“My Name Is …” June 7/8, 2014

Digging Deeper “My Name Is …” Written by: Robert Ismon Brown ([email protected]) Background Notes Key Scripture Text(s): John 8:44; Exodus 4; Judges 6; Psalm 139; Ephesians 2:10; Acts 8:1; Acts 9; 2 Corinthians 5:17; Revelation 21:5; Isaiah 43:19; Galatians 6:15; Titus 3:5 Introduction “You don’t even know me!” A young woman was recoiling from a harsh judgment made by a teacher on her school project. Although the topic was Victorian literature which the student was badly failing, the real subject was how she saw herself in light of her academic performance. In effect she was saying, “There’s more to me than what I wrote down here.” Granted, the attempted connection was a bit opportunistic, and the attempt to rationalize the quality of the work was all too obvious. Yet the lines drawn between ourselves and our performance are hard to erase. Early in life, from the first moments of human awareness, each of us starts to get constant feedback about our identity from parents, siblings, relatives, friends, neighbors, and the checkout clerk who tells us, “Wow, you are big for your age!” We wear labels just like we wear clothes, and not all of them belong to us. The difference between a label on a can of beans and the pet name somebody gives us is the distance between subject and object. Food processors label cans because they filled them. Clothiers label jeans because they sell them. Authors label books because they wrote them. But who has the freedom to label other humans beings? Ours is a society rooted in commodities that are produced and consumed. There is a tendency to accept the stereotype, “Clothes make the man,” or to associate strong character with a solid investment portfolio. Cultural formation includes identity formation, and none of us escapes the labels others want to place on us. And such labels are often placed to control us. Followers of Jesus, almost from the beginning, shared his shame as the “crucified one.” But who wants to be associated with a guy hanging on a cross, condemned for a crime against the state? Sitting outside during Jesus’ first “trial,” Peter refused the association by saying, “I don’t know the man,” while the rest of his disciples simply ran away into hiding. Wearing the label “Christian” was risky business, since “Christ” really meant “Messiah,” and followers of Messiahs were regularly labeled as enemies of the state whose identities came from the cause they espoused. Zealots — a particular brand of Messiah-followers — were full of zeal for their leaders and their causes. Pharisees separated themselves from the rabble. Herodians favored political connections with the famous family of Herod that hooked them up to Rome. And on it went. To be a Jew in the first century BCE placed you on a spectrum not unlike today’s political parties, and along with those loyalties came labels. How would the followers of Jesus be labeled? This week’s study examines biblical texts that address the big idea of personal identity. Who gets to name us? What influences shape the persons we are becoming? Can old identities really be changed without entering a spiritual version of the witness protection program? Those and other puzzles help sketch the outline for what follows. The Devil in Our Details (John 8:44) You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies (John 8:44).

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“Who’s your daddy?” The people Jesus called out in this provocative scripture belonged to the leadership of Judaism. Constantly sparring with Jesus, they considered him a threat to their agenda for Israel. If we read the full context of John 8, we discover fair amount of name-calling! Some of the language is veiled but clear to us nonetheless. Here are a few examples from the lips of his detractors: “Where is your Father?” (8:19). “Who are you?” (8:25). “We are descendents of Abraham” (8:33). “Abraham is our father” (8:39). “We are not illegitimate children; we have one father, God himself” (8:41). “Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?”(8:48). “Are you greater than our father Abraham? … Who do you claim to be?” (8:53).

A carefully reading of Jesus’ replies to each statement or question from his adversaries reveals that he did not allow them to define him by their ideas about him. Unable to figure Jesus out, they hung many different labels on him. There is even the implication in 8:41 that Jesus, unlike they, was illegitimate and thus wore the stigma associated with that label. Words are powerful as weapons to beat down reputations. Words create new realities that others are led to believe. We shape the world through words, and so also our identities are shaped by the words spoken about us. By calling Jesus a Samaritan, the leadership was invoking the cruel stereotype applied to a segment of the Palestinian population that stood in isolation from the rest and was considered unclean by observant Jews. By alleging that Jesus had a demon they used the power of religious terminology to cast Jesus in a bad light. Religious name-calling is all too frequent as a poor form of argument when honest discussion would be better. But name-calling is just so enticing and brutally effective against opponents, these enemies of Jesus couldn’t resist. They used a label to demonize Jesus — literally. In what ways do we demonize others by our labeling of them? How did we experience the same sort of stigmatizing? How do we respond? At the heart of John 8 comes verse 44 where Jesus places the force of his argument on a different kind of devil, namely the one who lies and kills others. The Greek word for “devil” used here is the familiar diabolos, a term that literally means “slanderer, backbiter” and has the powerful association of causing injury to another. False words that are hurled or thrown at other people injury their characters and undermine them in the eyes of others. This word diabolos has roots in the idea of that which is hurled. Once labeled by such tactics, a person has difficulty shaking off the identity they’ve been given. Jesus “outs” his audience by using strong language which ties them to “the father of lies” — the father of calumny and deceit, whose endgame is the murder of the human race. Throughout John 8:12-59, Jesus steadfastly disallows the labels others hang on him by affirming the source of his true identity. His strongest assertion is the simple claim that God is his Father, and that his Father “testifies on his behalf” (8:18). He further affirms: When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I am he, and that I do nothing on my own, but I speak these things as the Father instructed me. 29 And the one who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone, for I always do what is pleasing to him (John 8:28-29).

In other words, the answer to the question, “Who am I?” for Jesus, rests with his relationship to God as his Father. He does not label himself (“I do nothing on my own”), but allows God to give him his identity (“he has not left me alone”). The words “I am he” in the Greek text lack the word “he” and has simply “I am” (egō eimi), a statement Jesus makes later in 8:58: "I tell you the truth," Jesus answered, "before Abraham was born, I am!" (John 8:58).

