Redeemer Family,
One year ago, we introduced fresh language to describe the work we do together as a parish: Gospel Formation for Missional Presence. This past fall, I wrote a series of six articles to help us understand how this work, both in our individual and collective lives.
We engage Gospel Formation and we manifest Missional Presence through the seven practices of: Story, Identity, Belonging, Virtue, Context, Vocation, and Imagination. These are seven angles or perspectives on what it means to be a human being and they are accompanied by corresponding questions:
What story am I in?
Who am I?
With whom do I belong?
How do I change?
Where do I make my life?
What is my purpose?
How do I love?
These are not Christian questions per se, they are human questions.
Our conviction is that the Gospel provides uniquely satisfying answers to the questions, but the answers are not merely data or dogma to be thought in our minds, but rather ways of life to be taken up in our bodies. In other words, our lives are our final answer to these questions.
During the season of Advent, we undertook a 3-part sermon series on Practicing the Story. You are welcome to listen in here if you missed it.
This coming Sunday, we begin the season of Epiphany, and we will kick off a 6-part series called Identity: Practicing the New Self.
We will approach this by examining some of the places to which we most naturally tend to look for a sense of identity and reveal how they fall short of giving us the stable, secure identity we all need. Here are the sermon titles for the next six weeks:
You Are Not What You Do
You Are Not Your Body Image
You Are Not Your Sexual Appetite
You Are Not How Much Money You Have
You Are Not What People Say About You
You Are Not Your Own
Church family, I know that I need to receive my identity as a child of God from my Heavenly Father through the good news of the Gospel of Jesus. But even though I know this… I so often tend to functionally live as if my identity came from my work, or my image, or my reputation, or any number of other odd and unhelpful places. There is a gap between what I know and what I practice. And so, for me, embracing my identity in Jesus must become a daily (sometimes even hourly!) practice. Perhaps you need this too.
And so, as we begin a new calendar year together, I hope that this series is re-centering and grounding for us. I hope it helps us rejoice at the words so poetically expressed in the old Heidelberg Catechism.
Q: What is your only comfort in life and in death?
A: That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death— to my faithful savior Jesus Christ.
See you on Sunday.
In the Father’s love,
