"The Saints are Like...?"
Our identity above all others is being a child of God
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Text: 1 John 2:28-3:3
Growing up as a boy in England we used to play a game - not an official game, or one with a particular duration; it wasn't a game that anyone would know you were playing until you were playing it. I called it the game of “who is related to the royal family?” By that I mean, every one of us at some point wanted to feel that we were related to the monarchy and in a game of one-upmanship, using immense imagination, we would try to convince each other that we were directly related to royalty. Some would go to extraordinary measures to make this link. Indeed, I remember one girl in my class conjuring up an illegitimate great-great grandmother of hers who was somehow related to a member of the royal family but was never recognized or declared as such. She, as a direct descendant of this great-great grandmother who was an illegitimate child of a member of the monarchy, was part of the royal lineage. We made up all kinds of things to try to convince one another that we were royalty. It was pathetic.
Why did we do it? We did it because we had this great desire to belong, to have an identity that was important, to somehow hold our heads up high amongst everybody else in the sea, the morass of ordinary people out there. Somehow, by connecting ourselves to the monarchy, no matter how vicariously, we felt that we were important.
When I actually did some digging in my background, the closest I ever got to royalty was a member of my family who died in a ditch in Scotland from an overdose of some royal gin. But I claim that as a tie no matter what.
All human beings have a desire for identity. We all want to belong to something that gives us a sense of importance, belonging and status. In fact, I think whether it is our race, nation, ethnicity, tribal background or, even in the Marxian analysis, our class, we try to claim something that makes us belong, that makes us important. At times, however, and we are seeing this in the modern political era, belonging to a tribe or group not only provides a sense of identity but actually excludes others from sharing in that identity. We see the evil manifestations of this in the tribal divisions occurring right now in the Congo between the Hutu and the Tutsi. It's happening to some extent in Zimbabwe between the Matabeleland and Mashonaland. It is happening, I'm afraid to say, in South Africa again between the Zulu and Xhosa.
Not just in Africa, but in other parts of the world as well, identity - belonging to a particular cultural group, race or tribe becomes important. At times, it is necessary, laudable and important to belong. It is important to have a sense of identity and that identity should not be crushed. At other times, however, that identity is exclusionary and pushes others to the borders. The one thing we all share in common, but often forget, is our identity as human beings.
In preparation for Remembrance Day, I re-read a most touching book by my friend Roy Tanenbaum, the rabbi at Beth Tzedec, titled Prisoner 88. A number of years ago, here at Eaton Memorial, we helped launch that book. It's the story of a Polish Catholic man who was one of the first people interred in Auschwitz in 1940. He was given the number achtundachtzig - 88. That's how early on he was interred. Unlike many, he was able to survive until the very end of the war and tell his story of what he endured.
He survived the whole period of the war but he did so, as he said, “Without an identity.” The only thing that gave him a sense of who he was was the number that he bore: 88. He was known as 88, even by his friends. He said that in Auschwitz the one great thing was that all religions were taken away, all backgrounds were diminished; the number became the most important thing. When your number was called, you knew it was the end. As 88, it wasn't. He said that in the midst of all of this he lost his humanity; he lost his sense of being a person and became simply a number. A few years into his time there, he fell in love with a woman, a prostitute in the camp - the only way she was able to survive. Prisoner 88 wrote these words:
Achtundachtzig fell blindly in love. How strange that a woman I cared about and loved was taken by others, but I barely gave it a thought. A human being wants to be unique, different from everybody else, more than a number, but Auschwitz dehumanized us all. I have observed dogs beaten by their masters, come crawling, begging, wagging a tail, looking for a caress. But degraded as we were, you took any shred - a smile, a look, a word and made it yours to cherish even if hundreds of others were also embraced.