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What we take away from this passage is the encouraging word that God gives us our identity if God is our Father, and we are his children. Moses: “Who Am I?” (Exodus 3-4) Few Hebrews of his generation had the opportunity for a palace education. Talk about home-schooling! Moses as a baby had literally been snatched from the River Nile and adopted by the daughter of the Pharaoh. In the protected and privileged precincts of royalty, he received the best education other people’s money could buy. The princess had plans for Moses that ensured her own standing within the court of her father. She told a story about Moses that she embellished and revised to her own advantage. Had she not one day found this baby floating in the Nile, mysteriously nestled inside a pod made of reeds? Was this not a sign to her that this creature was in fact a child of the Nile’s god, and that by handing him over to her the god was making her his divine mother? Of course the baby’s real Hebrew mother and sister knew otherwise; that they were simply trying to spare his life from the ruthless policy of Pharaoh to kill baby Hebrew boys whose mere existence threatened his future control of the Egyptian population (read Exodus 1-2 for details). And so the princess of Egypt gave the child a name, the first step in shaping his identity and controlling his future. She calls him Mose, an abbreviated form of a royal name that appears in the annals of the Pharaohs: “Thutmose” and “Ahmose.” By naming him she labels him for the royal court and attempts a deception by using him as a pawn in her power game. “He becomes her son,” the text tells us in Exodus 2:10. He becomes a means to her end. For the next forty years, Mose (or as we know him, Moses), begins his training, unaware of the lie that his royal position represents; unaware that his mother is not his mother. When Stephen tells the story of Moses in Acts 7:21, he says: Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful in speech and action.

Yet deep inside Moses there smoldered the fire of his true identity that he could not extinguish. At some unidentified moment, unknown to the text, Moses realizes that he is a Hebrew not an Egyptian. He no doubt looked like a Semite with commensurate features that set him apart from the royal DNA. How did his “mother” the princess explain this? Probably she invented a good story about how his appearance only confirmed his divine origin from the Nile god. That’s how labels work: they define the person for the convenience of others. But true identity cannot forever be hidden in the case of Moses, for he visits his fellow Hebrews and immediately his loyalty to them is stronger than his commitment to the royal household. He kills a brutal taskmaster he found beating a fellow Hebrew. The die is cast, and once his own kinfolk “discover” him, he has no choice but to flee from the wrath of Pharaoh and begin the long journey of recovering the truth about himself — in the wilderness (Exodus 2:15). Circumstances conspire in Moses’ favor and soon he finds himself in the land of Midian. Upon his arrival Moses defends its priest’s flocks from the bullying of other shepherds. When the daughters bring this report to their father Reuel, they refer to Moses as “an Egyptian” (2:19). Old identities are hard to shed, but the hospitality of Reuel gives the foreigner a new start, as he eventually marries Zipporah, the daughter of the priest Reuel (also known as Jethro) and begins a family. The first child born is named “Gershom,” and Moses explains why: “I have become an alien in a foreign land.” Notice the irony: by ancestry, Moses is more closely related to the Midianites than to the Egyptians. However, he truly sees himself, as do others, as an Egyptian still. This part of the story reinforces the sociological truth that recovery of original identity, after it has been lost, is no easy matter. Pharaoh’s daughter still whispers in Moses’ ear, even in far off Midian, “You are still my son.” Back in Egypt, the kinfolk of Moses remain in deep distress, and they have no one to speak for them against the awesome power of the empire. “They groaned in their slavery,” the text tells us (2:23). However, hope still remains: -3-

God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob (Exodus 2:24).

Covenant refers to that solemn promise the God of the ancestors swore to them, even though for a time His people suffered. The dark times were anticipated when God first made this promise to Abraham. In a dramatic oath-taking scene, common when such agreements were made in the ancient world, father Abraham is given a vision with both bad news and good news: 12

As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him. 13 Then the LORD said to him, "Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years. 14 But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions (Genesis 15:12-14).

No mention is made of Moses by name, and yet the entire summary of future deliverance would be wrapped up in the identity of Moses and his willingness to accept the call of God to liberate the Israelite slaves. And so we come to Exodus 3 and 4 where Moses encounters the fiery bush in the desert — a bush that burns and is not consumed; a bush that is very much like Israel in deep suffering, but not destroyed because God is with them. What attracts Moses to the bush is the visual element, but what ultimately impacts him is the voice. What Moses hears forever changes the way he sees himself. His identity is transformed by the Word of God: 3

So Moses thought, "I will go over and see this strange sight-- why the bush does not burn up." 4 When the LORD saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, "Moses! Moses!" And Moses said, "Here I am." 5 "Do not come any closer," God said. "Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground." 6 Then he said, "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob." At this, Moses hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God (Exodus 3:3-6).

