Sermon text: Isaiah 43:1–7
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
“Self-identifying” is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary in this way: to believe that you are a particular kind of person, especially when other people don’t think you’re that kind of person. By now we’ve seen what self-identification, what subjectivism, brings to a society: males identifying as females, females identifying as males, human beings identifying as animals. It’s just simply become a bit irrational.
But there’s a kind of underlying truth in self-identification. When we’re asked that question — “Who are you?” or “Who am I?” — it’s an important question, often asked. And the answer sometimes is a little more tricky to give than we want to believe. It’s a serious question, and for a great many people, it’s a tough question. And we don’t answer so much as who are we, as we answer that question: what is it that we do?
Some try to answer it by grounding their identity in their careers: “I’m a homemaker, a teacher, a pastor, an engineer, a nurse, a policeman, a painter, a builder, an artist,” and the like. But the problem with that is that when the economy turns bad, or you grow old and out of your job — you’re out of your identity. People feel lost. The problem is: what happens when the economy lays you off, or the kids grow up and move away? What then? What’s your identity now? When things like that happen, we know how we begin to feel. We get older. We get tired. We feel like we’re worthless. Things aren’t working out the way that we want, and all the missed opportunities flood in from our past.
Some try to ground their identity in their family name and their family history. It happens a lot, especially in old churches. But what happens when the name is tarnished, or forgotten, or was never known to begin with? You feel again worthless. Still others ground their identity in their own talents and abilities. They define themselves by the fact that they can do something, or make something, or be something greater than other people. But what happens when you can no longer do those great things you once did? You feel worthless.
The good news of the gospel lesson today is that your identity doesn’t come from what you do, or from where you came, or what your name is, or what it is you think you’ve accomplished in your life. Your identity comes from God Himself. And as such, it’s pretty much irrevocable by the world and the devil and your own sinful nature. He gives you your identity, and it’s an identity that no one can take away from you. He puts it in different words when He says, “No one can snatch you out of my hand.”
In Holy Baptism, the LORD called you by name. He made you His very own. You are His. In the words of the Old Testament reading this morning, the LORD God says to you: “You are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you.” That’s 43, verse 4.
But have you ever felt personally worthless, insignificant, incapable, unlovable? Have you ever lost a job and searched and searched and had a hard time landing another one because the business owner didn’t think you had much to offer his business? You felt worthless. What if your personal life — what if you’ve lost a spouse through death, and now your identity is wandering, unattached to the thing to which you were anchored to for so terribly long? Or your divorce or messy separation comes along, and now you have no one to share, you think, the rest of your life with. How do you identify then? And what do you feel? Again: if you were worthless.
Or maybe you have been — or in the future you will be — diagnosed with some debilitating illness: cancer, dementia, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, or just plain old old age, which makes you incapable of doing the things you used to do. The ordinary things, like mowing your lawn, or shoveling snow, or working in your shop or garage, driving, reading, going to the bathroom by yourself. You feel incapable, worthless. Maybe you’ve said or done something stupid — that happens to me once — and someone you love told you that you were an extremely disappointing person, that they were disappointed in you. And in that moment, you wanted to take it back, undo what you’ve done. But it can’t be taken back, and it can’t be undone. So you feel worthless and stupid.
In that case — and what about when you come here each and every Sunday and speak those words, “I, a poor, miserable sinner, deserve temporal and eternal punishment”? Because we come here with nothing, nothing but sin. We feel worthless.
That was the case of the southern kingdom, the southern kingdom of Judah. That was its reality at the start of our Old Testament lesson this morning, Isaiah 43, verse 1. The people of Judah were now nothing. They were worthless. They were miserable sinners who deserved temporal and eternal punishment — even though the LORD led them and kept them and fed them and protected them for 40 years of wandering and brought them now into the promised land, where they built a great city, Jerusalem. Even though they swore an oath in Joshua 1:16: “All that you have commanded we will do.”
They failed time and time again — and not just in little ways, in grand, big ways. Time and again, both the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah turned their backs on the LORD God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob — even though He brought them out of slavery into their own land, and did so in the face of their strong-headed stubbornness, in which they built golden calves to worship. God still claimed them as His children. They even participated in temple prostitution as a form of worship to appease the pagan countries around them — Baal and Asherah. They even burned their firstborn children alive on some of the altars, the altars of Molech and Chemosh, despite all of God’s warnings to them out of the mouths of prophets. Israel and Judah reveled in their idolatry.
Hence in chapters 41 and 42, the prophet Isaiah refers to them as a worm, as a blind, deaf, and disobedient servant who had turned their back on the LORD God who had delivered them from so many of their enemies. In 586 BC, the southern kingdom of Judah suffered the same fiery judgment as their idolatrous northern neighbors had in Israel. They suffered that God’s temporal and eternal punishment: in 722 BC, Israel was punished at the hands of the Assyrian army, who slaughtered them and hauled the survivors off to exile. As for Judah, they were punished at the hands of the Babylonians. Both kingdoms endured burning, destruction, plundering, and enslavement, guilt and shame. Both kingdoms were defeated, and the children of God were found weeping in bondage in the lands of Assyria and Babylon.
