In the epic science fiction movie, “Avatar”, we are brought into the mid-22nd century, when humans are mining a precious mineral on Pandora, a lush habitable moon of a giant planet in a distant star system. The expansion of the mining colony threatens the continued existence of a local tribe of Na’vi – a humanoid species indigenous only to Pandora. The film’s title refers to a genetically engineered Na’vi body with the mind of a remotely located human, and is used to interact with the natives of Pandora. In common computer language, an Avatar is an artificial image that represents and is manipulated by a computer user. And so, by definition, an avatar is a false self.
Jesus’ teachings to his disciples on authentic piety reflect God’s abiding concern for our eternal destiny. God wants to claim our hearts – not only its cardiac cells, muscles and tissue, but its the deep waters. Jesus summarizes this eternal concern of God for us when he said, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
There is a salient reason why taking the top two spots in the Ten Commandments that God handed down to Moses, are the command of a jealous God: first, “You shall have no other gods before me”, and, second, “You shall not make for yourself any graven image, or any likeness anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them” (NRSV). The revealed Yahwistic monotheism, that declared a solitary God of creation and the universe, emerged from the ancient culture of polytheism, and the worship and veneration of numerous deities that represented the forces and phenomena of nature. And so one of the foundational moral demands of Yahweh was to desacralize all false gods.
We live in a culture of constant self-gratification. It is the norm for anyone of any degree of privilege in their particular cultural context. The sad result of being in a culture of constant gratification of the physical senses is that we lose any sense of mystery and wonder. Gratification dulls that imagination, and healthy spirituality loses out to the pursuit of the ultimate experience of sating our physical impulses. In a consumerist culture, gratification is much easier to achieve than the slow pace of character formation demanded by spiritual growth.
We cannot see God unless we go through the destruction of the false-self. The most commonly mentioned sins in scripture are idolatry, pride, covetousness, and cruelty to the poor and the helpless. They have given the false-self many faces: self-love, self-pity, self-hatred, self-justification, self-righteousness, self-glorification, self-pride. They become idols, and, in the end, they seduce us to worship them. The false self leads us away from our authenticity before God, because it deceives us to think that we are being faithful. The false self is the biggest stumbling block in our spiritual journey of transformation. We cannot see God unless we scrape off the barnacles of the false self that grow as encrustations on the surface of our souls.
Everybody who knows what a tanning booth is, understands that anyone who goes in there comes out with a tan (a more glamorous word for a sunburn). When you expose yourself to ultraviolet rays, your skin will burn. It’s a cause and effect thing. And so if we understand sanctification as the growth in divine grace, we also need to understand that that growth comes from the concrete commitment to submit and hold our lives to the way of Jesus. We grow in divine grace because when we consistently dwell in the presence of God, we cannot remain unchanged, untransformed. We cannot be in God’s presence and remain the same.
If the church, and her disciples, is the continuing presence of Christ in the world, then our journey here on earth must mirror the journey of Jesus. The gospels proclaim that there is a powerful and purposeful order in Jesus’ journey which is critical to the self consciousness and identity of the church. It begins in repentance and baptism, which then thrusts us into necessary preparation for ministry in the practice of engaging the powers and principalities of the world. Remaining in the crucible of this struggle, to strive for the constancy of the dying of the false self under the grace of Christ, is where we clarify our mission. And what becomes of us when we endure that self-emptying, also becomes our proclamation.
One of the Beatitudes (blessings) that Jesus ascribed to the faithful church in his Sermon on the Mount, is that she is “The light of the world, a lamp that cannot be hidden under by a bushel.” Faithfulness is not just heard. It is visible, it is seen, it is experienced by others. It leads us, and points others, to the path to human flourishing, to the abundant life promised graciously by Jesus. There is no shortcut around from the concrete moral imperative of Jesus’ command to let our light shine before others, so that they may see our good works that glorify God who is in heaven. We cannot merely be avatar disciples, a manipulated image of who we really are. If our claim to be Christians is not ratified by Christ-like behavior, then it is a performative faith, merely performing for an idol. False piety cannot masquerade as faithfulness. In fact, false piety only exposes one’s true motives and inner self, because a spiritual charlatan’s words never cohere with their actions. A Christianity that proclaims a faith that cannot be verified by one’s actions and character, is merely an avatar – a manipulated, and graven, image.
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Elmo Familiaran 