|
Twinbrook Baptist Church Rockville, MD First Sunday after Christmas December 31, 2006 Pastor: Kip Ingram Kipi1@aol.com |
|
This is a photograph of me that my wife found recently while digging through some old boxes. It was taken when I was a junior in high school and playing on the basketball team. For some strange reason, my daughters have set it up in our living room these days. When I look at this photograph, I hardly remember the person pictured in it. In some ways it is a different person than me now. Is there something that links us together? Physically we are different. We know that cells and groups of cells, even major organs, are constantly remaking themselves as millions of cells die and millions more are created continually. In a sense, I don´t really have any of the exact cells that I had at that distant time. I am also different in that I have encountered many different forms of learning since then, undergone emotional development, lived through formative events of different kinds. There is hardly a resemblance in thinking and feeling between the person I am now and the one I was then. So where is the continuity, the connecting link, between now and then so that I can say ”this is me”? This is the question of identity that all of us must answer in one way or another. For we are each of us an amalgamation, a potpourri if you will, of assorted experiences, impulses, encounters, habits, routines and relationships. In all the moment by moment contingent variety of our lives, is there a common set of features, recognizable patterns, that give us and others a sense of who we are? I don´t think we can answer this question, the question of identity, by appealing to some unchanging essence in each us that stays with us throughout our lives, for except for some rudimentary DNA information, we are all of us changing all the time, and the question of the fullness of who we are cannot be answered by reducing it to something negligible like our DNA or our fingerprint. So how do we claim our identity, for without some kind of personal identity, we would be a chaotic mass of impulses unable to say in a meaningful way, ”I.” One way we forge our identity is by viewing our lives as a story. We take all the experiences, formative decisions, and contingent events, and shape them into a meaningful narrative, a way to say that this is who I am with all my joys and losses, achievements and blessings. My ethics professor in seminary used to say: ”tell me your story and I will tell you who you are.” To be sure, we learn some of our story about our earliest years from parents and older ones, and sometimes when we are older, younger ones will keep our story if we can no longer recall it all. But all of us have a story of some kind. One of the most famous Christian people to share his identity in this way was St. Augustine in the 5th century. Augustine wrote his Confessions as a way of forging his identity by recounting the story of his life, chapter by chapter. We see the truth in looking back and telling our story as a way of expressing our identity. But this is only a part of how we find our identity, for we not only look back to our past, we also look forward in anticipation of our future. This morning I invite you to consider the meaning of the future, your future, in determining who you are. Between his birth and his adult ministry, the gospels recount only one episode in the life of Jesus. He is 12 years old, and like every year, Jesus has accompanied his parents and larger family to Jerusalem for the Passover feast days. It was a large family trip, and they would stay in the big city of Jerusalem, with all of its history and stories and opportunities. This was the place to come to celebrate the Festival of Passover, as well as to learn and share by interacting with others. The festival ends, and the large group of family and friends traveling with Joseph and Mary begin the journey home. After a days worth of traveling, someone notices that Jesus is not with them. Joseph and Mary begin to search among family and friendsBno Jesus. They travel back to Jerusalem, another day´s journey, and they begin to look around for their missing son. Finally, on the third day, they find Jesus in the Temple. He is sitting among some of the teachers, listening and asking questions. And people are amazed at his depth of understanding for such a young age. In a very real sense, Jesus is working on his identity by exploring the possibilities of his future. He is young, on the edge of what we might call adolescence, and he is trying to figure it out, trying to figure himself and his future out. You get the sense that Jesus is not so much looking back on his life as he sits with others as much as he is laying the groundwork for his future. In some ways, this story is a prototypical example of an adolescent who needs to create some distance in his family in order to focus intensely on his own identity and future. Jesus as the original teen rebel, running from mom and dad who just don´t understand, working through his own identity crisis. The developmental psychologist, Erik Erickson, said that the adolescent stage in life is about the challenge of identity versus role confusion. He said that in this period of our lives, like no other time, we are intensely concerned with who we can and will be, and the challenge is to forge an identity instead of wandering into a confusion about our roles in the world. This story about Jesus searching out his answers, and in some ways, asserting his independence, is a classic example of the adolescent exploration for identity and future possibility. And yet, the forging of identity does not end at adolescence. We are working on who we are and who we can be all through our lives, not just by looking back but also by looking forward. You see, the future is not something we relate to in a neutral way. As Kurt Reinhardt has written: ”the future . . . is not something wholly indefinite that will occur at some later date and therefore does not concern me at this present moment. The future is already alive in human hopes and fears, in human