The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
Anyone who was around in 1985, or is a movie buff, might remember the movie called The Breakfast Club. Five students who violated the school rules in one way or another had qualified themselves for a rather special version of detention — all day long, from 8 to 4, in the school library on a Saturday. The movie takes place on that one Saturday, specifically the date March 24th, 1984, when five of the students from Shermer High School have to report at 7:00 a.m. — thus the name, The Breakfast Club — on Saturday to serve their time. A voiceover at the beginning of the movie describes the five as a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal. The five students are radically different one from another, and if not for detention, this quintet would never be in the same room, let alone having conversations one with the other. What makes the movie so profound is that they not only end up, by the end of the day, talking, but also joking and arguing, laughing and crying together as great friends. So why didn’t that happen in the normal course of their high school experience? Well, the answer is: because that’s not how high school kids work. Your identity is who you are, and that’s extremely important in a high school — even if your identity is no identity at all.
The word “identity” is defined as a condition of being a certain person or thing: the set of characteristics by which a person or thing is definitively recognizable or known. In the case of the Breakfast Club students, they are known by certain aspects or characteristics of their persona. If you’re a brain, or if you’re an athlete, or a basket case, or a princess, or a criminal, you hang out with brains and athletes and basket cases and princesses and criminals. It’s the birds-of-a-feather-flock-together axiom. And if you don’t — if you fail to live up to the expectations of that particular group — you risk getting booted and losing your identity altogether. You might find yourself eating tater tots in the cafeteria all by yourself. So what happened with The Breakfast Club? What happened by the end of the day that made such a big and radical change in their dispositions and in their relationships? Well, they all got a new identity. Specifically, they got the identity as a detainee among detainees. That new identity, for that day, trumped everything else that had come before. They all got a new and common identity, which allowed them to begin to talk. They became free to be friends.
While Paul too was free, his identity was that of a Jew, a Pharisee, top of his class, a zealous enforcer for the Law. He wrote of his former identity in Philippians 3:4–6: “I was circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the Law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the Law, blameless.” That was Paul’s identity. But before Paul — who was previously Saul — before Jesus and Saul met on the road to Damascus, these were the things that Saul truly was. These characteristics, these things that Paul did and thought, were Paul’s identity. And his identity drove every action and interaction, without which there would be no Saul at all. Our identity — the way you think of yourself — and our characteristics, the things that we do, drive what we do and how we think about our own lives, and evaluate where we are in life, and what kind of groups we belong to, and what kind of groups we’d like to belong to. And very often, we’re held captive by our identity. Sometimes it’s a self-captivity: limiting ourselves by our own characteristics, the things we do and the things we have, and even the things we don’t have, define us as to who we are.
Many years ago, The New Yorker magazine published a cartoon of a man who looked, in the cartoon, to be 60-ish and older, relaxing by a pool and talking to another man. The caption read: “If I am not the second vice president for corporate brand awareness, then who am I?” The man in the cartoon was a new retiree, struggling with his identity and the place that he now needed to find to occupy in the world. For decades, his whole identity — his activity from the time he woke up in the morning — governed everything: how he spoke, how he dressed, how he walked, what he did — all came from his vocation, his job. Now without his job, who was he? What was he to do, and what would be his routine? Today, these days, many pastor friends of mine and others, they’re being forced to undergo an identity crisis. Since the time they left the seminary, they thought of themselves as pastors. It’s a lifestyle, a career, it’s a way of living and thinking and being. And being a pastor governed every aspect of their lives. Then all of a sudden, they can’t make a full-time living in the pastoral office anymore, and they’re forced to go find their way out there in a scary world. I’ve had lots of conversations with such. It just is an identity crisis. Then all of a sudden they can’t make that living, and they’re somehow now — because they have to go elsewhere — find themselves outside the groups, forced to become something else they didn’t plan to be, and struggling with a full-blown identity crisis.
Paul knows something about identity crisis. Up until the moment on the road to Damascus, Paul was held captive by his identity, which was held captive by the Law itself. That’s what the Law does: it takes a person, the whole person, and turns them into a captive. But Paul wrote of himself in our Epistle lesson this morning: “For though I am free from all, I have made myself a servant of all, that I might win more of them.” The word “though” should really be translated, and better translated, “since”: “Since I am free from all, I have made myself a servant of all.” Here in First Corinthians, in the middle of teaching the Christians in Corinth what it meant to live a Christian life — what a Christian life should look like — Paul celebrates the freedom he has been given as a son of God the Father and a brother to Christ Jesus his Lord. He makes it clear that he uses this freedom in service to the Gospel, and as a servant to all. Jesus, the Gospel, the Holy Spirit, you see, had transformed Paul and had given him a new identity — a new membership in a new group called the Church. This identity was both bestowed on him and created in him, in his new nature. It is an identity that lasts forever — literally beyond the grave. In freedom, in the Gospel, Paul no longer needed to prove anything to anybody, earn anything from anybody, or do any kind of virtue signaling to demonstrate that he was in fact a good Jew. In the Gospel, Paul was given an identity that he simply couldn’t mess up. Paul’s new identity bested everything else in life that he said or did. He wrote in Philippians 3:8: “Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For His sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.” Paul’s new identity was the result of the Gospel. This new identity allowed Paul to transcend the identity of his group — the Jew who was to live under the Law, and the Gentile who was free from the Law. In the Gospel, Paul was free. Verse 20: “To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the Law I became as one under the Law (though not being myself under the Law) that I might win those under the Law. To those outside the Law I became as one outside the Law (not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ) that I might win those outside the Law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some.” The old identities were now all gone. The new had come.
