Are You Having An Identity Crisis?

Introduction
In the movie “Finding Nemo”, a clown fish named Marlin goes on a frantic search and rescue mission to save his son Nemo who was captured by a scuba diver and put in a dentist’s fish tank.  Marlin meets a blue reef fish named Dory who saw the address on the diver’s mask and knows where they took Nemo.  Unfortunately, Dory has short term memory loss.  She can’t remember her own name, let alone the address P. Sherman, 42 Wallaby Way, Sidney.

The plot is a clever twist of a common theme in  many movies and TV shows.  It’s the
“Who Am I?” plot, in which a lead character has amnesia and can’t remember who they are. 
It’s an identity crisis.

Life is not a movie, but people do have an identity crisis in real life when they don’t know
they belong to God.  God’s Word reminds us our identity is greater than the superficial things of this world.  Our true identity is in Christ.

1 Peter 2:4-12
⁴ You are coming to Christ, who is the living cornerstone of God’s temple. He was rejected by people, but he was chosen by God for great honor.

⁵ And you are living stones that God is building into his spiritual temple. What’s more, you are his holy priests. Through the mediation of Jesus Christ, you offer spiritual sacrifices that please God. ⁶ As the Scriptures say,

“I am placing a cornerstone in Jerusalem,
    chosen for great honor,
and anyone who trusts in him
    will never be disgraced.”

⁷ Yes, you who trust him recognize the honor God has given him. But for those who reject him,

“The stone that the builders rejected
    has now become the cornerstone.”

⁸ And, “He is the stone that makes people stumble,
    the rock that makes them fall.”

They stumble because they do not obey God’s word, and so they meet the fate that was planned for them.

⁹ But you are not like that, for you are a chosen people. You are royal priests, a holy nation, God’s very own possession. As a result, you can show others the goodness of God, for he called you out of the darkness into his wonderful light.

¹⁰ “Once you had no identity as a people;
    now you are God’s people.
Once you received no mercy;
    now you have received God’s mercy.”

¹¹ Dear friends, I warn you as “temporary residents and foreigners” to keep away from worldly desires that wage war against your very souls. ¹² Be careful to live properly among your unbelieving neighbors. Then even if they accuse you of doing wrong, they will see your honorable behavior, and they will give honor to God when he judges the world.

Who You Are in Christ?
“You are living stones that God is building into his spiritual temple…” (verse 5)  The Holy Temple in Jerusalem was the most important place on earth to Jews in New Testament times.  They believed it was where God’s Spirit dwelled on earth.  Some had even come to idolize the Temple.  But Jesus reminded people God’s Spirit is not confined to the Temple.  In fact, people who put their faith in God through Jesus are the real residence of God’s Holy Spirit.  Therefore, Christians together make up the true Holy Temple.  What an honor and privilege!

Further more, verse 5 says “You are his holy priests…”  A priest is someone who intercedes to God on behalf of people on earth.  A priest prays for people and performs religious rituals that help people find healing and wholeness and forgiveness and purification so they can reconnect and be at one with God.  In the Old Testament, only one a certain tribe from the twelve tribes of Israel could be priests.  And even within that tribe, anyone who had a blemish or a defect was disqualified.  Only perfect people could be priests.  So for example, if you were born without a finger or lost eye in accident, you couldn’t serve as a priest.  But when we put our faith in Jesus, it is different.  We are all priest of God Most High—even if we aren’t perfect—because Jesus makes us whole.

Verse 9 says, “You are a chosen people…”  In the Old Testament, only Israelites were consider the chosen people.  Everyone else was a Gentile.  And in Jesus’ day, Jews believed only Jews were God’s chosen people.  But Jesus shows us that anyone who places their faith in Christ is God’s chosen.  So we could paraphrase verse 10 to say, “Once you were nobody; now you are God’s somebody!”  In Christ, everybody is somebody special.  Sinners become saints.  Heathens become priests.  The lame are made whole.  The blind can see and deaf can hear.  Those who were damned become holy.  This is what it means to be Christian. 

Why I Am Methodist
There are many different denominations of Christian churches in our world.  I believe God uses them all to serve a special purpose.  Communities need Baptists and Presbyterians and Pentecostals and Methodists.  

Unfortunately, when a church struggles with an identity crisis, it may begin to look around at what all the churches are doing.  They may think, "Well that church is on fire and really growing.  They must be doing something right.  Maybe we should just copy what they are doing."  Sometimes individuals have them same identity crisis.  They forget who they are or for some reason aren't happy with their life.  They look around at some other people who seem to have their life all worked out.  The temptations, the easy fix, is to just try to copy someone else.