Judah and Israel: worthless in the sight of God and men. They proved to be poor, miserable sinners, deserving of nothing but temporal and eternal punishment. Yet it is to these worthless sinners — to Judah, to the church, to you and to me — that God speaks, and speaks through His prophets and apostles today. Today God speaks a word of hope and comfort through the mouth of His prophet Isaiah, through the evangelist St. Luke, and the apostle St. Paul.
Notice how our Old Testament lesson began. It began with a radical shift in identity of who the people were to whom God was speaking: “I have called you by name, you are mine.” From that moment on, they are different. They are a called and set apart, chosen people from among the earth. You see, for the Christian, it’s not how you ultimately identify yourself. That doesn’t really matter at the end of the day. What is finally and ultimately important in this life, in the life of the world to come, is God the Father’s disposition toward you: what He says about you, and how He regards your identity, which He has given to you as an act of sheer grace.
That brings us to our Epistle lesson, Romans 6:1–11: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.”
In God the Father’s sight, you are, as I said in last week’s Bible class, little Christs. You are Christians. That’s your real identity. This is our identity. And Paul makes that point in Galatians 2:20: “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live” — it’s not my identity that’s important anymore — “but Christ who lives within me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
The truth of the matter is, we often feel like worthless sinners, because our old nature is: that’s how we began, how we entered this world, and how, up to the moment of the word of God claiming us in the sacrament of Holy Baptism — or in the preaching and teaching of that word — God declares something greater of us. “Thus says the LORD, he who created you” — in this case, in the waters of Holy Baptism: “Fear not, for I have redeemed you” — where? On the cross. “I have called you by name, you are mine.” That is, as Peter says, you are a holy nation, set apart from the rest of the world. “You are precious in my eyes, and honored,” and He says, “I love you.”
Valuable, precious in God’s sight, honored, in love: that’s how God saw the people of Judah. And what did Judah do to deserve this radical change in identity? Absolutely nothing in and of themselves. They were indeed a bunch of worthless, miserable sinners, deserving of temporal and eternal punishment. But there were two things that made Judah of infinite worth.
First is the matter of who owned them. Again: “But now thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: ‘Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.’” God makes His claim on this people, as He made the claim on you in the waters of your Holy Baptism. You belong to Him. That’s your identity. Despite how Judah felt about itself as they sat in slavery and oppression and brutality, God graciously, of His own accord, called them by name in the plains of Horeb at Bethel, at the foot of Mount Sinai. After all that He did, He calls and declares His love for them as they languish in slavery into Babylon. Even in their exile, Judah doesn’t belong to Babylon, Assyria, or Egypt. Israel and Judah belonged to the LORD. It was an illusion that they were anything else, but they belonged to God. They are — and were — His treasured possessions. That’s what we’re told in Exodus 19:5, at the foot of Mount Sinai: “You shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine.”
Second: Judah’s value was determined by the price that God was willing to pay for them. In verse four of the Old Testament lesson, God says, “I give men in return for you, peoples in exchange for your life.” That is, others had to die in order for God to claim and take His chosen people where He wanted them. When God led them out of Egypt, He paid with the lives of Egyptians: the firstborn son in every family. When He led them out of Babylon, He paid with the Babylonians’ lives, who were also invaded and ultimately slaughtered. The greatest payment God would make for His people — for Israel, for Judah, for His church, for you and for me — was when He sent forth His Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.
And there at His baptism in the River Jordan, Jesus took your sin upon Himself. He entered into the prophetic office of prophet, priest, and king, and became the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. The Father gave His only begotten Son as a ransom — not only for the many, but for you. You too are in the ransom. Jesus willingly and graciously loved you unto death, even death on the cross. The God-man Jesus Christ paid for your sins in full — not with silver and gold, but with His holy, precious blood, innocent suffering, and bitter death.
There is now no condemnation, no fiery judgment for you. See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are — First John 3:1. You are a child of the heavenly Father, a brother and sister to Jesus Christ. That is your true and everlasting identity. There is no identity crisis in the Christian nature. In Christ, you’re all sons of God through faith. “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.” That’s who you are.
You may feel worthless. But God paid the ultimate price for you: the death of His only begotten Son. And He says to you: You are mine. The good news of the gospel is that it doesn’t matter how you self-identify. It doesn’t matter what accusation the devil, the world, and your old sinful nature brings against you. It doesn’t matter what circumstances come in life, or the turbulence and trials that you’re made to endure on your journey as strangers and pilgrims in this world. It doesn’t matter what your eyes see, if it sees yourself as worthless. You were bought with a price — the highest price possible. So when circumstances tell you you’re worthless, when other people say the same, know that you’re loved by God the Father. You have an identity. You are a little Christ in the world, baptized into Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. To God, you are precious, and you are honored, and you are loved, for your sins are forgiven and your identity is in Christ. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.