FaceValues - LIFE : What's it all about?
Sermon preached at Barclay Church, Edinburgh by Rev D. Graham Leitch
based on materials provided by FaceValues
6 October 2002

In our facevalues series this morning we are challenge to think about LIFE. What IS life? At its most personal, intimate and disturbing the question “What is life?” is reduced to the question “Who am I?”

WHO AM I?
Today this question haunts people as never before. During the Christian era - in the past - the answer to that question was supplied by the church - a Christian understanding of creation, the world and human life was taught by the church and even where it was not explicitly believed was assumed. But it is no longer so today.

Today no answers are assumed and so the question looms larger and the crisis is sharper. “Who am I?” “What’s life about?” “Where am I going?” “Why am I here?”

The search for an answer is not to be found so much in the ivory towers of academia as in the every day behaviour of ordinary people - in their moral values and choices, their fashion statements and sharp changes in lifestyle.

It isn’t hard to identify, beneath the restless and sometimes frenetic behaviour of younger people, an anxious search for image, status, self-esteem, feel-good experience and self fulfilment.

A RELIGIOUS ANSWER
Christianity has always affirmed that the answer to the question “Who am I?” is religious or spiritual - to do with the human heart, human life and its relationship to its Creator. Close to the heart of the Chrisyian message lie important secrets concerning human identity and purpose. Who we are is rooted in the truth that our ultimate origin lies in God.

Just as we have been created by the God Jesus taught us to call “Father,” so we can only recover a true understanding of our origins and destiny with His help. Once we leave God out of the equation we soon drift from our moorings and find ourselves lost and without landmarks on a vast ocean of uncertainties.

“Who am I” then, and “What IS life?”

QUOTATIONS
Here is a selection of answers from famous names of the past:

“Life would be infinitely happier if could only be born at the age of 80 and gradually approach 18”

Mark Twain

“Life is not a spectacle or a feast, it is a predicament.”
George Santayana

“Real life to most men is a long second best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.”
Bertrand Russell

“We are the straw men, the hollow men... where is the life we have lost in living?”
T S Eliot

“Life us like a cup of tea, the more heartily we drink the sooner we reach the dregs.”
J M Barrie

“When a person puts his best foot forward he gets stepped on - that’s life!”
Anonymous

“The dignity of man lies in his ability to face reality in all its meaninglessness.”
Martin Esslen
“Life is a long headache in a noisy street”
John Masefield

Pretty depressing, eh!! Let’s see whether the Bible’s got better news!!:

WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS
As Christians we take our bearings on the subject of LIFE from what the Bible has to say. In the Bible we find that the question of IDENTITY isn’t new. The ancient Psalmist was asking the same kinds of questions we ask when he penned the words:

“When I look at the sky which you have made, at the moon and the stars which you set in their places, what is man that you think of him; mere man, that you care for him?”
Psalm 8:3-4

The answer that the Bible gives, when it comes to human life, centres around the key idea of the IMAGE OF GOD. We were made, the Bible says, IN HIS IMAGE. this is something that we touched upon last week - but it all-important because it conditions all that we think about life and has a bearing upon our approach to every question that affects or impacts even one human person.

Though human beings are created “in the image of God” however, the Bible tells us that this image has been marred by SIN. As a result the perfect relationship with the Creator which was part of God’s will at the first has been damaged and destroyed. Yet his image remains - as I put it last week, “it is over-written but not obliterated”; something of the divine stamp remains.

God’s purpose in sending Jesus Christ, the Bible teaches and Christians have always claimed, was so to act as to make possible the recovery of that image and relationship.

We find Jesus himself described in 2 Corinthians 4:4 as “the glorious Christ...the image of God.”

As Christians we believe that Jesus is “the image of God” in the ultimate sense - as the Son He uniquely reflects the glory of the Father. he is, the Bible says, “the radiance of the Father’s glory”
Jesus came to show us what God is like - here is the “image” the perfect reflection and therefore the revelation of God.

THE IMAGE OF GOD IN HUMANKIND
This is very wonderful. But it is not all. Jesus also show us humankind as God intends - as Adam was perfect, so in Jesus we see the perfection that God desires. That’s why he’s called the second Adam.

And God’s purpose in sending Jesus, the Bible says, is to redeem us from the consequences of the fall so that the process of being restored and transformed into God’s image can begin in us again.

This is what Christianity is at base about - its about sinful men and women who have come to Jesus Christ, accepted Him as Saviour and submitted to Him as Lord, who are (and this is the way Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians 3:18 and Romans 8:29):

“being renewed in the image and nature of their Creator.”

In other words its about a divine RENOVATION PROJECT - in which we are called to rediscover our identity in God and God is working to restore His image in us.

Now that’s all quite heavy but its important because it’s the framework within which as Christians we view individual conduct and social policy alike.

