Meditation on who we are; and check out the updated website

Meditation on being who we are.

“The Wiz” is a grooved up version of the 1930’s musical “The Wizard of Oz”. You know the story—it starts out in Kansas and a tornado whisks an approximately 15 year old girl off to la la land. There she meets witches, a talking scarecrow, tin man, a lion, the fake wizard and, of course, her real self. The movie used go from black and white to color about halfway through. The whole thing was great: evil and good witches, flying monkeys, and a scary, if happy resolution. I loved the movie. But then, I liked “Amahl and the Night Visitors”, too.

The story line of the main characters is as close to real life as you can get. It’s all about the main characters looking for their “missing piece.” They all feel incomplete, and if they just get that one “thing.” They will be complete and everything will be fine. To get that missing piece, they must perform a certain task. In the movie, it’s not spelled out so clearly. In the Wiz, it is: Dorothy and her companions must kill the evil witch to get help from the Wizard. This puts a great ethical pressure on Dorothy. She doesn’t want to kill someone in order to be rid of her demons. She understands that disconnect. On the other hand she does want to move on with her life.

Well, anyway, she pulls it all off with a flourish and a few skirmishes. Only then does she realize she already has what she’s been looking for. The Wizard couldn’t give her self-understanding.

This is a God story of sorts. Popular theology understands God as the great giver of understanding and meaning. This keeps God God and people people. We don’t want to mix the two roles. Some feel more safe as an “I’m hopeless and God will save me” attitude. Less popular theology claims understanding the self as the work of what it means to be human: “God’s self-disclosure comes when I am clearly myself and I know and appreciate who I am.” When we make no excuses (mistakes, yes, excuses, no), we are God’s creatures claiming our inheritance.

Genesis 5
1This is the list of the descendants of Adam. When God created humankind, he made them in the likeness of God. 2Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them “Humankind” when they were created.
Yesterday, a colleague was ordained a minister into the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)—one of our sponsoring denominations. In this personal and powerful service at 1st Christian Church (66th and Dodge, across from UNO) the man who brought the message was a good friend of the man to be ordained (there were a number of robed women in the service, too). His message was clear and powerful, centering on our human role of carrying the holy in jars of clay. This did not mean useless jars of clay, it meant imperfect jars of clay. That’s a good thing to claim.

Like Dorothy and her friends, we are not yet perfect, but we are linked to God and extraordinarily useful in carrying the sacred in this world. As the preacher said yesterday, “The problem is not in being who we are, the problem is our never ending fight to be who are not.”