The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
Unless you have been sleeping under a rock for the past decade or two, it should be obvious to you that we are in a cultural identity crisis, a crisis that threatens both body and soul of every single living human being in the Western world. By the phrase “cultural identity crisis” I mean that culturally, philosophically, and morally speaking, we live in a time when people are so confused, so lost, so blind, and so contrary to the will and way of God the heavenly Father that they literally think themselves to be God. They think they can create themselves, remake themselves into something God made them not to be.
A pastor and author released a new book about a month ago called Disordered, and he puts his finger on this identity crisis of the West. He wrote that for today’s psychological man, feeling has replaced thinking. Feelings define meaning. Feelings give identity and purpose. To be authentic, that is, to reach one’s telos, one’s life goal, he believes he must embrace his feelings and take them to their logical conclusion. Feelings, born uniquely to the self, are his truth, and thus no one can tell the psychological man that he is wrong. To put the whole thing in biblical language and biblical perspective, we have a whole generation or two today that believes they are in fact like God, that by the mere use of their language they can create things out of nothing. They think they have the ability to recreate the created order at every level. Nature, natural law, social institutions, even self-identity are all being sacrificed on the modern altar of psychological theories. God’s created power is seen most clearly in the new cult of self-identification. An increasing number of people now believe they can declare themselves to be something they are in fact not and will never be.
Identity is defined as the collective aspect of a set of characteristics by which a thing or a person is definitively recognizable or known. That is, identity is who you actually really are, and it is immutable — it continues on even though the circumstances around you may change. You may alter your body, but that does not alter who it is you have been made to be. Check the DNA code. So is a person a product of what he or she decides, or is a person’s identity created by God through nature and received by the recipient of nature — or in the case of the Christian, by holy Baptism and the Word of God? Are you self-constructed, or are you instead a creation of some other being, of some greater force, namely God? If you believe that your identity is self-made, that you are a self-constructed individual, then you are a person who is fundamentally disconnected from reality. A human being’s identity, social life, and moral life are not arbitrary. They are in fact products of and connected to nature, that is, to reality, and ultimately to the God who created nature, reality, human beings, and you in particular.
Believe it or not, today we are reminded of this truth, that God is the creator of nature and of human identity, in Paul’s sermon to the philosophers of Athens on Mars Hill. Acts 17:25 records Paul preaching, “God himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.” Now if it is true that God has created us and we have not created ourselves, then we must come to know God if we are also going to come to know who we are and what we are for. That is the launching point of Saint Paul’s sermon to the Athenians. In his sermon he argues that we can in fact know God through the person and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God’s only-begotten Son. Paul said it this way: “because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”
Paul puts before his hearers two fundamental truths about identity. The first truth is that God is the one who has made creation. God gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. Paul makes the argument even more clear, not simply in his preaching in Athens, but to the Romans in general, when he wrote in the first chapter of his epistle: “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” It is called the natural knowledge of God — that by looking at and examining nature and the universe around us, there are fundamental things we can know about God, first and foremost that God is the Creator and sustainer of everything and everyone. The second truth is that “in him we live and move and have our being.” God’s identity as Father is revealed in Jesus Christ, and our identity is also revealed in Jesus Christ — namely, we are children of the heavenly Father. That is our identity. In him, in Christ, we live and move and have our being. Identity crisis solved — for the Christian. Or is it?
You see, as Christians, our reality lies in the fact that we do not self-identify. It makes no sense for the Christian to self-identify when God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit has already given you a unique identity as a human being — and a truly unique identity as one who bears the image of Jesus Christ himself. Our identity is declared to be our identity by God himself, and that cannot be trumped. We are his children, image-bearers of Christ’s holiness. Paul refers to believers in Acts 17:28 as God’s offspring: “In him we live and move and have our being, as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are indeed his offspring.'” If you want to know why our generation has lost its collective mind, know this: they have lost the knowledge and fear of God because they have forsaken the church and the Word of God. If a person is to know what the human race was created to be, then we must first know something about God who created us and his relationship to us. But if a culture and people disconnect and tune out the church of the Word of God, they become ignorant, and they fall under the judgment of Romans chapter 1.
Prior to falling into sin, by the way, there was no such thing as an identity crisis in the Garden of Eden. In Genesis 1 and 2, Adam and Eve knew who God was, and thus they knew who they were and what they were for. They were image-bearers. They also knew who they were in regard to each other, to a fellow human being, that is, a helper. They were created to be perfect before God and perfect with one another. The key to knowing who we are is to know who God is. That brings us back to the sermon in Acts chapter 17. While passing through the marketplace of Athens, Paul found an awful lot of idols in the city, we are told, and he found an altar with the inscription “To the unknown god.” Archaeologists, by the way, have found them. Athens was also full of philosophers. All over the streets they were filled with them. They were sort of private tutors, and when they weren’t tutoring a student for hire, they went into the marketplace, set up their little stand, and preached and taught their philosophy, in the hope that some parent who could afford to pay them would hire them as tutors for their children. So they were all over, just like any other street salesman. As Paul went about talking to the Jews and the Gentiles, he conversed with many of these people, and he spoke about Jesus and the resurrection and God the Father, and he caught the attention of some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers. They thought he was talking about a new religion and wanted to learn more about it. Others said, “What does this babbler wish to say?” There is a particular Greek word used here, and what it really means is that they are accusing Paul — not of being ignorant or inarticulate, but they are being critical of his message. It didn’t fit the cultural thinking and dominant theories of the day. Thus he didn’t really have a right to speak. In other words, some of them wanted to cancel him because he was challenging the orthodoxy of the day. He was saying something different than what the scientists and the politicians and the movers and shakers of the day had approved as good and appropriate conversation.
