Who Am I?
July 26, 2009 1 Pet 1:1-2
Intro:
I’d like you to close your eyes for a moment so you can concentrate on this question: way down deep inside you, the place where few if any other people really see, deep in your soul, who are you? What is your identity?
Some of you don’t like that question, because you don’t like what you see. In these kind of quiet moments, just you and God, you are uncomfortable because you see mostly the bad stuff about yourself – some of the filth, some of the lies, some of the lusts, some of the hatred or selfishness – and you are convinced that God sees all that yucky stuff and is just waiting for you to acknowledge it so He can punish you like you deserve. So some people avoid thinking about who they are in the hopes that if we ignore it, it will just go away.
Others don’t like that question because it brings up more pain than bad things we have done. When we look deep inside, just us and God, we see all the ways that we have been hurt, damaged, wounded, and we start to feel that emotional pain, and we are often afraid that if we pay any attention to it, it will quickly overwhelm us. So again, we sometimes try to ignore it and hope it will go away.
Others maybe don’t mind the question so much – maybe because we’ve accepted who we are and are reasonably comfortable with our understanding of our identity. We know there are places of sin, and places of pain, but we’ve found ways of carrying on in spite of those or through those, and so we have a sense of who we are and try to live out of it.
Whatever your reaction to the question, it is an important one to ask, even if it is uncomfortable. Because how we see our identity has an awful lot to do with how we live our lives, and when we understand who we are in the light of the truth of God, it transforms how we see just about everything – including the stuff we see that we don’t like, the stuff we see that hurts, and even the things we accept. Knowing who we are as Children of God is a critical starting point for how we live as children of God.
So for the Sunday’s I’m around and speaking this summer, I want to focus on this question of identity. Who am I? Who are we?? And what does that mean for how we live??? We are going to jump into that question by studying various passages in 1 Peter.
Why Identity?
But before introducing you to 1 Peter, and looking just at the first two verses this morning, I’ve chosen this topic of identity because it is one I’ve been thinking about a lot these past couple years, both personally and institutionally.
Personally, I’ve mentioned previously that there were some things about myself that I wasn’t liking much. I didn’t like what I saw when I looked in the mirror. I didn’t like that my waist-line kept growing, my clothes were uncomfortable, and to put it as bluntly as possible – I had become fat. In fact, the first day I stepped on the scale on the Wii Fit, it measured my BMI and said simply and bluntly, “That’s obese.” Ouch! The point is simply that I didn’t like who I was becoming physically, and needed to make some changes to my diet and activity level. Several of you have noticed and asked if I’ve been losing weight, sometimes with concern about whether I’ve been sick, and the answer is yes I’ve been losing weight and no I haven’t been sick – in fact I feel much better than I used to. But thanks for asking, it made me feel cared for.
Institutionally, as “the church”, we’ve also been discussing the question of identity and will continue to. What does it mean to be “the church” in the middle of a drastically different cultural climate than even 30 years ago? It’s a big question… Institutional identity also became the subject of some research I began during my sabbatical in June. I began a Masters of Education program at the UofA, and discovered that many in the university system are asking similar questions as we are in the church – who are we? where do we fit in a changing culture? And I’m really looking forward to learning more and seeing more parallels and ways that we can understand our culture and how we define institutional identity. There are neat overlaps, like the place of the Christian church in the current university, which (in the Western world) were all founded on Christian principles and frequently by very committed Christian people – where is the church in the university world now? I noticed this picture in HUB mall, which certainly tells part of the story:
1 Peter 1:1-2 (NIV)
The reason I want to study 1 Peter together is because it addresses this very question: who are we, and what does that mean for how we live? Today we are going to look at just the first two verses (from the New International Version):
1Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To God’s elect, strangers in the world, scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia, 2who have been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and sprinkling by his blood: Grace and peace be yours in abundance.
Background:
New Testament letters, like this one, begin the way ours end – we sign our names at the end, back then they did it at the beginning. This one tells us it is by Peter, yes the Peter that we know from the stories of Jesus that was one of the twelve, often the spokesman of the twelve who was often rushing headfirst into everything. It was most likely written 30 or 40 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, and Peter addresses it to Jesus’ followers spread out through a number of different places, which tells us that this is what we call a “circular” letter, designed to be passed along from place to place so that a large number of Jesus’ followers would have the chance to read it and learn from it and be encouraged. And as I read the whole letter start to finish (which, by the way, is your homework this week!), I really believe it is a great encouragement to us because it helps us define who we are, and how then we should live.