planning and designing: it is a formative force and an integral part of the present.” The future affects each of us in the form of anticipation. We look forward to future events or dread them. We plan things in advance or drift through whatever happens. We foresee possibilities or forget our initial intentions or just feel trapped. We imagine that things will be a certain way, resist the unexpected, see ourselves following in the shoes of our parents. The future is a dynamic thing for each of us, and how we relate to it will shape our identity. I can illustrate this by inviting each of us to ask the following question: who can I be in 2007? You see, this isn´t just theory, it´s an important issue that strikes home with each of us. Who can I be in 2007? When you think about what might come in the next year, what feelings do you have? Fear or worry about certain things? Eagerness and excitement about specific plans? A general sense of dread or relative comfort with getting by? How will you integrate the future into who you are and can be? Will you commit to certain things, make some resolutions? Will you establish some goals or make some definite plans? Will you consider doing something new or going back to something you´ve neglected? We only have one lifetime on this earth and 2007 is lying out there in front of each of us. How will we engage it? As we consider this question of who we will be, there is some interesting insight for us that grows out of our gospel story today. First, like Jesus, we find our identity in future possibilities when we adopt a questioning stance. Jesus is in the Temple listening and asking. He is not passive about his future; he is actively working on who he can be. We can look at our lives and our future with the same kind of questioning and listening stance. Instead of assuming that we will go through 2007 largely just like 2006, we can give some focus to ourselves and our world. What can we do differently that will make this year unique and add to our identity in ways that are faithful and good? We all change, to be sure, for better or for worse, but we can be an active participant in the changes which come our way. It is never too late in life to ask questions about our future and who we can be. Second, like Jesus, the question of our identity is a deeply religious one. Jesus told his parents that he was about his Father´s business, about seeking out the deepest yearnings and values for his life. His quest for identity was at its heart a religious one. This is true for all of us. Whether we state it specifically or not, we all, in discerning who we can be, consider ultimate values and convictions which can guide our living. Will we be honest? The kind of person who says something when we´ve been given too much change? Will we be truthful with others in a way that others can count on our words? Will we believe in peace enough to cultivate it in our living? Or justice? Or any other kind of bottom-line conviction? You see, at the root, these are religious questions. We can draw from the deep well of wisdom in the Bible, in our religious traditions, in conversation with others. Do we have the heart to see God in it? In our search for who we can be? Third, like Jesus, the question of our identity gets played out in our families. It is curious what happens to family dynamics as family members work on their individual identities. It is interesting to see the family ignorance in play during this episode with the holy family. Jesus was somewhere else long before Joseph and Mary realized it. They had just assumed he was with them, that they knew where he was, while in truth he was not really where they thought he was. We feel that in our families as well, not just physically but relationally. Yet even after they find him again and ask point blank why he went his own way, and even when he had given a direct response about needing to be in his father´s house, they still did not understand him fully, still did not get what was driving him and pulling him toward his own unique future. If you pay attention to the language you can feel the distance between: Mary says: ”Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.” And Jesus says: ”Did you not know that I must be in my father´s house?” Do you hear the distance between. Mary says: ”why have you done this to us? Look what you´ve done to us.” Jesus says: ”I had to be in my father´s house. It´s not about you, first and foremost, its about me.” We can grow up buying into the cultural ideal that family life at its best is to be ever harmonious with continual feelings of closeness between members. And yet, even in the family that our tradition calls holy, there is some tension and distance that must be dealt with. We as individuals bring our deep yearnings for who we can be to our family life. It is part of being family to make room and create understanding and support where that can happen for each member The author and poet, David Whyte, has written an insightful book about finding your vocation and identity in life. It is called: ”Crossing the Unknown Sea.” In the very first chapter, he makes the following statement: ”Underneath the face, underneath the surface professionalism, underneath the brief obituary in the paper, there are forces grander than any human individual life at play. To lose contact with these forces is to lose a real sense of living, and especially of living a life we can call our own. Suicide, literal or metaphorical, is the loss of conversation with these forces. Any life, any life´s work, is a hidden journey, a secret code, deciphered in fits and starts. The details only given truth by the whole . . .” This is what´s at stake in our identities as we determine who we can be in 2007. We can engage in conversation with the larger forces and issues in our lives, looking to God and others, asking questions of ourselves and our world, finding the vision for new possibilities and the courage to grasp them. For tomorrow is a new year. Let us travel in God´s spirit to new places. i. . Quoted in Andrew Lester, Hope in Pastoral Care and Counseling. |
|
