“Dear children, keep yourselves from idols.”
1 John 5:21

When I was young I had many idols.

No, these idols weren’t anything like the idols in the Old Testament: golden cows, etc. These idols were human beings.

When I was in elementary school, I experienced my first major involvement in human idolatry. I idolized The Beatles.  As I grew older, I idolized a greater number of rock musicians, movie stars and other celebrities.

I was in my 20s when I came to Christ. Upon reading what the Scriptures said about the problem of having idols, I immediately began to work on that problem. But the thing was, my solution to this problem was to replace my sectarian idols with Christian idols. So, instead of having sectarian musicians as idols, I had Christian musicians as idols.

I started working as a newspaper reporter at about this time. Doing this work, I had occasion to meet many people who would be considered celebrities.  I soon discovered that though they were rich and famous and idolized by thousands, they were just “folks.”

In my youth I had many idols who were sports figures. One of them was Kent Benson, who helped lead Indiana University to the NCAA basketball championship in 1976.  Kent was the first pick in the NBA draft after his senior season.

Lo and behold, a major national magazine took me up on my offer to do a magazine article about Kent. At the time, he was living in a small apartment in Bloomington, IN., and, except for a fishing boat out in the parking lot, he had few of the trappings of fame and fortune.

I quickly discovered that Kent was/is just “folks.”  (though a very big “folk” at 6-10).  I enjoyed listening to him talk about his love for fishing and about his relationship with God and his Christian faith. Within 20 minutes of the interview, I forgot that I was talking with someone who had been my idol. We still keep in touch all of these years later.

In time, I began to meet many of my “Christian idols.” For the most part, they were different than I had imagined them to be. Like me, they had/have “clay feet” (which comes with being human) and some had/have very surprising human imperfections. One thing that amazed me when I began to meet my Christian idols is that many of them appear to be a bit antisocial. They don’t seem to like people very much. I imagine this comes from years of a having people want things from you, and want to have their picture taken with you, and want you to listen to all of their dreams and trials and tribulations.

The lesson in all of this is that God is not pleased when we make other people our idols - even Christian people. Having an idol of human flesh is to place that person between oneself and God.  The Lord wants nothing standing between Him and us.

God never tires of listening to our dreams and to our trials and tribulations. He’s never antisocial.  He is God and He never changes.

And, here’s something else to ponder: In the Book of Matthew, Jesus said He especially has a home in the lives of those He called “the least of these, my brethren.”  Christ also said that “the last shall be first (in heaven),” etc. etc.

My wife teaches severely mentally handicapped children. In God’s pecking order, they are much closer to His heart than all of our famous and wealthy human idols.

But no one asks for their autographs.

Book of John, Chapter 4

The Pharisees heard that Jesus was gaining and baptizing more disciples than John, although in fact it was not Jesus who baptized, but his disciples. When the Lord learned of this, he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee.

Now he had to go through Samaria. So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about the sixth hour.

When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)

The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans).

Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

“Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and herds?”

Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”

He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.”

“I have no husband,” she replied.

Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.”

“Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”

Jesus declared, “Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.”

The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”

Then Jesus declared, “I who speak to you am he.”
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Today, I saw an interview on a PBS show with the great actor, Michael Caine. He has just made a new film that deals with many transcendent questions about life and living, death and dying, youth and old age. Caine, who is 76, had a very pleasant discourse with the interviewer about why he is certain that God exists.  Caine said that he knows that God exists because his life otherwise would make no sense. Born into a poor family in Great Britain, he lived among the struggling, cockneyed, working classes in England and the idea that someone from that background could go on to such international fame and fortune would have seemed  an outlandish aspiration when he was a child.

I don’t know much about Caine’s personal life, but I do know that he seems to have a pretty fair idea at age 76 of who he is. In our 2009 celebrity culture, it’s not often that celebrities seem to know who they are. In fact, in 2009 it is unusual for most people to even want to ponder that question.

“What difference does it make ‘who I am’?” I can  hear a young person responding. “I’ve got a cell phone, a game cube, a Blackberry, a sexual partner, plenty of time to party.
What else is there to know about me?”

When I was a young man, I really didn’t anticipate this era coming. In my generation, the Baby Boom generation, our own “youth culture” reflected a search for identity and a search to understand our place in the world.  This is why the music of that period is, ironically, enjoyed by many young people today. They know that their own culture is shallow and that most of the music of 2009-ish culture is intellectually and spiritually unsatisfying.

One of the more famous music  groups of the era in which I grew up was the English group, “The Who.” One of their more popular songs had the title, “Who are you?”  Yes, they were young at the time and they felt that this was a question well worth asking.

So many people I know apparently believe that the answer to that question in their own lives is “I am what I do.”  This is why you often hear one person asking another person upon meeting, “What’s your profession?’ instead of “who are you, really?” For many people, if they were to have their work stripped away from them, what would they have left of a self-image? Who would they then be?

The Scripture passage above is one of my favorite discourses in the Bible for many reasons.  But the primary reason I love this passage is that it tells us: (1). Who Jesus Christ is; and (2). How He sees us and how he wants us to see ourselves in Him.

Just the fact that Jesus took the time to talk to a Samaritan woman tells a story in itself.  Jesus was a Jew and the woman was a Samaritan - a class of people looked down  upon by Jews. But the social status of this woman meant absolutely nothing to Jesus. He viewed her as a child of the Living God, a human soul, a person of great value.

Just the fact that Jesus took time to talk to any woman tells a story. Women in Jesus’ time and culture were treated by most men as second-class citizens. If the Biblical writers had wanted to created this story when it didn’t exist, they would not have written about Jesus having such a conversation with a woman.

The episode opens with Jesus asking this woman for a drink of water.  This was His way of making the woman understand that He wanted to talk with her and get to know her. A Jewish holy man would have never stooped to asking a Samaritan woman for a drink of water.

It also opens up the way for Jesus to talk to the woman about truly spiritually transcendent  subject matter. Using the metaphor of water welling up to eternal life, He explained to her how that His very Presence contains spiritual life and refreshment of the soul and spirit.  And, more important, that the “water” which is Jesus’ Holy Presence is what she (and we) need to drink of in order to have eternal life.

Then, this Scripture account takes us to the “who are you?” part of the discourse. Jesus tells the woman to go tell her husband about what she has just heard and she responds that she has no husband.  She is trying to cover up the true condition of her life and of her heart.  Very probably, she hoped the conversation would end at that point.

But Jesus essentially “reads her mail” and tells her all about the sordid life she had been trying to hide from Him,  the Son of God.  But what Jesus had to say goes beyond the sinful life she had been leading. Jesus was essentially saying to that woman (and to every human being who would come after her) that there is nothing we can hide from Him. He sees everything and knows everything about us.  We can posture and cover up and try to pretend we are someone who we are not. And, in many cases, we can fool other people.

But, we can never  fool God.

The most powerful and amazing part of this discussion occurs at the end, when Jesus answers the woman in the affirmative that He is the long-awaited Messiah and the Christ.

So, now comes the original question posed by this column I am writing. How does one discover who he or she really is?

First of all, by coming to know God. Secondly, by realizing that what we do is not who we are. There is certainly a value in work and in what we do with our hands, but it is of limited value in light of our certain physical deaths and the reality of a looming eternity.

Thirdly, we discover who we really are by letting God strip away our “fakeness” and our pretentiousness and our covering-up  - in order to free us to be people created in His Likeness whose lives are characterized by loving and caring for others and of loving God with our whole hearts, minds, spirits.

Who are you?   Maybe today is the day to start asking yourself - and God - for answers to that eternally all-important question……

“For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it 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 saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there were none of them.”

Psalm 139:13-16

The other night, I saw a television show on a Christian network in which experts, including a Princeton University professor, discussed recent decisions by the Obama Administration which will make abortion more accessible to people in other countries and which may open the door to human cloning for stem cell research purposes. Also, these experts said that a move is underway in our government to take away the right of individuals and hospitals to refuse to participate in activities such as abortion, etc., that they are opposed to on moral grounds.

One of the experts even went as far as to predict that Catholic hospitals may be forced to close down if the federal government tries to force them to offer the so-called “medical option” of providing abortions.

I imagine that some people who will read what I am going to write here will be quick to stereotype me as “one of those right-wing Republican Christians.” But let me tell you that this stereotype does not work with me. I am neither a Republican nor a Democrat. There is a lot to dislike about both political parties. When I go to vote - and I do in every election - I vote for the man or woman I feel best about: not a political party.

However, I have to say very frankly at this point: I am very disappointed in the actions thus far of President Obama and his Administration in regards to “life issues” such as abortion and stem cell research on human embryos. With all of the problems we are facing as a nation right now, I certainly did not expect him to make a priority in his first days of office these decisions which will result in more unborn human beings being killed.

I have been a very public and outspoken advocate for the Right to Life for many, many years. In fact, I have even protested outside of abortion clinics carrying a sign and have been interviewed by the news media about why I was protesting in such a visible (and proactive) way.

During my 25-year newspaper career, I wrote multiple newspaper columns advocating for life and against abortion. I like to think that maybe something I have written or said over the years has influenced a mother(s) to spare the life of the growing child in her womb.

One of the aspects of the “Pro-Choice” movement that disturbs me most is how they change language to make abortion seem more palatable to the public. They call abortion “a medical procedure” and an issue of “reproductive health.”

Please excuse MY language, but this is baloney! Abortion is stopping a beating heart. It is killing a developing human being. It is an act of violence against that developing human being which results in his/her death.

I also become disturbed when I hear language such as “a woman’s right to choose” bandied about. But where is the “women’s right to choose” for the millions of developing young females who are torn from their mothers’ wombs during the heinous act of abortion?

Scientists and politicians debate whether the fetus feels pain during the act of abortion. There is plenty of evidence that even the fetus in first-trimester suffers pain. In many states, abortion is perfectly legal up to the point of birth. That is absolutely horrible to think about!
Though most abortions in America do take place in the first trimester, there are still thousands of unborn babies being destroyed when they have been developing for multiple months in the wombs of their mothers.

Now, the question arises: are all people who call themselves “pro choice” just basically heartless and evil folks? No, I don’t believe that at all. Many people have told me that they believe abortion is morally wrong, but that they don’t want women to be forced to compromise their physical health by getting “back-alley abortions” if abortion was to be made illegal (a reversal of Rowe vs. Wade).

I won’t deny that this could happen. But when we are talking about literally millions of abortions taking place across the world every year, the numbers of women who might be injured getting illegal abortions pales in comparison to the human life that is lost with current abortion laws in our nation and in other nations.

Tragically, some protestant Christian (using the term loosely) denominations either do not speak out against abortion or actually actively speak out for the “pro choice” position - such as the Disciples of Christ denomination which has its national headquarters in the state in which I live.

Recently, I was talking to the pastor of a Quaker church. If you know anything about the history of the Quaker movement, they have been historically pacifist - refusing to fight in wars or to use violence even in self-defense. But here is what this particular Quaker pastor told me: “We don’t take an official position about abortion in our church. It is up to each individual’s conscience.”

So much for “pacifism.”

Those of us who identify ourselves as Christians not only have to change the hearts and minds of those who call themselves atheists/agnostics, we also have to change the hearts and minds of many who call themselves “Christian.”

So, what should be our strategy?

1. Prayer. We should pray for God to change our president’s heart and mind on these life-related issues of abortion and stem-cell research on human embryos. When Abraham Lincoln took office, he did not strongly advocate a position to end slavery. But during his term, this changed. Lincoln drew closer to God because of the trials and tribulations of the Civil War. As a result, he freed the slaves

2. Continue to speak out, write, and find other ways to express your support for the right to life for unborn human beings.

3. Support pro-life organizations that help mothers through pregnancy and afterwards such as Crisis Pregnancy Centers, etc.

4. Write, call or personally tell your elected officials that you expect them to support measures which will protect human life - not end it.

Unborn children are the most helpless and vulnerable of all human beings. Our government protects many species of wildlife - including the eggs of eagles - but refuses to protect the lives of unborn human beings.
This, my friends, is a national disgrace!