Who do you think you are?  Has anyone ever asked you this, and in this way?  I asked someone this just the other day, and he just ignored me, he didn’t even answer me.  Of course, he was driving in his car, and I was driving in mine.  He’d pulled out in front of me, and I had to say something.  As a minister you have to watch what you say.  So the best I could come up with on the spur of the moment was, “Who do you think you are?” 

And this is the question I want to ask you today, in a friendlier way, of course, in a naïve way almost, not knowing precisely what your answer might be.  Who do you think you are?  In the big picture of things, in the grand scheme of the universe, who do you think you are?           

One of my favorite preachers is Peter Gomes, the preacher at the Memorial Church at Harvard University.  One day he answered the phone at the church, and the caller, a woman, asked, “Who’s preaching this Sunday at the Memorial Church?”  And Peter Gomes told the caller that the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard University was preaching that Sunday.  That’s his title, and he’s proud of it.  But the woman who called, unimpressed, and obviously not realizing who she was talking to, said, “Oh, is that that short, fat, dumpy, bald, nearsighted, little old man, he’s sort of strange looking?”  I’m not sure how the conversation ended exactly, but that sure deflated Peter Gomes’ ego right away.  But he went to the mirror and looked at what was in the mirror, and he had to admit that she had described him pretty accurately.  Among other things, he was kind of strange looking.           

I heard about a grandfather who was reading the Bible to his granddaughter, and they were talking about God, and the little girl reached up and touched her grandfather’s face, his older, kind of wrinkled skin, and she asked, “Grandpa, did God make you?”  And he told her that yes, God did make him.  And then she touched her own young, soft skin and asked, “Grandpa, did God make me?”  And he assured her that God did indeed make her, too.  And she touched her grandfather’s skin again, and then she touched her own soft skin, and she said, “Grandpa, God’s getting better at it, isn’t he?”           

So for some of us anyway, if we’re asked, even in a nice way, “Who do you think you are?” we might have to admit with Peter Gomes that we’re not all that much to look at really, some of us may even be a little strange looking, and like Grandpa we aren’t any of us getting any younger.  That’s one way to answer the question.  That’s one way to describe who we are.           

Others, perhaps a few scientists who have a certain point of view, might say that you are a cosmic accident.  You’re an accident.  Everything that’s here is here by chance, everything is arbitrary, there is no purpose or order or design, the universe is a cosmic accident, which means that you are here by chance, there is no purpose or design to you, you are a cosmic accident.  One Nobel-prizewinning physicist wrote that “the more we understand the universe, the more we understand that it is pointless,” pointless, meaningless.  We are, as another has said, “impotent nobodies hurtling toward nothingness.”           

Jacques Monod, in his celebrated book Chance and Necessity writes, “Man must realize [and I assume that you women need to realize this as well] that, like a gypsy, he lives on the boundary of an alien world; a world that is deaf to his music, and indifferent to his hopes and dreams and sufferings.”           

So, I don’t know how to say this so I’ll just say it, I don’t really know what you people are doing here, it would be impolite of you to leave now of course, but I don’t know what you’re doing here, if you are just a cosmic accident, if who you are makes not bit of difference to the universe, I don’t know why you sing, I don’t know why you play, I don’t know why I’m preaching, because the world, the universe, is deaf to your music, it is indifferent to your hopes and dreams, according to Monod.           

I want to mention Hemingway.  Hemingway is and will always be one of my favorite writers.  But I have to say that it’s disappointing that in the end Hemingway gave in to a kind of despair.  His field, so to speak, was beauty and poetry and the magic of words; what Hemingway could do with words.  But in a rather depressing short story you may know, “A Clean Well-Lighted Place”, he inserted the Spanish word “nada” which means “nothing” into the Lord’s Prayer.  He writes, “Our nada which art in nade, nada be thy name, they kingdom nada, thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada.”  He concludes with “Hail nothing full of nothing.”  Inspired by beauty all his life, and as one who inspired so much beauty himself, this is the best he could do at the end, “Our nada who art in nada.”           

So who do you think you are?  Is this who you are?  The thing is that not everyone who looks at the same facts of life comes to the conclusion that the universe is a cosmic accident.  Some scientists, for example, might look at the universe and decide that they are atheists or agnostics.  But they keep looking and after a while decide that maybe they are not atheists or agnostics after all, a religious faith, God, makes more sense.           

