Sermon: Who Are You?

 Ephesians 4:25-5:2
Who Are You?
James Sledge                                                                                     James Sledge

Early baptism depicted in ancient fresco

My father was an electrical engineer who worked for the local power company until retirement. But he was also a man of deep faith who at one point in his life contemplated becoming a pastor. After I became a pastor, we would often engage in deep, theological discussions, perhaps some of the most significant such discussions I’ve ever had other than at seminary or with colleagues.

During one of our discussions, he told me about a woman he had dated as a young man who had no use for religion or the church. My father, who was very active as a youth in his church and had a very close relationship with his pastor, tried to communicate something of what he had experienced at church to this woman. She responded with a biting question that perhaps characterized her understanding of church. “Do they do anything besides tell you to be good little boys and girls?”

I’m met my share of people who would seem to share this woman’s view of church, although many saw it in more positive terms. I’ve known parents who brought their children to church even though they didn’t participate themselves because they thought a little moral formation would be good for them. They didn’t take their children to worship, but they viewed Sunday School as a moral companion to regular school, a place where children learned to be good little boys and girls.

I suspect there are a lot of adults, many of them church members, who view Christian faith primarily as a moral enterprise accompanied by divine carrot and stick incentives. Behave yourself and get a heavenly reward. Don’t and reap the consequences.

A cursory reading of our scripture for this morning might at first seem to support such a view. Tell the truth. Don’t steal. Take care with your anger. Be kind. Forgive people. In other words, be good little boys and girls. But the writer of Ephesians is not engaging in moralizing. Rather, he is describing what it looks like to shed an old identity and put on a new one.

Who are you? What is your identity? There are many ways to answer such questions. I’m a pastor, a husband, a father, a runner, and so on. Each of these identities carries with it certain behaviors, expectations, and relationships. I can’t say I’m a runner and never run. I can’t really be a father without children. And then there are people who father children without ever taking on the identity of father.

At your core, who are you, and how does it shape the way you live? From the time we are toddlers, our society works hard to give us the identity of consumers, people who define themselves by the things that they have and want. And thanks to Amazon and other online vendors I can be a consumer with the click of a button. But I do hope that consumer is not the identity that defines me.

 In our scripture reading, the writer speaks of identities as clothing that one takes off or puts on, an image that largely gets lost in translation. The imagery is connected to baptism which the first readers of this letter knew in the exclusively adult version. In the earliest liturgies of the church, baptismal candidates literally stripped off their old clothes and put on a new robe as they were welcomed into the church. It was a symbol of leaving behind an old life and putting on a new life in Christ.

In our reading, we are told to put away falsehood and to put away all bitterness, wrath, anger, and malice. The word translated “put away” literally refers to taking off clothes. The teachings in our scripture this morning are not a list of what you must do to be good little boys and girls. They are instead a description of what it looks like to becomes a new person in Christ, to be adopted through baptism and begin to live as children of God.

In the verse just prior to our reading, the writer speaks of this new life as to cloth yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. Putting on this new self means taking off the old and living in a new sort of community that reflects the image of God.

There is an explicitly corporate dimension to this new self, something that has too often been forgotten in modern Protestantism and its obsession with individual salvation. But for the writer of Ephesians, the new self has taken off everything that does not build up the community, that is not kind, tenderhearted, and forgiving.

So what identity are you wearing? What is it that shapes who you are, that creates the face you present to the world and to those around you? And where does it come from?

I assume that human identity is some combination of nature and nurture. We are all born with certain abilities, traits, and tendencies, but these are shaped by the world we grow up in. For many of us, family is the primary shaper of identity. For good or ill, it is where we learn what it means to be human, to relate to others, to define success and failure, to care or not care about others, to be a friend, a sibling, a spouse, and so on and so on. To some degree, we learn our identities by imitation, by observing the behaviors of those closest to us.

So I suppose it’s no surprise that our scripture expects that a new identity will also involve imitation. Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us. 

_______________________________________________________

Back in the 1990s, something of a fad developed where people wore wristbands with WWJD written on them, an acronym for “What would Jesus do?” It began as an effort aimed at Christian youth but became a more general phenomenon.

WWJD was often used in ways that were trite, encouraging people to be good little boys and girls, but I wonder if the idea might work better if it were applied less to simple questions of morality and more to issues of core identity. That is what our scripture is talking about when it calls us to live in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us. This is not a sentimental love but an active sort of love that seeks the good of the other regardless of cost and regardless of whether that person is liked or disliked, friend or enemy.

I dare say that for most of us, living out this sort of love involves a lot more that trying to be a little better. It involves a shift in who we are, and that is what God opens the door to in our baptisms. As the Apostle Paul writes, As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. Even if you do not remember your baptism, you have put on a new and different identity. It is there within you just waiting to be claimed and lived into, waiting to be nurtured by the Holy Spirit.

_________________________________________________________

Who are you? At your very core, what defines and shapes your identity? In Christ we have been offered a new identity, our true humanity given to us by our Creator. And right now, couldn’t the world use more people whose identities and lives show Christ to the world?