FIRST PETER: “WHO AM I?”

A Sermon Based Upon 1 Peter 2: 1-10

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

Fourth Sunday of Easter, 

Mother’s Day, May  11^th, 2014

Who are you?  Who am I?  We are, first and foremost, very much our mother’s child.   And we should never forget the one who made us who we are.   Mother’s Day is a special time in our Churches as we honor, thank, appreciate, recognize and remember the mother who carried us, gave us life, nursed us, fed us, loved us, and in more ways that we can remember or recall, is largely responsible for making us who we are?   But it doesn’t end there, does it?  We are our Mother’s child, but we are also our own person.  We are who we choose to become.   Our mothers and fathers gave us life, raised us, but they also set us free to grow up and to determine our own destiny and life’s purpose.  The best mothers give us roots, but they don’t hold on to us too tightly, but they give us wings, and they let us go so that we can fly, soar, and become all that we can be, should be, and want to be.   

Today I want us to think about this unending question: Who am I?  I want to begin with a poem with that very title.  Poems are not as well received today, but I beg you to consider this one from a man unjustly put in prison for 18 months, now writing this poem as the final lines only a couple of weeks before he was wrongfully hanged the Sunday after Easter.  If you listen well, you will hear him, not only asking himself the most important question (which we all would do in that situation), but if you listen to the end, you will also hear him declaring the only final answer of who we could ever hope to be as human beings:  

Who am I? They often tell me I stepped from my cell’s confinement

Calmly, cheerfully, firmly,  Like a squire from his country-house.

Who am I? They often tell me I used to speak to my warders

Freely and friendly and clearly, As though it were mine to command.

Who am I? They also tell me I bore the days of misfortune

Equably, smilingly, proudly,  Like one accustomed to win.

 Am I then really all that which other men tell of?  Or am I only what I myself know of myself?  Restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,

Struggling for breath, as though hands were  compressing my throat,

Yearning for colors, for flowers, for the voices of birds,

Thirsting for words of kindness, for neighborliness,

Tossing in expectation of great events, Powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance,  Weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making,

Faint, and ready to say farewell to it all?

 Who am I? This or the other?  Am I one person today and tomorrow another?

Am I both at once?  A hypocrite before others,  And before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling?

Or is something within me still like a beaten army, Fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved? Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.   Whoever I am, Thou knowest, 0 God, I am Thine!

 (Written by Deitrich Bonhoeffer, March 28^th, as quoted at: http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=385") .

FROM NOBODY TO SOMEBODY

This poem is appropriate to introduce our Scripture today, which is from 1 Peter, chapter 2, and is also about our true identity in Jesus Christ.   Very much like a mother, or like that prisoner, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Peter is concerned that his readers know who they are, as God’s people.  He writes out of his concern for God’s children, like a caring mother, saying that since they have been nurtured as “newborn infants” on God’s “spiritual milk”, they should keep “growing into (their) salvation”,  and he dares to add,  “if they have tasted that the Lord is good.”  That’s a big “if”, isn’t it?  “If” we taste and believe the Lord’s “spiritual milk” is good for us, then we should continue on the great discovery of learning and living out the truth of “who we are” in our unique Christian identity.   “Who are we” is the question Peter is trying to answer, but he also reminds us it is a question we must also answer.

Perhaps the most important way Peter expresses “who they are” and “who we are” comes at the end, where he says, “Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.”   He wants them to know, more than anything else, that God has chosen them, God desires to mold and to make them into someone they could never be or become on their own.  “Once you were not a people” can simply mean that you and I are nobodies unless or until God knows and choses us. 

Of course, how God choses and who God choses is very much a mystery from our side.  If we happen to try to “know” exactly who is “in” and who is “out” of God’s choosing, we will be out of luck.  Because if this “choosing” is truly from and of God, it is a choice only God does and only God knows.   And because God is God, there is nothing we can do to alter, nullify, or  reverse God’s choice.  In theological terms, we call God’s choosing “election” and it always remains God’s, and is never ours.  We can never determine or delete God’s choices, except in the way God has allowed: we can deny it by our own freedom to reject God’s choosing through our unbelief.   Peter acknowledges the possibility of rejecting who we are in Christ and who Christ is to us, as he calls God’s people to “Come to him, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight….” (v.4).  The point is this: You can’t undo God’s choice, but you can refuse to participate in God’s choice.  And Peter addresses this freedom to reject the “cornerstone”, but the cornerstone has already been put in place, and can’t be undone: “To you who believe, he is precious; but for those who do not believe, ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the very head of the corner…” (v. 7).