Now, a couple of weeks ago I preached on Jonah, and I took the aspect that Jonah had been given a vocation — a station, a commission in life — to go and preach the Gospel to the people of Nineveh. And remember: a vocation is a station, it’s a relationship, it’s a person’s reputation. And all those things are fundamentally important and taught in the Bible. They’re essential to a healthy Christian life and to a family life. Through them we help and serve our neighbors, we provide for our families, and we serve the Church of Christ. Today we learn that while all those things are important — the vocations and relationships are fundamental — they are not ultimately, or even primarily, our identity. Immediately after teaching us about Gospel freedom in regard to eating meat sacrificed to idols, or not eating meat sacrificed to idols, Paul teaches us about the Gospel and Gospel freedom and our identity in the Gospel. There’s no identity crisis once you’re in the Gospel and free. You know who you are. It’s been declared so. God has established it. And you are simply now new — a new creation.
Paul teaches us about the Gospel and Gospel freedom and our identity in the Gospel. He wrote of himself: “For if I do this” — that is, if I preach the Gospel — “voluntarily, I have a reward, but if unwillingly, I am still entrusted with a stewardship.” That is that vocation thing: whether he volunteered or was a conscript to preach the Gospel, the task remains the same — to live in the freedom of the Gospel and proclaim the Gospel to all who have ears to hear. “Since I am free from all,” he wrote, “I have made myself a servant of all. I do it all for the sake of the Gospel, that I may share with them in its blessings” — namely, the forgiveness of sins, life, salvation, and a new and eternal, primary and ultimate identity as one saved by the Gospel and free from the burdens of Jewish law and tradition. Paul elected to serve the Corinthians by preaching and teaching the Gospel. Paul says that he must preach the Gospel of necessity. It’s an old translation for the word — it means “compulsion,” actually. And yet by becoming a servant of all, he is actually free — 1 Corinthians 9:16 and 19. That’s his argument. He sees all those other identities — the ones that came before, the ones that exist now — he sees all of these identities apart from Christ. Only the one is in Christ now. Identities that are not in Christ, he argues, are by definition Law: expectations, enslaved to expectations based on the group and the thinking. Many Christians fall prey today, thinking that they have to become something, believe things, do things, in order to get along with the other groups and with the world — things that are apart from and contrary to their real identity as Christians, followers of Jesus Christ. Even if you’re not retired, or haven’t been laid off, or gone through such things as losing a job or a family or something else, you can imagine how difficult it is for someone to rethink who they are and the reason they get up and do what they do in the morning. That’s the problem with rooting our primary identity in temporal vocations, relationships, and things other than your baptismal adoption as God the Father’s son or daughter, or Jesus Christ’s brother or sister.
While in detention at Shermer High School, each of the five kids was given an assignment to write a 1,000-word essay to answer the question, “Who do you think you are?” At the end, no one had written the assignment, so it was given to the brain to write on behalf of the five. And the point of the essay that he wrote was that by 4:00 p.m. on March 24th, the detainees were not the people they thought they were when they arrived at 7 a.m. They had become something different than how they arrived. So also in the baptismal font, in the preaching and the hearing and the believing of the Word, you become something different than you thought. By the time Paul wrote his well over 1,000-word letter to the Corinthians, he knew who he was, and to what he was and wasn’t beholden. In the letter, Paul didn’t live up to the Corinthians’ expectations as a group. They expected Paul to write a nasty letter about people who refuse to eat meat sacrificed to idols. But that’s not what Paul did. No, Paul made it clear that they’re free in the Gospel. Their identity is one who has been freed to eat or to not to eat. In Jesus, Paul himself had a new identity. Paul was free. And since he was free from all the enslaving identities and expectations of both the Law and the group, he used his freedom to do what naturally comes to the new identity — for him, preaching the Gospel and serving the neighbor. With no one left to impress, Paul was free to become all things to all people, without worrying about accusations of contradiction: “To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews… to the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some.”
So the question, in the catechetical format: who are you, really, or primarily? The answer: you are a child of God, made so in the gift of Baptism and faith. What does this mean? It means that you’re a new creation. You have a new nature. The old is passing away; the new has come. Your callings, vocations, stations, and relationships are probably different than Paul’s. But your fundamental identity in Christ is exactly the same. Romans 12:5: “So we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.” God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit has given you a new identity in Holy Baptism and the gift of faith: a new creature, a member of the body of Christ, a holy one — hagios — a saint of God. Because your sins have been forgiven, you’re free from the Law in that sense. And now what are you going to do, when you’re free, when there’s no one to impress? Simply believe, trust, love — and then serve your neighbor. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.