BECOMING WHO WE ARE

When Jesus received his baptism from John at the Jordan River, a voice from heaven proclaimed him as God’s beloved son.  He spent the rest of his earthly life fulfilling that identity.

For Christians, baptism proclaims our identity.  Each is a beloved child of God.  Amid all our diversity, we’re bound by that common reality, given by the triune God who creates us, shapes us in the example of Jesus, and guides us ever more into the identity God gives.  For Episcopalians, the “baptismal covenant” which is important enough to include in the Book of Common Prayer no less than three times (pp. 304-5, and also 292-4 and 416-8) gives an outline of both faith and life in following Christ.

Of course, baptism marks but a beginning.  My first rector/boss used to say, “More is begun than is done.”  Indeed, we spend the rest of our lives developing the great gift of identity bestowed in that sacrament.  But the identity is ours; no matter how much one may try to shake it off (God forbid), nothing can take that away.  Vastly better, sincere Christians become who we are.  Or at least try…and in the trying, begin to succeed.

As it is for the individual Christian, so I believe it is for the Christian community, on every level.  We together are becoming who we are.

For instance, the Anglican Communion used to be something of a worldwide English gentlemen’s club, the British Empire at prayer along with a few add-ons such as in the erstwhile American colonies.  No longer.  We are an international, interracial, globe-spanning community whose typical member, it is said, is a 25-year-old Nigerian woman.  We’ve come a long way from tea and crumpets, even if we’re having a hard time figuring out what that means.

Or The Episcopal Church.  Not The Episcopal Church in the United States, but The Episcopal Church in 17 different nations or regions.  We sing a new church in languages ranging far beyond English, Spanish and French to Navajo, Hmong and Creole.  Over the past four decades, we’ve become far more the “House of Prayer for all people” that the cathedral in Washington proclaimed itself to be.  But what does that suggest in how our church structures itself?  On the role of national—no, I mean “general”—efforts?  Last summer’s General Convention tasked a force to try figuring that out anew.

Or the diocese.  My own, Southwestern Virginia, last year reaffirmed its longstanding pledge “to challenge and support the creativity of our congregations in Christian growth and global responsibility.”  But we’re still discerning specifically what that means, in how congregations relate to each other and to the diocese as a whole, how precisely the bishop and staff  promote that effort in a time of particularly limited resources and, frankly, a decades-long shift in understanding the practical purpose of a diocese, ironically toward the vision expressed in that decades-old mission statement.  We strive to become who we’ve long said we aim to be.

Isn’t that, in the end, the goal?  To become what God intends for each of us—and all of us—to be?:  A chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, as I Peter 2 put it, who have a purpose: to “proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”