Who You Are Is Who You Can Become in Christ
Year A Proper 16 (21) - Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost
Isaiah 51:1-6
Matthew 16:13-20
Do you know who you are? I remember a time in my life where people were putting a big focus on knowing yourself. They would say such things as “you can’t know another person until you know yourself”, or “how can you love another person if you don’t love yourself”. This is helpful to a point, but doesn’t get to what is truly important, especially since we know we change and knowing ourselves can actually be a pretty transcendental thing. Today, I think we have gone to a strange place. I have heard people say, “You can be whatever you want, or do whatever you want, as long as you aren’t hurting anyone or as long as it brings you happiness”, but we know we can’t be whatever we want and that our identities often lead to hurting people and don’t bring the kind of lasting happiness God wants for us.
I remember a time in my life, when I was an actor, that I had cared so much about what others thought of me, that after enough time I didn’t know who I was. For a time, I would look in on myself and see a hole, a kind of quicksand. It took a few years to realize that my identity could not be based on what other people wanted me to be. Only a few years prior I had the exact opposite experience. I was traveling alone through Australia. My parents had just been divorced and in this new reality, new place and new people, I realized I could reshape myself. I could be a new person every day if I wanted to be. So I was. Though I could change myself playfully with confidence, I found myself more and more unsettled, there was no peace and nothing better came of it. In both cases I needed something far more. My identity and purpose could not be grounded in what others wanted or on what I wanted. For most of my life I kind of existed somewhere in between, basing my identity off of my myself and others, but even still this wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t until seminary, when I began to pursue God’s call on my life, that I began to find my trueidentity. I had rejected God’s call on my life for 25 years, but it was only when I started to follow it that I began to take shape. It was not what others wanted, or what I wanted, it was what God wanted.
In today’s readings we learn something incredible about our identity. It is not who we are that is important, it is our source. It is not who we are, it is who we can become in God. God is calling us into a far greater identity with purpose and life than any we can find on our own. Both readings start out with the need to seek to know and understand our Lord God. This is really important, because as we understand God, as we understand our source, we can begin to understand who he created us to be, but what’s more, these readings show us, through the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, we can become something that didn’t seem possible.
In our passage from Isaiah, we hear that we have been hewn from the rock of God, we have been dug out of his quarry. That means that our life and identity is indissoluble tied to who and what God is. Like a rock we are meant to become something strong and beautiful, but that is only because God is truly strong and beautiful. One day I will preach a sermon on rocks in the bible, because there is a lot, but for now we can just take a moment to think about our own identity as a rock hewn from God. We can become like the stones of a house (created to give shelter and safety), with Jesus as our cornerstone and the rock we are built on. We can become like the stone thrown at Goliath, who by the hands of faith can overcome anything. We can be the stone rolled away from the tomb, revealing God’s immeasurable hope and love in Jesus. Or we can go our own way and become a stumbling stone, a collapsing wall or house, an unrefined and hidden jem, an idol's altar. All these examples are stones, but my point in quickly going through positive and negative biblical images of stones is to realize that there is something special and important about our Godly purpose and identity that we all must realize.
Isaiah’s message doesn’t go much into the rock’s purpose, but he does talk about the land's purpose (or Zion’s). He says God will bring comfort to the waste places. He will bring comfort to the places that don’t have order, purpose or life. He talks about the land like it has an identity, like it has emotions and experiences that need to be comforted. I think in God the land does have a life, personality, purpose, but I think Isaiah also talks in this way, because we relate to the land. We can easily become these waste and wild places that need comfort and purpose. The wilderness in our lives, needs to be transformed into Edens, gardens of an overflowing bounty and life. Our personal deserts, the places where nothing seems to survive, need to become places of life for God, that are filled with gladness, joy, thanksgiving and song. Who here wouldn’t want that. So our identities need to be transformed by our source, the one who ordered creation for life and who can bring order out of our wild and barren lives.
This may seem a little strange or too mystical to have purpose, but this is literally what we see happening for Peter, who was Simon. You will remember Peter was a fisherman who as he bowed low, knew he was unworthy of Jesus. As he followed Jesus he became something new. Today, we see him utterly transformed. Jesus gives him a new name and he becomes the rock, an ideal for what we are meant to be hewn into.
Sure Peter still got things wrong; only moments after our reading today Peter will try to get between Jesus and the salvation of the world and in turn Jesus will call him Satan. Or later Peter will reject Jesus three times, or will go back to fishing when he was called to lead. Even after following Jesus we still aren’t perfect, we aren’t yet completely who we are meant to be, but Peter does live into his new name, his new identity and he goes on to establish the church in Jerusalem, the church throughout the middle east, traditionally the church in Rome and more.
Peter is given a new identity in Jesus. Actually, Peter wasn’t given a new identity, he was given his first identity, the identity he was always meant for, even if it takes a while for him to live into it. So we all are meant to find our identity in Jesus. It starts with our identity as Christians, Jesus followers, little Christs, hewn from the rock. So before I am a father, before I am a friend, a priest, a teacher, anything, I am Christ’s. Then our identity goes deeper as we each have our own purpose and life in the body of Christ.
You will notice something interesting about how we have been talking about identity in Jesus: identity is not a stagnant thing - it is something we grow into. It is something that changes naturally with time, but with God it can be transformed into something more. It is not just an identity that fits, it is an identity of life, of purpose, of love and growth.
Just listen to how Peter’s identity and purpose is transformed: “you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven." So Peter becomes a part of God’s foundation for something that is so much bigger than him, the church that can never be overcome, even if Hell was to move next door.
Just a quick side note before moving on: many of you know that the western church has been shrinking. This does not mean that the church is dying, this is just an opportunity for us to recenter on God and not on culture, so that we might become that something more and find our purpose, even as a community. On top of that, the world church is growing, revivals are happening everything. The church of Christ is growing, it will not be overcome.
Back to our purpose. Peter is told that what he binds to heaven will be bound and what he looses will be let go. This is an immense power and responsibility and so our purpose in God comes with a similar amount of power and responsibility. This binding and loosing is often related to the priestly act of forgiveness, but it is more than that. We all live into this. When we share Jesus, invite people in and help them build a relationship with Jesus, we are binding them to heaven. When they refuse to listen or we refuse to speak, we are letting them go. Peter had a special role in this, as do priests, but so do we all as is our singular and created purpose.
So, we have looked at our identity in a lot of different ways. First and primarily, our true identity can only be discovered through knowing God. As Peter sees that Jesus is God’s anointed, the Son of God, then Peter is renamed and given his identity. It cannot be based on what people want us to be, or what we want to be, or a job or role as that will not give us who we are, or what we need. Instead, when we get to know God and follow him, we are transformed to become something bigger than what we want. This comes with an amazing purpose and power to bring people to God’s bounty, life and kingdom. It turns out that who we are is who we can become in Jesus. We are something that is only meant to grow into the amazing and wonderful character and potential of Jesus Himself. AMEN
