Matthew
14:22-33
Dr.
Tom Caneta has spent the last nine years sequestered in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan
in northern Africa. Because he is the
very last doctor left in a war-torn region marked by starvation, disease,
death, and rocket attacks, he alone treats up to 500 persons per day.
Dr.
Caneta summarized his life’s work to the 2015 graduating class at his alma
mater, Brown University: ‘Everyone is searching for happiness. Everyone is searching for fulfillment. I think if you really want fulfillment in
this life, what I would suggest to you is go and get rid of everything you
have. Sell everything you have. Get rid of all your baggage and go live a
life of full and total service to other people.
If you do that, you will find that the rewards are incredible. You will find that you have fulfillment more
than you could ever have imagined. So I
throw that challenge out to you’. “Good News” magazine, July/August 2017, pg 37
Can we get so busy with doing or having whatever
it is we do or have that we forget who we are?
Is it possible to lose our sense of identity when we accumulate too much
“stuff”? This, I think, must be at the
heart of Dr. Caneta’s observation as well as Jesus’ own lesson about becoming “perfect”;
whole, holy, “perfect” (Matthew 19:21).
I think it is entirely possible, even likely, that we
can get so caught up in what we do for the Church that we forget we should always
be not just representing The
Lord but, rather, revealing
Him. It is easy to forget, especially
when we receive personal recognition, maybe get our picture in the paper, or community
service credit for school or the courts.
Sometimes a genuine desire to serve can be obscured by our own need to
feel good about ourselves, to make our lives count for something.
In the name of religion or in a personal quest to
‘save souls’, what we do for others can often become confused if we take on the
mantle of ‘crusader’ rather than the identity of ‘servant’. ‘Crusader’ is what we choose to do; ‘servant’
is what Jesus was, is, and has called His Church to be (“I came not to be served but to
serve”, Matthew 20:28).
I cannot help but to wonder if this may have been at
least part of Peter’s great challenge, the same challenge we often face
ourselves when we lose sight of Who not only gives our lives real and everlasting meaning but is our True
Identity, bearing the Image in which we are created. But when we are more aware of the world
around us and our uncertain place in that world than we are aware of the One
who calls us out of that world of obscurity and distraction, we become
afraid. And we become afraid, I think,
because we begin to lose sight of who we really are. Not who we think we are, but who we are created
to be.
Think about it like this. We strive to get a good education, get good
jobs, find a mate, get married, have children, buy a home; in all this, we are
making a life for ourselves. It is
normal, it is expected. It is, in fact,
the American Dream.
Aside from the education, however, all these other
things – even persons – will absolutely be lost. None of this will last beyond its own time,
including those we love. We’ve all been
to funerals; we know how every life story ends.
So if what we acquire can be so easily lost – and we lose ourselves in
trying to keep all we’ve acquired – how can any of this be our true
identity? Stuff that can be lost,
stolen, or can rust and rot? Other persons
with their own identities? Where is our
own, unique, individual identity if we are only someone’s husband or wife? Someone’s father/mother/brother/sister,
employee, employer, etc?
On the other hand, if we seek to be connected first to the One who created us “fearfully
and wonderfully”, the One who redeemed us, claimed us, and adopted us,
the One who gifted us and calls us into the Life He has already established –
if we go there first, then all the other things, all the other persons, all the
other jobs will fall into place. Then we
can know who we really are – which is much more than who or what the world
expects us to be. Think of it; the world
expects us to be generous, to give a little; but to give it all, the world
would call “foolish”.
We must also bear in mind that perhaps Peter’s first
mistake was in “testing” The Lord.
Could this be construed as a means of testing our own identity? Remember what Moses had affirmed to the
Israelites in the wilderness; trust
The Lord, but do not test Him. Do not test His mercy. Do not test His power. Do not test His determination that we can only be – for all eternity! – what He has created us to
be from the very beginning.
Absent that, like Peter, we will lose sight of The
Lord at the first sign of trouble because The Lord was incidental to begin
with. We even teach our children this
way, do we not?? Think about it. We will fight with and encourage our children
to get them to school, to do their homework, to become involved in
extracurricular activities, to excel and succeed … but we do not put that same
energy into getting them to Sunday school.
Worse, we fail to teach them why
this is important in the first place. From
the beginning!
They may be prepared to find a place in this world
which demands all that and more, but they – like we – will one day struggle to
find out who they really are, who they were “fearfully and wonderfully made” to
be from the very beginning. They will know only what the world expects
and demands from them. And at the first
crisis point, whatever that crisis may be, they will be lost – as many of us
have been.
Then when they, like Peter and like we, “notice
the strong wind” and the waves of the sea lapping over their feet and
getting what we refer to as “that strong, sinking feeling”, we “test”
The Lord to see if He’s still there – mindful
of our own will rather than His. Or,
like Peter and the others in the boat, whether we can even recognize Him –
especially if The Lord was the last One we expected to see!
We can spare ourselves and our loved ones a lot of
anxiety if we will take the means of grace at our disposal more seriously than
we take our jobs and our education.
Those means of grace – worship, study of Scriptures, fasting, praying,
the Sacraments, even fellowship with other Christians – are offered to us so we
can not only discover who we are in The
Lord but grow more faithfully into that role.
Then, like Dr. Caneta (Mother Teresa, MLK) and so many
others who have come before us, we will have no doubts, no worries. The “strong winds” of human culture will
not disorient us – because we will know who we are in Him. The case of ‘mistaken identity’ can only
apply when we worry more about what the world thinks of us and what we do than what The Lord has created and
called us to be before we were even
conceived by human means!
He knows us, all of us as The Body, each of us as individuals. And He wants us to know Him … first. Only n that Identity will we find peace and
calm and confidence. Even in the face of
life’s storms, adversity, and our own doubts.
This is what He wants for us all.
Let us together find the courage and the identity to live into
that. Amen.
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