Trained in the wisdom of Egypt, the man is conditioned to be curious. Like a small child discovering the wonder of the world, he asks “Why?” What happens next, as Moses draws closer to see whether the flame is real or only a mirage, is that God speaks. The double address (“Moses, Moses”) is common in the Bible when God issues a call; when God invites a person to take on a new identity (see Genesis 22:11; 46:2; 1 Samuel 3:4, 10; Acts 9:4; Luke 22:31). Curiously, the voice sounds like that of Pharaoh, summoning him, calling the ground before his throne “holy,” and asking him to take off his sandals. That’s royal language from the palace precincts, but it is dramatically out of place here in the desert where the scarcity of resources doesn’t look anything like the luxury of his mother’s Egypt. Moses is already having an identity crisis! What he hears next shakes his world view to its foundations. “I am the God of your father …” It’s all about roots, dear Moses; it’s all about where you really came from before the daughter of Pharaoh told her lies, from the father of lies. The time has come to tell the truth about you, Moses, and bring to the level of consciousness all the submerged secrets about who you really are. It will not be easy knowing your true identity, because with that knowledge comes serious responsibility that you will need to take for yourself. No longer will you carry around the label of the son of the Pharaoh’s daughter. The little voices inside your head will grow silent, and the voice from the bush will thunder in your soul: “I am the God of your father…” Or, in other words, Moses, I am your father. Not the god of the Nile. Not Pharaoh. Not the scores of Egyptian deities that filled the curriculum at school. Just, “I am your father.” Names like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were identity signposts for Moses, and they offered him the anchors for the person he was about to become. But his identity was wrapped up in a call to serve others — his own people. In what follows, Moses offers an array of excuses that all refuse to accept this new identity. At first he ventures a timid, “Here I am.” So we are led to ask, “Who is this ‘I,’ Moses, that you think you are?” He will only come to realize his true nature after he is reminded about the misery of the people he left behind in Egypt. God accommodates that need by laying out the grim reality that slavery continues to bring suffering as it always does, whether in Egypt or on the plantations in Georgia or the killing fields in Cambodia or the traffickers in Eastern Europe. Then comes the identity-transforming word: 10

So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt" (Exodus 3:10).

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Moses, you are the “sent one” who goes to Egypt in full solidarity with God’s people the Israelites. In the muscle of those words, “I am sending you to Pharaoh,” lay the heart of Moses’ true self. Moses once claimed Pharaoh as the source of his royal identity, but now the mask has been torn off the lie, and Moses must speak truth to power. Only in this way can he reclaim himself. He must lose his life so that he can save his life. Moses, there is no more future for you in the royal court of Pharaoh’s daughter. It’s all been a lie. The truth is here in the voice that cries out to you from the bush that burns and is not consumed. The truth about you is here. Will you accept the Word into your heart, Moses? Astonishingly, the first response from Moses is about identity: But Moses said to God, "Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?" (Exodus 3:11).

And God’s reinforcing response follows: "I will be with you” (Exodus 3:12).

However, the road to Moses’ true self is not easy, for he is uneasy about the voice. Who is this voice that speaks? What is the identity of the voice? How will Moses secure confidence from his fellow Israelites when he arrives in Egypt if he doesn’t know who the voice is? Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you,' and they ask me, 'What is his name?' Then what shall I tell them? (Exodus 3:13).

In his reply, God utters the literal meaning of His covenant name, Yahweh, when he says: "I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: 'I AM has sent me to you'" (Exodus 3:14).

God’s identity is pure subject and the verb to be. He has no predicate in the truest expression of Himself. He is simply: “I am ___.” Whatever Moses or his people will ever require from God, He will be the ever-sufficient One whose existence and essence are identical. For God to be is who God is. He is pure being, and He is pure existence. He is not a “being among beings, but the ground of all being” (Paul Tillich). For Moses to stand without his sandals before the burning bush and listen to the voice pronounce the words, “I am who I am,” was for Moses to experience the purest and most sublime form of personal identity he had ever known. From this voice, Moses could have supreme confidence with full trust that whoever Moses could become would come from this God of pure being. Unlike the fabricated identity he knew in Egypt that rose from the clever deception of royal power, this identity was true and honest and pure. In disclosing his true self, God hid nothing from Moses about His intentions. God would send Moses on a dangerous mission to Pharaoh, and Moses would have difficulty convincing both his own people and the royal family about this mission. However, the future would not resemble the past, and not only Moses but also the whole community of Israelites would undergo a radical change in their labeling: from slaves to free persons (Exodus 3:20-22). In the face of initial resistance, God would clothe Moses with His mighty power and display His glory through convincing signs (Exodus 4:1-9). Becoming new persons generally means facing obstacles from those who knew us before. Then comes Moses’ own self-doubt. He knows himself all too well, or so he thinks. Moses has his own “I am” statement in Exodus 4:10: “I am slow of speech and tongue,” he objects to God. This self-definition arises from his speech. Moses is caught between the Word of God that speaks without hesitation, and his own word that stutters and stammers and mumbles. It has presumably been this way his whole life, even with the best education Egypt could offer him! “Neither in the past nor since …” Moses insists in his objection. How powerful is the past to hold back the emergence of the new “I am” in Moses’ life. Stuck in the past, Moses -5-

