YOU LOOK HOT... HAVE YOU LOST WEIGHT?
- A critical examination of John 15 prepared and delivered by Tim, "The Theology Man" Muller-
Discussion: What is beauty? How do we recognise beauty in God? In Creation? In Art, Music, Poetry, Theatre etc? In others? In ourselves? How should we view ourselves?
So what we're talking about today is essentially self-image, an idea which Mary-Jane coldly stole from me last week, but which I'm going to speak on again today nonetheless. Basically, the question I want you to ask yourselves today is "how does my view of myself, my ways of speaking and thinking about my own worth, line up with the way God thinks of me?"
Self-image is an enormously important concept to have under our control, because our concept of self is the window through which we view the world. If we do not adequately understand or value ourselves, then our understanding of the world around us will be equally warped.
- Gandhi
The outward freedom that we shall attain will only be in exact proportion to the inward freedom to which we may have grown at a given moment. And if this is a correct view of freedom, our chief energy must be concentrated on achieving reform from within.
Sydney J. Harris - American journalist
It's surprising how many persons go through life without ever recognizing that their feelings toward other people are largely determined by their feelings toward themselves, and if you're not comfortable within yourself, you can't be comfortable with others.
In answer to this question of how we view ourselves, and how God views us, there are an infinite number of positions we can occupy, but I think essentially they're well represented by two extremes. So now we're going to look two video clips that represent these two polar views of the self, and hopefully will tell us a lot about what lies in the middle.
The Office - Series 2, Episode 6 - 5:05-7:03 -
David: Here we are. The Madhouse. Heya. Hi Tim.
What her? Just writing an article on me. For Inside Paper. Ben's w… Are you wondering? Ben, are you wondering who that is? Well I'll tell you all. If you're wondering who this stranger is, wandering round, she's writing an article on me for Inside Paper. Where have you been?
Random: Warehouse
David: Well you've missed me telling everyone. She's writing an article on me. For Ins… Subject matter. Right. What do you want to know?
Reporter: Do you mind if I talk to some of your staff later?
David: Why?
Reporter: Well my train doesn't leave till 1:30 so I I'll hang about if that's ok and have a chat to them.
David: Well I'll want to see what they say before
Reporter: Well I won't put anything nasty
David: Well they won't say anything nasty, so…
Reporter: Right so would you like to tell me about your individual outlook on management?
David: Sure. Put: David Brent is refreshingly laid back for a man with such responsibility.
Reporter: Yeah. Can you.. Can you just answer in your own words and then I'll work it out myself
David: Um. Brent mused and then replied…
Reporter: Sorry now David. Can you just say what's on your mind and I'm getting it down, so…
David: Well are you getting it down? Because you're not doing shorthand and I'm going to be pretty…
Reporter: Just…
David: Well. OK. Your question, I suppose was "is it difficult to remain authoritative and yet so popular?"
Reporter: Well no that wasn't my question
David: Well shall I answer that one first?
Reporter: Sorry no. Can we just stick to my questions?
David: Well maybe you should be clear what the question is, because I'm getting a little bit…
Reporter: OK
Scrubs - 9:47- 10:27 -
Dr Cocks: The key to my exercise programme is this one simple truth: I hate my body.
Turk: What?
Dr Cocks: Don't you understand that the second you look in the mirror and are happy with what you see, baby you just lost the battle.
Turk: You should give lectures to teenage girls.
Carla: Baby, I've been looking all over for you.
Dr Cocks: You didn't happen to bring his leash did you?
Carla: What are you doing here?
Turk: I'm going to go for a little run with Dr Cocks.
Carla: But I haven't seen you in forever. We were supposed to go to the park. I was going to let you tell me how pretty I am.
Dr Cocks: See you, chubby
Turk: Son of a… Baby, you're prettier, like, every day
Carla: I'm prettier at the park.
Discussion: So how do we think about ourselves? Clearly the positions taken by both David Brent, and Dr Cocks are absurd, but taking ideas to ridiculous extremes can often teach us a lot about the real world that exists in the middle ground. So how accurately or otherwise do you think the way we think about ourselves is represented by these two clips?
- arrogance vs self deprecation.
I don't want to talk about arrogance today. That doesn't mean it isn't important, and it doesn't mean that we don't all have a lot to learn about being more humble, but I think that the arrogance card has been very much overplayed by the Church, particularly historically, but still today. Scriptures like:
Luke 14:10 But when you are invited, take the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he will say to you, 'Friend, move up to a better place.' Then you will be honored in the presence of all your fellow guests. 11For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted."
And
2 Corinthians 10: 17 But, "Let him who boasts boast in the Lord."[c] 18For it is not the one who commends himself who is approved, but the one whom the Lord commends.
Are of course very important to keep in mind, but there has been a tendency to encourage the belief that we are all terrible people, which while it may be well-intended, is not helpful, and can only serve to demoralise people, which I don't think can ever be a Godly thing.
