Sunday, January 18

Here's my reflection/sermon for today (Sunday, January 18)

At our lectionary discussion group last Tuesday evening, the group started off fairly cautiously exploring the concept of what it would mean to be known. It didn’t take long, however, for one member of the group to throw caution to the wind and ask a rather provocative question.

“I can see how it would be a good thing to be known if you were a regular person,” the member began, “but what would it be like to be known completely if you had issues – I mean serious issues. If you lacked a conscience... If you were a sociopath, for instance?”

As the group sat quietly for a moment contemplating the question, wouldn’t you know it – my mind began racing. And within a matter of seconds, it landed on a particular individual that I had encountered on a television show.

On October 1, 2006 the world was introduced to a character in a Showtime program titled simply: “Dexter”. The show told the story of a thirty-something year old man by the name of Dexter Morgan.

Dexter was a young man whose life had begun with a horrific trauma that most of us here could not imagine living through. His single mother who – at one time had been a drug user – had turned police informant. She was involved in a sting where her cover was blown. As a result, she was taken with her children to a small storage unit by associates of the drug dealers and brutally murdered in front of her two young sons: Brian and Dexter. As if being forced to watch the brutal murder of their mother wasn’t bad enough, Brian and Dexter were left alone in the bloody storage unit for days with their mother’s body.

One of the policemen who eventually found the boys made the decision to adopt Dexter – knowing full well all of the details of Dexter’s life. Despite years of interventions that followed, Dexter’s adoptive father – Harry – knew that Dexter had deep-seeded issues that he would probably never be able to fully overcome: mainly a propensity toward violence and a fascination with blood.

Given that knowledge of Dexter, Harry made two decisions in a bold attempt to salvage Dexter’s life. First, he decided to get Dexter involved in hunting – which he hoped would serve as an outlet for Dexter’s propensity toward violence. And second, he helped set Dexter on a path of study that led him to a career as a blood spatter specialist in the Miami police department – a career where he could be around blood and not get himself in trouble.

These two actions represented desperate attempts by Harry to take the knowledge he had of Dexter and make the best of a bad situation. And while Harry’s plan seemed to work for a while, eventually it broke down – and Dexter turned into a vigilante serial killer who administered his own brand of justice.

All week long, my mind pondered a question regarding the issue of what it meant to be known that grew out of both the Tuesday evening discussion and Dexter’s circumstance. That question was this: what makes being known by another human being different than being known by God.

The more I thought about the question, the more a sense of clarity began to emerge for me. Let’s see if I can help bring some of that clarity to you as well.

When we think about what it means to know another person – there’s usually a passive side to that process. We think that in order to know another person we simply need to get inside their head a bit and discover what makes them tick. It’s there that we often stop – at the point of understanding. Under the guise of getting to know someone, we allow the other person to stay the same.

So what about the act of being known by God? How’s that different?

In his commentary on the book of Psalms, J. Clinton McCann, Jr. says that the implication of the Psalm, is three-fold: “our lives derive from God, [our lives] belong to God, and [our lives] find their true destination in God’s purpose” (New Interpreter's Bible 1237). That is where the seed of the difference lies.

You see unlike the process of being known by another person - where the goal is to stay largely the same - the goal now becomes something else: transformation – transformation in the sense that we come to understand our lives are no longer simply our own, they are God’s.

Nowhere is that simple but profound truth more evident than through the person of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Had Martin allowed himself to settle for a goal of simply being known by others; Martin would have gone to his grave as the person others knew him to be in 1957. He would have gone to his grave with descriptors like “preacher’s kid”, “doctor of philosophy”, “husband”, “father”, and “pastor”. He would have accepted the status quo that surrounded him, and he would have taught us to accept the status quo as well.

Thankfully, Martin didn’t settle for simply being known by others. He aspired to be known by One much greater. A knowledge that was rooted in the awareness of where his life was derived from, whom he belonged to, and where his true destination lie. First, he allowed the power of what the psalmist called that “wonderful knowledge” to seep in and transform his life. Then he took that power out into the world and transformed our lives as well.

Friends, as I conclude my time with you this morning, I want to leave you with this simple and straightforward challenge. This holiday weekend I ask you to open yourselves up and allow yourselves to be made known: not simply for whom you are today – but for whom God is calling you to become tomorrow. If you do that one thing, we won’t be a room full of people who have gathered to honor the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. – we’ll be a room full of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s.

Amen.