must now face the possibility than there is something new ahead of him that is not held back by precedent. “That’s just who I am,” holds no muster with the God whose name is “I am who I am”! Karl Barth wrote in the earliest pages of his Church Dogmatics that the world decides in advance what is possible and then vets all other claims to reality against that standard. That is opposite to the Christian stance that starts with what is real (“a bush burns and is not consumed”) and then judges what is possible. Moses must learn that truth from God Himself. God asks Moses, “Who gave man his mouth? Who made him deaf or mute? Who gives him sight or makes him blind? Is it not I, Yahweh?” (Exodus 4:11). The truth about Moses’ true identity rests with the God who made him. God creates reality and thereby determines possibility! Whatever future lies ahead in Egypt for Moses and for Israel is rooted in Creation and in the Creator. Yahweh will do wonders in Egypt! And He will start by doing wonders through the mouth of Moses. Underneath the carefully crafted objections of Moses, rooted as they are in his identity crisis, there exists a deeper problem. Moses really doesn’t want to accept the call of God, but would rather someone else take the job (Exodus 4:13): “Send someone else.” What happens next is best summarized in the words of Exodus 4:14, “Yahweh’s anger burned against Moses and he said …” The Hebrew language has a colloquialism for anger: “His nose grew hot.” How God feels about Moses at this point feels very human and completely palpable. What did Moses know about God at this point that led him to experience God’s anger? To say that God’s nostrils flared or that His face grew red probably captures the underlying sense of the text. But how do we process such human reactions from God? The answer lies within our belief that we are made in God’s image, and that in ways beyond counting He and we share an identity. Does not God wish Moses to feel deeply His own passion for Israel as they suffer in Egypt? Does not God know that for Moses to fully share in His identity, he must become compassionate about the plight of an enslaved people who are his people too? Moses comes face to face with this reality and experiences it as God does. In his wisdom (and in his anger), God makes clear that Moses must finally meet his brother Aaron, and he must yield the role of spokesperson to Aaron, while God speaks solely to Moses as the agent of His Word. Aaron will speak the Word, and Moses will bear the prophet’s staff full of signs and wonders. God will speak audibly through Aaron and visibly through Moses. Moses will become “God” to Aaron, and Aaron will bear the identity of Moses to Pharaoh. In a real sense, Moses will become an incarnation of the divine Word, and as such his own identity will absorb the identity of Yahweh: He will speak to the people for you, and it will be as if he were your mouth and as if you were God to him (Exodus 4:16).

In those words, “as if you were God to him,” are found the identity of Moses for himself and for his people Israel. Aaron also hears from God in Egypt. Aaron hears the instructions to meet his long-lost brother “in the desert.” In the passage which follows, we watch with amazement as the new identity of Moses takes shape and as a new future begins to open for Israel, the nation of slaves: So he met Moses at the mountain of God and kissed him. 28 Then Moses told Aaron everything the LORD had sent him to say, and also about all the miraculous signs he had commanded him to perform. 29 Moses and Aaron brought together all the elders of the Israelites, 30 and Aaron told them everything the LORD had said to Moses. He also performed the signs before the people, 31 and they believed. And when they heard that the LORD was concerned about them and had seen their misery, they bowed down and worshiped (Exodus 4:27-31).

The story of Moses’ call to a new identity begins with the sort of wonder that takes off its sandals and continues in the presence of slaves who see signs and then bow and worship. There is no new self, no new person, or no new identity without the profound experience of the Sacred before whom we bow and worship. Having bowed before the merciless whips of Pharaoh’s taskmasters, toiling to “make more bricks,” this generation of Israelites -6-

bows before the merciful God who overflows with signs and wonders and the hopeful promise, “Let my people go.” Embracing a new identity, Israel will lose their old labels as slaves and receive new ones as the children of the living God. In this way, Moses finds himself precisely when he becomes God’s agent to set his people free. Gideon: The Pit and the Promise (Judges 6) A few months ago, we studied the story of Gideon from the book of Judges. Shaping that story was the idea of the “turnaround.” Like Moses, Gideon was stuck with a label. In his case the label mirrored the predicament of the Israelite communities all around him. For Moses, Midian was his new home and the start of a new family outside of Egypt. But for Gideon, Midian spelled trouble: Big Trouble, as Judges 6:1-10 explains. The reader is encouraged to read the Background Notes for January 11/12, 2014 for all the details. Midianites were the aggressors in a war with God’s people that drove them into hiding. The initial reaction of Israel at the beginning of Judges 6 is one of hiding: “Because the power of Midian was so oppressive, the Israelites prepared shelters for themselves in mountain clefts, caves, and strongholds.” And the condition of Israel is one of loss, as we read words like “ruin (6:4),” “swarms of locusts (6:5),” and “impoverished (6:6).” At we reach the end of 6:10, the people had reached bottom, driven by their oppressors to complete brokenness, all of their efforts to find reality in false worship played out, and their nation on the brink of disappearing. While God placed before them life and death, yet they chose death. When they cry to God, His response was first to send the prophet to interpret the chaos of their otherwise deconstructed lives, and tell them why things have gotten so bad. This is strong medicine, and, like God in Eden, Israel must listen to the voice of God before deliverance comes. We need to know why we are stuck in our situation before we can move beyond it. After the prophet is finished speaking, there appears another elusive and mysterious figure in the biblical text, one who shows up at different times throughout Scripture with the designation, “the angel of Yahweh” (6:11). Students of the Bible have long debated the identity of this personage, whose coming had all the marks of a human being, yet was surrounded by an aura of divine glory.1 He is, at the very least, a messenger from Yahweh’s divine council in heaven, sent to disclose the divine purpose. According to Exodus 23:20-23, God’s “name is in him” — suggesting that this angel is no ordinary heavenly messenger, but is the embodiment of God’s presence and His nature, including the power of His word and of His works. When this angel arrived, he rather nonchalantly “sat down under the oak in Orphah,” the hometown of a man named Gideon. Our first impression of Gideon comes from the comment in 6:11 that he was threshing wheat in a winepress. Hewn out of rock and lined with plaster, the winepress normally received harvested grapes that were then trampled to squeeze out the juice and make wine (compare Isaiah 5:2). Usually this process had a festive tone and became a joyful vintage celebration following the grape harvest (August/September) — the climax of the agricultural cycle in Israel. But Gideon doesn’t want his Midianite oppressors to know that he was threshing wheat on an-above ground threshing floor, lest they would come a take it from him. Faced with an external threat, Gideon hides his activities in a place and at a time his enemies would not suspect. He hides into the winepress. When the angel finds him there, he addresses Gideon this way: “Yahweh is with you, mighty warrior” (6:12). Sneaking around the winepress, threshing his wheat, Gideon probably looked and felt like anything but a “mighty warrior,” yet God’s messenger speaks the Word to him as if it were already true. For Yahweh, the God of Israel, is as Paul would later describe him: “He who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Romans 4:17). Furthermore, this God waits before calling into existence the things that do not exist until after He “reduces to nothing the things that are” (1 Corinthians 1:28). Israel’s defeat preceded God’s decision to summon Gideon and call him by a name that he could not claim for himself. God had For a concise treatment of the topic see Walter Kaiser Jr. et. al., Hard Sayings of the Bible (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 191-192.

