January 9, 2011 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Purpose and Personhood

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 19
Isaiah 42:1–9
Matthew 3:13–17

“And a voice from heaven said,‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’”

Matthew 3:17 (NRSV)

Imagine the choices you have in saying things about yourself. . . . There are things you include and things you don’t. . . . Most people can tell a version that emphasizes the continuities in their lives to make a single story that goes in a clear direction. But the same people can also tell their life stories as if they were following on this statement:“After lots of surprises and choices, or interruptions and disappointments, I have arrived someplace I could never have anticipated.” Every one of us has a preference for one of these versions, but if we try, we can produce both.

Mary Catherine Bateson
“Composing a Life Story”

Ten years ago I was invited to preach at the baptism of my dear friends’ infant son. The family lived in Germany, and I couldn’t wait to see their baby boy. I was curious to know what he looked like; no longer a newborn, would he resemble in any way his mother or father? And to be sure, upon my meeting him for the first time, his parents, grandparents, and I spent quite some time tracing the provenance of his physical features.

This is not, I think, an uncommon experience. Who can refrain from wondering, from the very beginning of a new life, what a child will look like, what she will be like, who he will become? It makes sense that we look for signs—things that signify to us the identity of a child.

For Christians, baptism is such a sign. Baptism marks our identity, not as children of biological parents, but as children of God. When we witness a baptism and remember our own baptism, we remember who we ultimately are and what we ultimately are called to be.

Today the church remembers the Lord’s baptism. Matthew tells the story of Jesus’ baptism precisely for this purpose—to reveal Jesus’ identity. Throughout the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is given many titles: he is called “the Messiah,” “Son of David,” Servant of God,” and “Son of God,” to name a few. These are all titles rooted deeply in the Jewish tradition, and when they were given to Jesus, the Jewish Christians in Matthew’s community understood the significance of who he was. Among the many titles, the most significant title by which Matthew identifies Jesus is “Son of God.” It is this title that Matthew uses most extensively, throughout all the phases of Jesus’ life, including here in the story of Jesus’ baptism, the purpose of which is to reveal Jesus’ identity. Preparing for this revelation, Matthew describes the heavens as opening up, the Spirit of God descending upon Jesus, and a heavenly voice being publicly heard, saying, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

This description resounds with imagery from the Hebrew scriptures. When in the Hebrew Bible prominent figures were being called by God to become servants of the Lord, similar imagery was used. As in the passage from Isaiah that we heard this morning, in which the Old Testament figure of the suffering servant was being identified and called, the spirit of the Lord descended upon him and God spoke, saying, “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights.” The baptism of Jesus is portrayed with similar imagery. By drawing upon these motifs well known among Jewish Christians, Matthew characterizes the baptism of Jesus as the event in which Jesus’ identity and call are revealed. Up to this point, Jesus has not yet begun his public ministry. He has not yet healed the sick, preached to crowds, or taught in synagogues. He has not even selected his disciples. In Matthew’s Gospel, the baptism of Jesus is the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. It is the inaugural event. It is his commissioning to do the work for which he was created and to which he was called.

There is a relationship between being created and being called, between personhood and purpose. We know this on an intuitive level. We sense that what we are called to do with our lives somehow emerges out of who we really are, and for better or worse, we know that what we do with our lives shapes and forms who we will become. Just how our personhood and purpose are so intimately connected has been construed in significantly different ways by different philosophies and by all the world religions.

Christians have inherited from the Bible a wealth of call stories, not only of prophets, disciples, and ordinary individuals, but also of nations and peoples called to be God’s faithful people. Alongside these call stories are creation stories in which God names each thing and makes each thing for a purpose. In creation, humankind is endowed with the capacities that make it possible for us to be called and commissioned. Throughout the scriptures, the stories of creation and of call intimately intertwine and overlap with one another to the extent that they are nearly inextricable. Shaped by these stories, it is hard for us to make sense of our own lives in terms of one without the other. When we speak about who we really are, we tend also to speak about what we feel called to do, about our sense of purpose.

In an essay entitled “I Resolve to Become a Jungle Doctor,” Albert Schweitzer tells the story about how he came to the decision in 1905 to become a doctor in equatorial Africa. At the time of his decision, Schweitzer had not yet gone to medical school. Instead he was a dean of a theological seminary. He had already become successful as a biblical scholar, organist, and organ builder. In this autobiographical essay, Schweitzer explains that though many of his family members and friends were surprised and baffled by his decision to make such a radical change in occupation, he felt that he was acting in accordance with his lifelong sense of vocation. In his teenage years, Albert Schweitzer already knew that he would devote most of his life to helping humanity. So he made a deal with himself: until the age of thirty, he would throw himself into the arts and would pursue the scholarship that he loved; then at the age of thirty, he would change courses in order to devote himself to helping humanity. “What to my friends seemed most irrational in my plan,” he writes, “was that I wanted to go to Africa, not as a missionary, but as a doctor. . . . I wanted to be a doctor so that I might be able to work without having to talk. For years I had been giving of myself in words, and it was with joy that I had followed the calling of theological teacher and preacher. But this new form of activity would consist not in preaching the religion of love, but in practicing it.” Albert Schweitzer ends his essay with yet one final reason why it seemed to be his destiny to become a doctor: from what he knew of missionary societies, he writes, “I felt very doubtful that they would have accepted me as a missionary” (Leading Lives That Matter, Mark R. Schwehn and Dorothy C. Bass, eds., p. 36).

