Hide and Go Seek

I have a confession to make. I once melted a vinyl-upholstered chair. I’m not exactly proud of it, but there, I’ve said it. Now I can live in peace. It happened a long, long time ago when I was a student at the University of Virginia. During my second year there, I was living in a house with three other guys and we had a hideous orange vinyl chair in our living room. I think my roommate, Wart, had brought it from his house, or the landfill, I really don’t remember. It was ugly, no doubt, but it served its purpose and everything was fine until it started to get cold. That’s when we stoked up the wood stove in the living room that happened to be right next to the hideous orange vinyl chair.

Well, I suppose that I, as stoker of the fire, should have known better, but I was young and inexperienced in the ways of fires and vinyl. The fire I mastered. We had a roaring blaze in no time and we were soon stripped down to T-shirts and shorts just to survive the heat. It wasn’t long before we noticed a funny smell, though, and looking at the orange vinyl chair we discovered what it was. One side of the chair had turned to liquid. Now if you school children have been studying your science SOLs, you know that it’s perfectly normal for matter to exist in different states--solid, liquid, gas--but this is not acceptable for a chair. Needless to say, it was never the same again, which doesn’t mean that we didn’t continue to use it after this little incident. It was just more hideous than ever.

I have another confession from those years, though, and this one is a little more serious. I had a roommate by the name of Geoff and it was during that year, that second year of college, that we grew apart. Geoff was from New York City and he was trying to find his way in a houseful of Southern guys and there was a certain cultural adjustment we all had to work through.

Geoff loved basketball. We all did and that’s how we spent a lot of our free time. Once we even played a four-and-a-half hour marathon game that in our memories has now become legendary. The Game. But our interests started to diverge through that second year. Geoff spent less and less time in the house. I’m sure the fact that I was teaching myself to play the guitar during this time had absolutely nothing to do with it. We started to get on each other’s nerves. And we stopped talking to one another, not in a hateful way, but just because we didn’t know what to say anymore.

Friendships that develop in college can be intense. Lifelong friends emerge from the experience of sharing space and time together. But it’s also a time of change and growth and in a year you look back and realize how different you are than you were when the year started. What happens to relationships in the midst of change?

Well, they can take the route my relationship with Geoff took. A year later we were living separate lives in separate parts of the university and we rarely saw each other. But another way they can go is to introduce honesty and really confront the changes that are going on. I wish, instead of letting that relationship go, I had had the strength to say, “Geoff, I know we are going separate ways, but we’re still friends. Let’s talk about what’s really going on.” Perhaps we would have still gone very different ways. But maybe we would still be friends.

Richard Foster, in his book, The Celebration of Discipline, talks about the importance of honesty in relation to simplicity. He talks about the spiritual discipline of simplicity and considering what it means to live simply, since it is something that Jesus asked of his disciples. Foster says that part of that discipline is simple, plain speech. He’s pretty blunt about what that means: “If you consent to do a task, do it. Avoid flattery and half-truths. Make honesty and integrity the distinguishing characteristics of your speech” (CD, 93-4). Our culture now laughs at the blunt honesty therapy methods of the sixties and seventies as a “touchy-feely” extravagance, but there was a great truth there. We can’t be real until we can really say what we mean.

For most of us, me included, this really is a difficult discipline. Maybe we’re too respectful, especially us Southerners…too respectful to speak an unvarnished truth even when we see someone we love dying from the decisions they are making. Maybe we’re too fearful that the world can’t handle the truth. Maybe I’m too fearful that the world can’t handle me. “If they really knew what I was like, with all the mess that there is within me and in my life…if they really knew me they would abandon me.” And so we live our lives with some of the richest, deepest parts of ourselves tucked away, even from the people to whom we say we want to be most open.

Paul, in his letter to the Colossian Christians, reminds us, “Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self.” Failing to be truly honest with each other is a form of that lying.

This is my memory of a Garrison Keillor story. He once told a story on his radio program, A Prairie Home Companion, about a time when he was a boy and he saw his neighbor, a farmer in the town of Lake Wobegon, walking down to a ravine outside of town. Being curious he followed him from a distance, watching to see what the man was up to. He saw him pull a box from under some rocks and get something out and look at it. Then, after awhile, he put whatever it was back in the box and hid it away under the rocks again.