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reduced His intended servant to threshing wheat in a winepress so that He might then call him, “Mighty Warrior.” The message of the biblical text is commonly this, that God “uproots, tears down, destroys, and overthrows” before he “builds and plants” (Jeremiah 1:10). That is, we fall into despair and loss before God brings us back to life. Gideon may have hidden in his winepress, but he still has nerve — or chutzpah, as our Jewish friends would say. His reply is the classic objection of a good Jewish dialog, namely, to flood the other speaker with questions. Gideon objects: “But sir…” from the Hebrew bin ’adōnî, “Excuse me, my Lord…” Gideon doesn’t agree with the messenger that “Yahweh is with us,” for he sees too many things all around him that tell the exact opposite. He offers two interrogatives: 1) “Why has all this happened?” and 2) “Where are all his wonders?” From these sarcastic questions, Gideon proceeds to declare that “Yahweh has abandoned us and put us into the hand of Midian” (6:13). No doubt, Gideon had already heard the words of the prophet (6:7-10) and had come to accept his situation as the direct result of Yahweh’s judgment, and that there was simply no way back, no way out, and no turnabout. “Done. Played. Busted. Dead.” Gideon could have said any one of those words in reply to the angel. That is, “We messed up big time, there’s no point in imagining our situation otherwise. We are stuck. We are Sisyphus.” Abruptly, the text stops referring to the “angel of Yahweh” and shifts instead to Yahweh who speaks directly to Gideon. Still appearing in a tangible form, Yahweh “turns” to Gideon, before speaking to him. This is an important literary touch in the text, a fine verbal maneuver that depicts Yahweh as a thoughtful and engaged conversation partner with Gideon, One who turns his head, and looks His man squarely in the eye before speaking! Crucial words follow, as Yahweh tells Gideon: “Go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian's hand. Am I not sending you (6:14)?” What is “the strength you have” to which God refers? The Hebrew text has, lēk bekōhakā zeh, “proceed in your strength — this strength,” referring perhaps to the cautious and guarded action exhibited by Gideon when he hides his threshing in the winepress. What God sees in Gideon is his resourcefulness and his ability to get the job done even when threatened by his enemies. In weakness, he had found strength, and the Lord affirmed this initiative as a sign of Gideon’s call to be Israel’s deliverer. Putting this call into words, God asks rhetorically, “Am I not sending you?” The NRSV translates this as “I hereby commission you.” The NLT has, “I am sending you!” This is the classic call narrative found elsewhere in the Old Testament when God enlists the service of chosen human beings to fulfill his purpose. No doubt the account of Moses’ call in Exodus 3 is the most stylized of these examples. Close parallels are Isaiah 6 and Jeremiah 1. Each case underscores the reluctance of the intended candidate who usually tries to beg off because of inability or unfitness for the task, generally expressed as some form of the question, “Who am I?” Or, “What makes me qualified?” Such questions are followed by a series of excuses (“I can’t speak; I’m only a lackey; I’m a sinner among sinners”). In Gideon’s case, he responds with, “But Lord…” and then he expresses reservation about the strength of his clan and his lack of stature within his own family (6:15). By referencing his tribal name, “Manasseh,” Gideon connects his family tree to the lineage of Joseph, whose actions generations before delivered his little family from the aggressive famine that engulfed Canaan and Egypt.2 Manasseh was a large tribe, occupying two sides of the Jordan River, and Gideon’s clan and family were easily lost in the crowd, as the reluctant deliverer explains to Yahweh. Words like “weak” and “smallest” tell how insignificant the man felt about his place within Israel. Hearing him speak reminds us of Paul’s words: 2

When Jacob blesses his sons, he grants a double inheritance to Joseph by including Joseph’s two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, as fully vested members of the tribal community. In effect Joseph’s blessing is a prophecy that his lineage would be multiplied and enlarged within the future of Israel (see Genesis 48; 49:22-26). A close look at the map of Canaan after the occupation reveals multiple land allotments, divided among the two sons. In fact, Manasseh has allotments on both sides of the Jordan River, leading to the common designation, “half-tribe of Manasseh” which appears some thirty-three times, illustrated in texts like Numbers 32:33 and Joshua 21.

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Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. 27 But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. 28 He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things-- and the things that are not-- to nullify the things that are, 29 so that no one may boast before him. 30 It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God-- that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. 31 Therefore, as it is written: "Let him who boasts boast in the Lord" (1 Corinthians 1:26-31).

