If someone asks, “Who are you?” Chances are good you will answer by offering your name. Or you might add, “I’m so-and-so’s cousin from West Who-ville,” describing yourself in terms of relationship to a person and a place that you presume to be known to the person who is inquiring. How you answer that question might change depending upon its context. Depending upon who is asking, you might even wonder who wants to know and why, before you provide an answer!

In my experience, the “Who are you?” question is the hardest to answer when  looking in the mirror. It’s one thing for someone else to look you in the eye after you’ve behaved unpredictably or reappeared after a long absence, saying, “Who are you?” It’s quite a different thing to ask your own self, “Who am I and why am I here?” Sometimes life throws you a big curve ball, and all of a sudden you might be forced to let go of who you’ve always thought you were, quickly redefining yourself by new circumstances. Other times, change can overtake you so slowly that you don’t notice it’s happening until you wake up one day and realize you are someone entirely different than who you were a few months, a year, a decade or perhaps even a generation ago. This has happened to me a few times, and it causes me to wonder– when did Jesus know who he was? In our culture, we tend to define one another in terms of what employment we’ve held.Did Jesus ever do that? We’re told he was a carpenter, so someone must have thought it an important detail to pass along to history. We are told the occupations of a number of biblical persons important in our faith history, soI wonder if it’s not just part of the human condition to think about who people are in terms of what people do. But Jesus was also so much more than a woodworker. At what point did he decide to let the carpentry go and hit the road preaching the Kingdom of God? Did he think of himself as someone else at that point?

Theologians have argued about when, or even ifJesus knew who he was. He did call the creator “Father” and taught his disciples to pray also addressing God that way. We all do that as well. In Jesus’ culture, it was considered presumptuous and a sacrilege to pronounce the name of God, and that’s how Israel came to use the reference “The Lord,” or sometimes just “The Name” when referring to God. And here’s Jesus calling God “Father.” That alone doesn’t seem to be sufficient evidence that Jesus knew his own identity, but look at how he responded when Pilate asked him “Are you a king?”  “For this I was born,” said Jesus. “And for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice” (John 18:37). Whoa!

Can you imagine how good it must feel to be able to say, “I was born to be this. That’s why I’m here!” But that was no ordinary guy– that wasJesus, and it makes sense that the Son of God knew who he was, whether it was a life-long knowledge or he came to it slowly. But what about the rest of us?  How do we learn why we are here and who we were born to be? 

I think there’s a relationship between who we believe Jesus to be and who we believe our own selves to be. If we believe that Jesus really was and is Christ the King, and we further believe that we are the Body of Christ on Earth, then by extension each one of us has a unique role in that Body. We may not know what that role is, but it is an essential and unique one that only one person– you– can fill. If we believe that Jesus is Christ the King; “theAlpha and the Omega,  who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty,” then that Body of Christ in which every one of us has a place is an enduring one, and we can count on Jesus’ promise that we each have a specific and important job to do in that body. If we believe the words you heard from the Revelation of John that Christ “made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his and our God and Father,” then you can know who you were born to be– once by birth in the flesh and again by the water of baptism. Or as our post communion prayer states, “that we are very members incorporate in the mystical body” of [God’s] son, the blessed company of all faithful people; and are also heirs through hope of [God’s] everlasting kingdom” (BCP p.339).

Everything we have and everything that we think we are in this world is temporary. However we define ourselves by the standards of success in this world, those criteria will ultimately cease to be ones we can meet.However important any one of may have been in the board room or the kitchen atone time, that time will pass, and some of you may be tempted to ask, “Don’t you know who I used to be?”

Who you are now in the Body of Christ will never be replaced by someone else who is faster, better or less expensive. There is only one of you. The prophet Daniel said, “to him was given dominion and glory and kingship, that ALL peoples, nations and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away.” Who you were born to be is a beloved member of that kingdom, and if you believe that Jesus is Christ the King, then you can count on his promise that you are all heirs to that kingdom. Who are you? A beloved child of God, yesterday, today and forever. Amen.

And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching (Heb. 10:25)

I wish I knew how to provoke others to love and good deeds, because if I could make it happen, I would. Who wouldn’t want to be surrounded by more patience, more kindness, more love? Why would anyone want to be surrounded by complaining, bitterness, and anxiety?

When you picture a “life of the party” person—a warm and funny person who seems to draw others to him or her like moths to a flame; do you wonder what that person is like when they are alone? Because it’s true that some people have one public persona and another private. Yet, the most attractive feature of any charismatic figure is their genuineness. That, above all else is what draws you into relationship with someone else—it’s that virtual certainty that when a truly authentic person is giving you attention, it is with his or her whole self, and you can feel the connection when you are in conversation.

I think that’s what Jesus wanted for his disciples. I think he was that kind of guy—why else would people have dropped everything to follow him? And this church idea? Its reason for being is an inheritance—the daughter of Jesus’ vision for his disciples—a group of authentic people who show up for one another day after day, in good times and in bad. Because if we don’t show up for one another when times are good, who would feel comfortable calling upon us when times are bad? So when people ask if the church is still relevant in the 21^st century, or if they ask, “Can’t I just be a good person without needing a church?” my answer is the same one: that is not the point of church. We come here to be a community of hope—a community of infinite possibility.

