Sermon for Friends Congregational Church

“Identity Crisis” (title inspired by a sermon of the same title delivered by Peter Gomes)

Delivered by Reverend Dan De Leon

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

A Light at the Table Service

Bad breakups are the worst.  There’s a reason why the playwright insists that “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” and it’s because when you’re in the midst of it, there’s probably nothing worse than a bad breakup.  But what’s funny is that for such an intense emotion, that feeling of being scorned, when the healing sets in, we forget what the pain felt like.  I had a couple of bad breakups, but I don’t remember how I felt.  Even when I come across the occasional old journal entry that describes the feeling of torment I was going through, I read the words on paper and think, “Wow, that must have been terrible for that guy.  That’s not me.”

I may not remember what it felt like to have trouble sleeping, or eating, or to always be looking for something to keep me busy.  What I can remember, though, is that once I got over it, I didn’t know what to do with myself.  With hindsight, I can say that all I was going through was an identity crisis.  When I was with the girl, I let that circumstance define me.  When the breakup happened, I was defined by the scorn.  And when I woke up one morning and didn’t think about it anymore, I found myself asking the question, “OK, well, what do I do now?”

When you look at it like this, breakups really aren’t the worst.  Not knowing who you are because everything you defined yourself by is gone, that’s what really stinks.  It’s a scary feeling to graduate high school after years of telling yourself that school is your job, and then you find yourself without an identity.  What now?  It’s the same thing with losing a job or even retiring from work altogether.  What now?  Your best friend has to leave because someone in her family found a great job in another state.  What now?  Then there’s the empty nest thing, which I have come to assume is up there with feeling scorned.  Now that my brothers and I are out of the house, we receive more cards, newspaper clippings, emails and unsolicited advice from our mother than we ever received when we lived under the De Leon roof together.

“What do I do now?  Who am I?”  This is an identity crisis, and it’s the worst.  This is what Adam and Eve are struggling with in the garden when they eat from the tree of knowledge.  Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit—as we call it—and suddenly they know a lot about who they are, and it’s even scarier than when they were clueless, because all of a sudden they realize that they are naked.  Knowing what they know, they put on their makeshift fig leaf bikinis and run as fast as they can away from God.  They are scared, more so than they have ever been.

And now here we are: the supposed descendants of this foolish duo.  We know what we like and what we don’t like.  We know what turns us on and what disgusts us.  We know our capabilities and we know our limitations (well, most of the time).  And we think that with all of this knowledge of “who I am,” we can get by with pretty much anything.  We can pull a fast one on the world, if we put our minds to it, because they don’t know me, but I sure know who I am.

Do you ever do that?  Do you ever walk around in situations in your life saying, “If only they knew who I really was?”  It can make you feel pretty clever, like you’re on top of the world, like you can get away with anything and suffer no consequences, but then you look down and realize that you’re naked.

That’s when we take a page from Adam and Eve and we run and hide from the world.  We run and hide from our selves and we run and hide from God.  Because of who we think we are, because of how we define ourselves, we hide.  We hide in the safety of our own homes, finding anonymity on the internet.  We hide in our jobs, wearing the fig leaf of our daily responsibilities so people won’t see who we really are.  We hide at school, in a sea of our peers, hoping they won’t see who we really are.  We even hide in church.  We hope that God is out there watching us walk into this building and pulling out a clipboard and going ‘check.’  As if God stays out there and isn’t present in this place!

But if there is any place where you are invited to feel free to let down your metaphorical fig leaf, Church is the place!  I’m talking metaphorically, so keep your clothes on.  We’re beautiful people, but we’re not that beautiful.

You may be going through an identity crisis right now.  You may be in school or out of school, working or unemployed, single or married, mindful of the news of the world or ignorant to it, comfortable with your faith or irritated with it, but these are just circumstances.  And if our human circumstances define who we are, then, my friends, we are all in one hell of an identity crisis.  Medieval imagery may have informed us that hell is a location of eternal fire and brimstone where the damned spend eternity, but in this time between the already and the not yet, hell is simply not knowing who you are.

But here is the Good News, and I know this will initially sound crass: God doesn’t care about our circumstances, at least not in the same way we do.  God is not concerned with where we’ve been or even where we are.  God is concerned with where we are going.

This isn’t to say that God is not looking out for us, watching over us like the Divine Shepherd that the Psalms always speak about.  No.  This is to say that so long as our identity is in God’s hands, then all of our circumstances are out of our hands.  This is to say that so long as we define ourselves by where we are going, then the Shepherd who leads us will watch over us and our circumstances, whatever they may be, throughout the journey.

When we people of faith follow Christ and journey toward God, then we are not defined by where we have been or even where we are right now.  We are defined by where we are going.  We are defined by hope and expectation and construction and progression and growth and faith and love.  We are defined by our relentless desire to look ahead to God’s new day of justice, mercy and peace, and in that definition of our lives made new in Christ, we are called to words and deeds that would make the world look at us in our beautiful nakedness and say, “She’s a child of God.  He’s a child of God.  No question about it.”

God knows who you are.  Do you?  Listen to this poem by Peter Gomes and let’s share an answer to the question, “Who are you?”

Formed by God, Nourished by love,

Preserved by his mercy, Open to his promises,

Expectant of his future,

You are the human expression of the Divine hope.

You are God’s best and last chance in the world,

You are the means for hope and for love in the world.

Who are you?

That is who you are. You are all of that, and more.

And for that, we praise God.