This morning it may or may not be true that we have visitors with us as part of "bring-a-friend" Sunday. In any case, I want to think with you about our identity as Christians. Who are we as men and women having an on-going connection with this church and considering ourselves in one way or another to be followers of Jesus Christ?
The concept of identity is something we pay attention to in our culture. My Google search on the word identity told me there were 259 million possible links to pursue. My online dictionary gave six definitions for the term "identity." The first was "The collective aspect of the set of characteristics by which a thing is definitively recognizable or known." Rather vague, I think. The fourth was more to the point: "The distinct personality of an individual regarded as a persistent entity; individuality."
If you go to the psychology section or self-help section of any bookstore, you will find lots of titles that focus on the matter of identity. The name of Erik Erikson is important in any academic discussion of identity. He laid out a sequence of eight stages through which the human personality develops. Additionally, wellness gurus like John Bradshaw have popularized the idea that we are human beings rather than human doings, thereby reminding us that we are not ultimately defined by our work or accomplishments.
I learned a long time ago that a lot of people want to define me by what I do professionally. Other people have had to learn that, but ministers and priests certainly need to learn it. I think of traveling in an airplane and having to decide whether or not I will tell the stranger sitting next me that I am a Protestant clergyman—or minister. When I have done that, I have had to listen to stories about how the Church abused the narrator in the past and why the narrator no longer participates in any kind of organized religion—or disorganized religion, which is what many churches really are when you come right down to it—Rutgers as an exception, of course.
I consider myself to be very fortunate, because I really like what I do professionally. But that is not the essence of who I am. I am a combination of many things—to name a few: gender, sexual orientation, ethnic or national origin, political persuasion, economic class, age category—and the list goes on.
Clearly I make decisions on the basis of one or more of those factors in different situations. For instance, when I go skiing, I no longer choose trails that are marked with a black diamond as expert. When I was much younger, I did that, realizing that if fell (which was likely), I might get bruised but I probably wouldn't break a bone and need medical care. Now a fall on the slopes could be disastrous, so I am a little cautious. My age is part of my identity, but it's not the whole picture. The same is true of my gender, my sexual orientation, my marital status, and other factors.
It has become pretty clear to me that I need to have a core identity that will give shape and meaning to the many facets of who I am. I know people who order their life and priorities on the basis of their political affiliation. Back in the nineteen-eighties I had a church member who became seriously ill and came to a time when she shared with her husband what she wanted her obituary to say. She made it clear that more than anything she wanted everybody to know she was a strong supporter of Ronald Regan. For her, politics were the organizing principle of her life. I know people for whom national origin takes that central place of ultimacy.
Identity for gay and lesbian people is closely tied to sexual orientation—probably in a way that many straight people find difficult to understand unless they are part of some minority group. Erik Erikson, to whom I referred earlier, has said that the development of identity is focused in adolescence, and in our society gay and lesbian teenagers get hurtful negative messages from the culture and from, God help us, most religious communities. So for many gay and lesbian people sexual orientation may become their core identity. It can shape the way they make decisions about time, money, relationships, and loyalties.
The matter of identity is complex. It is also important. The longer I live, the more I am learning that it's healthy to be intentional about the way we make choices, so that we don't react unthinkingly in situations but rather act on the basis of our considered values and priorities.
The verses I read from Mark's Gospel speak to the issue of core identity for many of us here in church this morning. They speak to people who have made a conscious decision to follow Jesus, or to be a Christian disciple, to put it another way. Mark's Gospel tells us about twelve men, who among a larger group of women and men, spent a lot of time with the young carpenter-teacher-healer who lived in the area of Galilee and the Jordan River—Jesus of Nazareth. He lived a simple life, owning little or nothing so far as we know, and he spoke strongly against people who claimed to speak for God while reducing spirituality and morality to rules or laws. He was not afraid to challenge authority, especially when authority was used to exclude people from life's abundance and joy. Much of what he taught threatened the security of the privileged people of his time, and eventually they succeeded in having him executed. Three days after his death many of the men and women who had been his followers experienced him as alive in an inexplicable but undeniable way. They understood his resurrection as confirmation of his teaching and as validation of the hope he had engendered in them, his followers.
During the two thousand years since his death and resurrection, Jesus of Nazareth has had an uncanny ability to continue attracting followers. I and many of you are among them. Like his resurrection, his power to attract is difficult to explain but impossible to deny. Over centuries people have willingly chosen to die rather than deny their loyalty to Jesus as Savior and Lord.
Honesty requires his followers to admit that at times Christians, the name given to his disciples, have acted contrary to his teachings, causing pain and death for people unwilling to embrace his name or live by the kind of restrictive rules he worked so hard to do away with. But the far greater part of Christian history is marked by behavior like that of the Pennsylvania Amish people, who, to the utter bafflement of even the evening news commentators, recently forgave the man who murdered their children and raised money to help the murderer's family in their humiliation.
When the Amish people of Pennsylvania were asked why they forgave and helped the murderer's family, they seemed surprised. Their answer was, "That's what we do." They spoke firmly but not arrogantly, unassumingly but not apologetically. I realize there is much about the Amish understanding of Christian faith that doesn't fit in with my understanding of it, and the understanding of many American Christians in 2006. But I can't help respecting, even admiring, their ability to do what is so different from the way most people in our culture respond to violent behavior that takes human life and cheapens it. The standard in our culture is to want the perpetrator punished in a way that takes on aspects of the crime—an eye for an eye. But Jesus wasn't willing to settle for that. He saw other possibilities.
The verses I read show us two of Jesus' original followers asking him to grant them a big favor—to have places of special honor when he established his rule in heaven and on earth. They are like so many people who try to use Jesus or God as a genie in a bottle: grant me three wishes and I'll go to church every Sunday for a year. Or, if I just pray the right way and believe hard enough, God will give me my heart's desire. It doesn't work that way, my friends. That's not what it means to follow Jesus.
What does it mean? I believe it means to take a long, hard look at Jesus and see him for who he was, what he taught, and what he did. The essence of that is in the last verse I read: he came to serve rather than be served. He came to make his life an offering of love—love that affirms unconditionally the worth of every human being just as she or he is. Jesus knew himself to be the deeply loved child of God, and so he could love out of strength, not out of need for approval and acceptance.
It's only on the basis of that unconditional love that he invites followers in every age to live by counter-cultural norms and values, to establish an identity grounded in healthy self-acceptance, and to engage in service not out of burdensome duty but out of a joyful celebration of life's goodness.
And so, if you were seated next to me on an airplane and asked me who I am, I would say, "I am a deeply loved child of God, God who accepts me as I am, and who wants me to experience life in all its fullness. Everything else about me flows from that." Then I would ask, "And who are you?"