This week I faced one of those decisions that could affect my life for years to come.  It involved my very definition of I am.  It was the kind of momentous event that gives one pause ­ and pause I did, for a long time.  I can be notoriously indecisive.  So what was it that froze me I my tracks?  I was signing up for something on a web site and there it was, that soul-wrenching decision.  Sitting in front of my laptop, I agonized for at least a quarter hour.

What would be my user name? 

Face it. It’s a difficult decision.  I wanted to pick something creative and expressive, something people would say, “Oh how clever!  Let’s read what he has to say.”

You know what I finally picked as my user name ­ don heatley.  There’s 15 minutes of my life I won’t be getting back.

Our nicknames, screen names and user names say something about us.  Not only do they express how we see ourselves, they tell how we want others to see us. Discovering who we are, defining our identity, and struggling with how others perceive us is all a part of being human.

Jesus was fully human.  Sometimes I’m not so sure I am but Jesus was fully human.  That’s orthodox Christian belief.  We believe he was both fully divine and fully human.  Yet I wonder when Jesus knew who he was.  His divine nature suggests someone who knows everything, but his human nature suggests a struggle with identity.  Which was it for Jesus?

Now I’m fully aware that some church people get nervous with this kind of talk.  “Of course Jesus knew who he was.  He was God!”  Perhaps, he did think that way, but I wonder if those kinds of defensive statements gloss over Jesus’ authentic humanity.  The safe not-too-human image of Jesus diminishes him.  It implies he just went through the motions of this earthly life and subtracts from the very human dilemmas he wrestled with in the Temptation story or the Garden of Gethsemane.

History and scholarship can tell us a lot about an historical person, when and how they lived, what they did and said, what social forces shaped them.  But it can’t tell us what was in their head or how they thought of themselves.  So admittedly, we are dipping our toes into the murky waters of speculation here. 

There are some things, however, that we can surmise influenced how Jesus saw himself.  Jesus grew up as a Jewish peasant in the land of Judea.  At the time it was occupied by the Roman Empire.  His family wasn’t powerful in the Jewish community and being Jewish they certainly weren’t powerful in the eyes of Rome.  It is safe to assume that Jesus did not see himself as powerful or important by the standards of his culture.  The world said he was a nobody.

But as a Jewish man, he carried a sacred story inside him.   He knew he was part of a people through whom God did and would still do incredible things.  Jesus carried in his very being the knowledge that he was descendant of Abraham, the one who God promised would be a father of a great people who would bless the whole world.  Jesus was the descendant of slaves who God liberated through Moses.  He inherited the rich tradition of the torah, God’s promises and laws of how to live a good life in this world.  Jesus came from a line of great kings, wise people, social rejects who were invited into God’s saga and prophets who ranted about social transformation.  It was a proud, noble and inspiring heritage to carry.

So by the time Jesus reached adulthood, he was living in this tension.  It was a tension between being a semi-powerless nobody from the hick town of Nazareth, and this divine holy heritage DNA that permeated who he was.  Like any of us living in tension, he struggled.  How do I find my place between the limits the world places on me and this story I carry inside me?  How do I, one small person, find out who I am?

You and I are like Jesus.  Shocking, but it’s true.  Jesus shared the human experience with us and a core struggle of that experience is finding our identity. 

Identity is word we hear a lot today.  Fear of crime is nothing new.  In recent years, however, we’ve all learned to fear a new crime ­ identity theft.  Between the internet and electronic banking, we are more vulnerable then ever to having our personal account information and ultimately our money stolen.  Maybe you’ve even received a phone call from your credit card company asking something like, “Have you recently spent $3000 in Las Vegas on Judy Garland drag?”

We fear losing the very things that make us us: bank account numbers, passwords, credit card receipts, PIN numbers.  Anyone notice a common element here?  In our culture, when it comes to our identity, we are defined by one thing ­ our money.  It’s the primary means for expressing who we are and for others to label who we are.  So we fear, rightfully so, that if our financial identity is stolen then our very identity will be also .

But that’s not the only way we lose our identity.  The experiences and trials of life can also strip us of our sense of self.  When I was in college I loved being in a band.  As a person who got nervous meeting new people, being in a band became a great shortcut to having an identity at a party.  I was “with the band.”  No need to actually talk to people.

Then I stopped playing bands and had a bit of an identity crisis.  If I wasn’t Don-who-plays-in-bands, who was I?  How would people know me or like me?  I was mistaking what I did for who I was.

