In the early Church Lent was a time set aside for baptism. Those who were to be baptized took the 40 days of Lent to prepare and were baptized into Jesus’ death during the Easter vigil on Saturday night as the whole church prayed and remembered the time Jesus spent in the tomb.

Those of us who are long past our baptism in Christ are preparing to grow deeper in our relationship with Jesus, to increase our maturity as people of faith and to make a deeper commitment to the ministry to which we have been called, and to reach out to others inviting them into the same life-giving relationship with Christ that provides the meaning and direction for our lives.

Baptism is only the beginning. Living our lives in Christ as Christians is the hard part. Just what does it mean to be a Christian? Who am I as an individual and who are we as a community?

If you ask someone off the street what it means to be a Christian the response goes something like this: you go to church every Sunday, you try to be a good person and you are nice to everybody. Churches are supposed to be service organizations that take care of the poor and helpless. As long as we stay within those boundaries everybody is fine. The moment we get preachy or publicly religious we are labeled as fundamentalists or Bible bangers. The problem is that the street definition of Christianity provides a pretty simple path that allows others to think well of us, yet it keeps many Christians from the kind of discipleship and Christian maturity to which Christ has called us.

During this Lenten Season I am going to try to focus on these questions of Christian identity. Who are we as Christians, and what does it mean to be a community in Christ? There are a number of things that give us a great start as we look at these questions. First you start at the beginning: God created the heavens and the Earth and all that dwells within it. So we are not creators, that is God’s role, we are created. We are wonderfully and lovingly created, to be sure, but we are created none the less. If we are created, the question that immediately follows that is why? What is God’s purpose for our lives? We can easily answer that if we remember that not only are we created in the image of God, but we can know the details of God’s image because scripture tells us that Jesus is the exact image of God. This is one of the direct ways God leads us, because by knowing Jesus’ purpose we know our purpose as well. Like Jesus we are to be bringers of the good news that God has forgiven us and we can be reconciled to our creator as the children of God.

Other questions that are critical to our understanding of what it means to be a Christian, individually and as a people of God, are also revealed by the image of God as well. How should we live? What kind of things should we be concerned with? What should our priorities be? Where do we as individuals fit within the body of Christ? This list can go on and on.

A lot of these questions concern our personal character and can be answered by understanding the character of Jesus. The place to begin is Matthew 11:28 "Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." This is Jesus’ only description of himself in Scripture. If we are truly to learn from Jesus, to become like Jesus, we must begin with gentleness and humility.

In that same humility let us all join in a journey through Scripture this Lenten season as we attempt to discover who we are, what we have been called to do and what kind of people we are called to be, individually as disciples of Jesus, and together as a people of God.

Pastor Jim Bliss
March 2009