I remember growing up spending my free time as a child playing in the woods behind my house. I’d bring my animal figures, and my friend Tim would bring his, and together we’d make up storylines set in the rocks and roots in the ground. Just being under the sky seemed the most natural thing for me to do. Tim was Christian, and I was nothing at all. He told me as we were getting off the bus one day in third grade that I was going to hell, because I didn’t believe what he believed. I ran home and cried to my mom, and don’t remember Tim ever mentioning it again. But the words were said, and I wondered for myself, “Was I going to hell?” I couldn’t shake the suspicion that I needed to do something to secure some sort of safety for myself. 

The next year, my family moved away from our small rural town in Massachusetts to the Atlanta suburbs in the Bible Belt. A few years went by, and I joined a Boy Scout troop, which held its annual court of honor in a small, dimly lit chapel with heavy wooden arches supporting an octagonal ceiling. It seemed old, and intentionally constructed, and the place evoked a sense in me that it was reaching out to something greater than itself. When my parents asked if I’d like to go to church on Sunday mornings, mainly because I didn’t have any friends in the neighborhood who stayed home, my thoughts went immediately to that place. That place changed my life.

In middle school, I came to a faith of my own. And I felt like I should act more and more like how Jesus is portrayed in Gospels. I listened to sermons from my pastor, and I applied them to my life. In my Boy Scout troop, I volunteered to be the Chaplain’s Aide. On camping trips, I’d lead the prayers at the beginning and end of each day, as well as the blessings for the meals. The language I used was what I thought God wanted to hear. I was trying to become something I thought would be pleasing to God. That impulse to conform my life to God’s will isn’t unusual. But I think I missed the point of believing in a savior who loves the whole world, who saves the world, and does not condemn it.

In high school art class, when my teachers asked me to focus my paintings on a particular subject, I chose church architecture. I drove around the county and took photographs of church buildings, their edifices and their interiors. I researched forms and motifs for Buddhist temples and Russian Orthodox towers. I filled notebooks with sketches and doodles, and I would eventually build a portfolio of pieces to tell a story of how spirituality comes alive in our different contexts. It honors the parts of our culture which developed to mean something, to convey beauty, to cultivate peace.

Architecture was my first dream job when I was 9, and I have always loved art. Later on in seminary, I would take a course called Theology, Art, and Architecture, to explore the relationships among the three fields through the church’s history. On one Friday evening, I had the pleasure of joining a group of seminarians and a rabbi on an interfaith class outing to a Shabbat service.

As we walked toward the Temple, all I could think was that American religion tends to create its own brand, whether it be Jewish or Christian. I marveled at the sanctuary. Completed in 1931, it was and remains to be such a stunning piece of architecture. I was impressed with the fusion of classical design elements and Jewish iconography as I looked up. The top dome made it stand apart. And the renovated chapel inside, with its modern, swooping ceiling, like a tent, or a tabernacle, provided such an exciting, organic, and spiritual atmosphere. The up-to-date design of the rest of the building gave me the impression the community was wealthy and had good aesthetic sense. Walking through the Temple, all I could think was that this design was innovative and culturally and symbolically rich.

I contrasted it to the church that Amy went to, which I would go to perhaps a third of the weekends of the year when I visited her in DC; it was finished in 1911. It also bears many of the features of the Temple sanctuary – the gilded work, the ceiling details, the classical columns – all done in plaster and marble. When Amy would take me to church early, so she could rehearse for choir, I was left to wander the building for an hour before the service. I was so familiar with what her sanctuary looked like.

Seeing the Temple for all its beauty – so architecturally similar yet moving in a different direction – provided the perfect metaphor for how I can look at Judaism. Though both have roots in the same plot of ground, and both have gone through history closely together, and both interact now closely with each other in a broader culture, still these different iterations of the Abrahamic faiths are cousins: They are not the same. My wife’s and my church where we were married has a cross at the top rather than a vaulted dome. Its iconography is particularly Christocentric; the message preached on Sunday mornings usually involves Jesus.

But both faiths communicate God’s beauty to me. The effect of the visit to the Temple on me was through the architecture. It showed me that the design I love to find in churches is not limited to only one faith. The stories of Jesus, which move me in the Christian churches I have attended, I did not find in the Temple. But what I did find in the Temple still touched me. Both traditions have the capacity to draw me from thinking about myself to thinking about something larger and more important than me. And I love it when that happens.

I didn’t used to. I used to think that only one very specific set of beliefs and practices would lead me to safety. I used to think that only by overcoming myself could I be what God wanted me to be, to please my Father in Heaven. But as a father, when I look at my children, I don’t want them to be anything other than who they are. I don’t want them to be like their friends, or like me, or like their mom. I want them to be who God made them to be. I want them to be comfortable with themselves. I want them to know in their bodies that they are beloved and accepted, not only by Christ but by their parents and by each other. I think that’s what God wants for us as well. We’re just supposed to be our truest selves, created by God, loved by God.

When Jesus asks Peter who he thinks Jesus is, Peter proclaims a statement of faith: Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God. Jesus is the revolutionary, the rebel, the renegade, who Peter thought would ultimately lead Israel to overthrow Rome. And, he is the Son of God; he bears God’s likeness. If you thought of all the qualities of God – loving, fair, kind, patient, merciful, creative – you could find them expressed in the words and actions, the way Jesus lived. Jesus was to Peter the epitome of everything good. He could recognize in Christ all his hopes.

Now, if I had asked that question of a family member or a friend, I think I would have been wondering who they thought I should be like: “Who do you say I am? Please, make sense of myself for me.” Not just, what am I to you, what does my friendship mean to you, but what does my being and existence mean? What is my purpose?

Have you ever thought that? What is my purpose? Or, what has been my impact? What did I do that helped someone, and what did I do that hindered someone’s flourishing? In John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, he opines:

I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill? …

In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.

We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil.

What about you? Have you honestly considered what your life means in some absolute sense? Have you vulnerably asked someone what you’ve meant to them? Have you errantly tried to deny aspects of yourself in an attempt to be good and acceptable? Have you needlessly scrambled after the mistaken belief that you need to say certain magic words about Jesus for him to love you unconditionally and save you by his grace? What would happen, if you took a moment in the quiet part of today or this evening and asked Jesus what you mean to him, what parts of your life are beautiful or deplorable, and how you can accept how much he loves you? I’d love to hear about it next week, if you realize something that helps you live more fully as yourself, as the person God made you to be.

Will you pray to God today and ask out loud who you are? I pray you will. And I invite your response. Amen.