Monday, August 14, 2017

Mistaken Identity: a sermon for 13 August 2017

Matthew 14:22-33

Dr. Tom Caneta has spent the last nine years sequestered in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan in northern Africa.  Because he is the very last doctor left in a war-torn region marked by starvation, disease, death, and rocket attacks, he alone treats up to 500 persons per day.

Dr. Caneta summarized his life’s work to the 2015 graduating class at his alma mater, Brown University: ‘Everyone is searching for happiness.  Everyone is searching for fulfillment.  I think if you really want fulfillment in this life, what I would suggest to you is go and get rid of everything you have.  Sell everything you have.  Get rid of all your baggage and go live a life of full and total service to other people.  If you do that, you will find that the rewards are incredible.  You will find that you have fulfillment more than you could ever have imagined.  So I throw that challenge out to you’.  “Good News” magazine, July/August 2017, pg 37

Can we get so busy with doing or having whatever it is we do or have that we forget who we are?  Is it possible to lose our sense of identity when we accumulate too much “stuff”?  This, I think, must be at the heart of Dr. Caneta’s observation as well as Jesus’ own lesson about becoming “perfect”; whole, holy, “perfect” (Matthew 19:21).

I think it is entirely possible, even likely, that we can get so caught up in what we do for the Church that we forget we should always be not just representing The Lord but, rather, revealing Him.  It is easy to forget, especially when we receive personal recognition, maybe get our picture in the paper, or community service credit for school or the courts.  Sometimes a genuine desire to serve can be obscured by our own need to feel good about ourselves, to make our lives count for something. 

In the name of religion or in a personal quest to ‘save souls’, what we do for others can often become confused if we take on the mantle of ‘crusader’ rather than the identity of ‘servant’.  ‘Crusader’ is what we choose to do; ‘servant’ is what Jesus was, is, and has called His Church to be (“I came not to be served but to serve”, Matthew 20:28).

I cannot help but to wonder if this may have been at least part of Peter’s great challenge, the same challenge we often face ourselves when we lose sight of Who not only gives our lives real and everlasting meaning but is our True Identity, bearing the Image in which we are created.  But when we are more aware of the world around us and our uncertain place in that world than we are aware of the One who calls us out of that world of obscurity and distraction, we become afraid.  And we become afraid, I think, because we begin to lose sight of who we really are.  Not who we think we are, but who we are created to be.

Think about it like this.  We strive to get a good education, get good jobs, find a mate, get married, have children, buy a home; in all this, we are making a life for ourselves.  It is normal, it is expected.  It is, in fact, the American Dream. 

Aside from the education, however, all these other things – even persons – will absolutely be lost.  None of this will last beyond its own time, including those we love.  We’ve all been to funerals; we know how every life story ends.  So if what we acquire can be so easily lost – and we lose ourselves in trying to keep all we’ve acquired – how can any of this be our true identity?  Stuff that can be lost, stolen, or can rust and rot?  Other persons with their own identities?  Where is our own, unique, individual identity if we are only someone’s husband or wife?  Someone’s father/mother/brother/sister, employee, employer, etc?

On the other hand, if we seek to be connected first to the One who created us “fearfully and wonderfully”, the One who redeemed us, claimed us, and adopted us, the One who gifted us and calls us into the Life He has already established – if we go there first, then all the other things, all the other persons, all the other jobs will fall into place.  Then we can know who we really are – which is much more than who or what the world expects us to be.  Think of it; the world expects us to be generous, to give a little; but to give it all, the world would call “foolish”. 

We must also bear in mind that perhaps Peter’s first mistake was in “testing” The Lord.  Could this be construed as a means of testing our own identity?  Remember what Moses had affirmed to the Israelites in the wilderness; trust The Lord, but do not test Him.  Do not test His mercy.  Do not test His power.  Do not test His determination that we can only be – for all eternity! – what He has created us to be from the very beginning. 

Absent that, like Peter, we will lose sight of The Lord at the first sign of trouble because The Lord was incidental to begin with.  We even teach our children this way, do we not??  Think about it.  We will fight with and encourage our children to get them to school, to do their homework, to become involved in extracurricular activities, to excel and succeed … but we do not put that same energy into getting them to Sunday school.  Worse, we fail to teach them why this is important in the first place.  From the beginning!

They may be prepared to find a place in this world which demands all that and more, but they – like we – will one day struggle to find out who they really are, who they were “fearfully and wonderfully made” to be from the very beginning.  They will know only what the world expects and demands from them.  And at the first crisis point, whatever that crisis may be, they will be lost – as many of us have been.

Then when they, like Peter and like we, “notice the strong wind” and the waves of the sea lapping over their feet and getting what we refer to as “that strong, sinking feeling”, we “test” The Lord to see if He’s still there – mindful of our own will rather than His.  Or, like Peter and the others in the boat, whether we can even recognize Him – especially if The Lord was the last One we expected to see!

We can spare ourselves and our loved ones a lot of anxiety if we will take the means of grace at our disposal more seriously than we take our jobs and our education.  Those means of grace – worship, study of Scriptures, fasting, praying, the Sacraments, even fellowship with other Christians – are offered to us so we can not only discover who we are in The Lord but grow more faithfully into that role. 

Then, like Dr. Caneta (Mother Teresa, MLK) and so many others who have come before us, we will have no doubts, no worries.  The “strong winds” of human culture will not disorient us – because we will know who we are in Him.  The case of ‘mistaken identity’ can only apply when we worry more about what the world thinks of us and what we do than what The Lord has created and called us to be before we were even conceived by human means!


He knows us, all of us as The Body, each of us as individuals.  And He wants us to know Him … first.  Only n that Identity will we find peace and calm and confidence.  Even in the face of life’s storms, adversity, and our own doubts.  This is what He wants for us all.  Let us together find the courage and the identity to live into that.  Amen.

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