The trouble with both of these quick fix situations--for a church or and individual--is that God created us the way we are for a reason.  God made the Methodist church Methodist for a reason to fulfill a specific need in a community.  God made you as an individual for a specific reason.  If you try to copy someone else, you won't be you and something important God wanted to give the world will be lacking.  The same true in the case of a church.  If my church just tries to copy some other church, we won't be who God wants us to be.

I am a Methodist minister, but I was not always a Methodist.  I grew up going to Baptist churches.  My grandparents and parents were Baptists and so I was a Baptist.  I started attending a Methodist church when I was 18.  My girlfriend (now my wife) and I started attending Wesley United Methodist Church in Macon, GA with her friend Laurie Stewart.

Now, I was skeptical when I started with the Methodist church.  The Baptist churches I attended as a kid taught me to be wary of churches that were overly ceremonial and ritualistic.  These, they warned, were superstitious innovation that were not necessary or biblical.  So I was concerned when the first thing I saw happen in the Methodist worship service was acolytes lighting candles on the altar table.  I eventually learned that this wasn't some magic ritual, it was a symbol to remind us that Christ, the Light of the World, is with us when we worship in church and that His light goes back out into the world as we leave (symbolized by the acolytes carrying the flame from the candles out at the end of the service).  Churchgoers follow the light out back into the world.  This is a tradition that teaches us about our faith and our purpose as followers of Christ.

I learned that the Methodist church is a church that values tradition.  We have many.  We believe we can learn from the traditions of Christians who've gone before us and wrestled with the Bible and with the Christian faith.  These tradition help us be better Christians today and help preserve the hard lessons of those who've gone before us.  But Methodist are not only a church that values traditions.

We also value reason.  Jesus told us to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, and mind (Matthew 22:37).  So Methodist use the brains God have us to understand Him and how we should live.  Our intellect helps us to mature in the faith Jesus gave us.  And our intelligence keeps our traditions from becoming superstitions.  We understand that Jesus is not literally in the candlelight on our altars.  The candles are symbols for our minds to interpret.  And sometimes our reason also concludes that some tradition have outlived their usefulness and we can change them.  At other times, reason leads us to know a tradition is wrong and needs to be changed.  Methodist value tradition and reason.

Methodist also value experience.  Our relationship with God is not merely intellectual.  It is an personal experience that includes feelings and emptions and an actual relationship with God.  our relationship must be more than intellectual--just as a relationship with another person must be more than intellectual in order to be real.  So we experience God as a relationship and we learn about God and our faith through personal and communal experiences.

Methodist value tradition, reason, and experience.  However, Scripture is the foundation of all our beliefs and practices.  We understand that our experiences and feelings are limited and very subjective. We may have feelings of great love for someone today, but tomorrow we feel quite irritated with them.  And then the day after that, we may feel great love once more.  That is the subjective nature of experiential feelings.  Traditions change, reason may evolve, and experience is subjective, but the Word of God in Holy Scripture is always the same.  The Bible is an anchor that keeps our faith from floating away into the oblivion of our own human subjectivity.  Methodist have always been a people grounded in Scripture and we must always be so if we are to be true to Christ our Lord.

Thankfully, Methodists are not a group who accept Scripture blindly as fundamentalists often do.  No, Methodist read Scripture intelligently--seeking to understand the historical and cultural contexts.  We use our reason to mine the depths of God's Word.  We use traditions to remember the lessons of God's Word.  And we experience God through the lens of what Scripture teaches us is true about God.

Tradition, reason, experience and Scripture are all distinctive parts of the Methodist way of Christian living.  They are some of the reasons I am a Methodist and I think our way of following Christ may be helpful for you too.   But there is another distinctive features of Methodism that is important for our world.  I will share some of these in the coming weeks, but I want to end with one more thing today.

The Methodist church is a sacramental church.  We believe that Jesus gave the Church some sacred ceremonies that He uses to help His people.  For instance, we typically celebrate Holy Communion once a month in a Methodist church because we believe it is a sacred and special ceremony Jesus told His followers to practice.  

We call it Holy Communion while many other denominations prefer the term The Lord's Supper.  We prefer Holy Communion because of the notion of communing with Jesus.  You see, some denomination would prefer to call Holy Communion an ordinance, while we call it a sacrament.  An ordinance is something you are supposed obey (sort of like a city ordinance).  So some denominations practice the Lord's Supper primarily out of obedience to the ordinance Jesus gave that they such celebrate the meal.  Methodists, on the other hand, celebrate Communion as a sacrament.  We believe it is a sacred moment when God is actually doing something.  So yes, we practice Communion out of obedience, but also because God does something.  We base our believe that God does something on several passage from the Bible where God acted through the celebration of Holy Communion.  For instance, the understanding of the 2 disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24) was illuminated when Jesus broke the bread of Holy Communion. 