In reading Schweitzer’s autobiographical essay, I found myself intrigued not only by the intriguing life he lived, but also by the way he chose to tell the story of his life. In recounting the decision to become a doctor rather than to remain a religious scholar or to become more a missionary, Schweitzer acknowledged both the discontinuity of his decision and the continuity between his decision and his lifelong vocation.

There are many ways people can speak about who they are. Choices must be made about what to include and what to omit. Quite appropriately, these choices often depend on who the audience will be. As anyone preparing for a job interview knows, a lot of care must be taken in making these choices. As users of social networking websites know, how public the audience is makes a difference for what people choose to reveal about themselves. Perhaps the decision that makes the greatest impact on the whole story we tell about ourselves is the decision we make about how we are going to frame our story.

In an essay entitled “Composing a Life Story,” anthropologist and writer Mary Catherine Bateson, who is also the daughter of famous anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, writes about how we frame our life stories, or what kind of versions we compose. She makes the point that there can be multiple versions of the same life history and that, though different from each other, they can each nevertheless be authentic. Using her own life story to illustrate the point, Bateson writes, “For example, one version of my life story goes like this: “I already thought of myself as a writer when I was in high school, and there hasn’t been a year since college that I haven’t published something. Now I spend half the year writing full-time and half the year writing and teaching. Many of my students are future writers.” In contrast to that version, she offers another, which goes like this: “I planned in high school to be a poet. But I gave up writing poetry in college. The only writing I did for years was academic publish-or-perish writing. When I became unemployed . . . , I dealt with unemployment by starting to write a memoir. I suddenly found that I could write nonfiction. Now I’m considering switching again and writing a novel” (Leading Lives That Matter, pp. 462–463).

Depending on how we frame the stories we tell about ourselves, our stories can appear either “continuous” or “discontinuous” (Mary Catherine Bateson, “Composing a Life Story” in Leading Lives That Matter, p. 463). At one extreme, a life story can appear like a smooth, single, continuous trajectory, and at the other extreme, a life story can be marked by such interruptions, or disruptions, surprises, and apparent loose ends that it appears altogether discontinuous.

It is hard sometimes to compose versions of our life stories that incorporate discontinuities. Discontinuities in life can be painful to claim. They can feel like failures, disappointments, or embarrassments, and they can be tough to come to terms with. Sometimes we don’t know how to make sense of such events in the context of our lives. They don’t seem to fit in with the pattern of our lives, with whom we understand ourselves to be, or with whom we have envisioned ourselves to become. In speaking about ourselves, it would seem easier to choose a framework of continuity over discontinuity.

In the story of Jesus’ baptism that we read today, we find that Matthew, like the other Gospel writers, chose to include an element of discontinuity. In all four Gospels, Jesus is said to have been baptized by John the Baptist. By applying common sense to their reading of this story, biblical scholars have agreed that early Christians undoubtedly would have felt some embarrassment over the fact that Jesus was baptized by John. This embarrassment is even expressed by John the Baptist himself, when, protesting, John says, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” Given their understanding of Jesus’ identity and John the Baptist’s inferiority to Jesus, the early Christians would have empathized with the embarrassment John felt. Given their own feelings of embarrassment, this is certainly not the kind of story that early Christians would have invented. Moreover, it is quite remarkable that, despite the embarrassment it caused, the story of John baptizing Jesus was nevertheless included in all four of the Gospel accounts.

Like Matthew, the writers of the Hebrew Bible and the other New Testament writers did not omit discontinuities in the stories they told about the people of God. They did not compose a story of creation without the Fall; of the Promised Land without the wilderness; of a chosen nation without defeat and exile; of faithful disciples without faults and betrayal; of the early church without divisiveness; of salvation without the cross.

And yet, holding together the ups and downs, the joys and despair, of the biblical story is the continuity of God’s love, God’s mercy, God’s faithfulness, and God’s creative activity. That God so loves the world he created that he will tirelessly work to redeem it is what lends continuity to the history of God’s people. It not only frames the failures, disappointments, and embarrassments experienced by the people of God, but it also helps the people of God to make sense of the discontinuities in their history.

Herein lies the revelatory power of the biblical stories: in the light of these stories, our own life stories can be illumined and made sense of. The things in our lives that we would rather forget, keep buried in the past, or leave in the dark can be brought to light and held within the context of God’s ongoing love and creative activity; the events of our lives that we never could make sense of before can be incorporated and transformed into a new, coherent understanding of who we are and what we are called to be.

For Christians, who we are and what we are called to be becomes revealed in baptism. We are, all of us, children of God. Baptism is the sign by which we are reminded of this identity and call, of our personhood and purpose. As people of God we can tell our stories differently than we might have told them otherwise because we can have confidence that God will hold and even transform the failures, disappointments, and pain, the grittiness and messiness of our lives, into something with which he will be well pleased. Amen.