Well, of course, this got Garrison’s curiosity up, and after he was sure that the man was gone, he snuck down and got that box out from under the rocks. He opened it up and there inside were old, faded letters from many years ago. Love letters written to the man when he was much younger. He realizes that they must have been from an old flame in a time before the man was married and he kept the letters for who knows what reason – to remember a special time in his life? To reconnect with something that was very important to him, something the relationship with the young woman brought to life? But it was definitely something that he wanted to keep hidden, even though he was now very old.

Garrison says that he would often go to the ravine after that and read the letters, even though he knew he was invading a very private space. He was fascinated by the depth of the exchange between the two lovers, the ideas they talked about, the plays they attended. Plays! He had never known that this dour, old farmer had an interest in plays or philosophy. He would never have expected it. Suddenly he looked at this man in a whole, new light, with a whole, new respect for how deeply he experienced life.

Then one day he was putting the box away beneath the rocks when he saw the man approaching from down the ravine. He didn’t think it was obvious what he was doing, but he hurried away trying not to look guilty. Later that afternoon, though, he saw the man standing over a fire behind his house burning all of those notes. Now, Garrison says, that man is dead and all the richness of those letters has never been told. Only he knows that story of what that man was capable of and one day he will be gone, too.

“Do not lie to each other,” the apostle Paul says, “because you have put on a new self in Christ.” You have put on a new self in Christ. Have you ever worried that putting on a new self in Christ might mean giving up your true self? If I give myself to Christ, does it mean that I lose my individuality? If I say ‘Yes’ to Jesus does it mean that I am less than I was? After all, Paul says that when we are in Christ “there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!” I don’t know what the modern equivalents to that are but it certainly sounds like there will no longer be Cavaliers and Hokies, baysiders and seasiders or any other distinctions. Christ is all in all. And where does that leave me?

The promise Paul gives to us comes a little earlier. To me this one of the most amazing promises in the Bible. It’s one of those things that takes a lifetime to live into. “Your life,” Paul says, “is hidden with Christ in God.” Your life, your true life, your authentic life, your honest life, your honest-to-God life, your life that you have been dying to live, your abundant life, your life that you have been trying so hard to conceal from everyone else because you’re just not sure how it could possibly be your real life, your life that is waiting to be born, to be exposed, to be revealed, your life that you never knew you even had until Christ came to liberate you from the life that is death…that life is hidden with Christ in God.

You know what this says to me? It says that we get real when we get closer to Christ. We get to be…we get to be the people God always intended us to be. And when we do we can give up all of the lies and illusions and delusions with which we’ve been trying to cobble together a life. We can stop trying to pretend that we’ve got it all together or that our lives are fine…no really, I’m fine…or that we’re not dependent on someone or something. We can stop the defensiveness, stop the elusiveness…and risk being honest with ourselves and with our brothers and sisters in Christ and, most importantly, with God. Most of us are giving lip service to God, saying that we trust God to take care of things, but as soon as our prayers are over we are grabbing everything back again. If we could be honest, oh, then we could be more than we ever imagined.

What does it mean that our lives are hidden with Christ in God? It means that we ultimately find out who we are by getting in touch with something outside ourselves. We don’t get dropped into the world self-sufficient. We, unlike any other creature on God’s earth, have the capacity to change our orientation to the world entirely. A possum does not come into the world with the capacity to ignore its instincts, pierce its tongue, get tattoos and start up a garage band. Only humans can do that. But humans can also find themselves in Christ. Humans also need to find themselves in relation to God. And the way has been opened for us to do just that.

I aspire to one day be the Alex Joyner that God intends me to be. It will be the most honest and authentic day I can imagine. It will also be the day when I give up trying to be separated from God’s love for me in Jesus Christ. I want to ask you to help me be that honest and open and I will pray to be able to do that for you. Thanks be to God.

Colossians 3:1-11 (NRSV)
So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.
Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry). On account of these the wrath of God is coming on those who are disobedient. These are the ways you also once followed, when you were living that life. But now you must get rid of all such things -- anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator.
In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all! As God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.