Methodists believe Holy Communion is sacred, but we also believe it is accessible to anyone.  We practice an "open table" where anyone can receive Holy Communion even if they are not a mmber of the church or even if they are young children.  We believe God is infinitely sacred, but He is not something that must be kept separate from people.  Because of what Jesus did for us on the cross--shedding His blood to purify us--God has torn the veil that separates us from in two.  We can come boldly into his presence and so we do this symbolically by welcoming everyone to His table in Holy Communion.  It is a beautiful sacrament that nourishes the spirit just as food nourishes the body.  God impart grace to help His people through the celebration of Holy Communion, and we want everyone to receive this blessing if they are willing.

I hope you will follow this series as I continue over the next few weeks to discuss the identity of the Methodist people and what I believe we have to offer the world.  Perhaps, you may also discover your identity and maybe even choose to be a Methodist Christian as well.

Profanity

Exodus 20:7 You must not misuse the name of the LORD your God. The LORD will not let you go unpunished if you misuse his name.

Introduction

Have you ever looked up at the clouds and saw they were shaped like animals?  One minute, you see what resembles a cow.  But a few moments later, the wind blows, the clouds move, and the cloud changes to something else.  

Our words are like the wind reshaping world around us. We need to be careful how we use words, but that can be tricky.  The meaning of the words we use and how we use them changes from one generation to the next just like the clouds above in the sky.  And words can mean different things in different communities.

A young pastor had an unfortunate experience on his first day pastoring a small church.  He grew up in the city.  So on his first day as the pastor, he was full of wonder driving through the countryside.  Unfortunately, he offended half the congregation in his opening remarks when he talked about all the bulls and cows he saw on the way to church.  Unknown to the young minister, the polite society of this rural community only used the words cow and male cow! “Bull” was a profanity to their sensitive ears.  Can you imagine the horror of finding out half the congregation thought you were cussin’ them in your very first sermon?

Do you consider the word “bull” a profanity?  I guess some communities do.  There may be words you consider profanity that others don’t.  One polite way to refer to a person’s backside is to call it a fanny.  We even have “fanny packs” to hold stuff when you go for a walk.  However, don’t ever call it a fanny pack if you take a walk in Ireland. Fanny is a very vulgar word in Ireland.  (Call it a bum bag.)  Meanwhile, while in Ireland you will find the Irish sprinkling the word “F.E.C.K.” liberally throughout their conversations.  They use this word on TV and radio; even nuns and priests use “F.E.C.K.” in polite company.  For them, it simply means “very” or “extremely”.  So they might say something like "That fecking idiot told the nun he was wearin' a fanny pack! How vuklgar!"

Last Sunday, I shared that words matter.  Today, I want to talk about profanity.  We have a serious problem with profanity in our society.  However, profanity may not mean what you think it means.

Profanity is deeper than just using cuss words.  Profanity is desecrating something that is sacred--whether it is God’s name and reputation or something sacred He has made. Ultimately, profanity is living with the attitude that nothing is sacred.

The Apostle Paul wrote the Church in Corinth about their problem with profanity.  Listen to what he said.

1 Corinthians 11:20-22, 27
20 When you meet together, you are not really interested in the Lord’s Supper. 21 For some of you hurry to eat your own meal without sharing with others. As a result, some go hungry while others get drunk. 22 What? Don’t you have your own homes for eating and drinking? Or do you really want to disgrace God’s church and shame the poor? What am I supposed to say? Do you want me to praise you? Well, I certainly will not praise you for this!

27 So anyone who eats this bread or drinks this cup of the Lord unworthily is guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord.

Desecrating the Holy
In the first century church, what we now call Holy Communion was still full meal.  Just as Jesus originally shared dinner with his Disciples at the Last Supper, New Testament churches would gather for a special dinner to eat and drink and remember their sacred Savior.  As they dined, they would break bread and recount what Jesus said: “This is my body, given for you, and this is my blood shed for you...”  Jesus told his followers to do this often and remember how he died on the cross for their sins.  Though these meals served the common function of nourishing the body, they were also sacred and holy.

What Does It Mean to Take the Lord’s Name in Vain?
Many Christians share how offended they are when people take the Lord’s name in vain--whether it is as extreme as using God’s name to damn something or someone or even something as simply as using God’s name to express ecstatic excitement like--“Oh my god! I love your new car!” Many have shared how hearing God’s sacred name used this way is extremely offensive, and I understand.  You love the Lord and revere Him and you want to honor His name.  That’s noble.

