2 Pentecost, Cp7, June 19, 2022
1 Kings 19:1-4, (5-7), 8-15a Psalm 42
Gal. 3:23-29 Luke 8:26-39
Paul wrote some very startling things. Like in Christ, there is neither Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female.
It could be that everyone was given a Christ-identity at creation, in that everyone is made in the image of God. But what has humanity occupied itself with?
Taking on identity after identity and regarding them as being more important than the original identity, the original blessing.
Our societies and cultures teach us to put on may personae, many layers of identity. And not just put them on, but idolize them and make them primary.
Our lives are full of qualifying adjectives: American, Russian, Californian, Episcopalian, male, female, Gay, Straight, Transitioning, Republican, Democrat, Liberal, Conservative, Wealthy, poor, Middle Class, educated, uneducated. On and on, the list of qualifying identities pile up in our lives and we can become like the man wearing a hundred coats, and wondering why he's feeling hot.
Was Paul trying to say that being Jew, Greek, slave, free, male or female were unimportant and irrelevant identities? Was he silly enough to live in such denial? I don't think so.
I think what Paul was trying to teach is that we need to understand and know how to be related to all the identities which we come to have in our life settings and cultures. How do we moderate between all the identities?
We find our Christ-identity, our baptismal identity, our original blessing identity and we make it our primary identity. And from our Christ-identity we learn to articulate, control, and balance our other identities so that they serve our Christ-identity rather than replace our Christ-identity.
One of the purposes of spiritual practice is to learn how to let one's Christ-identity rule our lives. One of the outcomes of the practice of meditation and contemplation is the silencing of all our identities so that the Christ-identity can come to recognition in the deep silence of peace within us.
St. Paul believed that one could find this Christ-identity and be lifted into heavenly places above all principalities and powers, all controlling impulses which can wreck us if we allow them to make our secondary identities our primary identities.
St. Paul believed in this mystical experience of being in-Christ. How did this get presented in the Gospel narratives of Jesus?
Jesus was the one who was above all inner principalities and powers; above all demons. In ancient Greek a daemon in the negative sense was a controlling impulse. The poor man in the story from the Gerasenes, and being a place where pigs were raised it was not inhabited by Jews. Jesus what are you doing there? The man is not a Jew. He's is crazy, the kind of crazy that is so deep that we say he has a dirty, impure, unclean spirit. What is the dirty and unclean animal for Jews? The swine. So ,Jesus who is above all principalities and power puts the unclean spirits into the unclean animal and they rush to their elimination.
This story is highly parabolic and symbolic. The man who had a non-Jewish identity and an unclean inner life identity, was brought to his Christ-identity. Can we understand how the Jesus story exemplified what was happening within the really foreign Gentile peoples who were coming into their Christ-identity and having their lives transformed.
What everyone wants in life is their God-identity, their Christ-identity. The Psalmist said his soul longed for God like a deer panting for the water.
Our Christ-identity is something that is both character and situationally active. By practicing coming to realize over and over our Christ-identity, it becomes our habit and character.
Elijah was a prophet, with a practiced God-identity; but he still allowed in a situation his "fearful identity" to assert itself. He fled in fear from Ahab and Jezebel and went to spend time alone in the mountain cave, there he became re-established in his God-identity as he realized the still small voice of the divine within him. And he was restored.
Let the Scriptures for today teach us that our hearts seek the divine with a profound thirst. And let us practice the finding of our God-in-Christ identity over and over again so that we can tame and control other potential proudful identity or fearful or tyrannical identities. Let the Christ-identity become the controlling identity of our lives, and let us not be too proud to admit when in practice we still sometimes forget the Christ-identity and allow a past habitual identity enslave us or bring us to acting out in wrong ways.
The Gospel is that no matter how much we fail to act from our Christ-identity, it is always there for us to return to. And we come here as a community to say, let the Christ-identity be our identity, again today. Amen.
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