Date: April 14, 2024 

Scripture: 1 John 3:1-7

Sermon Title: “Who Are We?”

Preacher: Rev. Dr. Bob Jon

You can also listen on Podcast from iTunes and Spotify. Search for “Podcasting from Rev. Bob Jon.”

A few weeks ago, I signed up to be the mysterious reader for Joshua’s kindergarten class. Honestly, I did not know what to read. So, when I posted it on Facebook, several people in the church reached out to me, leaving the books at my door. I showed up at the school, excited to surprise Joshua and imagine what kind of face he would make. And when I entered the classroom, a couple of children came to me and said, “Are you Joshua’s dad?” I laughed and said, “Yes, can you tell?” 

I love the fact that these children asked me if I was Joshua’s dad. I did not tell them my name, but it was enough for them to know that I was their friend’s father. When my wife was working at the pharmacy, her coworkers knew me as her husband. That was how I was known to them. When I go to the church, people know me as a pastor. The other day, I heard my two boys saying each other, “We need to call our dad Pastor Bob because that is what everyone calls him at the church.” I laughed and told them that they could call me Dad. 

We all have our names. But we are often known to others by our relationship to others. When we were young, people in town knew us as someone’s daughter or son. We grow and struggle to define who we are. Sometimes, we resist parental guidance as an interruption in developing our own identity. We go away to college and experiment with a few things to understand who we are. We meet someone we love, we are introduced as someone’s boyfriend or girlfriend. We get married, then known as someone’s husband and wife, our children’s father or mother. In each stage of our lives, we attempt to define who we are.

Our struggle to define who we are does not stop easily. Erik Erikson, a psychologist, once said, “In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity.” In other words, as long as we are satisfied with the basic needs such as hunger and safety, we are beings that continually seek to define who we are. We want to understand the meaning of our lives such as where we come from and where we are going after this life. Our desire to define ourselves intensifies, especially when we face challenges that threaten our beings, such as illness, poverty, or discrimination. 

For me, my crisis with identity came when my parents sent me away to my uncle and aunt’s house at the age of 11. Since the countryside where my father was pastor had such a poor educational system, they decided to send me to a city, attend a better school, and stay at my relatives’ house. My uncle and aunt were initially happy about that decision. They had two daughters, my cousins, of their own. And they were excited as if they gained a son. After moving to the city, I seriously wrestled with my identity. When I went to bed listening to the melody of frogs and bugs at night, I could not sleep in the city due to the sound of cars all night long. 

Besides, I was quickly picked on by other kids as a poor country boy. Compared with the city children’s clothing, my clothing felt like from North Korea. What broke my heart the most was when I saw other children walking with their parents happily. “Hey, I have my parents too. Why can I not be like them?” I felt extremely alone by myself. You won’t believe it when I say this. I quickly became a troubled kid. I was picking a fight with another kid everyday at school. My uncle, who was a high school teacher, became upset and often came home drunk, threatening me. One day, my mother came to see me at the school, and saw how dirty and torn my clothing was. She told me later how heartbroken she was in looking at me because she could not recognize the son she knew. 

In our reading today, the author of 1 John says, “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God, and that is what we are.” We do not know exactly who wrote this epistle, even though it bears the name of John. It seems that the faith community, the audience of this letter, was facing many challenges to the point that threatened their identity. Some people were teaching others that Jesus was not the Christ. They were saying that Christ did not have an actual body but existed only as a spirit, therefore denying his bodily resurrection. That he actually did not suffer hunger, thirst, or even pain on the cross. While persecution and martyrdom were looming around, they were dealing with those who were deceiving with a false doctrine. 

In such a time as this, the author of 1 John communicated with the faithful that their identity did not reside in their achievement or their status in the world. Their worth did not come from their positive self-images saying that they are good people, or they are decent people. Instead, their identity was rooted in the affirming action of God who created them all in God’s image and called them God’s beloved children. We are God’s children not because we have earned God’s favor to be worthy. But we are God’s children because of the sacrificial love of God as shown in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, therefore, calling us God’s own. 

This message is important to all of us, as we all struggle in our world that defines one’s self-worth by how much we have, what we have accomplished, or how beautiful we are according to the societal norm. This is especially important to our young people as we are coming out of the pandemic. In an educational journal, Alyson Klein acknowledges it might be too soon to determine the impact of this pandemic on the development of teenagers. However, the mix of the pandemic, isolation, death of their relatives, educational disruption, and economic upheaval could pose a huge question for the identity of many young people, as our identity is often shaped by our relationships with others, such as teachers and peers. According to a survey of 2400 high school students in 2021, it was reported that more than half of students did not feel connected or only a little connected to classmates, teachers, and others in their schools and communities.^[1]

Even before the pandemic, America was wrestling with the problem of loneliness as the new epidemic. As people continue to feel alone and isolated, they are experiencing their identity crisis. Rather than having the courage to sit with people who might be different from them, we are tempted to affirm our thoughts, our ideologies, or even ourselves by going to social media begging for words of affirmation for ourselves. This might be the reason why we are experiencing more and more division in our society and even church today because we are experiencing our identity crisis – we do not know who we are, even though we say we do. 

Many biblical authors tell us that our self-worth, our identity, is not determined primarily by what other people say about us or even what we want to believe ourselves to be. Instead, our identity is grounded in what God says about us. The matter of who we are is connected to whose we are. Therefore, Howard Thurman, the author of Jesus and the Disinherited, says “The awareness of being a child of God tends to stabilize the ego and results in a new courage, fearlessness, and power. I have seen it happen again and again.”

Recently, I went to H-Mart in Burlington. How many of you know H-Mart? It is a big Korean grocery market. It is like the mecca for every Korean immigrant living in New England. If someone is a Korean pastor and gets appointed to a new church, the very first thing the pastor does is probably look up Google Maps to see how far his or her church is from H-Mart. If you want to learn more about the identity of an immigrant who finds a sense of home by going to a grocery market, I suggest you read Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner. Anyway, when I went grocery shopping with my family the other day, I saw a young man screaming and making weird sounds. I quickly realized that he was a mentally disabled person. And standing next to him and walking with him was his father who gently put his arm around his shoulder, comforting him, “It’s ok, son. It’s ok.” 

As I watched this father and son, I felt such immense love in my heart, witnessing such love of this father for his son. The world might have something to define this son in its own way, “disabled, handicapped, mentally challenged.” But for this father who was holding on to him, he was nothing but his precious son for whom there was nothing to separate him from his love. Even when we feel broken in our hearts, bruised, or abandoned in this world, that is how God defines us today and until the end. We all are a precious daughter and son of God. 

Amen.

---

^[1] https://www.edweek.org/leadership/the-pandemic-has-shaken-students-sense-of-themselves/2021/10