In the novel by Philip Roth, The Human Stain, the central character has a character problem. Coleman Silk is a seventy-one year-old widower, his wife having died in the midst of, and he thinks as a result of, his unfair treatment by the college he used to be dean of. Coleman ended his illustrious career teaching classical languages due to a scurrilous and spurious accusation of racism.

Professor Silk had lost everything — job, wife, illusions of a life to look back on with pride. He took solace in a thirty-four year-old illiterate cleaning woman, who had been abused by her stepfather and ex-husband and seemed incapable of sustaining anything but a purely sexual relationship. Describing his motivation for the affair, the narrator says: There’s the wish to let the brute out, let that force out—for half and hour, for two hours, for whatever, to be freed into the natural thing. All the years he had tried to do everything right, to be a husband, a father, a scholar, a respectable man, he had kept the brute in a box. Now the box was opened and he was thrilled, feeling more alive than ever. What bonds him to her is the thrill, we are told. Tomorrow he develops cancer, and boom. But today he has the thrill. [Vintage, 2000: 32-33.]

When the Apostle Paul reaches chapter 3 of his letter to the Colossians, he is ready to make the point about how Christians ought to behave. He has been hammering away about belief in Christ as the true definition of who we are. Now he wants us to act up to it. We’ve been following him up to now in a series of sermons on how to become a colossal community, a vital church. Now he speaks to a community of character.

Our lives are not really what they seem, Paul says. A deeper than the surface, way beyond the scene something has happened that has made all the difference in how we understand ourselves. We are no longer to think of ourselves by ourselves. Who we really are is tied to who Christ is. The old us has died, the new us has come to life with Christ. It’s not all that obvious to people who only look skin deep at things. It’s not even obvious to us, if we only look at ourselves in the usual ways. But what we believe makes all the difference is that our true identity is hidden … with Christ … in God. We will only really know who we are, and other people will only really find out the truth about us, when at last Christ is revealed at the end of time for all to see. Then he will show us and everyone else who we really are. In the meantime, he’s working on us and wants us to work with him on us.

Now think about this. If all this is true, if we are not really just the sum of our parts—if who we are is not a fat person or skinny, a smart person or dumb, a creative person or analytical, a tall person or short, an overachiever or under, if we are not just a bundle of raging hormones or unbending genes or the product of good or bad breeding, then what are we? Well, we are not fully sure about that yet—we are in process and we’ll have to wait to find out in due time. But we are given clear instructions about how to live until we find out.

On the positive side, Paul simply says we ought to strive for things that are above and leave behind things that are below. Nurture things of the spirit, avoid things of the flesh. Avoid things like fornication and what not, things that Coleman Silk was thinking were making him feel alive but were really killing him. Avoid letting the brute out. Leave behind the forces of sheer personal pleasure that are rooted in purely selfish desires.

Now it’s stuff like this about Christianity that makes many people avoid it. They figure what this means is have no fun until you get to heaven, and even then the fun you have earned by doing nothing fun your whole earthly life will be like the fun of playing Pinochle with your grandmother or discussing the fashion sense of the cherubim and seraphim. But that isn’t it at all.

Just look at the list of all those things Paul says we ought to have done with. Fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, greed, anger, wrath, malice, slander, abusive language, lying. Some of these are probably more fun sins than others. And you can argue that some of these aren’t so bad—like anger at evil, or a passion for goodness, beauty, and love. Which we need. But the actual words Paul chooses are entirely negative because they are all about desires that are only about ourselves at the expense of other people.

Imagine a world in which we all let the brute out and didn’t care about what it did to anyone else. Imagine the hurt we would do to everyone else in the pursuit of our own selfish pleasures. You don’t really have to imagine it—just watch a daytime soap opera! Do you really want to live in a soap opera world? A world in which everyone is angling for advantage over everyone else, where everyone has eyes for someone else’s spouse, where no one’s possessions are safe from someone else’s greedy hands? Those are the very things Paul says we ought to avoid if we are to become the people Christ will one day show us to be. And although we will never rid the church of all sin, and although we don’t want to be on a witch hunt for sins in each other, we don’t want a soap opera church. The church must be an alternative community of character that gives the world hope.