After telling us who the author is, the letter tells us to whom it is written. There are three very distinct descriptors of the people of God, which are packed full of meaning.
“God’s Elect”:
This idea is picked up again at the beginning of verse 2, and in its very simplest it means this: who are we? We are people whom the God of the Universe, creator of all things, from everlasting to everlasting, all-knowing all-powerful and all-present, has chosen to be His own. God picked us, God chose us, God “elected” us.
That is a pretty amazing place to start our discussion of identity. When we close our eyes and ask the uncomfortable question “who am I?”, Peter’s first answer is that we are people chosen by God. Picked. Not because we are great and can help Him out so much, but because we are loved by God.
Do you know what it is like to be chosen out of love? Many adopted kids know. I’m in the middle of “wedding season”, where I have the great privilege of watching couples who have chosen one another out of love for something truly amazing – a covenant of marriage. These people aren’t all the beautiful, talented, successful, perfectly-white-toothed people that our culture sets up as the supposed standard to which we are all to aspire, but they are each incredibly beautiful and alive and full in the love that they have chosen to give to one another. And that is the picture of God and His church – we are even called “the bride of Christ” – chosen, elect, made beautiful in His perfect love. So the first answer we have to our question, “who are we”, is clear: “God’s elect”.
“Strangers in the World”:
Peter’s second packed phrase about our identity is “strangers in the world”. There is something very different about the true people of God compared to the rest of the people in our world, so different that it literally makes us “strangers in the world”. We shouldn’t really fit. We should be a little uncomfortable, because we have chosen and been chosen to live in the Kingdom of God first, and it is in many ways pretty different. It is a Kingdom where the least are the greatest, where the highest call is service, where the pursuit is not of things to enrich our lives but things to enrich the lives of others – because as we live like that we discover the best lives of joy. Where mercy triumphs over judgment. Where sin is met with forgiveness. Where love covers a multitude of sins, and where the highest expression of love is gladly laying down our lives for another.
“Scattered”:
This simple word refers to the geographic placement of the people to whom Peter was writing, but I think there is something more: this was God’s desire. To “scatter” His people around the world, so that people everywhere would have opportunity to see others who live differently, according to the Kingdom of God. And I think this applies to us today – we too are “scattered” into different neighbourhoods, workplaces, schools, social groupings for the same reason: that people might see us, and see something different about our lives that points them to the Kingdom of God.
Vs. 2:
Verse 2 could easily be a whole sermon on its own – it is packed. But since Peter wrote it simply as one sentence, I’ll try to treat it simply as well. Notice the presence of God the Father, God the Holy Spirit, and God the Son. And notice the progression: it begins with the idea of being chosen by God the Father, through the work of the Holy Spirit, for the purpose of obedience to Jesus.
The key is actually in the three prepositional phrases. Should I ask a high school english student to define for us all the “prepositional phrase”? Instead I’ll just highlight them: “according to…”, “through…”, and “for…”. The Father chooses, the saving work is done through the power of the Holy Spirit, for the purpose of obedience to Jesus. I’ll leave it at that for this week.
Conclusion:
We began with an introspective question about our identity, and I want to return to that question to wrap up. If you don’t like that question because you see all the bad in yourself and expect God to judge, do you see any of that in this passage? I don’t – I see the love of God choosing us to be His children, adopting us into His family, without some conditional love that says “I’ll only love you if you are good enough…”. That is not how God works. Or if you see the pain or hurt, what do you see in this passage that speaks to that? I see a lot – we are strangers, we are scattered, and both of those realities can sometimes contribute to our pain. But we are those by God’s choice, and we’ll see later in 1 Peter how God really sees the pain and suffering.
There really is only one thing I want you to get out of today’s sermon: the answer to the question “who am I?”, “who are we?” is found first and foremost in the reality that we have been chosen by God, through the Holy Spirit, for obedience. You are God’s precious child. Us together are called “the bride of Christ”, and God intends us to define ourselves first in terms of our relationship to Him. And defining ourselves that way begins the path to freedom and life abundant.