We should welcome whatever moves LIFE, society and our world closer to the intention of God the world and its inhabitants. In the same we we should resist whatever undermines or seeks to destroy God’s intent - whatever goes against his purpose and revealed will for creation and humankind.

SOCIETY TODAY
As we look at present day society in Britain it is increasingly evident that the crisis of identity and the departure from life as the Creator intends in many spheres is producing a world in which consumer choice, individualism and self-interest are displacing traditional values based on the Christian message of love, righteousness, humility, self-denial and compassion.

Aggressive demands for individual rights and freedom have been emphasised at the expense of moral principles, public values and personal responsibilities.

The fruits of such departure from God’s order are manifest in the increase of violence and crime, the breakdown of relationships, the multiplication of mental health problems, the prevalence of drug abuse and alcohol problems, domestic abuse and an increasing suicide rate amongst the young.

Alongside this we see a lack of integrity in public life - the abandonment of any concept of decency in a society in which anything goes and the breakdown of trust (a subject we’ll cover next Sunday).
Claiming a care for the poor, society (in the form of commerce and the leisure industries) ruthlessly exploit the poor for their profit.

A MANIPULATIVE WORLD
One of the most frightening trends of all - frightening because it is so powerful and yet often unnoticed or simply taken for granted is the abuse of human freedom and the assault upon human dignity by COMMERCE which turns us from our earliest days into its victims.

Advertising is no longer merely intended to inform or encourage action that is wise or good - in the best interests of the individual or of society.

It intention is to create desire and persuade or manipulate us. The luxurious houses in “Country life”, “Ideal Homes” or “Homes and Gardens” make our perfectly adequate homes seem shabby and in need of urgent refurnishing. We are made to feel inferior or guilty if we don;t buy this season’s fashions - and our children are shamelessly bombarded with propaganda from their earliest years.

The average British person is exposed to between 5,000 and 10,000 TV commercials a year - we are bombarded by costly manipulative advertising at every turn.

The human individual is no longer a person to be appreciated or respected but a unit to be manipulated and exploited. And this abuse of humanity we accept in the name of progress!!

LIFE’S A LAUGH
“What is Life?” and “Who am I?” Today the answer to the first question’s “Life’s a laugh” or “Life’s fun.” But it isn’t so much fun when you;re on the receiving end of cruel humour or a sick joke.

And the question “Who am I?”seems increasingly to be answered “I’m me - I’m for me. I’m out for me? What I want’s what counts? What I like’s what matters? It's nobody elses business, my aim in life’s to please myself!!”

Where this comes to the fore is in what are nowadays called “life issues” subjects like abortion and euthanasia.....where a pregnant woman’s right to an abortion denies any rights to the unborn child forming in her womb (at one end of the scale) and the individual right to be “put down” whenever he or she shall choose is asserted (at the other).

There is an urgent need to recover the Christian concept of the SANCTITY and the DIGNITY of every human being, born and unborn, and the infinite worth of the individual in God’s eyes.

MARRIAGE IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY
In the same way the Judaeo-Christian concept of MARRIAGE - the permanent and exclusive union of one man to one women for life - is being replaced either by serial monogamy or looser forms of sexual of relationship which which many wish to see accorded equal value.

The Bible is quite explicit here - stable and healthy marriage relationships and secure and loving family relationships are the foundations of a healthy society. Where these are absent society is destabilised and children suffer.
Marriage is as basic as the creating of man and women. Jesus said, "God the Creator made us from the beginning men and women. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh."

It’s more than a temporary human preference - it’s a permanent divine instruction!

In a single generations we have seen changes in social structure which are as disturbing as they are dramatic:

The number of marriages in the United Kingdom has practically halved in the last fifty years while the number of divorces has increased more than sixfold.

As many children are conceived outside of wedlock today as are conceived by married couples and 4 out of every ten children are born outside marriage.

Divorce is common-place and while “civilised divorces” are fashionable bitter divorces are common.

Children are more than 3 times as likely to run away from home and young adults are much more likely to end up living on the streets if their parents have either not been married or have subjected their children to the process of an acrimonious divorce.

The teenage suicide rate is three times what it was 25 years ago.

“Well it’s the same everywhere!” you shrug your shoulders and say. But it is’t!!

Not only are more children born outside of marriage, do more teenagers become pregnant, more children languish in poverty, become homeless, take drugs and experience significant mental problems than at any time in out history - Britain has the highest divorce rate, the highest proportion of teenage pregnancies and the highest proportion of lone parents in Europe.

Is it not beyond question that children are paying the penalty of a post-modern lifestyle. Lack of love consistency stability and security combined with the legacy of broken homes are directly connected with the devastating erosion of young people’s sense of identity today.

Over against the negative statements about life with which we began, set the words of Jesus:

“I have come in order that you might have life - life in all its fullness.”

“I am the resurrection and the Life.. he who believes in me will LIVE!”

What an invitation! What an opportunity! What a promise!

AMEN

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