We may think it’s obvious who we are. But there are many ways of answering this question ‘who are we’?
The question ‘who are we?’ as a nation is rather important at this moment in our history. We are British, but what would it mean to be ‘British’ if Scotland gained independence? We are British, but are we also European, whether or not we belong to the European Union? Is Norway European? Is Switzerland European? And if they are, despite not being in the EU, how does it affect our understanding of ourselves that we are European as well as British?
Or that, as well as being British, we are English rather than Welsh?
‘Who are we?’ The answer doesn’t seem simple, even if we look just at our national identity.
There are many other ways of answering the question ‘Who are we?’ We start our lives as sons and daughters. That doesn’t change, but what it means to be a son or a daughter changes greatly through our lives, until we can reach a moment when our parents feel almost like children in their need and dependency. We remain sons and daughters even beyond the old age of our parents, but as a memory rather than as a lived experience. And through all those years, we acquire at the same time new identities: brother, sister, husband, wife, father, mother, grandparent, great-grandparent.
So who are we? Who am I? When someone asks me the question, my answer is normally simple: ‘I’m David.’ We identify so closely with our names that for me to say ‘I’m David’ is more than passing on information about my name. It sums up in one word the whole bundle of memories, characteristics and emotions that make me ‘me’. And although I’ve changed, my name hasn’t. It provides continuity, enables others to identify me with the baby born in the Royal United Hospital, Bath, in February 1959.
And yet names not only reveal identity: they also conceal it. Yes, our surnames say who we are by identifying us with a family stretching back hundreds of years, all sharing the same name. But surnames only tell half the story, failing to identify us with our mothers and their families. And for many married women their names mirror the disruptions and lack of continuity in their lives, as they lose one name at marriage and acquire a new one.
So names, at first sight so simple a badge of identity, turn out to reflect the changes and complexities in our identity. They also make it clear that our genes and our families are far from being the only noteworthy thing about us. Although our surnames have been fixed for centuries now, often they bear witness to a time when someone’s name and so identity was wrapped up with what they did for a living: Smith, Mason, Wright, Butcher, Baker, Potter, Cooper, Taylor, Thatcher, Miller, Cook, Fisher, Shepherd.
There’s been quite a lot of public conversation in recent months about different kinds of identity.
One way to make sense of the current disagreements in our country is to identify two different types of people: on the one hand those whose identity comes largely with things they were born with: a nationality, a language, a family, a town; and on the other hand, those whose identity is largely a matter of what they have achieved, through education and work, often by moving away from a town, from their family, sometimes even moving nations and learning a new language.
Sociologists have their own words for these two types of status in our society: ‘ascribed’ status and ‘achieved’ status. But there are simpler ways of putting this: we could instead see the divide as being between people who come from somewhere in particular, and people who could come from anywhere, whose roots and origins seem almost irrelevant.
The way we see ourselves – and the ways others see us – are important because they shape the way we behave.
And so it’s not surprising that Christian faith raises questions about our identity. Of course who we are is shaped by the particular Christian tradition to which we belong. If instead of being an Anglican priest, I was ordained into the Coptic Orthodox Church; or the leader of an independent charismatic church, then I would understand my role, and so my life, in rather different ways.
But Paul’s letter to the church at Ephesus, from which we heard earlier, lacks anything addressed to its recipients this specific. And although book of the Bible has always been known by its title of ‘Ephesians’, we now know that the very earliest copies of the letter are addressed simply ‘to the saints who are faithful’, missing out the words ‘at Ephesus’.
So it seems quite likely that the New Testament book we now know as the ‘Letter to the Ephesians’ started life as a general letter and that what ended up in our New Testament was a version of the letter which found its way to Ephesus.
But this doesn’t stop the letter from exploring issues about identity and reaching conclusions presumably not only for Christians at Ephesus, but also in Corinth, Galatia, Philippi, Thessalonika and Kettering. It’s true for Christians in all these places and others because it’s talking about something more fundamental, our relationship with God, our standing with God.
‘We are what he has made us.’ There is no such thing in the spiritual life as the self-made man or woman.
We don’t completely lose our identity when we accept our place in the family of God. But we are given a surname which transcends our differences.
Each of us here today has their own unique identity. For each of us it is complex and embraces family, place of birth, nationality, language, work and so on.
Are we ready, willing, to be surprised by God?