Can we not imagine Gideon in Paul’s thoughts when he wrote the words, “Think of what you were when you were called”? Or more correctly, “Think of what you thought about yourself when you were called”! Gideon brought no boast of his ability to God in response to his call, but instead confessed his utter inability to be the one “to strike down all the Midianites together.” That’s a remarkable description in 6:16, as Yahweh proceeds to explain why Gideon will be able to do this marvelous feat. “I will be with you,” Yahweh tells him, and so God’s man will be able to do what God asks him to do. Until this moment he did not consider himself able, but the assurance of Yahweh’s presence is enough to turn his heart. Transformed identity: from man in hiding to man in waiting: waiting for a fresh future which left the winepress and its secrecy behind. In God’s new future for Gideon, he would come to know himself as God imagined him, apart from the dispirited circumstances of threatening Midianites. He would become the mighty warrior that God saw him to be. The reality God saw would be the possibility that Gideon would become. Saul: Not the Man He Used to Be (Acts 9; also Acts 22 and 26) To start with, he had two names: is it any wonder he had an identity crisis? Seriously, he really did have two names: Saul was his Jewish name, while Paul was his Graeco-Roman name. He was Saulus Paulus! Coincidentally, when he later travelled to the island of Cyprus, he met the Roman procurator whose name was Sergius Paulus (Acts 13:7): another guy with two names. Such combination of names was common in societies that were culturally blended. Jews lived in the Roman Empire, and walked a fine line between honoring Caesar and worshipping God. Not all Jews lived in Palestine. This situation had existed since the disorienting events of 587 BCE when Babylon (another empire) seized Jerusalem, destroying both the Temple and city. 587 was Israel’s 9/11, and in that case they never fully recovered from the effects. Upper class Jews and the priests ended up in Babylon where they were employed by their captors in suitable positions within the bureaucracy. Some Jews remained in Israel where they had no leadership and quickly melded into the adjacent populations. Others fled to Egypt and to points west where they collectively became part of what became the diaspora — the “scattering.” Lots of identities in limbo! Saulus Paulus called Tarsus in Cilicia his birthplace. He was known as “Saul of Tarsus” for that reason. According to the New Testament, his dual identity grew from his father’s unique situation — and later his own — as a duly recognized Roman citizen (see Acts 22:24-30). In Acts 22:28, he explains to the Roman commander after an illegal flogging, that his citizenship was “from birth,” which meant that his father also held this privilege before him. If we continue the reading in Acts 23, we hear him explaining that his faith-tradition was that of a Pharisee, and so he discloses his theological position within Judaism. He is both a Roman and a Jew. His Jewishness owed much to his teacher Gamaliel, as he explained earlier in Acts 22:3, “thoroughly trained in the Torah of our fathers and was just as zealous for God as any of you are today.” Judging from his conduct of Stephen’s “trial” in Acts 7 (before his conversion), he belonged to the right-wing of the Pharisee party that took its moral and theological cues from a rabbi named Shammai. By contrast, his own teacher Gamaliel favored another rabbi, more moderate-to-liberal in his views, Hillel. This fact makes his dual identity even more onerous, for Shammaite Pharisees truly hated the Roman occupation of Israel and hated all aspects of enculturation by outsiders who controlled their land. Such Pharisees made it their goal to purify Israel in order to bring back the favor of Yahweh to their beloved Zion. Clearly, when the events of Acts 7-8 were happening, this man with two names was wholly and completely Saul, a wholly and completely Jewish name borrowed from the first king of Israel who lived more than a -9-

thousand years earlier. Life in his family of origin must have been interesting. Roman citizenship was a source of pride, and it is likely his father celebrated the status, while Saul disdained it. His teacher Gamaliel held views that were left of center, and no doubt had his reservations about Saul’s extreme treatment of the Jesus movement. While he shared Saul’s loyalty to Jewish identity, and the labels that went with that, yet he was entirely open to what the God of Israel was doing afresh in the world. In one moving text, Gamaliel articulated what Saul was not quite willing to say: 34

But a Pharisee named Gamaliel, a teacher of the law, who was honored by all the people, stood up in the Sanhedrin and ordered that the men be put outside for a little while. 35 Then he addressed them: "Men of Israel, consider carefully what you intend to do to these men. 36 Some time ago Theudas appeared, claiming to be somebody, and about four hundred men rallied to him. He was killed, all his followers were dispersed, and it all came to nothing. 37 After him, Judas the Galilean appeared in the days of the census and led a band of people in revolt. He too was killed, and all his followers were scattered. 38 Therefore, in the present case I advise you: Leave these men alone! Let them go! For if their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail. 39 But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men; you will only find yourselves fighting against God." 40 His speech persuaded them (Acts 5:34-40).

In due time, the spirit of his old teacher’s wisdom would once more influence how Saul looked at himself and at others. The critical circumstances leading up to that identity transformation are summarized at the end of Acts 7 and the beginning of Acts 8. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, gave a faithful witness to Jesus in the hearing of this Saul of Tarsus who had authorized his death: 57

At this they covered their ears and, yelling at the top of their voices, they all rushed at him, 58 dragged him out of the city and began to stone him. Meanwhile, the witnesses laid their clothes at the feet of a young man named Saul (Acts 7:57-58). And Saul was there, giving approval to his death. On that day a great persecution broke out against the church at Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria (Acts 8:1). But Saul began to destroy the church. Going from house to house, he dragged off men and women and put them in prison. 4 Those who had been scattered preached the word wherever they went (Acts 8:3-4).

