t be heaven without me.”
Whether he knows it or not, he is reflecting the truth of Genesis 1: because nothing good could ever be lost to God. This is why Jesus tells the stories of the woman sweeping her house to find the lost coin and the shepherd going into the wilderness to find the lost sheep.
In that very first chapter of the Bible we hear that humankind, male and female, is created in God’s image, so we could justifiably answer the question as to our identity, by saying, “I am the image, a reflection, of the Living God.”
Unfortunately, too many churches ignore this first chapter and instead drill into their members’ psyches the message about the talking snake and the eaten fruit of the knowledge of Good Evil from the third chapter of Genesis: that we are fallen sinners, banished from the presence of God, wandering the world East of Eden. If we really want to be self-revealing we might say, “I am a sinner far from home.”
In every person’s life there is evidence pointing to all three of these descriptions of who we are: We have all done and are doing good things in the world; we all reflect in some ways the love and grace of God; and of course we all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
One way to understand how these three stories fit together is to imagine that a heavy fog comes over our minds when we eat the forbidden fruit and take over God’s job of judging others. This fog creates this thing some call the mortal mind. The chief characteristic of mortal mind is that it hides from ourselves who we really are in God and projects in technicolor all the ways we fail life and life fails us.
Mortal mind generates a force field of negativity, like a toxic fog, rolling over a beautiful landscape.
When we believe what mortal mind is telling us, then we experience the world as a scary, dark, and threatening place.
Therefore, when we believe that life is “nasty, brutish, and short”, as Hobbes said, then we become anxious, greedy, and violent in order to keep our lives going.
It doesn’t take long for this kind of thinking to manifest in material ways. So now there are vast garbage islands the size of Texas floating around the Pacific Ocean, filled with every sort of waste, including micro-plastics and macro-plastics.
Our inner fog produces a literal smog over this “fragile earth our island home.” All dog owners know only a very sick dog will soil its own den.
And now we are confronted with an existential crisis of global weirding and climate change that threatens our existence as a species. The cockroaches may be fine, but human beings won’t be fine.
What’s really sad about how mortal mind is destroying lives, oceans, skies, and world, is that we do not need to be enslaved to it.
Jesus in his temptation in the desert resists the mortal mind with its hunger, greed, and fear, because at his baptism he receives the truth about who he is: God says to Jesus: “You are my beloved son and with you I am well pleased”, and he is flooded with an awareness of God’s Spirit.
In other words, Jesus is convinced that the mind of Christ is his true mind and this mortal mind, shaped by the world in which he is raised, has no power to control him.
And Jesus spends the next three years before his crucifixion empowering women, men, and children to realize that we too share the Mind of Christ and are free in Christ to ignore the mortal mind and its fog.
The great 20th century theologian Karl Barth puts it this way:
“In his anxiety man sets his own house on fire. He bursts the dyke which protects his land from flooding. He torments and crushes himself. In his attempt to find security, he loses it.”
He says but “If we lived with the objective truth that there is no reality in the enemy which threatens us or the abyss before us because we are in the hand and under the protection of God, we should not yield to care [and worry] in the first place.”
Church Dogmatics IV.2, 472
“We should still exist simply as a child of our Father.” V.1.493
Many of us may believe this intellectually, but until it sinks into the marrow of our minds, we find it hard to experience it in our lives.
In the gospel reading designated for this day, the disciples say to Jesus, “Increase our faith.”
But as Tom Wright puts it, faith is like a window through which we can see God, so what we need is not a bigger window, but a bigger God. Even if all we have is faith the size of a peephole, we can see our All-Good Creator who makes us in God’s image and gives us the Mind of Christ that sweeps away the fog covering the landscape of our lives.
As Jesus says, the birds and the flowers, even our pets, show us how to live in the Mind of Christ.
And as we take the time to look at the good God through the window of faith, we show this to one another.
At the prison Bible Study an inmate who regularly attends says that when a new inmate asks, “What’s your story?”, he sometimes says, “I am a beloved child of God.”