A word from your Bishop
Identity. This is a word we are hearing more often these days. We talk about ‘identity politics’, and people are ‘identifying’ sexually or racially or in all sorts of other ways. Now we can even identify personally with the pronouns of our choice. People want us to identify with their causes and we are labelled as to whether we do or don’t identify with them.
Who am I? What is my identity? These are basic questions we all grapple with during different stages of life. Young people look for their identity in relation to their peers. We may wish to identify ourselves through our career and what we have to show for it. As I write I am stuck in my COVID-cave, isolating even from my wife at the other end of the house for the obligatory seven days. Hidden from the world, treated like a leper, who am I now? As I head towards retirement next year I have to begin asking and answering the question “who will I be then?”.
During this week while I’ve had COVID I’ve been reflecting on being hidden and invisible to the world for a time. Colossians 3:3 appeared as the reading for the Sunday I when I couldn’t preach in my home congregation like I had planned. “For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. Your life is Christ…”.
I have always been drawn to those words. They tell me who I am, ultimately, in whatever age or stage or circumstance of life. In Christ, God has identified with me, us, all humanity. He has identified with us in our sin and taken it to the cross. He even identified with my death. Now through baptism I have been raised with Christ. My “life is hidden with Christ in God. Your life is Christ…,” God says to me, to you.
That’s how God sees me and identifies with me. Knowing my life is hidden with Christ in God is greatly comforting when attacks and accusations and self-doubt come, when I have failed and have to own that fact. Whether I am in the workforce or one day retired, whether rich or poor, and no matter how the world sees me or what I think of myself, or not – my life is safely hidden with Christ in God. What a wonderful mystery, no, more than that, what a wonderful reality to live in and die in.
During the same week I write these words a pastor in active service died, and the wife of another pastor in active service also died. Jesus was right when he said our lives could be required of us at any time, so what will matter then?
In the same gospel reading, that day Jesus told a man worried about money that “a person’s true life does not consist in what they own”. At a time when the personal finances of many are under stress from cost-of-living pressures, that is worth hearing. We are more than what we do for a living or earn from our living, or what we have to show for it in the end. That’s not where our worth or identity come from.
As we reflect on who we are – our identity – at different stages of life and circumstances and ultimately as we reflect on our mortality, always remember “whose” we are. We belong to the God who has in Jesus identified with us, and who gives our lives ultimate significance, meaning and purpose. Thank God he identifies us with Jesus.
“Your life is now hidden with Christ in God. Your life is Christ…”.
This piece originally appeared in the September edition of the LCA SA-NT District magazine, Together.
READ MORE STORIES ABOUT Bishop