Saul’s actions were his zeal, a quality in his identity that labeled him as a radically observant Jew, committed to stamping out any attempts to dilute the purity of Jewish faith. He was a zealous Pharisee without being a political Zealot per se. He was known for zeal especially against the Christian movement. As he prepared for a major assault against the Jesus community in Damascus, Jesus appeared to him in a blinding vision and issued a fresh call that turned Saul away from his violent identity and into the “apostle to the nations.” The man with two names discovered a new self, having left behind the old one on the road to Damascus. The story of this remarkable transformation is told three times in the book of Acts, 9:1-22; 22:4-19; 26:9-15, and also in Galatians 1:13-24. Each account contains a special texturing of the incident that turned Saul around. You are encouraged to take time to read each of them. We know from Acts 13 that Saul begins to use his other name, Paul, at the point he launches the first of several missionary journeys out into the Graeco-Roman world, in fulfillment of the commission the Lord Jesus gave him. With the support of the church in Antioch of Syria, Saul, aka Paul, begins to use this other label to signify his new affiliation with the Christian movement and his new devotion to be the apostle of Jesus to non-Jews in the wider world of the Roman Empire. He left behind the prejudices of a Shammaite Pharisee and pursued instead the promise of the Gospel for the whole world. No longer were Gentiles an anathema to his faith, but were the whole reason why God had brought him into the world in the first place. Rather than being preoccupied with purifying Judaism, Saul, aka Paul, wanted to bring the purifying power of the Gospel to the whole world. Though Paul had always been his “other” name, his use of it in Acts 13 simply marks the beginning of his new mission as part of his new identity in Jesus Christ. Writing his letters, Paul (we will call him that now!) determined that his past was well behind him and would no longer define his identity. One insightful text is Philippians 3: If anyone else thinks he has reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: 5 circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; 6 as for

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zeal, persecuting the church; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless. consider loss for the sake of Christ (Philippians 3:4-7).

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But whatever was to my profit I now

He continues this deeply personal self-assessment by declaring that his major achievements prior to Damascus road were essentially “fecal matter” (the Greek word is: skubalon, “dung, garbage”) when compared to the privilege of being identified with Jesus Christ in his death and resurrection. That’s a pretty stiff judgment, but it cuts to the heart of Paul’s conversion (radical change) that resulted in nothing less than what he would later call “a new creation”: So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! (2 Corinthians 5:17). For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything! (Galatians 6:15).

The language kainē ktisis (“new creation”) comes from Old Testament texts written after the tragic events in Israel some 600 years earlier, commonly called the exile. In order for Jews to receive back their promised status and precious identity as the people of God, the whole creation would need to be reworked. That’s how Isaiah the prophet imagined it when he wrote: I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert (Isaiah 43:19). You have heard; now see all this; and will you not declare it? From this time forward I make you hear new things, hidden things that you have not known (48:6) For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind (65:17). For as the new heavens and the new earth, which I will make, shall remain before me, says the LORD; so shall your descendants and your name remain (66:22).

Moreover, the new creation themes introduced by Isaiah are connected to a “new name”: The nations shall see your vindication, and all the kings your glory; and you shall be called by a new name that the mouth of the LORD will give (62:2).

Whenever the language of name change occurs in the Bible it usually implies the emergence of a new identity. Names were crucial as indicators of changed character or new personhood in place of old. Abram became Abraham. Jacob became Israel. Thus, the New Testament can speak freely of persons having been given a “new name”: Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches. To everyone who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give a white stone, and on the white stone is written a new name that no one knows except the one who receives it (Revelation 2:17) If you conquer, I will make you a pillar in the temple of my God; you will never go out of it. I will write on you the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem that comes down from my God out of heaven, and my own new name (Revelation 3:12).

Names were also closely tied to reputations, and hearing a name could easily conjure up images of either a person of courage or cowardice, love or hatred, trust or fear. Even the early Christians cringed at first when they heard that Saul was in town, fearing the repetition of his actions against them as once performed in the past: All those who heard him were astonished and asked, "Isn't he the man who raised havoc in Jerusalem among those who call on this name? And hasn't he come here to take them as prisoners to the chief priests?" (Acts 9:21). When he came to Jerusalem, he tried to join the disciples, but they were all afraid of him, not believing that he really was a disciple (Acts 9:26).

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Years later, reflecting on the wonder of Paul’s changed identity from persecutor to proclaimer of the Gospel, the apostle wrote: They only heard the report: "The man who formerly persecuted us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy." 24 And they praised God because of me (Galatians 1:23-24).

That is, “I’m not the person I used to be.” We sometimes have difficulty believing that people can really change, especially when they (or we) have lived especially wicked lives. What the Gospel teaches us is that we are all “sinners saved by grace,” and that the ground at the foot of the cross is quite level. We are all in the same predicament because of sin. The Good News is that Jesus came to make us new. A New Label for a New Life From the moment of our conception, God has known us and been influential in the form our lives might take. The ancient Hebrew poet wrote Psalm 139, partly in awe and partly in gratitude for the skillful way his human form took shape in his mother’s womb: 13

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. 14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. 15 My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, 16 your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be (Psalm 139:13-16).

With lyrical finesse, the musician of Israel compares human development to a woman sitting at a loom making cloth or sewing a piece of clothing. What can match the beauty of the words: “fearfully and wonderfully made”? Phrases like “secret place” and “depths of the earth” linked to “my mother’s womb” create a mysterious tone in the text. Who can possibly figure out the genius of God in making not only our biological selves, but also our emotional, psychological, and social selves? By leaving the whole matter in such imaginative form, Israel’s muse invites our own poetry as the medium for speaking of our unique identities. Who we are really — the label of God — is actually a two-staged affair. We are naturally the product of a physical process, complete with the wonders and limitations that involves. Our parentage is physical and ordinary, whether we are royalty or pauper. DNA operates as the blueprint of an understandable chemical process that is better known today than at any time in history. Science, in one sense, knows us to be this recipe of nature’s building blocks in the human genome. Right down to our temperaments, both nature and nurture engender our personal existence and apply their label to the baby who emerges from our mother’s womb. Of this, there is no real doubt. And yet, that is not all we are. This otherness of our existence that is not easily comprehended through protein synthesis or the double helix is known by us through a self-awareness that takes its first beginnings at our mother’s breast, in her arms, and from her love. The touch and smell, the sounds and tastes, and the blurry patches of light that brighten our eyes — these all slowly and steadily identify the world around us and also the world that we in fact are. Consciousness gives way to self-consciousness. That is what the Hebrew poet strives to express in his elegant verse. That is what we come to know as the heart and soul of our humanity as it gets to know the world in all its many-splendored forms. At the center of this self-awareness is the capacity to know God, to know the Other beyond our growing selves. When we contemplate as thinking beings the wonders of the world around us, there occurs to us, here and there, what N. T. Wright has called the “echoes of a voice”3 We discover that our identity is wrapped up in things like beauty, justice, truth, love, and a host of other experiences that do not easily boil down to ingredients in our original recipe. Through paying attention to these echoes, a new voice is heard that invites us to realize another self, one that shares in the life of God Himself. This God not only creates the world and us, He also re-creates, renews, and breathes the life of His Spirit into all the things He has made. The Bible talks about His further work of life-giving in the images of deserts that “bloom like a rose,” and in the wind blowing across the empty deep bringing forth the world.