For prisoner 88, the only way he could find his humanity falling in love. In our passage from the Book of John, John talks about something similar. But he talks about an identity that is beyond being human, beyond the tribe, beyond the group, beyond language. It is the identity that is above all other identities: being a child of God. “For great is the love that the Father has lavished on us,” writes John, “that we are called the children of God.” He understands the importance of this; he knows that this identity is greater than all other identities. Children of God live between the now and the age to come in the partiality of being a child of God, with all its finitude and restrictions. But someday we will all realize we are the children of God and like the saints in the Book of Revelation, we will dance around the throne of grace with one another. We will recognize one another. “We will be with God as a child is with a parent. For great love has been lavished on us that we are the children of God,” John says.
The Apostle Paul picks up the same theme in the Book of Romans: We cry, “Abba, Father;” we are heirs and co-heirs with Christ because we are the children of God. My friends, if there is an identity that draws us together and gives us freedom and power, it is that very reality. The problem is, as John notes, that the world sometimes questions our identity as children of God. John writes that the world does not know we are God's children because it does not know our Father. We see this manifested when we try to declare that we are children of God and that statement is belittled and questioned. “Who are you to say that you are a child of God? Look at you - you're flawed, you're fallible, you're mortal, you're imperfect. How can you be a child of God? You are broken, you are wounded, you are incomplete, you mourn, you grieve and you die! How can you be a child of God?” That is what the world says. At times, we believe it ourselves. We ask ourselves, “Are we really children of God if we are so broken?”
John says that we are sinful human beings; we know that. We know that we are broken; we know that we are not perfect, but somehow God has done something about that. Through his Son he has healed that, he has forgiven that, he has restored us. That image that was tarnished has been polished into the brightness of the likeness of his Son. God no longer sees us as simply sinful and broken human beings, but as redeemed. He sees us in the light of his Son. When we realize that, we hold our heads up high. We recognize that no matter what the world may say, we are still the children of God. Not on the basis of something that we have done, not on the basis of our moral perfection, not on the basis of our absolute beauty and wonder, but by grace. That's why we are the children of God.
There will always be those who say that you can't authentically be a child of God unless you act in a certain way. You can't be a child of God unless you worship in a certain church. You can't be a child of God unless you speak a particular language. You can't be a child of God unless you know all the coded language and doctrine of religion. You can't be a child of God if you belong to a certain race.
It was fascinating, just the week before Barack Obama was elected president, I went back and looked at some of the case law relating to race law I read years ago in a class I took. I went back to the writings of none other than the great Frederick Douglass, a black constitutional lawyer who was also from the ranks of the slaves. In the 19th century, he wrote a most profound and telling statement. I couldn't help but contrast his words and with what I saw on my television screen the night of the U.S. presidential election:
I have no love for America, as such I have no patriotism; I have no country. What country have I? The institutions of the country do not know me, do not recognize me as a man; I am not thought of or spoken of in any direction out of the anti-slavery ranks as a man. I am not thought of or spoken of except as a piece of property belonging to some Christian slave-holder and all the religious and political institutions of this country pronounce me as slave and chattel. Now, in such a country as this, I cannot have patriotism. The only thing that links me to this land is my family and the painful consciousness that here there are three million of my fellow creatures groaning beneath the iron rod of the worst despotism that could be devised. Here are men and brethren who are identified with me by their complexion, identified with me by their hatred of slavery, identified with me by their love and aspirations for liberty, identified with me by the stripes on their backs, their inhuman wrongs and cruel sufferings. This, and only this, attaches me to this land and brings me here to plead with you and with this country at large for the disenthrallment of my oppressed countrymen and the overthrow of a system of slavery, which is crushing them to the earth.
But then he says, “Where will I find the bright ray of liberty lighted in the souls of all God's children but by the omnipotent hand of God, himself?” Here was a man who by virtue of the colour of his skin was not considered a man but chattel, but in the midst of it pleaded for liberty. On what grounds? The love of God; the omnipotent love of God.
Frederick Douglass found his identity when his identity was being taken away. When the world said he was not human, he saw himself and others like him as human precisely because he saw himself as a child of God. No matter what the world may say, no matter what the world may do, we have an identity that transcends all other identities.
