Identity

Proper 16

Fr. Tim Nunez

May my spoken word be true to God’s written word and bring us all closer to the living word, Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen

This morning’s readings speak to the question of identity. Who are we, really? We tend to think of that in terms of where we were raised, what we do and other sorts of tags of what is called social location, as though we could be plotted on a map. But it’s more like an ever-shifting sea.

And identity isn’t just about us as individuals. All of those markers place us in groups and as such we take on those identities, too.  The history of those groups is our history. That can be anything from sharing joy in Lake Wales High School winning a state championship to cherishing our Declaration of Independence.

With that in mind, the Old Testament is at once the Jewish people’s collective witness to God’s creation of the universe and their experience of him and it is also highly personal. Through Jesus Christians are grafted onto that same root. One can find an immense amount of objective wisdom in it, but the personal nature is a function of faith. The Exodus is our story. David is our hero. The prophets spoke to their time, and their words carry eternal significance.

Whether you are sitting in church or sitting at your kitchen table, when you hear or read Isaiah say, “Listen to me, you that pursue righteousness, you that seek the Lord,” it is God himself talking to all of us and to you specifically. It doesn’t matter that this text was written over five hundred years before Jesus or that it was written during Israel’s exile in Babylon.

God says look to your foundations, “the rock from which you were hewn.” Abraham was one and God promised him and Sarah innumerable descendants. You are a child of Abraham and therefore living proof that God’s promise to Abraham and Sarah is true. That is your history personally as well as our history together. Own it. Trust it. With that firmly established, here is what the Lord is going to do. Trust that as well.

We have a further advantage in that we know what Isaiah wrote did come to pass. The Lord did comfort Zion. He did lead Israel out of captivity in Babylon and restoring the land. The waste places were made fertile again. There was great joy and gladness, thanksgiving and song. The words God spoke through the prophets stuck and continue to be a “light to the nations” as we are sharing in that light right now. The Lord has shaped our entire vision of justice, even as we struggle to achieve it, we hope in the Lord.

And the Lord says that one day the earth itself “will wear out like a garment” and the heavens vanish and people will die like gnats; but his salvation will be forever, and his “deliverance will never be ended.” That is at once very sobering and very hopeful.

Whatever your “social location” may be, wherever you and your ancestors came from, whatever your experiences have been, whatever your vocational, cultural and family ties, the Lord has grafted you into this history and this promise. What has been is yours. What will be is yours, by faith.

That should be your foundation, the rock from which you are hewn. But that is a choice, a choice among many false options, of which indifference is a choice, as is how seriously we choose to attend to our rock.

When Jesus and his disciples come to Caesarea Philippi, they have stepped into a very different place. It is naturally very beautiful, lush, and green. It has a spring-fed, crystal clear river flowing out of the roots of Mount Hermon that becomes one of three main headwaters that form the River Jordan.

It was and is in Israel, but the site is called Banias, which in their time had been a center for worshipping the Greek god Pan for hundreds of years. Pan was half man, half goat and god of the wild – as in wilderness and wildness. Our word “panic” is derived from his name. There were dozens of statues and other monuments to Pan, many of which are still there among the ruins. Herod the Great also built a temple to Emperor Augustus Caesar. It had a Greek city at the time as well.

In that pagan place, Jesus asks two questions. First, who do people say that he is? What do they hear among the crowds? People are regarding Jesus as a prophet. His emphasis on repentance is akin to John the Baptist. He’s doing some miraculous things, perhaps like Elijah signaling mighty acts from God. He’s echoing Jeremiah’s promise of a new covenant with God. True prophets call people back to God’s promises. He’s like that. But he’s so much more.

Then Jesus asks who the disciples think he is. They have seen and learned so much more than the crowds, after all. Peter answers, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” He connects Jesus to the one, true living God in the middle of a pagan shrine, with dozens of dead, stone idols all around them.

He’s got it, except that when Peter says it, it’s kind of like me knowing Einstein’s theory of relativity formula is E=MC2, or energy equals mass times the speed of light, squared. That’s right, but I really don’t know the fullness of what it actually means.

For the moment, Jesus commends Peter for getting the formula right as divine revelation, even though he will immediately show he has a lot more to learn. His confession of Jesus as the Messiah, the Christ, and the Son of the living God will become the rock upon which the church will gather when Peter and the other apostles share the Good News. Unlike Isaiah or any other prophet, the community of faith will gather around Jesus himself. Nothing, not even death itself can prevail against Jesus, the ultimate word of life. Jesus himself will prove that with his own death and Resurrection.

This is the essence of what we say about Jesus in the Nicene Creed:

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
    the only Son of God,
    eternally begotten of the Father,
    God from God, Light from Light,
    true God from true God,
    begotten, not made,
    of one Being with the Father.
    Through him all things were made.
    For us and for our salvation
        he came down from heaven:
    by the power of the Holy Spirit
        he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,
        and was made man.
    For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
        he suffered death and was buried.
        On the third day he rose again
            in accordance with the Scriptures;
        he ascended into heaven
            and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

We are formed around this witness, this creed, this statement of faith. We know these words by heart. Are they truly foundational for us? Do we pray them or recite them? Do they guide the way we live?

Times of testing always come; accidents, injuries to body, mind and spirit, disappointments and failures, anxieties and depression, tragedies and sorrows too deep to speak for ourselves and those we love. 

When all other lights go out, this is the light that shines in the darkness, and the darkness shall not, cannot, overcome it. This is the truth we proclaim in our day and time, in the midst of people who believe anything and everything and nothing (which is to say they worship themselves.) God has burdened us with his love and grace to introduce Jesus, to graft them into his hope and promise.

AMEN!