Hope should never be confused with desire. Desire is a wish for something, and it’s basically a passive state. Oh you might want something, so you go out and try to get it, but hope is another thing. It is seeing the possibility and then going out and making it happen. It’s active, and the Christian perspective on hope is that it is undergirded by faith. The author of Hebrews says “Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. Earlier in Hebrews (3:6), we’re told “Christ, however, was faithful over God’s house as a son, and we are his house if we hold firm the confidence and the pride that belong to hope.” So what this means is that we—the church—are God’s house, and to be faithful over it means that we firmly hold onto hope. We are the bringers of hope when we show up to one another on every occasion. How do we serve as the guardians hope if we come to church bringing our sorrows and not our joy—or if we come to the communion table for “pardon only and not for renewal,” (BCP p. 372)? The answer is, we can’t be the custodians of hope if we don’t have it ourselves, and that is why faith is so important. Faith is trust in action and it enables hope. This is precisely why the author of Hebrews asks us to consider “how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another.” We ask that question because we come to church not for our own self but for each other. Each one of us is here to reveal hope for the person beside you, because they might be struggling to see it! And that’s why we need church—not just so we can have a beautiful building in which we can take pride but so WE can collectively be God’s house—not the building. It’s great that our founders left us this beautiful building, but at some point in time, “not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down” (Mark 13:2b). That’s the nature of all creation; it is never static. But what is enduring is the Body of Christ, the awesomeness that emerges in relationship—the hope that emerges in faith. “So how do you provoke others to love and good deeds?” It’s not even a secret; it’s in the next line: “by not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another. This book is the open source code for becoming a community of love. Crack it open. And bring every gift you have and every gift you are, early and often, because YOU are God’s house, and it’s only you who can make it last.

Because we live together in community, it’s important to have a code of conduct that we all agree to follow so that we can preserve the safety and the harmony of the community. This code of conduct sets the expectations of the community for what constitutes acceptable behavior, and we call that code ethics. Ethics and morals are not the same thing, although some people use them interchangeably. Morals are internalized values whereas ethics are the externally imposed rules. Morals are the compass needle that we hope will keep our behavior pointing true north, even if the community agrees to a set of rules that we think are unjust.

When the community’s rules that we call ethics conflict with our sense of what is moral, it can be deeply disturbing to the degree of paralysis because we become uncertain about the right thing to do. And because all of us exist in more than one community grouping simultaneously, sometimes the rules for the different communities in which we exist can conflict with one another! Different families have different expectations from one another for acceptable behavior, and your family rules may be different than your school or workplace rules, and those may be different from the laws of the city and state in which you live. For a specific example, the code of conduct within the church is distinctly different from the code of conduct on the football field, even though some football players are Christian. That’s a sort of silly example, but at times I feel guilty that I love football because it is a somewhat violent sport. As much as I can’t keep from getting emotionally involved in it, I do recognize that at its heart, it’s essentially a war game, and at the end of the 4^th quarter, one team will be a victor and the other the vanquished. I want my favorite team to win and that means I have to deal with my desire for someone else’s team to lose. That makes me feel bad because wanting that win at the cost of someone else being a loser creates an ethical dilemma for me as a Christian. The code of conduct in the Body of Christ means that there are no winners and losers—we are all winners. Yet, on the football field, we want our offensive line to plow through the defense just to make a funny looking ball get ten yards further down the field. And while we don’t want to see anybody get injured, we do seem to tolerate that risk as a consequence of a game where the bigger and more beefy guys are trying to flatten their opponents. Why? My conundrum about the ethics of football conflicting with the ethical standards of a Christian is kind of an armchair philosophical exercise—one that has minimal consequence for me as a person sitting in my chair, watching the game on TV.

But there are desperately serious ethical/moral conflicts that some people have to face, and they are a matter of life and death. Such are the conflicts that a soldier faces in the theater of war. Most civilized people are taught to value life and to take care of their friends and family and our country. AND a soldier cannot always do both because he or she is faced with the uncertainty that winning may require killing and losing could mean being killed. Children and other innocent civilians may be inadvertent casualties, but failure to recognize that they have harbored a threat could mean that you or someone fighting beside you may not live another day. These are horrible choices and we ask our loved ones who serve to make them. These are the choices that tear up a person’s soul, leaving them questioning whether they can still recognize the difference between good and evil.

Those of us who have not had to wrestle with the choice will never understand the depth of its effects on the soul. We’re pretty sure we know the difference between good and evil, and right from wrong. But most of us have not been put to that test. And may we never have to be.

Fortunately not every veteran has had to experience the clash between the call of duty and the instinct to honor the Christ in all people. When someone agrees to serve, knowing they may have to make a split second decision to take a life, that person is not only offering up their own life in defense of yours, but they are also potentially offering up their sanity and their souls on behalf of yours. These veterans of war are changed forever, and while we can make the attempt to thank someone for his or her service, we can’t really understand what it is like to live in their skin.

And yes, of course there are others that put their lives on the line to keep us safe— but today we are talking about people who are willing to go far away, to experience the terror of war, traumatic injury or death and perhaps a lifetime fighting post-traumatic stress symptoms. So whether or not any given veteran has had to suffer these particular consequences of service, the point is, they were willing to do so. If you want to really thank a veteran for their service today, ask your own self what you are willing to do. We all carry the responsibility of keeping each other safe and we are to give all that we are and all that we have in that service. If you really want to thank a veteran, do everything you can to make sure they have jobs, housing, adequate healthcare and emotional and spiritual support. Carry the Veteran Crisis Line phone number in your wallet. They have been willing to offer up their own lives in the service of yours, not unlike Jesus did. And for the veterans that made it through their service without scars, thanks be to God!

May God protect all who serve and chasten us all to do right by them.

To contact the Veteran Crisis Line, callers can dial 1-800-273-8255 and select option 1 for a VA staffer. Veterans, troops or their families members can also text 838255 or visit VeteransCrisisLine.net for assistance.