A few weeks ago, Lonnie Karges and I traveled to our California-Nevada-Hawaii District Joint Meeting Workshop. This is an annual opportunity for pastors and principals to learn about current topics that affect our Lutheran churches and schools. This year’s presenter was Rev. Dr. Chad Lakies, the regional director for North America at Lutheran Hour Ministries and a friend and former co-worker of mine from my seminary days in St. Louis.
The topic Lakies spoke on was “The Rise of Identity – Broadening the Conversation Beyond Sex, Race, and Gender.” In our world today, these hot topics often lead to contentious and divisive discussions about identity. However, they don’t need to be a source of division. How can we have these conversations in productive and God-pleasing ways? And in the future, when new topics will come to the forefront, how will we address them? What framework should we use when dealing with these kinds of cultural conflict?
Lakies began by reminding us that we are made in God’s image, and we derive our value from being created by God and baptized into Christ. The most important role we have (which we touched on in last month’s newsletter) is our role as stewards of God’s creation and of each other. This means we start from the common ground of a relationship with God as our Father and Creator, and by our baptism we are many members, yet one body, as St. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 12:12-31. This transcends all other categories of identity. When we see ourselves as stewards charged with taking care of the world and the people around us, this helps us make decisions in all realms: whether civil, household, or the church.
Human beings are made to be in community. God says in Genesis 2:18 that it is not good for man to be alone. So after God calls us to be unified by virtue of being created by God, we also find value in our diversity and the different ways we are made to interact with each other. This echoes what St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12, that “God has so composed the body… that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another.” (v. 25)
Each person, whether Christian or not, functions as a gift from God. My barber Jeff at Capital Barbershop, whom has been cutting my hair for the last 6-plus years, is doing God’s work even if he hasn’t darkened the door of a church in many years. (That’s not to say that he won’t! I pray for him regularly, and this past month, after a particularly personal conversation, I was able to pray with him for the first time.) The same goes for those who work in grocery stores, as police officers, in government offices and corporations and family-run businesses, and we can be thankful for their role in society as they help and serve others. God works through all people. All people are “masks of God,” as Luther puts it, whether they believe it or not.
The biggest takeaway I had in this meeting was hearing how Lakies uses this approach in his conversations with people. People have a lot of preconceptions about Christians and their attitudes, but not many people who are unchurched have had someone tell them that they believe God works through them. And yet this is exactly what our Lutheran theology says as part of our doctrine of vocation.
Unlike the culture around us, which assigns social status based on people’s different roles (celebrities and the rich are given more status than service workers and the poor), we are all alike before God and as God’s representatives in the world are called to treat each other as if we are of the same status. As St. Paul writes to the Galatians, who were assigning status on the basis of whether or not someone was circumcised, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (3:28) Vocations are more than our jobs, although they do include that.
Vocations are relationships of responsibility to others. Because we interact with people in a multitude of ways, we each have many vocations. In the church, we have vocations of being laypersons, pastors and professional church workers. In the home, there are roles of parents and children, husbands and wives, and even siblings, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and other relationships. In the civil realm, we are citizens and leaders, voters and taxpayers, those who are under authority and those who exercise authority. And we all have the vocation of being neighbors to those around us, which Jesus points out in the parable of the good Samaritan. As Lakies summarized it, “Our neighbor is anyone in need that we have the capacity and capability to help.” We find our identity in all our God-given vocations, in roles of responsibility to others as we are embedded in a human community of needy neighbors.
One more thing: Jesus doesn’t go into the world afraid that He’ll be corrupted by the world as He served His needy neighbors. He brings light to the darkness of the world, and we, too, bear witness to His light. If there’s any influence, we are the ones infecting the culture because this understanding of love and service for each other is contagious!
In a culture that is filled with people trying to fashion an identity for themselves, Christians have a lot to offer by simply seeing ourselves in the context of the relationships in which God has placed us. By following Jesus’ example and loving our neighbors, we can make an eternal difference in the world by pointing to Him and loving one another as He has loved us.