Artisan Soul: Interpreting Life

[podcast]http://www.revkwon.com/podcast/artisan-interpretation.mp3[/podcast] Last week I concluded by saying that we find our own voice when we allow God’s voice to speak to us. In saying that, I was talking about how our voice is often the echoes of other people and as a result our voice gets drowned out. Yet when God speaks to us, we find the voice that was hidden away and can be released into the world, unashamed of who we were created to be and become that thing that we’ve always dreamed of becoming. I want to continue that train of thought this week as I introduce a paradigm in our ability to interpret the voice within us. There’s a psychologist from Princeton named Daniel Kahneman who won the Nobel peace prize about 12 years ago who said that we are all essentially two selves—an experienced self and a remembered self. What he meant was that we can choose how to define our experiences and remember them. Kahneman was that it is not our experiences but how we remember those experiences and even what experiences we choose to remember that have the most profound effect on our lives. The conclusion being that our experiences are not nearly as powerful as our memories. If you don’t understand the theory, it is that what has happened to us is not nearly as powerful or as formative as our interpretation of why it happened. Our life is defined by how we interpret it. We create through what we interpret and that interpretation changes everything. Let’s look at John 14.

 “Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. ² In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? ³ And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. ⁴ And you know the way to where I am going.” ⁵ Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” ⁶ Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. ⁷ If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”  ⁸ Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.” ⁹ Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? ¹⁰ Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does his works. ¹¹ Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else believe on account of the works themselves. (John 14:1-11)

When I was a kid going to summer retreats with the youth group at my church I never really understood the purpose of testimony time. Testimony time was a short period of time between singing and the sermon or right before a meal where somebody would get up and share their experiences in life before they accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and savior. I would lament testimony time and make sure I would have to go to the bathroom or do something or be late to it. I hated testimony time, it was so emotional. It was usually really sad and depressing. But the stories all ended the same way: those bad experiences led me to Jesus. I mean, how could those bad experiences lead you to Jesus? The reason it never made sense to me was because by all means those experiences that some of these people had would have surely destroyed me, but when they meet Jesus, they understand why it happened. I always, always, always asked couldn’t Jesus have done it another way? Why did it happen that way? That always messed me up. I hated testimony time because it didn’t make sense how they were going to redefine their experiences as gifts to be remembered so change who they can become—their best self. We don’t do testimony time often here at our church. We do it when one among us becomes baptized, we ask the person being baptize to share their personal story. The reason we do that is because in telling your personal story as defined by why and what, we interpret wounds as gifts and losses as models. You see in the passage we just read that our experiences often cause us to stumble over and over again; they cause us to doubt over and over again because we remember them as a disconnect between what we believe or believed and what our life actually looks like. John paraphrases it this way: Let not your hearts be troubled. How often do we allow our experiences trouble us? Isn’t the reason we explode in anger, apathy, bitterness, unforgiveness, and destruction because we allow our heart to be troubled by what our experiences are now. Moreover, aren’t those experiences now interpreted by what we remember about similar experiences we’ve had previously? I think most of us, rather than being terrified by our past histories and experiences, we’re more ashamed of them. We’re ashamed of what we did. We’re ashamed of where we came from. We’re ashamed to admit that we have various emotions and we can’t ward off the assaults that await us and we interpret that and become less than what our voice within us says we ought to be. To that, Jesus says, Believe in God; believe also in me. Whatever you thought about yourself and said about yourself; whatever experiences you had, whatever it is that tells you who you’re really not because God says otherwise, you need to stop doing all of that and believe in God—believe in Jesus. He says it right there. I want to deconstruct this passage a little bit here. Look at verse 2 and 3:  Two times Jesus says, “I go to prepare a place for you.” What does that mean? Let me explain what I think he’s saying to us. First, every obstacle between us and our room in the Father’s house is about to be redefined. Jesus is preparing it because I believe we’re not there yet—we’re not dead. We have plenty more experiences left in this life to live—future memories to be made and interpreted. I think Jesus confirms this in verses 4-6 when Thomas says, “I don’t know the way?” and Jesus response by saying, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” Our sins do not mean that our place in God’s household will be unavailable, or unsuitable because Jesus purchases our forgiveness and becomes the way to the Father’s house. He makes our room not only available, but tells us that we need to interpret the experiences that are coming through what he did and does for us. Secondly, Jesus says, “I go to prepare a place for you” because he wants us to know that our interpretation of our experiences cannot be void of knowing Jesus. I think this is one of the most important phrases in this passage: I will take you to myself. This shifts the focus from a place to a person. Where Jesus is, there is heaven. This a key distinction Jesus makes in this passage. You cannot interpret your life through Jesus if you don’t know who he is. You can’t interpret your life you do not know why he does the things he does and what he does in our lives. Jesus is your room in His Father’s house and He will come and take you to himself. The immediate presence of Jesus in your life redefines your past, present and future. It allows you to interpret life in Him and through Him. I want to point out one more thing about this passage. Jesus started by saying, “Believe in the Father, and believe in me.” He concludes by saying, “Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else believe on account of the works themselves.” There is a reason he says to his disciples, “believe in the Father” and it’s not just to create effect, although it creates a lot of effect and is effective the way he says it because it draws you two that word, “believe.” You see believing here is not just blindly trusting something without absolute proof or confidence. Rather, “believing” here is Jesus telling the disciples to examine the power by which their experiences are happening. He is telling the disciples to interpret those experiences. Albert Einstein once said, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” Jesus is telling us to choose how we’re interpreting the experiences of our lives. Moreover, he is telling us to be prepared to interpret the future experiences of our lives.  One of the best stories about interpreting life is from the Book of Job. Job is a Greek tragedy. It is written in the lenses of himself, his wife, and three friends trying to figure out why and what had just happened. If you don’t remember what happened, the story begins with Satan telling God that people only worship Him because He blesses them. Satan says that there isn’t a single person who wouldn’t curse God if their experiences in life began to be more curses than blessings. God disagreed and said that Job would worship Him regardless. Satan takes away Job’s kids, his house, his possessions, his health, everything. When Job hit rock bottom and his wife can’t come near him so she feeds him with a stick a few feet away, Job and his friends begin to interpret his experiences to reason out the things that had happened and why they happened. At the end of the story, all of them had interpreted Job’s experiences incorrectly. God tells Job that he’s been interpreting it all wrong. Look at what Job concludes after God speaks to him about how he should have interpreted life:

² “I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. ³ ‘Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?’ Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. ⁴ ‘Hear, and I will speak; I will question you, and you make it known to me.’ ⁵ I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; ⁶ therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”

It takes 42 chapters to come to the single conclusion: life can only be interpreted and embraced when we know the truth of who God is and why and what he does in our lives. Our interpretation will be informed either by the worst of who we can be or by the best of what we it means to be human. When we allow interpretation to be shaped by shame, bitterness, jealousy, envy, greed and hatred, our interpretation of life is skewed and the future becomes smaller and smaller. When our interpretation of life is informed by the best of human emotions, when we are informed by love and hope and faith, it changes the way we see everything. Let’s pray.