“Who Am I?”
Mark 1:4-13
(This sermon gets its inspiration from Henry Nouwen’s “Life of the Beloved” 1992)
Life is short, isn’t it?
I was born in 1968 and say I live until 2054—that’s not so bad, right?
But that’s it.
Now you may be thinking, “I came along a little bit later than you, and so I have a few more years,” or “I came along a bit earlier so I probably have fewer years ahead of me than you.”
But it doesn’t make a huge difference in the whole scheme of things.
We all have a limited amount of time and our lives go by very, very fast.
It’s like a flash in the pan.
And the question most of us spend our lives trying to answer is: “Who Am I?”
And one answer we live with is: “I am what I do.”
When I have a little success in life I might feel good about myself, but when I fail I might start feeling a little low.
As I get older, I might say “I can’t do a whole lot anymore, but look what I have done in the past.”
“Look at what I built or look at my children…look, look, look.”
(pause)
Another answer I may have as it relates to who I am is “I am what other people say about me.”
And what other people say about me can be very powerful.
Sometimes it can be the most important thing.
If people say good things about me, I can walk around feeling good, feeling free.
But when someone starts talking behind my back, or when somebody starts saying negative things about me, I might start feeling sad.
I think most of us can relate to this, I might get a hundred compliments about something, but then, say, one person doesn’t like what I’m doing or the way I’m doing it—they are unsettled about me in some way, then that’s the only thing that I remember—that’s the only thing I focus on and it ruins just about everything.
When someone speaks badly about us—those words cut deep and wound us.
And if someone says something mean or negative or hurtful to us in the morning it can ruin our whole day.
(pause)
Another thing we might say to try and figure out who we are is “I am what I have.”
I have a good background.
I have good parents.
I have a good education.
I have good health.
I have a lot of things.
But the problem with this is that as soon as I lose any of it—say a family member dies or my health starts to go or I lose my house I can fall into darkness.
I can slip into despair.
As humans, a lot of our energy goes into these claims: “I am what I do,” “I am what other people say about me,” and “I am what I have.”
And this puts our lives, our happiness, and our identities at the mercy of our highs and lows.
And so, we obsess over staying above a certain line…we obsess over surviving.
And then, we die.
And when we are dead no one talks about us, not enough to matter to us anyway.
We don’t have anything anymore.
The ups and downs end in death and just surviving is not surviving at all.
And what little life we have ends up as nothing in the end.
(pause)
But this whole thing is wrong!!!
That is NOT who you are and that is NOT who I am!
But these things are what the devil said to Jesus when Jesus went into the wilderness after He was baptized.
The devil said, “Turn these stones into bread and prove you can do something.”
“Jump from the Temple and let the angels catch you so that people will speak well about you.”
“Kneel in front of me and then I will give you all kinds of things.”
“And then your life will be worthwhile because you will have done something, people will speak well about you and you will have something.”
“And everyone is going to love you.”
And Jesus says, “That is a LIE!!!”
And that lie is at the root of what causes us to enter into relationships of violence and destruction.
It’s the root of war, misery, and selfishness.
In our Gospel Lesson for this morning, we are told that a time came for Jesus to come from Nazareth in Galilee to be baptized by John in the Jordan.
And “just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove.
And a voice came from heaven:
‘You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.”
That’s Who Jesus was.
That was His identity.
Jesus heard His Father’s voice and He clung to that voice as He lived His life.
And there were times when people praised Him, and there were times when people rejected Him.
When He entered Jerusalem at the beginning of the last week of His life people shouted Hosanna!!!
But by the end of that week, people crucified Him.
But through it all, Jesus hung on to the Truth—He is God’s Son, God loves Him and with Him, God is well pleased!
And that is Who Jesus was and that enabled Him to live triumphally in a world that kept rejecting Him, or praising Him or laughing at Him, or spitting on Him.
His identity didn’t depend on what He did, or what others said about Him or what He had.
He was God’s Son, Who God loved.
And God was pleased with Him.
And that was all that mattered.
And if there is nothing else you or I hear this morning, I want us to know that if we have given our lives over to Christ—What God said of Jesus God says of us!
You are God’s son, you are God’s daughter.
God loves you.
God is pleased with you.
And we have to hear this, don’t we?
We have to hear it, not so much with our ears, but in our hearts—through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and that changes our entire lives.
“I have loved you with an everlasting love,” God says in Jeremiah.
“I have engraved your name on the palm of my hands,” God says in Isaiah.
And in Psalm 139 God says, “I created your inmost being; I knit you in your mother’s womb.”
“I love you.
I died for you.
You are mine and I am yours.
And you belong to me and no one can snatch you out of my hands!”
Have you heard that?
Do you hear that?
Do you know that?
Is that who you are—the beloved child of God?
This is who we have been created to be.
And yes, the other voices come in to try and steal our identity.
The other voices come in to ruin our lives and confuse us.
But the truth is that we are loved by God.
And that is what we affirm at our Baptism.
And we tell the devil that those other things are all a lie!!!
If we can hear the voice of God speaking to us from all eternity to all eternity—our lives will become more and more like the life of Christ.
And then we will start to discover that all we do is nurtured and sprouts from our knowledge that God loves us.
And this will cut right into our daily lives.
And we will still be rejected at times, and we will still be praised at other times and we will still have loses but we will live as people who are no longer searching for our identity—no longer trying to answer the question: “Who am I?”
We will still have pain and failures and success, but we will know who we are and Whose we are.
In 1st John, it says, “We love because God first loved us.”
And the great struggle in life, and I’m not saying it’s easy because it’s not, but the great struggle is to claim that love—that God first loves us.
Every time we are tempted to feel bitter, to lash out, and feel rejected can we go back and say, “No! I am loved by God!
And even though I have been rejected that rejection will become for me an opportunity to reclaim the truth!”
It’s like being pruned.
It helps me to claim more fully and deeply the truth of how much God loves me.
And if I can hold onto that I can be free to love other people without expecting them to give me everything my heart desires.
After Jesus, having been led by the Spirit into the wilderness for forty days to be tempted by Satan, was able to hold on to His identity as the Son of God, whom God loves and is well pleased…
…He went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, “The time has come.
The kingdom of God has come near.
Repent and believe the good new!”
Brothers and sisters, God has created you and me with hearts that only God’s love can satisfy.
And if we can hold onto the fact that God loves us, that Jesus came and died for us—if we repent and truly believe that Good News—we too, can be free to walk in this life proclaiming God’s love to others.
And that’s what it’s all about.
Today is Baptism of the Lord Sunday.
It’s an opportunity to re-claim the truth that we are God’s children, adopted through the blood of Christ, and He is well pleased with us.
That is who we are.
That is Whose we are.
And nothing else matters.
If you have been baptized, whether it was as a child or an adult, please come forward, touch the baptismal waters, re-claim your baptism, and be thankful, and then take a shell with you as a symbol of your baptism.
If you have not been baptized, please come forward and let me know that you would like to be baptized…
…and we will make an appointment to sit down and discuss what baptism means and we will plan a Sunday for your big event.
