Like many people, I am interested in genealogy and where I come from. Over the years, I have done a fair amount of family history, and for better or worse, I am the go-to person for such stuff in my own family. It seems to me that there is one such person in each family in each generation. One of the gifts I received from my wife and daughters last Christmas was a subscription to Ancestry.com, together with a DNA kit. It took me awhile to work through some jitters that I had about going through with sending in the sample. What would happen to my DNA sample? Would this be stored in some research facility without my knowledge or permission? Would this be used for some secret purpose? In the end, I chose to go ahead and do it, which turned out to confirm what I already knew; namely, that I come from northern European stock (Irish and German). The subscription opened up new doors to discover and appreciate the lives of family members who have come before me.
To know one’s identity is a pivotal task in life. In our formative years, we may be swayed by who or what others want us to be, leading us to become someone we really are not. The search for our identity is certainly part of the great interest in family history and genealogy as we learn about our ancestors. Sometimes this information is welcome, but sometimes it is not. In the search process, we may discover previously unknown facts about who we are and where we come from that are in conflict with what we thought to be true. For some, this can lead to an identity crisis because we are not the person we believed ourselves to be. Finding your roots can be tricky business. I recall something my dad once told about a question he asked his dad (my grandfather). He asked his dad why he didn’t look up his relatives who happened to live in a different part of the state? My grandfather’s reply was very pragmatic: “Either they would be so high-toned that they wouldn’t know you, or they would be so poor that they’d want to borrow money.” But still, we want to know who we are and where we come from.
When it comes to faith, many people are also in a search process. We are looking for who we really are in life. This becomes more urgent at different points in life: as we grow in our youth; as we leave home and start off on our own; as we settle on a career path; as we marry and have a family; as we retire, cope with aging, and face our own mortality. We can spend a lot of time and energy in life fretting about the identity question as this relates to the big picture of who God is and what is our relationship to Him. We need not worry about this. The good news is that God himself has declared who we are. The wonderful words of the Lord to his people through the prophet Isaiah remind us of this: “But now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: ‘Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior’” (Isaiah 43:1-3a). “I have called you by name, you are mine.” Those are wonderful words! We have been given an identity and a sense of belonging in the Lord. He tells us that not only has He created us, but He has also redeemed us. To redeem, in its original sense, means to buy something back that has been taken from you. So what does that mean?
If God has created us (and this is what Scripture teaches in Genesis 1-2), then we originally belonged to him. But our identity and belonging as God’s own children, created in his own image, were hijacked by a force bent on our destruction. This is what Scripture calls sin; a twisting and perversion of God’s original plan and purpose for his creation (of which we are but one part). Our human history has been one constant rebellion against God as we try to make God in our own image with all of the terrible things that have come about through this warped reality. Like genealogy, when we start digging in our history, we may find some pretty ugly things. That is certainly true of our faith history. As one hymn writer has put it so eloquently:
O God, O Lord of heav’n and earth,
Your living finger never wrote
That life should be an aimless mote,
A death-ward drift from futile birth.
Your Word meant life triumphant hurled
In splendor through your broken word;
Since light awoke and life began,
You made for us a holy plan.
(Lutheran Book of Worship #396, stanza 1)
Our faith story doesn’t end with brokenness and shattered plans. God’s plans are not so easily thwarted! In amazing love, God chose to send his only Son on a rescue mission to deliver his creation from destruction and death. Through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God’s own Son, we have been given a new identity. In fact, in Jesus we have been given a new life! In the cleansing waters of Holy Baptism, we are united with Jesus and everything that Jesus has done becomes ours (see Romans 6:1ff.). A great exchange has taken place through which Jesus takes our sin and shame, bestowing on us his righteousness and blessing. This is where our new life and identity begin – in Jesus and what He has done for us.
Finding our roots means that this takes work on our part. We press on, we persevere, even when the work we are doing doesn’t seem to produce any results. It is big-picture stuff as the pieces slowly come together. The same is true in our faith story. We press on and persevere, even when it feels like there’s nothing to show for it. We trust that “he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion in the day of Christ Jesus” (Philippians 1:6). Knowing who we are begins with knowing Whose we are. The same word that God spoke through Isaiah He speaks to us today: “I have called you by name, you are mine.”