The True Lens

It may seem like an odd time of year to talk about Christmas movies, but one of my all-time favorites is A Christmas Story. It’s the story of a young boy named Ralphie, growing up in the 1940s, who wants one thing and one thing only for Christmas: a Red Ryder BB gun. But along the way, he becomes obsessed with something else—the Little Orphan Annie radio show. When he finally receives his long-awaited “Speedomatic” decoder pin, he’s convinced it’s going to unlock some great mystery of life. So he rushes to decode the secret message… and it turns out to be a crummy commercial: “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.”

All that anticipation. All that hope. And the message is empty.

I think about that scene sometimes because it’s such a perfect picture of what it feels like when we’re looking through the wrong lens. We spend so much of our lives trying to make sense of ourselves and the world—trying to understand who we are, what we’re worth, where we belong. And we do that by looking through different lenses: the lens of culture, the lens of expectation, the lens of fear, the lens of success. But so often, when we finally “decode” what those lenses are showing us, what we get back is something distorted, something shallow, something that doesn’t reflect the deeper truth of who we are.

In our Gospel reading today from the Gospel of John, Jesus is speaking to his disciples in a moment of anxiety and uncertainty. He says to them, “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” And then he says something that has echoed through centuries of Christian faith: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” Now, those words have often been heard in a very narrow way, as if Jesus is drawing a boundary line, saying who is in and who is out. But in John’s Gospel, something much deeper is happening.

John isn’t just talking about the historical Jesus standing in front of his disciples. He is pointing to what he calls the Logos—the Word of God—the living presence of God that has been with us from the very beginning, the creative heartbeat of the universe itself.

This is the Christ who is woven into everything, the Christ through whom all things came into being, the Christ who is not just in the world but at the very center of it.

And Jesus, in his life, saw everything through that reality. You might say he was looking through the clearest possible lens—the lens of divine union, the lens of oneness with the Source of all life.

He didn’t look at himself through the lens of rejection. He didn’t look at others through the lens of judgment. He didn’t interpret God through the lens of fear-based religion. Instead, he saw clearly—because he saw from within his union with God.

That’s why he can say something as bold as, “I and the Father are one.” And even more striking, he invites his followers into that same way of seeing. Because here’s the quiet truth running underneath everything Jesus says: the same divine presence that lived in him lives in you.

The theologian Paul Tillich once put it this way: if God were not already within us, we wouldn’t even be able to perceive God at all.

Or as Richard Rohr describes it, there is within each of us an “immortal diamond,” a spark of the divine that cannot be taken away, no matter what the world says about us. This is our true identity. This is our birthright.

And yet we so often look through other lenses instead. We look at ourselves through the lens of not-enoughness. We look at others through the lens of comparison or suspicion. We look at God through lenses that have been handed to us—sometimes by culture, sometimes even by religion—lenses that portray God as distant, judgmental, or conditional. And when we look through those lenses long enough, they start to feel like reality.

But Jesus says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” Trust in God. Trust in me—in this way of seeing, this way of understanding, this way of living. “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.” Not just someday, not just somewhere else, but right here, in this vast, living reality we inhabit—a reality that is, in every moment, held within God.

What if the truth is we are already living in God’s house? What if this is a God-soaked world?

In Psalm 139, the psalmist asks, “Where can I go from your Spirit?” If we rise on the wings of the dawn, God is there. If we make our bed in the depths, God is there. Even there, God’s hand holds us fast. Jesus came not to tell us that God was somewhere far away, but to make visible what has always been true.

“Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” In other words, Jesus becomes the lens through which we can finally see clearly. If you want to know what God is like, look at a life of compassion. Look at healing. Look at forgiveness. Look at love that refuses to give up. That is what God looks like.

And that also becomes the lens through which we begin to see ourselves.

Because any image of God that is rooted in violence, exclusion, or fear—that’s a distorted lens. Any way of seeing yourself that tells you that you are without worth, without dignity, without belonging—that is not the truth of who you are in God.

Jesus helps us set those lenses aside. He invites us to see with new eyes.

To see a world that is already held in God.
To see a God who is already present in everything.
To see a self that is already grounded in divine love.

Because the true message—the one that comes from the heart of reality itself—is this: you are already held, you are already loved, you already belong.

And the invitation of Jesus is not to become someone else, but to see more clearly who you already are. To look at your life through this deeper lens. To trust that the presence you glimpse in him is alive in you, too.

So maybe faith, at its heart, is not about getting all the answers right. Maybe it’s about learning how to see. Because there are plenty of lenses out there. But only one of them brings the world—and your life—into focus.

Amen.