All about you.

There's a good chance that if I reference a Nintendo Wii game here on this blog, none of you will have played it.  But that's okay, I'm gonna reference it anyway.  The game in question is called 'rhythm heaven fever,' and it's a game that's subdivided down into a whole bunch of, as you may guess, rhythm based minigames.  You have to either press A, B, or A and B together in time with the beat of the song to pass the level. I know, it doesn't sound too engrossing, but after a short while of playing it, you can get quite into it.  And I should know, having played it many times before.

There's one minigame in question that is not only strangely compelling, but is also eminently quoteable, and that's the game called 'love rap.'

As you can expect, you have to press the A button when the time is right to continue.  And the lyrics are quoteable, but they're also completely insipid.  Crazy into you, fo sho, all about you, etc.

It's the lyric 'all about you' that stuck in my head though.  All about you.  It's a fairly frequent criticism of contemporary Christian music that you could change all the instances of Jesus in the song to 'Baby,' and it could be a pop song, and probably not a bad one. That was a subject of one of the better episodes of South Park, where the guys started a Christian rock group, and were able to satirize all aspects of contemporary Christian music.  But the lyric of 'all about you' is pretty much our attitude when it comes not just to contemporary Christian music, but also to Christianity.  We get to thinking that most everything is all about us, that we are the most important thing in the universe, and that God's most important job is to do what we want him to do.  He should be doing what we want him to do, loving those whom we love, and hating whom we hate.  God almighty should be working on what we want him to work on, and paying attention to what we want him to pay attention to.

But here's the thing that happens, which is that we end up oddly focused ourselves, and less focused on what God wants, and what he's all about.  And the story of Jonah is one of the best ones for understanding that.  For Jonah was one of the absolute worst prophets of all time, not only bad at delivering his message, but bad at not wanting to give it in the first place.  From the very beginning of his story, Jonah has been told to get to Nineveh, and to counsel the Ninevites to turn back from their sin.  But Jonah has no urge to do that.  He has no motive to counsel the Ninevites to turn back from their sin, mainly because of the possibility that if he preached the message well, they might actually listen.  And Jonah wasn't exactly keen on the Ninevites.  Not keen at all. He wanted them to be struck down by God, destroying them in their sin.  And the possibility of the message being adhered to, listened to, and acted on, was too much for Jonah to bear.  He wanted God to destroy the city, and burn its inhabitants.  So when he delivered the message in the worst way possible, sadly for him, the people listened, and turned away from their sin.  And Jonah was devastated.

You see, the majority of us get fixated on what we want out of things, and turn a blind eye to what God may have in mind.  He may want to rescue our enemies, because he desires that all men should be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth.  But we have a nasty habit of inserting ourselves perhaps too much into the situation, making sure that it is our will that is done, instead of God's will.  We want to be certain that our needs are met, and that God will pay attention to our likes and dislikes over and above everything else.

The reading from first Corinthians that we had for today talked about that.  It talked about how there is a real temptation that we all have to let the day to day fabric of our lives obscure God and his needs and desires.  Paul cautions us that if we're married, that we ought to live as though we weren't.  If we have dealings with the world, we ought to act as though we didn't, if we have posessions, to act as though we didn't.  Why, one might ask.  Well, because these things have a nasty habit of getting

in the way, of obsuring God and his will, of forcing themselves into our lives, throttling us with the day to day of just being alive.  And lest you think this is a new problem, this was happening even in the time of Jesus, where he asked people to follow him, and their answers were all 'I will, just as soon as I find time.  Let me bury my father, let me finish my land purchase, let me take care of what I have to take care of, then I'll get to you.' The day to day stuff of life has a way of getting in the way, to the point that seeing what God has in mind can easily get strangled away.

So Paul cautions us to not let this stuff get in the way.  He cautions us because he knows how easy it is to have wedges driven between us and God.  He knows how distracted we are by the day to day, he knows how things creep into our mind, how fickle we are.  And he knows that if we're focused on our day to day, if that falls away through age, or death, or anything like that, then we will lose God as well.  If our love for God depends on how well things are going, when those things are stripped away, what is left.

We are notoriously short sighted to the bigger picture, and if was left to us, we would be forever separated from God.  If God waited for us to find him, for us to give our hearts to him, for us to chose to love him over and above all things, he'd still be waiting.  We need to know that it's not up to us, that it's not all about us, it's not about how well we do at finding God, at seeking him out.  If you look at the Gospel reading for this last Sunday, you would have seen that Jesus walked out to the beach to call his disciples where they were.  He knew their focus was going to be on the day to day business of home, work, family and daily life, so that's where he found them.  But more than that, he knew that even after calling them, their concerns for hearth and home, for life and limb, were going to persist.

And that's why Jesus went to the cross.  For his followers who would be tempted to flee to save themselves, for people who would not do a good job of following through with their commitments, for people who could have God as their highest priority, yet did not .  As it says in the reading from First Corinthians, we ought to live as though we didn't have any of these encumberances.  But we do have these encumberances.  There are things that get in the way, we know that.  And God knows that too.  That's what Jesus is for.  He's there to live without these encumberances, all the things that get in the way between him and us.  He is there to bridge that gap, not us.  He knows we're going to be frail, and so he does the work that needs to be done, to bridge the gap, to find us, to claim us as his own.  This is what Jesus is all about - loving us, seeking us, bringing us back because it's not all about us.

It's all about him.