There is an illusion that it is somehow "spiritual" to think lowly of ourselves. We are taught to be humble, which is of course a good thing, but we confuse humility with self-deprecation, and this is not how God sees us.
So how then, does God see us? Well this brings me back to John 15, looking particularly at verses 9-17.
9"As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. 10If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father's commands and remain in his love. 11I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. 12My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. 13Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. 14You are my friends if you do what I command. 15I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. 16You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit-fruit that will last. Then the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. 17This is my command: Love each other.
Jesus not only speaks numerous times of his love for us, he calls us his friends. This is not some distant, impersonal, wafty love of a deity for his people, the love Jesus speaks of is personal. We are no longer servants, we are his friends. Everything he learned from the Father he made known to us. He chose us, and leaves us with the command to love each other how? As he has loved us.
Now any of you who know me will know that this is one of my many hobby horses, about which I am very passionate but thoroughly hypocritical. Yes, we must love others, regardless of where they come from, who they are, or what they have done to us personally or anyone else. If we are told to show the same kind of sacrificial love that Christ showed for us, then this is a given, but I think there is something we miss here.
"As I have loved you, so must you love one another," (John 15:12) or, a similar command that appears 9 times in the Bible: "love your neighbour as yourself" (Lev 19:18, Matthew 19:19). But hang on a minute here. If, on the one hand, we are to love others as we love ourselves, and if on the other hand we are to love others as Christ loved us, then what does this imply about the way we should think of ourselves?
We must not only love others, we must love ourselves. Indeed, it is impossible to love others unless we first love ourselves
Conor Oberst, in the song "June on the West Coast", which I was going to play but was usurped by Scrubs, sings (and I use the word "sings" in its lightest possible sense).
"and I went to San Diego in the birthplace of the Summer
And watched the ocean dance under the moon
And there was a girl I knew there, one more potential lover
I guess that something's gotta happen soon
Cos I know I can't keep living in this dead or dying dream
And as I walked along the beach and drank with her
I thought about my true love, the one I really need
With eyes that burn so bright they make me pure."
See any love for others, any REAL love for others, must begin with a love for ourselves. If we do not begin from this starting point, then the selfless love Jesus talks about and demonstrates will be impossible. We all need to feel valued, and if we cannot first value ourselves, then any relationship we have with others will simply be an attempt to fill that void within us. I don't know how many of you are unfortunate enough to have studied management 111. I bring this up not because it's the only time in my life that I've really fully related to the kind of meaninglessness and futility that Conor Oberst talks about in that song, but because, to my absolute horror, something I learned there has finally come in handy.
What I'm talking about is Maslow's hierarchy of needs. This essentially outlines all of the needs that human beings have, and the idea is that it is more or less impossible to begin fulfilling a higher order need until every lower-level need has been met. For instance if we are starving to the point of our lives being in danger, or in need of shelter, then we are unlikely to be concerned at that particular moment about the fact that no-one loves us. Our concern will be on feeding our face. Only after our survival is not in danger will we begin to think about higher order needs such as the need to be loved and accepted.
Now Maslow did not, to the best of my knowledge, include the need to give selflessly in his cute little pyramid, but I think that this is a very real human need, and frankly, the fact that Maslow was a management theorist and I am not leads me to counsel you most earnestly to believe me and not him.
Coming to my point though, I believe, as I said, that human beings NEED to give selflessly to some entity, whether it be a cause that they believe in, or a person they love, or a goal they believe is important. I don't believe that Jesus tells us to do so simply because he thought it would be funny to see how hard we'd try, nor do I think it was purely a matter of communities working better when those involved in them give selflessly, I believe that a person cannot be whole until they give in the manner that Jesus talk about and leaves the perfect example of.
However, and this is the point, I think that the need to give love comes above the need to feel loved, and it is simply not possible to be selfless unless we first love ourselves. We can only give from what we have, and if we do not love ourselves, then our thoughts will be on satisfying the need we have to feel valued, rather than on showing love to other people. When we read Phillipians 2, in which
Paul and Timothy tell us to
3Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. 4Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.
We should not confuse putting others first with putting ourselves last. For someone to serve you is no compliment if you know that they consider themselves your servant, your slave. There are no books written about butlers who faithfully served their masters dinner day in, day out. This is their job, this is their station, nothing less was expected of them. But yet biographies are full of Professors, Presidents and CEOs who took time out of their busy schedule to help out a nobody.
One of my father's favourite stories, of which there are many, all of whose validity is highly questionable, and I'm taking a bit of artistic license myself as I don't remember the details, so it would be safest to consider this a total fallacy rather than a factual story tainted by inaccuracies. Anyway, while Dad was growing up in a rural Swiss village called Schmidrued, population about 200, unless you don't count the chickens, then it's about 100. Or 20 if you ignore the cows. At some point, the Church in this town got a new pastor from somewhere in Scandinavia, Sweden from memory.
