Sermon Central
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Identity
Contributed by Sermon Central on Feb 1, 2011 (message contributor)
IDENTITY
Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France has proposed a decree that would ban anyone from wearing religious symbols of any kind. The decree is aimed particularly at forbidding Muslim women from wearing their traditional burqa with a full-faced veil. However the decree is broad enough that it would ban any religious symbol.
President Sarkozy's contention is that the French people are being divided by a myriad of diverse religious expressions and therefore can no longer focus on their common identity as the people of France. Homiletics Magazine puts it, "The emphasis should be on being French first, secular second and religious a distant third, at best (but probably not at all)." The idea is that the powers that be in France want the people of France to rally around the flag... the nation being the unifying factor rather than the divisiveness of individual religious preferences. (Homiletics, July 2010, P. 31)
In the July 26, 2010 issue of Time magazine I read that there are an estimated 5 million Muslims living in France and of those 5 million, 2,000 wear the full-face Islamic burqa veil. In a country of 65, 447,324 people, 2,000 does not seem to be very many. However, on July 13 the National Assembly passed a draft law declaring that "no one can, in the public space, wear clothing intended to hide the face." (Bobby Ghosh, The Moment, Time Magazine, July 26, 2010, p. 11)
The French are wondering what it means to be French.
The bible acknowledges the reality of the existence of our many and varied identities. The inference is that our varied identities can serve to define us and even divide us. So God's answer to our dissimilarities is to focus on our single similarity...our identity in Christ.
Paul wrote, "You are all Children of God through faith in Christ Jesus...there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." Galatians 3:26-28
(From a sermon by Monty Newton, Finding Your Identity, 7/27/2010)
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