One scientist has said this, “Take the expansion rate of the universe, which is fine-tuned to one part in a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion.  That is, if it were changed by one part in either direction – a little faster, a little slower – we could not have a universe that would be capable of supporting life.”  Just tinkering with the fundamental forces of physics on that miniscule level would have completely eliminated the possibility of life.           

Another scientist has written that “all the seemingly arbitrary and unrelated constants in physics have one strange thing in common – these are precisely the values you need if you want to have a universe capable of producing life.”  All this has led one legendary physicist Freeman Dyson to make this famous comment, “The universe in some sense must have known that we were coming.”  The universe must have known that we were coming, it must have known that you were coming.           

Some poets, of course, write of this, rather than writing that everything is basically meaningless.  Longfellow wrote in “A Psalm of Life”:

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

Life is but an empty dream! –

For the soul is dead that slumbers

And things are not what they may seem.

Life is real!  Life is earnest!

And the grave is not its goal;

Dust thou art, to dust returnest,

Was not spoken of the soul.

Let us then be up and doing,

With a heart for any fate;

Still achieving, still pursuing,

Learn to labor and to wait. 

I love these words of David the king, “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and stars, what is a human being that you are mindful of him, that you care for him?  And yet you made him a little lower than the angels and crowned him with glory and honor.”  A cosmic accident?  An impotent nobody hurtling toward nothingness?  Well no, as it turns out, but rather crowned with glory and honor, “God’s own people”, as the writer of I Peter puts it, “called out of darkness into his marvelous light.”  The universe, God, knew you were coming. 

Do you remember my opening illustration of Peter Gomes, the preacher at Harvard University?  The woman who called and described him as short, fat, dumpy, bald, etc., and kind of strange looking, and he went to the mirror and had to admit that, well yes, that was kind of what he looked like.  But then he thought to himself, that description is not the sum total of who I am.  That’s not who I am.  I am at heart, he said to himself, a son of the Most High, I am a child of the King, I am cared for and loved by the very God of the universe. 

Do you know the name Charles Colson?  He writes and travels all over the world speaking to large audiences.  He speaks in a lot of prisons.  He was once in a prison in India.  You know that in India a whole class of people, untold millions, are classified as “untouchables”.  They are the poor mostly, the underclass, if you aren’t one of them, you are not to touch an untouchable.  A civilized person in India will not touch an untouchable.  So here’s Chuck Colson preaching in a prison in India to thousands of inmates in a field, most of whom are “untouchables”.  At the end of his sermon, just on impulse, it may not have been the wisest idea, it could’ve been dangerous, but he jumped down from the platform and waded out into the crowd of inmates, and they just kind of surged toward him.  But he was trying to shake every hand he could, touching the untouchables, trying to let them know that they are people of worth and dignity, they are not untouchable to him, they could never be untouchable to God. 

So who do you think you are?  Maybe you’ll look in the mirror and find some room for improvement.  Did I put that delicately enough?  But that, what you look like, is not who you are.  Nor are you untouchable, no matter what you think you’ve done.  Nor are you a cosmic accident.  No.  You are a child of the King, you were made in his image, destined for greatness and glory, a son or daughter of God with possibilities in you only the eternal ages will reveal. 

When I came to Christ Church a month and a half ago, as you can imagine, I got a lot of advice, I got a lot of advice on how I should act, what I should do, how I should run this place.  You can imagine, I’m sure.  And it’s all very good advice.  Maybe some of you have given me advice.  Maybe some of you are going to give me advice following this sermon.  But I think the best advice I got from anyone was something our bishop told me.  He told me this, this was his advice, he said, “Just be yourself, Duane, and everything’ll be just fine.”  Just be yourself.  Now he knows me pretty well, I suppose, and he knows that my self is far from perfect, and yet he said just be yourself.  Just be yourself that sometimes sins and must ask God for forgiveness.  Just be yourself that is sometimes tempted, and sometimes gives in to temptation, but sometimes, heroically, and with God’s help, doesn’t give in.  Just be yourself, always striving, always reaching, always dreaming of that better and best self.  Just be yourself.  It’s advice I pass along to you.