A chic, expensive London restaurant is so well attended it is booked up a year in advance. A man is refused a seat and shouts at the headwaiter: “Do you know who I am? Do you know who I am? Do you know who I am!”
So the headwaiter spots a psychiatrist on his way out and says: "Will you please tell this gentleman who he is?"
In John 6 63 Jesus says the spirit gives life, but the flesh is useless.
The spirit prompts the question: “Who am I?’
Stars exploded to create our flesh. Consider how every atom in your body came from the nuclear furnace of an exploding star. The atoms in your left hand may be from a different star than the atoms in your right hand, or from the same star as those in your neighbour’s hand.
John’s gospel suggests we are not meant to separate our spirit from the Father’s - the Reality giving us all our life. “That they may be one as we are one,” prays Jesus.
But we promote consumer stuff over creation stuff.
In North America alone, only one per cent of the total material consumption from shops is still in use six months after it has been bought.
While creation stuff dies and rises, consumer stuff is designed to be quickly obsolete. Adverts say we’re not good enough without more of it. We destroy the planet to keep the consumption going.
As someone said: “We borrow what we can’t pay back to buy stuff we don’t need to impress people we don’t like.”
Until the system crashes, again.
After WWII the US retail analyst Victor Leboux declared that consumption must be made a way of life.
His words were: “We must convert the buying and use of goods into rituals that we pursue. We must find our spiritual and ego satisfaction in consumption.”
And the Chair of President Eisenhower’s council of advisors on the US economy declared that its ultimate purpose was to produce more consumer goods.
Not health or wisdom or community, but more products.
A Basque proverb advises us otherwise: “Mountains don’t need mountains, but humans need humans”.
So, back to creation stuff. Each second, not even as long as it takes to breathe in once, as many blood cells will die and be born in your body as London has inhabitants.
You don’t know how it works, but it works without you controlling or consuming it. You can’t give instructions to the 35 million digestive glands in your stomach to digest even one strawberry in an expensive restaurant.
You are fearfully and wonderfully made, as Psalm 139 says.
The maps in shopping centres add: “You are here”.
But you are also embodied, as Jesus was, and in your better moments, you belong to an all-embracing presence. Failure to live these blissful moments alienates you from God.
A seven-year-old recently asked me who made me. “Who made you?” he said. “God” I replied. “Who made God?” he responded. “No-one” I said. “Then how did God make you?” he said.
Laboriously is the answer.
John 16 12 says: “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”
We are alienated from the divine in and beyond us. But when the heart breaks, truth beyond us can break in.
“Sin” a word connected with “asunder,” it is a rift. It is alienation, a feeling that our bond of belonging in God is gone, so we buy, borrow control or consume happiness.
Jesus is gone, so without God the Holy Spirit, death is a vastness too frightening for project self. But we either actively receive death or we are killed by it. We can’t make it or buy it. But we can let go of smallness.
Tumble in the expansive truth that we belong in infinite greatness and love does not come from a limited source.
If we put a fingernail against the night sky, there are a million galaxies just in the little space it obscures.
And in John 16 15 Jesus says: “The spirit will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you.”
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