Cheesehead in Paradise

Recently I added a new television drama to the line-up of things I like to watch. I guess I’m a Janie-come-lately to the crowd of people who watch this show, and I freely admit that I am giving in to peer pressure—because all of my friends, the ones I consider the cool kids watch it—but now I am a watcher of “Lost”. This is how I convinced myself that it was time to add Lost to my list of must-see-tv: I found out that I can watch it from the beginning, from the very first episode in streaming HD on my laptop. And then I figured out that I can prop my laptop against the wall of our exercise room at home, and watch “Lost” while on the treadmill. The last piece of the puzzle was that I figured out that I really need to spend an hour or so on my treadmill each day. Viola! A brilliant plan was born.

So, I’m about nine or ten episodes in right now, because I take one or two days off from the treadmill each week. Now, I haven’t exactly been living under a rock for the past three years, so I knew a few things about “Lost” before I got started: I knew about the plane crash, and the survivors, and that there were other people mysteriously on the island. I knew there was conflict between the survivors, and I knew that the men spent quite a bit of time shirtless, and that the women strangely did not seem to have bad hair days, which doesn’t seem too realistic to me. But I suppose if we can buy the idea that 40-some people survived that crash after the tail section of the plane went plummeting into the ocean, then we can be expected to believe that the survivors are all attractive people with good hair. That doesn’t explain the polar bear, but as I said, I’m only 9 or 10 episodes in.

There’s something else I instinctively knew about “Lost” before I started watching it in earnest: I knew that every character has a story, a history, and I knew that one by one, those stories would become part of the arc of story for the show. Forty-some people don’t just show up on an island—they all started the journey someplace else, for some reason. Some were in Sydney to run from something, some were there to run to something. But everybody has, so far, a secret—something that the rest of the survivors would not guess about them just from the look of them.

But on the island, dropped quite literally in the middle of the ocean, they try to deny or change their stories to become more like whomever they want to be on the island in a crowd of mostly strangers. The weak and crippled become strong, the brave have an opportunity to let down their guard, the shy and awkward appear charming and smooth, and the haunted live as those who have nothing left to lose. I haven’t seen the whole series yet, but I’m guessing that the characters will not be able to keep up the façade of being who they are not for very long. One, by one, by one, the truth will out. And one of the reasons that it makes for such riveting television is that—polar bears notwithstanding—we recognize what is taking place on that island.

Secrets. We all have them. We are made up of yin and yang, sunlight and shadow. We all have a public persona and a private one. And life seems sometimes to just be a balancing act between the two. For some of us, the hardest question we will answer on any given day is this one “Which me will I show the world today?” I wonder what secrets the Psalmist had. Anybody who says,

“Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.”

Anybody who says those words before God has got to be carrying around some serious mojo. That’s a lot of effort to go to to avoid God, isn’t it? Most of us just stay home from church, where we figure God can’t see us.

Many of you might remember that I chose Psalm 139 as the Psalm for the day of my ordination and installation. Now, if ever there was a day when we want God to show up, its ordination day. It’s a day when not only do we want God to show up, but we give the Three-in-One the whole front pew—the seats of honor. We want God and everyone else to see what has taken place, “See what we did!” We want the Holy Spirit to bear witness to this accomplishment: in spite of decent and orderly church process, in spite of geography, and in spite of ourselves, we all found each other! And so to celebrate this miracle, I sat in that pew and I listened while this was read:

For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed. How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! I try to count them—they are more than the sand; I come to the end*—I am still with you.

Those are incredibly comforting words to me—to someone, anyone who has ever felt that where she came from, and what she was made of were secret and shameful. To a person whose very origins are the source of speculation and gossip, to be fearfully and wonderfully made—knit together, and intricately woven—well, that beats the heck out of being a drunken one night stand. And on that day, when it seemed that so many things—things I could comprehend and things I couldn’t—had come together for God’s purposes, that declaration that we are all Imago Dei , made in the image of God, seemed especially comforting.

But what about when its not so comforting to know that God is there every moment of every day, stuck to us like gum to our shoes? What about when our efforts to make God over in our image—to escape the gaze of the One who has seen and known us inside and out since before we were born— fail? What about when our lives are more like a rock that gets turned over and the ugly underbelly stuff is there? A friend of mine insists the hymn “O Love That Will Not Let Me Go” should be called, “Let me go, let me go, let me go!”

When I was growing up, we were constantly reminded that “Jesus is watching.” And it was clearly meant as a threat, not a promise. Jesus was painted to be like a big cosmic Santa Claus—he knows when you’ve been sleeping, he knows when you’re awake. He knows if I’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake! So that followed me around everywhere I went. “Can’t kick my sister, even if my mom has left the room—no matter how obnoxious my sister is being. Jesus is watching.” “If grandma sets out a bowl of candy and tells each of us to take just one, I’d better not take two—even if it is my favorite candy and nobody else really likes it—Jesus is watching.”

At the same time I often wondered why “Jesus is watching” didn’t seem to work on my older brother, who liked to hold me upside down by my ankles over the toilet the minute our parents left the house, in order to threaten to give me a swirly if I didn’t cook him a frozen a pizza and serve it to him while he watched TV. I marveled at the kids who made fun of my funny buck-teeth and my skinny chicken legs on the play ground—didn’t they know that Jesus was watching? What made them think that they could get away with anything? I don’t know what bothered me more—that I was the butt of playground teasing, or the fact that these kids seemed impervious to the impending doom that was sure to follow when Jesus watched!

Those of us who spend our growing years looking over our shoulders, convinced that Jesus is watching, soon grow up and get over that. And sooner or later we realize that not only is Jesus not watching, but that God doesn’t really care about us anymore—no reason to look back, and no reason to hide, either. God surely must have better things to do—bigger, more important things—that keeping tally on our mistakes, or our triumphs. We become convinced that the Love That Does Not Let Us Go has got up and gone. And that is probably all for the best, in some strange way. Because some how, some way, it seems to get us to turn back to God. If we are lucky, it happens to us well before a “death-bed conversion.” But it happens—one way or the other. Because staying separated from God and seemingly unaware of God’s presence is not the default setting for being a human. Quite the opposite is true, in fact.

The truth of the matter is that God does know us inside and out. There may be times in our lives when that reality—that we are creature and not creator— manifests itself in our conscience, in that still small voice that reminds us that right is right and wrong is destructive. But it may also manifest itself in a balm in Gilead, in succor in our most painful moments, in strength just when we need it most, in reminders that in everything we do, we do not labor alone.
God, out of such love and devotion to humanity, was not content to be a far off god, keeping track of our faults and our failures. God needed to be beside us as well, to be one with us. Immanuel.