It didn’t fit. Then as now, there was a received orthodoxy, and part of that received orthodoxy was the belief that the spirit was pure and the flesh and the physical world were evil. So to preach about a resurrection made no sense, because a resurrected body, in their thinking, was unworthy to be resurrected, and a divine being wouldn’t do such a thing. Thus the Athenians scoffed at the resurrection because the flesh was evil. Yet some found Paul’s message intriguing. Verse 19: so they invited him to the place where philosophers debated, to discuss all things philosophical, political, religious, and moral. They took him up to Mars Hill. In regard to their own understanding of God, for the philosophers of the Areopagus, God was a product of human imagination — in the same way it is today. Yet behind this philosophical and cultural backdrop, the thinkers of Athens understood that there must be something more than simply the imagination of a human being. There must be something more than the gods they created in their minds to fill their mythologies. There must be a hidden god, one unknown to us. Thus the inscription, “To the unknown god.” Paul takes hold of that inscription and of the Athenians’ ignorance and says, “What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for ‘In him we live and move and have our being,’ as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are indeed his offspring.'”
If God is only a product of human imagination, then God is made in our image, and human beings are the creator and God is the creation — the exact opposite of plain common sense. As long as we look to our own imaginations and our own feelings, then the identity of God will remain unknown to us. If God’s identity is unknown, then our identity is unknown and remains unknown, no matter how we try to fix it. In Jesus and God’s Word, we have God’s self-revelation — God revealing to humanity who he is and what he has done for us. God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit has revealed himself to us in his Word. We know who God is, what God has done for us and for our salvation, and thus we Christians know who we are. When we see the man Jesus Christ in the flesh, we know we are looking at and seeing God himself. Colossians 2:9–10: “For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority.” Or in the Gospel lesson today: “you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.” There you have the bridge to identity: God the Father to the Son, God the Son to us.
By way of our old sinful nature, though, we are participants in the world’s identity crisis. We are god-makers, and we aren’t very good ones at that. We make gods of our possessions. We make gods of our popularity. We make gods of our money. We make gods of our passions. We make gods of our reputation. So also we define ourselves by the things of the world, and now we define our identity by our own feelings, which shift daily if not moment by moment. Left to ourselves, we are separated, lost, confused, and hostile to the one who created us. We find ourselves in direct opposition to reality, because God is true reality. By virtue of the new nature, we now know who we really are. In Christ there is no identity crisis. In Baptism, in the gift of faith, and in the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, God the Father now sees the same immutable — that means unchangeable — characteristics of identity that he sees in his only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ. That is, when he sees you, he knows your identity as one remade into the image of his immutable Son.
Identity, again, is the collective aspect of a set of characteristics by which a thing is definitively recognized or known. That is, God sees you through the lens of your Baptism. He sees you through the lens of faith. He sees you as his only-begotten son or daughter in Jesus Christ. We are, for example, a new creation. Second Corinthians 5:17: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” Your old identity is gone, as far as God is concerned. In our new identity we are no longer slaves to sin, but free from sin (Romans 6). We are no longer enemies of God, but reconciled to him (Romans 5:10). Our identity gives us the same relationship with God the Father that Jesus Christ has with the Father. Galatians 3:27: “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.” God the Father identifies us as his children. Romans 8:16: “The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.” He has adopted us as sons and daughters; therefore we are able to call him Father. We are joint heirs of the heavenly kingdom (Galatians 3:29), and we are friends of Christ (John 15). We can now approach God with confidence and ask him for anything that we need (Hebrews 4:16). We are now instruments of God for righteousness (Romans 6:13). All these are unchangeable aspects of what your identity in Christ is, what God the Father sees. This new identity sets our minds on things that are above, not on things that are on the earth. All these people running around self-identifying and proclaiming it negate the latter for the former, and that is a very dangerous thing to do. Our minds are no longer to be conformed to the image of this world. One of my favorite passages, Romans 12:1–2. We have the mind of Christ, we are told (1 Corinthians 2:16).
So if you find yourself confused about who you are, what your place is in the world, then consider first and foremost who God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit is to you. He is your Savior. He is your brother. He is your comforter. He is your father. He is your king. He is your prince. He is your shepherd. He is your justifier, your strength. He is the Great I Am. He is the God who restored your identity and made you righteous and holy in his sight, a son and daughter to him, a brother and sister to Christ. That is who you are: a holy one, a hagios, meaning saint. That is the identity God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit knows of you. That is your real identity. That is the one that counts. Use it. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.