Let’s play a little game. I’m going to ask you one question.
Who Are You?
We would start with our names of course, but then what? Most likely, your occupation. I’m a pastor, I’m a teacher, I’m an engineer, I’m a student. But that’s your job, that’s not who you are. So, who are you? You might say that you love watching football or you’re a glorified taxi driver for your children or that you cook or play video games or you read books. That’s another version of the same thing. You are not what you do, whether for money or for pleasure. So, who are you? I’m a father, a daughter, a sister, a husband. Right, but you’re not your family. Neither are you your religious identifier (Baptist, Catholic, Buddhist, or Jedi). You’re not the clothes you wear or the food you eat or the kind of home you live in or the team you root for in the Superbowl (Rise Up). Who are you?
We have a particularly hard time answering that question of Who am I because you and I live in a culture that is based on measurement. It’s not just because we live in a science town; it’s all of Western society. We measure success and worth and ourselves by the observable – the measurable.
- What do you do for a living?
- How many degrees do you have?
- What’s your 401K doing?
- Do you work hard and do you have ambition?
- Are you a good parent?
- Do you go to PTA meetings and are your kids in enough extracurricular activities to make them competitive for college?
- How many Twitter followers do you have?
We measure the success and worth of businesses by how much money they make, or how many stores they have nationwide, or units sold, or market saturation. We tend to measure our churches the same way, which is even more egregious. There are a bunch of people that want to measure the success of a church in nickels and noses – budget and attendance. I’m not going to harp on it, but that’s a pretty sorry way of talking about church.
It should come as no surprise that the pastor thinks that the answer to the question of Who Are You is rooted in your soul, what Fr. Richard Rohr might refer to as the “true self.” It’s the part of you that God sees. It’s the part of you that can’t help but show in your actions and words. It’s the part of you that longs to be the kind of person you always wanted to be.
Right after Jesus calls the first disciples, he starts going around to the synagogues and teaching about a new way, a new world (he calls it the Kingdom). He heals people of disease and ailments and suffering. Huge crowds are flocking to him and he delivers a sermon beginning in Matthew 5 aimed directly at his disciples, his followers. It’s a sermon about your true self. We’re going to consider just one chapter for the next few Sundays. The entire sermon is brilliant, but for our purposes, we’ll walk through chapter 5 looking for answers to one question:
Who Are You?