Today’s author is Prince of Peace’s Intentional Interim, Pr. Steve Sylvester.
“You are not your own.” 1 Corinthians 20a
You’re in your “working years,” short of retirement, and you’re meeting people you don’t know at a party. Another youngish person comes up to you. After a few pleasantries—perhaps something like “How about those Twins?” or remarking on the quality of the food—you get asked THE question: “So, what you do?” That’s it, isn’t it? Not, “Who ARE you?,” but “What do you DO?” In this world, what we do IS who we are, because it tells people what we produce, how much we make, how important we are. St. Paul asks a different question of us. St. Paul wants to know not what we do, or even who we are. He wants to know WHOSE we are, and he wants us to know that as well.
In their very early years, the people of God identified themselves in this way. Who they were wasn’t about customs or a specific belief system or anything like that. After delivering the Israelites from enslavement, God said to them, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.” That is the central Jewish prayer, said to be the oldest confessional statement in the Bible. Who they were was about whose they were.
That’s certainly still true of our Jewish siblings, and two thousand years in it’s true of Christians as well. At the risk of getting stuck on Trinitarian fly paper, we follow Jesus, but we belong to God. That means we can choose to listen to Jesus or not, we can choose to emulate him or not, but we cannot choose not to be God’s. Hardcore free willers might see that as a problematic statement, even demeaning. I see it as comforting. There is no place I can go, nothing I can do that will cut me off from God and God’s love for me.
In addition to it being comforting, the reality that we belong to God also means we are called to account by God. Jesus told us what God requires of us when he said that we are to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and we are to love our neighbor as we love ourselves (and we do well to add to that God’s Genesis call to us to be good stewards of God’s creation, an expectation God has always had of us, but which has more urgency these days).
I encourage you to take a moment right now to think or say the words, “I am not my own.” If you are entering into a new day, consider what that means for your daily interactions, that you are not a free agent, that God calls you to participate in the world as a lover of all that God loves. If you are reading this in the evening and are preparing to lie down to rest, think about being watched over by the God to whom you belong. Waking or sleeping, we are God’s.