This Sunday at Nexus, we continue our series on anthropology by asking what may be the most practical question of all: what do we expect from the people we love? Anthropology can sound abstract until you are married to someone, raising kids with someone, building friendships, joining a church community, or assembling a gazebo with your spouse and discovering that “marital harmony” apparently has a Rona assembly fee. Much of relational life happens not only in what people do in relationships, but in the story we tell ourselves about why they did it. When people disappoint us, forget things, get defensive, act strangely, or fail to become the people we hoped they would be, what story do we tell? This week we will explore how a low anthropology may not make love less possible, but more honest, more merciful, and perhaps more able to carry the ordinary weight of real human relationships.

Friends, this Sunday we keep moving through our anthropology series by asking a deceptively simple question: what if the "self" is not something to be found, but something to be formed? As we start to explore the real-world implications of the anthropology we hold, I want to explore the tension between cultural aphorisms like “be yourself” and “you do you” with Jesus’ words “deny yourself.” Can you be yourself, or do you, while denying yourself? There is a tension here between the modern quest for authenticity and the strangely different path Jesus offers. So, our anthropology journey continues with a look at the "self" and why it may be less coherent and stable than we often assume, and why that might actually be good news! Along the way I want to explore the story of Peter denying Jesus, his dinner invitation to Zacchaeus, and why the movie Downhill (starring Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus) might offer us a clue as to why performing the "self" can come to feel less like freedom, and more like a burden. So, this Sunday, we’ll consider the possibility that grace begins not when you finally find your truest self, but when you discover something better.

Where we begin makes a big difference to our journey and to our future. We don’t pick up a book and begin at Chapter 3. Why would we do that with Scripture? The Bible begins the human story in beauty and goodness, but so often, our theology and the stories we tell ourselves tend to begin with our brokenness. We overindex on the negative. (Don’t mean to brag, but I am quite skilled at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory...like everything went well, but I will find something to berate myself for, just in case I get any ideas...) A negative theological starting point and focus impacts us in a wide variety of ways…imagine you receive an invitation to the world's greatest art gallery. You enter expectantly, but instead of being invited to take in the masterpieces, someone hands you a bucket of soap and a scrub brush and barks at you to start cleaning the floor tiles, saying you should be thankful to even be allowed inside. The orders meet your inner sense of shame and unworthiness, so you hit the floor and get to work. An unlikely scenario maybe, but many of us go through life as a cleaning crew, focused on the floor instead of the art. In a similar vein, there’s an old story about a giant clay Buddha statue in Thailand which was being moved. At some point during the move, it cracked. As the monks gazed in horror at the cracks, someone looked more closely. They saw something shining underneath the clay. Chipping away the mud, they discovered the clay had been covering a statue made of fine gold. Instead of enjoying and valuing the treasure we hold, cultivating the goodness we do find inside, many of us spend our lives trying to fix the cracks in our clay. What if we stopped trying to patch the mud and began to notice the gold - there since the very beginning? This Sunday, let’s continue the journey, exploring the highs and lows of our anthropology, considering what happens when we start with beauty. We certainly cannot deny that we are cracked. But what happens when we consider that perhaps our cracks don’t just let the light in, they let it out?