However, I want to make sure you understand the prohibition of using God’s name in vain goes far, far beyond merely the words you say.  When Exodus 20:7 says, “Do not take the Lord’s name in vain...”, the word name means God’s reputation.  You see, the Israelites (to whom the Lord gave these commandments) were supposed to represent God to the world.  God set the Israelites apart as His royal representatives.  Everywhere they went, it was like they were carrying a banner that said, “We are God’s people.  Look at us and you will see what God is like.”  So then, it would desecrate God’s perfect pure reputation if His people were dishonest, disrespectful, vulgar, immoral, bad people.  

In the same way, Christians today are to represent Jesus Christ to the world.  In the New Testament in 1 Peter 2:9, it says, “You are royal priests, a holy nation, God’s very own possession. As a result, you can show others the goodness of God...”  You can live your whole Christian life without ever saying GD or even OMG, but if your bad behavior misrepresents God’s character, you are just as guilty.  Scripture repeatedly shows that behavior that profanes God's name is far more offensive than mere words.  

Profanity - Definition
Profanity is becoming more commonplace in our world today.  People use profane words and even use the Lord’s name in vain. We hear it in the workplace, at school, and profanity has even become more prevalent on TV shows where the FCC used to censor offensive language.  We also live in a time when our attitudes and actions toward one another are not very gracious.  People are angry, divided, and mean-spirited to one another.  I suspect the two go together.  Our words matter.  They affect our actions.   If we speak profanity, we soon act profanely.  And the more we act profanely, the more profanity comes out our mouths.

Just because something is sacred, doesn’t mean it also must be somber or boring. There are many sacred ceremonies full of joy and celebration. At a wedding, we sing, we dance, we laugh, and we love. It’s a wonderful celebration, but it’s also a sacred time when a man and a woman stand before God and a group of eye-witnesses and promise to love each other for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, for the rest of their lives.

Sacred moments don't necessarily have to be religious ceremonies either. One of my church members just had a baby. This is a time of pain and joy, and it is also something very sacred. So something sacred doesn’t have be a sombre or even "religious".
However, there’s a fine line between sacred joy and profane behavior. Unfortunately, the Corinthian church had completely abandoned the sacred nature of Holy Communion. Some would hoard a bunch of food to themselves while others didn’t get anything to eat at all. Others were drinking so much communion wine they were sloppy drunk and acting very vulgar. The spirit and remembrance of Christ’s love was not their focus. They were desecrating the sacred memory of Jesus and how he died on the cross for our sins. Appalling!

However, I want to make sure you understand the prohibition against using God’s name in vain goes far, far beyond mere the way people use words. When Exodus 20:7 says, “Do not take the Lord’s name in vain...”, the word name means God’s reputation. You see, the Israelites (to whom the Lord gave these commandments) were supposed to represent God to the world. God set the Israelites apart as His royal representatives. Everywhere they went, it was like they were carrying a banner with God's name that said, “We are God’s people. Look at us and you will see what God is like.” So then, it would desecrate God’s perfect, pure reputation if His people were dishonest, disrespectful, vulgar, immoral, bad people. God would not put up with His people sullying His name with their bad behavior. This command was more about behavior than words.

In the same way, Christians today are to represent Jesus Christ to the world. In the New Testament in 1 Peter 2:9, it says, “You are royal priests, a holy nation, God’s very own possession. As a result, you can show others the goodness of God...” You can live your whole Christian life without ever saying GD or even OMG, but if your bad behavior misrepresents God’s character, you are just as guilty. Scripture repeatedly shows that behavior that profanes God's name is far more offensive than mere bad words.

I don’t want to be naïve nor a prude. However, I believe Christians are to be salt and light that makes our world a better place. I believe the words we use matter and affect the world around us. We need to be gracious and loving to one another in both our words and deeds. 

Furthermore, we need to remember that God made the whole world. It is not that the church sanctuary is sacred and the world outside is not. All of life is sacred. We gather around the sacred table in the sanctuary to share Holy Communion. but then we will go out and interact with people all week long. They are sacred too--living beings God created and loves who have a purpose. The environment is sacred and God command us to be good stewards of creation. Our own bodies a called "living stones" in the temple of God. We house the Holy Spirit of God. We are sacred and out to treat our own bodies as sacred spaces. All of life is sacred, but too many people in our times live as though nothing is sacred. This is profanity--in its deepest sense. And Jesus wants us to live a different way, a better way.

How can you do that this week?