I don't ever remember my father telling me of anything that this pastor did or said, or even any suggestion that he was a good pastor. However, what my father does remember is that the people of his village found out some time after the arrival of this pastor that he was the eldest son a tremendously wealthy businessman. In normal circumstances, this man would be being trained up to be the head of a massive business, let's say for argument's sake that his father was the manager of Abba. It was his birthright, as it were, to take over the reins of Sweden's biggest (and only) export from his father, to be rich and famous and to spend the rest of his days relaxing in a swimming pool filled to the brim with Money Money Money, but instead, he chose to give all of that away, go to an almost non-existent village he'd almost certainly never heard of until he arrived there and minister to a tiny congregation, most of whom weren't even mammals.
The fact that this is the only thing I know about this guy suggests that he very likely sucked at the job, but the fact that he chose to "lower himself", as it were to a life of servitude rather than accepting a life of being served hand and foot stays with my father to this day.
Of course I never met this man, but I'd venture to say that he did not do this because he considered himself worthless. Indeed I think it would have been quite impossible for him to do so if he thought so lowly of himself. Instead, in full knowledge of his worthiness, completely aware of what he had available to him, his ability, his mana, he chose to lay that aside, and in humility put others ahead of himself. Such stories, as I said, can be found in pretty much every autobiography ever written, and in doing so, the people who commit such selfless acts inspired many of the biographers to become the great and humble leaders of tomorrow.
My point is that an attempt to serve others does not even qualify as humility UNLESS WE ARE AWARE OF OUR OWN WORTH. In fact, if we believed that we were of no use to anyone, then the act of washing someone's dishes unasked could even be perceived as an act of arrogance, an attempt to assert mana that we ourselves do not believe to exist.
It would be easy to interpret what I am saying as arrogance, and, to be honest, the line is often broad and blurry, as we all know, but the bottom line, I think, is that IT IS NOT ARROGANCE TO SEE YOURSELF AS GOD SEES YOU.
Only when we truly believe that we are worthy in God's eyes. When we believe that our value to the human race is as great as anyone else's, and that we have the right to be treated as such. When we believe that we, too, are worthy of being served. Only then are we able to truly serve others.
See it is a very common belief throughout Western society, and perhaps the human race as a whole, that we amount to nothing. The Christianised version of this fallacy is that we WERE worth nothing, but by Christ's death we find some value.
I don't believe this is what God says. God says Acts 11 - "'Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.' As it says in Romans 5, "8But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us."
It was Christ's death that sanctified us, but it did not give us our value, because we were worth the blood of the Son of God while we were still sinners. It reminds me of the quote from Julian of Norwich which Malcs shared with us at the start of the year: "sin is thinking ourselves unworthy of God's grace".
There is nothing we could ever do that would devalue us in God's eyes. We were worth more to him than his own dignity and the blood of his Son, and to fail to grasp how worthy, how beautiful, how capable we are in the eyes of God is to heap one more insult on the King of the Jews. To deny the gift is to insult the giver.
It is not your right to think yourself ugly when the same God that made all the wonders of nature poured his heart and soul into creating you perfectly. It is not your right to think yourself incompetent to do that which God was preparing you to do even before you were born, and it is not your right to think yourself worthless when God has declared you worth the life of his Son.
So that's basically all I have to say today, but the last thing I want to do is have you all go away feeling crap about yourselves, and feeling guilty about feeling crap about yourselves. Thus, we're all going to have a group discussion about how we can think happy thoughts, how we can help others to think happy thoughts, and then we're all going to go round the room and say the best thing about ourselves, have a nice big group hug and go home.
But seriously though, and at great risk of sounding like a DARE programme co-ordinator, I want you to think about and discuss what it is that makes you feel ugly, depressed, unworthy or however you think of yourself when at your lowest, and try and think of ways to stop thinking this way, and also talk about ways that we all, as a community can help each other to be one big happy family. THEN the group hug.
Richard Bach We wait all these years to find someone who understands us, I thought, someone who accepts us as we are, someone with a wizard's power to melt stone to sunlight, who can bring us happiness in spite of trials, who can face our dragons in the night, who can transform us into the soul we choose to be. Just yesterday I found that magical Someone is the face we see in the mirror: It's us and our homemade masks.
Scrubs episode 21
00:52 - Who's your new friend, look it got a letter etc
4:33 - There's not a doctor here who's in shape
6:15-6:30 - Shaun: You know, Freud said that 90% of all human behaviour is motivated by sexual impulses. But, you know, give me some credit. I'd say at least 30% of my behaviour is motivated by advertising and the rest by violence in film.
Elliot: For me it's 98% getting my Dad to love me and 2% chocolate.
6:50-7:50
7:20 - could I work out with you sometime?
9:47- 10:27 - I hate my body
13:01 - Don't be embarrassed about staring at my ass
14:08-15:15 - It's a weird feeling when you realise you've lost the respect of 4 people all at once, but it's nothing compared with losing respect for yourself.
18:51 - Hey, do you know any women who hate themselves enough to actually date me?
St. Francis of Assisi
It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching.