May 17, 2026

Who Are You?

What is it that makes a person who they are?  It’s the difficult question that arises when you meet someone new.  How do you find out about them?  What do you ask?  The most common of such interrogatives (and one that, I must admit, I turn to myself all too frequently) is, “What do you do?”  It is as though we can learn a great deal about a person, we can paint them with an identity, if only we can ascertain what it is that they produce, what they create, what they get paid to accomplish.  This seems so normal to us that it sounds simplistically self-evident.  How else would one identify one’s self?  But it is a  purely cultural construction, and one that often does damage to our true sense of self.  That’s what I want to talk with you about this morning.

There’s a wonderful quote that’s been attributed to John Lennon.  I don’t know if he really is the source, but it’s worth repeating.  It goes like this: “When I was five years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life.  When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.  I wrote down ‘happy’.  They told me I didn’t understand the assignment.”  That is the cultural soup in which we swim.  When a child is asked what he wants to be when he grows up, the answer is supposed to be “a fireman,” or “an astronaut,” or even “a brain surgeon.”  A child learns early on that the phrase, “what you want to be” is synonymous with the phrase “what you want to do.”  A person is defined by what they do for a living.

It’s only a small step, then, from defining ourselves by what we produce to defining ourselves by what we consume.  When meeting someone for the first time, you might not be so impertinent as to ask what kind of car they drive, or how many square feet of living space is in their home, but we all know how much of one’s identity is established by these things.  This also is entirely shaped by the culture around us.  The TV shows and advertisements make it absolutely clear what sort of car one drives, what brand of vodka one drinks, and what type of electronic gizmo one carries around if one is really among the “in” people.

It all reminds me of something I came across from a German scientist describing his experience as a school boy.  He wrote, “When I was a student in a German Gymnasium and thirteen years old, I learned a lesson that I have not forgotten. . . . One early morning our physics teacher placed a telescope in the school yard to show us a certain planet and its moons.  We stood in a long line, about forty of us.  I was standing at the end of the line, since I was one of the smaller students.  The teacher asked the first student whether he could see the planet.  No, he had difficulties, because he was near-sighted.  The teacher showed him how to adjust the focus, and that student could finally see the planet and the moons.  Others had no difficulty; they saw them right away.  The students saw what they were supposed to see.  Then the student standing just before me – his name was Harter – announced that he could not see anything.  ‘You idiot,’ shouted the teacher, ‘you have to adjust the lenses.’  The student did that and said after a while, ‘I do not see anything, it is all black.’  The teacher then looked through the telescope himself.  After some seconds he looked up with a strange expression on his face.  And then my comrades and I also saw that the telescope was not functioning; it was closed by a cover over the lens.”¹  The kids at the front of the line declared that they saw what they were supposed to see, even though there was a cover over the lens.

You and I see what we’re supposed to see.  We see a person working in an important job and we deem her to be a significant and worthy person.  We see someone driving a shiny, expensive car and we assume he is a man of substance.  We never stop to consider that there’s a lens cap on our telescope, that we are seeing things that we’re told to see, and missing the real truth about one another.

When a person’s identity is entirely wrapped up in their profession, what becomes of them when they lose a job, or when they retire?  Do they suddenly cease to be a person of worth?  That is, in fact, what this twisted culture of ours tells people.  If you’re not being what we have come to refer to as “productive,” and therefore being a good little “consumer,” then you might as well be relegated to the sidelines and disregarded.  I am here this morning to tell you, don’t buy it!  It’s a load of hogwash!  You are not defined by what you produce or by what you consume.  By twenty-first century American standards Jesus of Nazareth would be a total loser.  He didn’t have a job.  He didn’t have much of anything.  He was defined – take note of this – not by what he produced, but by who he was.  I hope I won’t be cast into the outer darkness of American society for saying this, but human identity is not about doing; it’s about being.  And the challenge before every one of us is to find our identity and worth in our being, not our doing.  That is an unbelievably difficult task.  Because to do so is to run counter to the very pulsing bloodstream of our culture.   It is to muster the courage to stand up and say “The emperor has no clothes.  There’s a lens cap on the telescope.  I refuse to see myself the way I’m told to by the world around me.”

The prophet Jeremiah longed for some distant day when the law would no longer be something external, something written on parchment, and held over the heads of those who are deemed to need instruction.  Jeremiah’s grand vision was of a day when that law would be written “on their hearts,” when the core of what it meant to be a Jew would not be defined by an imposed tradition, but by something that lived inside each person.

And in his letter to the church at Philippi, Paul put it in his usual tortured language.  He said, “it is we who are the circumcision.”  In other words, the outward mark that carries the weight of the community’s blessing is now, in his view, something that is expressed in the very hearts and lives of Christ’s followers.  And he says, “I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”  In other words, all the things that we lift up as valuable symbols of our worth have become meaningless to him.  He now regards them as “rubbish.”  He says, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death.”  I think he is suggesting that to know Christ, to understand Christ – that is to stand under the same truth as Christ – is to experience a kind of death, the death of that artificial self, defined by the culture, the self that clings to the predominant, socially accepted, outward symbols of worth.  It is to become truly and wholly one’s self, the self that you were intended to be.  And like Christ, that self has almost nothing to do with what you do that the world around you regards as worthy, it has everything to do with who you are.  In short, it’s not about doing; it’s about being.

I think that’s what Jesus was talking about when he said that he came that we might have “life, and have it abundantly.”  Abundant life is not about abundance of possessions, abundance of position, abundance of power, or abundance of image.  It’s about abundance of being.  Joseph Smith put it wonderfully; he wrote, “We are assured that Jesus came not that we may have more ‘prayers,’ or more reading of scriptures, or more pious devotions, or more of anything, but only ‘that we may live life and have it abundantly.’”² Abundant life is abundance of being.

This is a particularly important word for us men (although not exclusively so).  Men (and increasingly, women) in our culture have been almost exclusively defined by what they do.  I guess it all goes back to the “protestant work ethic.”  From the early days of our nation, men particularly were evaluated on the basis of their work, their productivity.  An idle man was considered lazy and worthless.  This distortion of what it means to be human has persisted to this very day.  That’s one reason so many men (and often, women) enter retirement with dread, and either find some way to keep working, or retreat to the Barcalounger and withdraw within themselves in a blue funk of worthlessness.  What an unbelievable waste!  What an unbelievable distortion of life!

Your worth is not summed up in what you do.  If you have a heart of compassion, you have that kind of worth that is not transient but abiding.  If you have a clear sense of self that gives you strength of character and inspires those around you, you may be the most important person in the room.  If you have wisdom that comes from nurturing a spirit of reflection and discernment, then whether you are sitting with friends, bagging groceries, or walking through a shopping mall, you are bringing to the world a priceless gift, the gift of your authentic self, a self that “knows Christ,” in other words, it stands under the same truth as Christ.

But Paul adds a caveat.  He writes, “Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.”  Each one of us is a work in progress.  Extricating your true inner self from the complex layers of socially defined values is like trying to climb out of your own skin.  It can’t happen overnight.  You and I are to such a large degree the products of our culture, and attempting to grow in counter-cultural ways is enormously difficult.  It is a life-long endeavor.  I wish I were able to say I have attained this highly evolved state.  I’m not there, by any stretch, but I (as Paul said) “press on to make it my own.”

So, who are you?  Here’s my answer: you are a child of the Most High, created in that Divine image.  In the depth of your soul resides a bit of the very divine spark that called the world into being.  That’s who you are.

¹ Brunno Mueller/Shield, “Science, Truth, and Other Values,” The Quarterly Review of Biology.

² Joseph F. Schmidt, Liturgy, Edited by Gabe Huck, Liturgy Training Publications, 1994, p. 177.