Paul says that behind all those sinful behaviors is one giant sin of false belief. You might look at the punctuation in your Bible on this point and think that the only sin this refers to is greed, but really the sin of idolatry is what’s behind all of it. We are worshipping the wrong god when we do these things. We are worshipping a god that tells us life is what you make of it in the here and now, that you don’t really belong unless you make yourself belong.

When I was a kid I used to sneak onto the Richmond County Country Club in the early evenings. It was just across Todt Hill Road from my house, and it was too alluring not to just slip on and carry my golf bag and pretend to belong. I always dressed up and tried to just act the part, but every step I took, I knew I didn’t belong there and I looked over my shoulder for someone who would drive up in a cart and kick me off for trespassing.

Many of us live that way. We don’t really know that Christ has made us to belong. And so we are always trying to do things to convince ourselves we do belong. When we try to live like that, we are like new money— throwing it around to show people we belong. Old money people don’t flaunt it. They can just be themselves and be comfortable with who they are.

This is what Paul wants of us, to learn to be comfortable enough with who we are in Christ that we will trust in it and live out of that trust. We can be generous and think of other people, because we are secure in who we are in Christ. We don’t have to have things or covet things or act on whatever impulses shoot through our senses at a given moment. We are not animals. We can delight in things that make us better people and that make other people better people, too.

We are talking about character. And character is not the same thing as personality. Personality has to do with your unique given nature, your sense of humor or carefreeness or discipline or intuitiveness. Character has to do with your capacity to make choices for the good of not only you but others—and to do that even under great stress or pressure. Personality is what it is. I know I’ll always be the kind of person that looks before he leaps, that thinks too much, that is basically a loner. I can work to not be too obnoxious about all that, but that is my nature. Character is something I can work on. Character is formed and shaped by the choices we make and commitments we keep. But it is also an imaginative exercise. You can decide what kind of person you want to be and begin to live toward that until you become that person. Paul says we ought to set our sights on things above, we ought to aim high in character building. We ought to envision becoming certain kinds of people and then work toward that.

My daughter Jillian and I were in Hollywood, California this week. The summer after each of my kids turned 13, I took them on a special trip with dad. My oldest two chose to go to New York, where their father grew up, where civilization first flourished, don’t you know?!, in these United States. Jillian chose Hollywood. Go figure. And if you know Jillian, you can go figure. Anyway, while we were there, we touched base with four different Wilshire kids who’ve gone out there and made good—Tom Welch, who is a graphics designer; Peri Gilpin, who plays Roz on Frasier; Lee Clay, who works with Stephen Spielberg; and Amy Acker, who is a regular on a TV series. One night we got to go to Paramount Studios and watch a taping of Amy’s show Angel, on the WB network. It was a fascinating experience to sit with the producer, director, camera and lighting people. To watch the scenes take shape on the carefully constructed sets. They must have rehearsed the 3 minute scene seven or eight times before actually filming. And then it took three takes to get it just right. The whole thing starts with a script that the actors then begin to memorize. They have words on the page, but they also have to imagine how their character might react in the scene, given what they already know about the character and where the writers want the story to go.

Amy did a great job, and we could watch it all unfold as she practiced the part. But I got to thinking, isn’t that it? Isn’t that kind of like what it takes for us all as grow in our Christian lives? Aren’t we supposed to imagine ourselves playing out the part in the community of Christ that we are called to by our gifts and talents? Aren’t we supposed to hone our characters to the characters the creator desires for us? And when we do, and only when we do, isn’t that when we are most alive? Isn’t that when everything really comes together not only for us but for the whole community?

It’s not the brute we are trying to let out, the force of earthly nature; it’s the Spirit of Christ we are trying to let in, the force of Christ at work to bring us to life. We have died to the brute in order to live to the Spirit.

If we want a church that is truly a colossal community, an example of life and love, of vitality and virtue, we need to let Christ live through us until he so transforms us that we one day awaken to find that true person he has created each of us to be. And won’t that be an exciting future? When we come into our own? When Christ is at last all in all?