I know most of us are so busy making and living our own choices in life, that we think we have less or too little time to consider God’s choice of us.  But I want you to think about who you could be in God, just as much as you might think about who you are because of your mother or father.  In this life there are things we can’t choose, like where we are born, who are our parents, or where we grew up or how we grew up; but there are also some things we have to choose, like what work you will do, what kind of person you will become and what you will do with the rest of your life.  But although life is made up of a few things we can’t choose, overall our lives are about the many things we can and must choose.  You can’t be a human being without making and living out the choices we must make, because to choose not to choose is a choice to be nothing, and that is exactly what God has chosen us from, from being “not a people” to becoming “God’s people”.   In this way, God has chosen us to be people who are now capable to choices that not only make us who we are today, but who we are and will be in eternity, before the eternal God.  God has chosen us, but you and I still have to choose, we have to make choices and live them, and more than anything else, we have to choose to be chosen or we end up just like we were, nobody.   

One of the most dramatic moments of choosing and being chosen, comes during adolescence.  Eric Erikson labeled it our “Identity Crisis” when we start getting serious (or anxious) about who we can choose to become.  This “crisis” is so wonderfully illustrated in the story Tony Campolo tells, when as a college sociology professor, a student comes up to him and declares, “Prof.  I’m dropping out of school.”  When Dr. Campolo asked the student a reason, the answer came: “I’ve got to have time to peel back all these expectations people keep putting on me and go out and find myself”.  Dr. Campolo then challenged the student with the rather strange question:  “What if you peel off all these “expectations” and discover you are an onion?”  The professor went on to explain: “If you peel away the layers of an onion all you get is layers all the way down to the end.  If you peel back who we are as people, all you get is the commitments and the promises we make and keep.”  There is no ‘self’ to discover except for the self we decide to be as we commit ourselves.  If we commit ourselves to nothing, this is who we become.  This is who God has come to save us from---becoming nothing.  (http://65583.netministry.com/Articles-and-Prophetic-Words?blogid=2093&view=post&articleid=74195).

FROM A PERSON TO A PEOPLE

The question about our identity of “Who are we?” is so huge a question that it can’t be answered by ourselves and once for all, but it is a question that  includes other people and it is a question that will stay with us, and even sometimes haunt us, all the days of our lives.  Notice how Peter himself addresses God’s people who still need to “grow” and still need to learn, and still need to “rid (themselves)….of all malice, and all guile, insincerity, envy, and all slander.”   God’s people are not robots or puppets programed to do God’s will, but God’s children must choose who they will are every day of their lives, and that ‘choice” must include how we relate to others.  

In this way, our identity in Christ is both a promise and a process.  As we choose Christ, Christ chooses us.  As we follow Christ, we become Christian.  As we live in community with other Christians, we must be more than who we say we are.   For only by being a people are we fully the person God made us to be.   This is the direction Peter’s description goes, as Peter moves from telling us who we are as persons, given new birth in Christ, to who now become as a people: “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people….”  (vs. 9).  God has not just chosen us to be who we want to be, but God has chosen us to be live as a people, living in communion with God an in community with others.  

Carlyle Marney, a great Baptist pastor and leader, once said that as Baptists, our great gift to the world is our freedom, our “soul liberty,” freedom of conscience and “self-autonomy”.   He also said that our great failure in the world is that we failed to understand we have this freedom to become “a people” of faith, not just “persons” who believe.  In his last book, Marney complained that we Baptists have “ignored” understanding that our Baptism is an entry into a community of faith and instead, we made it the display of a personal, almost private decision to follow Christ on our own.   How do we repair what he called the “leaky bucket” of self-centered Christianity?  He claimed that we need to renew our commitment to being a “people” who live together in fellowship, sharing and strengthening each other in our faith journey  (Based on an article “Carlyle Marney on Pilgrim Priesthood” by Curtis W. Freeman, in Baptists Today, June 2002, p. 28-29).    

This is certainly what Peter means, when he says we are to be “living stones”,… a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s on people” (2.5,9).  The “you are….” (2.9), is plural, not singular.   We don’t become who we can be in Christ by being saved, but we are saved as we become part of loving, serving, caring “people” of God.  And right at the center of  becoming a “people” is that God saves us, choses us, and sets us apart, to become “a royal priesthood” (2.9).   We live in a time when the whole concept of “priesthood” has a very negative connotation, even in the mind of Roman Catholics.   But the kind of “priesthood” Peter means is not a class of special, superior, or elite persons who serve God on behalf of the rest of us, but Peter means that because Jesus has become our one and only Great High Priest, we have been made into a “priesthood” ourselves.   Because Christ has forgiven, freed to become his chosen people, we can and should become, as Dr. Marney said, “Priests to Each Other”.  This means “who we are” is always connected to who become together, with and for each other. 

