The Second Sunday before Lent, 23 February 2025
Readings: Genesis 2.4b-9, 15-end; Luke 8.22-25
‘Who then is this?’
Lilly and the Wave arrived in the nave of the cathedral in the middle of last week. If you haven’t yet had a chance to look at this community art installation, let me encourage you to do so before you leave this morning. Put simply, the story that has inspired it begins, once upon a time, with Lilly, a tiny drop of water, who lived inside a glass in a kitchen. Every day Lilly dreams of leaving the kitchen and becoming part of the greatest wave the world has ever known.
What happens next, I’ll leave you to discover for yourselves, but it’s no accident that we’ve put this installation next to the font. For with its colourful droplets, every one unique, made by children and adults across the country, it speaks of two of the most important realities that are celebrated in Christian baptism. First, that our true identity extends beyond the confines of our individuality; and second, that as baptised members of the body of Christ, we are brought into relationship with others.
‘Who then is this?’
Both the question asked by the disciples at the end of this morning’s Gospel and Lilly and the Wave challenge us to think not only about the identity of the one who stills the storm, but also about the identity of each one of us.
Contemporary society puts us under considerable pressure to label ourselves as one thing rather than another – liberal or conservative, Catholic or Protestant, Monarchist or Republican, right-wing or left-wing, Brexiteer or Remainer, and so on. I don’t want to suggest that we shouldn’t have the freedom to stand up for what we want to stand up for – of course not. But to my mind such an approach, requiring an either / or stance, not only unhelpfully promotes an oppositional way of relating to those who take a different line from us, but also, at a spiritual level, can result in us skewing the way in which we see ourselves by defining ourselves using narrow, polarised categories.
‘Who then is this?’
When questions are asked about identity, the Christian response is often to say that our identity is in Christ and that this trumps all other ways in which we may self-identity or others may define us. The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, expressed this very powerfully when, back in 2016, following a DNA test, he discovered that his biological father was not the person he’d grown up knowing as his father. As well as expressing shock at the news, he went on to say: ‘I know that I find who I am in Jesus Christ, not in genetics, and my identity in him never changes’.
And that, of course, is right – Christian identity is in Christ; it is rock solid, and it’s the gift we receive in baptism. But this confident approach needs to come with a spiritual health warning, for it can damage us if it’s thought that other aspects of our identity are so transcended, or short-circuited, by our divine identity either as to be unimportant or to get in the way. And here I have in mind not those polarised categories which can so easily and unhelpfully define us, but those good, God-given aspects of our identity which we are also offered to us as gift – not least among them gender and sexuality.
At many times in its history, not least at the present time, the Christian Church has struggled to speak of these as God-given, as gifts in creation, because it has got bogged down in polarised ways of thinking about them, rather than seeing them as essential to the way in which we experience the presence of God in our lives and in our relationships. This disciples’ question ‘Who then is this?’ helps us to see that, so often, we’re unable to see Jesus as he is, because we’re unable to see ourselves as we are, by which I mean, as God sees us.
If we go back to the creation narratives in the Book Genesis, the second of which we heard this morning, the fundamental truth which underpins the text is that creation is God’s gift, and he delights in it.
When the first human is formed, what makes that human a living being is God giving something of Godself to the human, the breath of life. What it is to be human is one of the most important questions of our age. There are many ways of approaching it but, to my mind, the starting point for the Christian must be to know ourselves and every other human being as those in whom God delights, the objects of his unceasing love. That is how God sees us. And this love has no purpose or ulterior motive, other than that loving is what God does, because love is who God is.
It sounds so simple, and yet it’s so difficult for us to get our heads and hearts around. For many of us, self-doubt, and sometimes self-hatred, skew our perspective away from seeing ourselves as God sees us – as objects of love. Fear of failure, anxiety about what others think of us, and uncertainty about our own identity combine in an unhealthy way to distort our view of self, others and God. We can easily find ourselves in a maelstrom of powerful emotions which leave us feeling overwhelmed and out of control, like the disciples on the lake when the boat fills with water and they begin to sink, while Jesus is asleep, apparently oblivious to their need.
Jesus’ stilling of the storm is, first and foremost, a revelation of his true identity – human and divine, Son of God and Son of Mary – these are not polarised or oppositional, but held together by love in the paradox of the incarnation.
On that lake, after the storm has been stilled, the disciples’ questioning response is not entirely care-free, but now their fear has been transformed into awe, awe in the presence of the one they have begun to recognise as the embodiment of the perfect love which casts out fear.
If the word truly became flesh in Jesus Christ, then in the incarnation God embraces every aspect of our lives; nothing falls outside this divine embrace. And if that’s the case, then gender and sexuality need to be seen first and foremost not as issues for the church to fall out over, but part of our God-given identity; and we need to recognise and celebrate that, if we’re going to become the people God created and redeemed us to be.
The great second century bishop of Lyons, St Irenaeus, gets to the heart of the matter when he says that ‘the glory of God is a human being fully alive’. Irenaeus believed in a God who does not constrain or limit us or try to stunt our growth, who isn’t interested only in our best bits, what we’re least ashamed of, our Sunday best; but rather a God who looks at us with eyes of love, and desires us to look at ourselves and each other in the same way; and, from that starting point, take the risk of being open and honest in our relationships with one another and with God, co-operating with God in his work of transformation, so that through repentance and the grace of the renewal, we might discover afresh what it means to become our true selves, a human being fully alive.
So, ‘who then is this?’ One of the most powerful aspects of the artwork currently in the nave is that it’s not just about Lilly, it’s about all of us, and every part of all of us. As we are invited to approach the altar this morning, let us do so not hiding our fears and anxieties, but also not lacking in confidence and hope; let us not be tempted to allow ourselves to be known by narrow, polarised labels, but take the risk of discovering afresh that our true identity is in the God who, in love, created us, and who now and at every moment of our lives longs to breathe his life into us; for if we dare to look up from our inward-looking selves and meet the gaze of the one who looks upon us with eyes of passionate, unconditional love, then the possibility of a new life will become open to us, a life lived in generous acceptance of ourselves, of others and of our God.