Maybe you or someone you know has had a similar experience.  Perhaps your identity was wrapped up in your job, and then you lost your job.  I have friends who were part of the dotcom boom of the last decade.  They loved being a part of a cutting-edge industry and the instant image of success it created for them.  Then they lost their jobs and sadly, many of them cannot face the fact that that dotcom era is over.  They still look for the same kind jobs they had eight years ago, but those jobs don’t exist anymore.  So their life is on hold, their identity stolen from them.

What’s your identity?  Is it invested in being someone’s spouse, child or parent? When you lose that person to divorce, death or simply the natural progression of life, who are you?

Too often, the criteria by which we form our sense of identity is based on transient circumstances that can easily be taken away from us.  And we are left to wonder who we really are.

Jesus discovered his true identity at his baptism.  Today we heard the account of that event from the Gospel of Mark.  Mark was most likely the first Gospel to be written, probably around 70 AD.  It begins with the passage we heard this morning.  No Nativity story.  No tales of a child wowing the religious leaders in the Temple.  It begins with a baptism.  So for Mark’s community, this event, not the Christmas story, defined who Jesus was.

What is so interesting about Mark’s account of Jesus’ baptism is that it is written from Jesus’ point of view.  Many of us are familiar with the elements of this story, the Holy Spirit descending on him in the form of a dove, the voice from heaven.  We automatically picture, as the other Gospels do, the crowd seeing and hearing these things too. 

But in this, the earliest version of the story, it is Jesus himself, not the crowd who sees and hears these things.  This suggests that at this point in the story, Mark is writing about Jesus’ sense of identity, of his internal knowledge of who he was.

What does Jesus discover?  He sees the heavens opened.  Actually “opened” is too weak a word.  The Greek literally means “ripped apart.” Understand that in the ancient world, the sky was a dome that separated humans from the realm of the divine. These words foreshadow an incident at the end of Mark’s Gospel when the curtain in the Temple rips apart after Jesus dies.  The barrier to the people and the Holy of Holies is opened.  And similarly Jesus sees this barrier, this separation between the human and divine ripped wide open.

What comes out of this portal to the divine world?  When we make movies about portals to another dimension opening, something bad always comes out.  Will it be a Pandora’s box of demons and plagues?  Will it be the armies of heaven?  An angry judgmental God?  No, it’s a dove.  A dove that represents God spirit comes forth and hovers over the waters where Jesus is baptized.  It recalls the creation story in Genesis when the spirit of God hovered over the chaotic waters of creation.  The time when the Spirit lured the world out of nothingness.

That spirit of creation comes to rest on Jesus.  It comes to rest on the chaos of his humanity to create something new.

Then Jesus hears a voice.  The voice quotes an ancient Jewish song, Psalm 2, which we heard earlier.  Psalm 2 is not a feel good psalm.  It warns us about a God that you don’t want to get mad.  But here it is quoted in a new context, a new creation.  Jesus is told by God, “You are my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.”  It’s the language of adoption.

I am pretty sure Jesus had a strong sense of identity after all that.  When I read that story, I get a little envious.  Maybe you do too.  We long for an experience like that.  We ache for God to break open the sky and tell us who we really are.

The truth is, many of us have had such an experience.  God has ripped open the dome of the heavens before our eyes.  We just don’t see it.  God’s voice has adopted us as beloved children.  We just don’t hear it.

“When did that happen?” you may ask.  It seems like we would remember something like that.

Many of you may have been too young to remember because you were a baby. Whether we realize it or not, that is what occurred at our baptisms.  Some of us may have been babies.  Some of us may have been teenagers or adults.  It doesn’t matter.  In the United Methodist church we practice both infant and believer’s baptism.

For those of you who have never been baptized, please don’t feel excluded.  In fact, if you would like to have you or your child baptized or have any questions about it, please get in touch with me and we’ll talk.  God’s invitation is open to everyone.

For those of you who have been baptized, no matter when it was done or by what method, at that moment God told you who you were.  God gave you an identity ­ a child of God.

Baptism is not a slap on the back and welcome to the club, but a sky-ripping event. It breaks the barrier between ourselves and God.  It is a sacrament that opens the portal of God’s grace and creates a passage for God’s transformational Spirit.

Like Jesus, we struggle with our identity but we carry a sacred story inside of us.

No matter what our past.  No matter how the world has stolen or diminished our identity.  No matter how viciously those we know or even love have taken away our sense of worth.  The Spirit of God breaks through that tear in the heavens, hovers over the chaos off our lives, and creates something new.

On the day we were baptized, we stood like Jesus in the water and heard a voice.  A voice that declares with loving certainty, “You are my beloved child in whom I am well pleased.”

And nothing, nothing can steal that identity away from us.