We are also to be different. It's not enough to say, “I am a child of God,” if one does not live as the Father, if one does not live as the One who calls you. To live as a child of God is to live as the parent wishes you to live. To live in obedience, to live in righteousness, to live in truth and to make that life so profoundly different from what others might wish it to be.
One of my great heroes in the 20th century is William Stringfellow, a great lawyer and constitutional thinker in the United States. He grew up in Northampton, Massachusetts and his father was a weaver. He was so poor he had to work three jobs to get through school. He finally graduated at the age of 15 and went to Bates College. From Bates he eventually went on full scholarship to the London School of Economics, then entered the Second Army of the United States and then attended Harvard Law School. As many do when they graduate from Harvard Law School, he received offers of great wealth and prestige. But he did something different: He went to Harlem. He used the great intellectual gifts he was given to work with the poor, with those who could not find someone to represent them. He lived in a room that was 25 by 25 feet for years. As he said, there were more cockroaches in his room then there were neighbours on the streets. But Stringfellow committed himself and his great intellect to help people who would otherwise have no representation.
William Stringfellow was a Christian and more than anything else he saw his identity as a Christian superseding his career. He saw his life as a Christian as his vocation and his life as a lawyer as his career. As a Christian, he decided to spend his life working for people who had no other source of help. The seminaries wouldn't listen to him, churches didn't want to hear what he had to say. But universities did, the people on the street did and the poor did. When Stringfellow died, he was actually said by Jim Wallis of the Sojourners to be one of the men in this world who lived his faith completely. But there was a telling moment in Stringfellow's life. When he was with the Second Army, he noticed that many of the people around him were complaining about the amount of work they had to do, that they were losing their identities and were no longer able to assert themselves. Stringfellow stopped and said,
My friends, my fellow soldiers, we are first and foremost children of God. Our identity, our sense of who we are is what gives us purpose. We do not try to hide ourselves or elevate ourselves. Either way, we are a child of God and that is the only place where we can find out who we really are. If we are a child of God, we should not concern ourselves about where we are able to be ourselves; we should concern ourselves about the extent to which we can serve others.
William Stringfellow, a man of great intellect, but a man who understood that his identity in Christ meant more than anything else. My friends, if we take that seriously, then our lives should be lived differently. If we take that seriously, it is the greatest calling we can ever have. “What great love God has lavished upon us that we should be called his children.” But, as Dave Toycen rightly said at the prayer breakfast last Thursday, to do that we must change. To do that, we must be different. To do that, we must have a standard that is greater than the standard of the world. It is about living up to Jesus Christ. And what a great challenge that is.
During the very darkest days of the war, when he was suffering from a great depression at the death of his son, Abraham Lincoln was at his lowest and was questioning his identity. As was his custom, he went to church - a Presbyterian church in Washington. He tried to enter unnoticed but, of course, how could a man like Abraham Lincoln not be noticed? We all like to do that, sit as far away from the minister as possible in the hope that he doesn't know that you're there. He listened to the sermon and prayer. He put his stovetop hat in his lap and as he got up his aide asked him, “Mr. President, what did you think of the sermon today?”
He said, “It was the most eloquent, wonderful, magnificently crafted sermon.”
His aide said, “So, you liked it?”
Lincoln responded, “No, I hated it. It was dreadful.”
“Why? Why was it dreadful?”
“Because it didn't ask of us to be something great.”
My friends, nothing asks us to be great, to have a greater identity, more than this singular phrase: The saints are like the children of God and the children of God have their identity in God alone. May you live that reality. Amen.
“No, I hated it. It was dreadful.”
“Why? Why was it dreadful?”
“Because it didn't ask of us to be something great.”
My friends, nothing asks us to be great, to have a greater identity, more than this singular phrase: The
saints are like the children of God and the children of God have their identity in God alone. May you live
that reality. Amen.