Most of us realize that our Amish brothers and sisters around us do a much better job at living in community with each other than we do.  And we can learn from them.  We don’t have to be just like them, or even to live as they do, to learn a great spiritual lesson from them.  Just the other day, my Amish neighbor came to me wanting me to look up and help him purchase a used set of Encyclopedia’s on the Internet.   He did not have “Internet” or a “Computer”, not because it was considered evil or bad, but because he lived in community with others who had decided together they would not have internet.  When we learned that the set of books were going to cost him up to $500 dollars, but that he could purchase a computer and a CD much cheaper, I suggested to him this would be better.  I reminded him this a couple of times, but each time he said “No” he could not do this.  He could not do this because he was more than a “person” but he was a part of a “people” living in community, being priests to each other.

Is there anything to be gained by living in “community” as a “people” and a “priesthood” who share their spiritual lives rather than living individually and all alone?   The Amish believe there is.   Baptist used to believer there was.  Christian are still called to live that way--in community, and not as ‘long rangers’.  But why submit ourselves to God and to each other, in a covenant or as a family, when we think we can do just as well by ourselves and on our own?

FROM BEING TO BECOMING

So what is the advantage of becoming a “people” over deciding to be your own “person”?   And what is the advantage of becoming a part of the “people” who are “God’s own people”? 

In the original King James Version, it is translated that Peter says that we are a “peculiar” people and in our English language today, that sounds like we are to be “weird”, “odd” or “strange” or “abnormal”.  But the original language does not mean that at all.  In 1611 the word “peculiar” didn’t mean that either, but “peculiar” referred to something that is “peculiar” in that it belongs to someone.   This is why the newer translations are even more correct, saying that God’s “peculiar” people are “God’s own people.” 

So, again, how important is it that we become “God’s own people” together and not to settle for being our own person, even if we do it in the name of Christ?   I think the answer comes in seeing how important Peter’s language is as he identifies us as “chosen race,” a “priesthood”, a “nation” and a “people”.  We should see these words as not simple who are, but who we are “chosen” to “become”.   On this Mother’s day we can most easily understand that our Mothers love us ‘as we are’ because of ‘who we are’, and not because we make anything of ourselves.  But we also can understand that a good mother, a loving and wise mother, one who loves us more than she loves herself, will also try to love us into “becoming” who we can be and she never settles for just having us just as we are (I still remember how my mother thumped me on the ear lobe as I misbehaved in church want to be my own person, rather than being part of a people, respecting others need to hear, even if I didn’t want to).  For you see, love never settles for who we are, but love wants us to drink our “milk”,  eat the right “food”, “grow” to become the “strongest”, “healthiest” and “best” person we can be, even being that “person” means we will no longer a child, but will become an adult.  Of course, it take “courage” to ‘become’ for it is hard for a mother to stop mothering as it can be difficult for us to stop being children, but we all know that to stop “growing” and not to stop being ‘children’ or to try to make it on our own and all “alone” is not realistic and not really an option.  It is not an option, because, as Peter reminds us, he is not simply telling us who we are, but he is us of who we are ‘chosen’ to become and who we must ‘chose’ to become to fulfill our destiny in Jesus Christ.   

And although we are ‘free’ to choose our identity and to determine our own destiny, and as the poet said, “We are captains of our souls, and masters of our fate”, but as a child really can’t choose not to grow up, neither can a person reject God’s own choosing, that is, if we want to have the ‘future’ and ‘fulfillment’ only God has to give.  This is why Peter not only tells us who we should be, but he is choosing, calling and declaring us to become ‘God’s own people, in order that (we) may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called (us) out of darkness into his marvelous light’ (v. 9).  The “darkness” God choses us “out of” is the same darkness of being “nothing” and going back to being a nobody as “not a people” and “not receiving mercy” (vs. 10).   

Isn’t it most instructive, that in the Hebrew Bible, God names himself “I Am?”  Today we understand better that the Hebrew verb is not simply, “I am, who I am”, but the Hebrew should read “I am becoming who I will become” meaning that God is “eternal” (Ex 3.14).  God announces who he is by declaring he is eternal.  In the Christian Bible, this same “eternal’ God calls ‘becoming’ not just being.  We should not settle for who we are, but we are to become partake in the divine nature, like God is “becoming”.  I know this is heavy talk, but to realize that the eternal God has created, called and chosen us to join in his eternal nature, and to not be a ‘has been’, or to become "nothing" should be heavy, if it is the most important person or people could ever become.  Amen.