3

N. T. Wright, Simply Christian (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 3-51.

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For Christian believers, new creation life is the work of the Holy Spirit, whose mysterious work Jesus explained to devoutly religious Nicodemus in John 3 under the rubric of “the new birth” when God gives new life to old persons. Later, in the telling of the Gospel story, followers of Jesus would announce his resurrection from the dead and then proceeded to offer new life to any who would “receive him, believe in his name, and become God’s children” (John 1:12). And so, texts like these started popping up in letters of Paul and others: 8

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith-- and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God-- 9 not by works, so that no one can boast. 10 For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do (Ephesians 2:8-10).

In other words, God the creator has more gifts to give (“grace”), and they have to do with re-working our old selves as newly created identities now given the capacity to do newly gifted works within the old creation. There is both majesty and amazement in the words “we are God’s workmanship.” If we read further in Ephesians 2, the idea of a former self in contrast with a new self begins to take shape. What we learn is that the old self is essentially an alienated self, while the new self is a welcomed self. One example will help us see this distinction: Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God's people and members of God's household (Ephesians 2:19).

Old, destructive labels need not detain us! There is celebration in the words “you are no longer … aliens” when read alongside identities like “God’s people” and “members of God’s household.” Identity does not mean isolation for the followers of Jesus. One way of understanding the purpose of the church is seeing it as the community where the isolated self becomes the identified self. This is the work of God’s Spirit who re-creates the life of Jesus in us and among us. Baptism is the sign of this new identity, and so we may speak freely about our new baptismal identity. Consider this other important text from Paul: 4

But when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, 5 he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, 6 whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior, 7 so that, having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs having the hope of eternal life (Titus 3:4-7).

The phrase that attracts us to this passage is “renewal by the Holy Spirit.” Notice how the words “saved,” “mercy,” and “washing of rebirth” line up to accomplish this change of identity through God’s Spirit. Paul skillfully combines the language of new birth, baptism, and the Holy Spirit in a single movement that focuses on what he calls “the hope of eternal life.” Hope is about opening up the future, so that the future does not need to resemble the past or present. Who we are, and who we are becoming converge on the promise of the coming new creation that will one day transform the old world we now occupy. Our old self and our new self are located at the intersection of this hopeful future. Right now we experience our identities as both continuity and discontinuity; or, as already but not yet. When Paul speaks about us as being “heirs,” he obviously knows that our whole inheritance hasn’t yet arrived, though even heirs can be accorded the privilege of sharing part of their inheritance ahead of time. Indeed, even now things like forgiveness of sins, the Holy Spirit living in our hearts, new birth, growth in grace, and scores of other fruits of the Spirit are already part of our Christian identity. Yet we live in a world where people still die, including ourselves, and where sickness, poverty, war, hunger, injustice, and other evils still roam among us, robbing human life of love, joy, and peace. The promise of the Gospel is that these painful realities will not persist forever. What we carry in our new identities is the living sign that such things will one day end. We are walking, talking examples of what the world can be like one day. That is, we might be such -13-

persons if the new birth has consumed our old selves through the grace of God made present to us by the Holy Spirit. Conclusion Like Paul, we may well be persons with two names — two selves, marked out by heredity, environment, and the Gospel! Asking the question, “Who am I?” helps draw a line around our solitary self and wonder, “Is this all I am?” The force of social labeling is strong. It might be said that the whole world around us “has a plan for our lives.” Within that external shell offered by the world there still remains a God-shaped vacuum that is not easily filled by social conditioning, and in fact becomes more unsatisfying because little about the current labeling touches the offer of a new self. For you see on the other hand, “God loves us, and has a wonderful plan for our lives.” Hearing those words, like the echo of a voice, peaks our curiosity about another way to be human than what is currently on offer within the external shell imposed on us. If we are honest, we must admit that the presently imposed self robs us of freedom and the future. By contrast, God addresses us in freedom and not in fear. Whereas our external selves, shaped by the will of others, deny us this freedom, God’s grace liberates us to become a new self unfettered by the social constraints that do not have our best interests at heart. In a deeply moving text near the end of his letter to the Romans, Paul describes two ways of being human, and then invites his audience to courageously chose one of them over the other. What he proposes is nothing less than an identity shift, a radical re-labeling of our human selves. By God’s grace, we can become new persons who share in the freedom of God’s perfecting will for our lives. We close with this text, and invite our readers to meditate on its words, allowing them the open their hearts to its hopeful message. Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God-- this is your spiritual act of worship. 2 Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is-- his good, pleasing and perfect will. 3 For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you (Romans 12:1-3).

Glory to God! Amen.

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