St Margaret's Church Prestwich

Here is Rev Sue’s sermon from Sunday 17 December 2023. The readings that day were based around John’s description of John the Baptist being interrogated as to whether he was a prophet or indeed the Messiah.

I wonder how you would feel if you were to get a DNA testing kit for Christmas? These kits can give you a variety of information, and one popular use is to track relatives by looking on websites to find whether there are unknown family members who share your DNA. For some people nothing unexpected is revealed, some find unexpectedly that their racial heritage is different, and in a few cases there can be revelations about paternity. Medical data might reveal a disposition towards cancer or diabetes. It’s quite a risky process – people can find out things they might not have wanted to know. Why do they do it? It’s because a fundamental human question is “Who am I” and DNA gives one answer to that question.

In the time of Jesus and John the Baptist, of course, very little was understood about genetics beyond the observation that some children resemble their parents. Yet the question “Who are you” was put to both Jesus and John again and again.

John was a man sent by God. He was the cousin of Jesus, and from his birth he was marked out as someone specially chosen – his conception was announced by an angel telling his father Zechariah that his wife Elizabeth would have a baby, even though she was past the age of child bearing. The angel promised that he would be filled with the Holy Spirit even before he was born. In John’s gospel we meet John the Baptist by the banks of the river Jordan, immersing people in water to express the washing away of their sins. This in itself attracted attention – no one had baptised anyone before. In Jewish law people washed themselves to signify cleansing from impurity, but up until now no one had baptised another person. This was something new. So when he was asked “who are you” he straight away answered the unspoken question “I am not the Messiah”. The Jews had correctly identified the beginning of a new age with the coming of the One sent by God, but no, it was not John.

Then there was the way that he was dressed. Elijah was described in the Old Testament as “A hairy man with a leather belt around his waist.” – a style of dress John deliberately adopted. There was an Old Testament prophecy that Elijah would return before the Messiah came. Although John was fulfilling that role, he was not literally Elijah come back to life. Nor was he the prophet that Moses foretold. John quoted Isaiah ‘I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, “Make straight the way of the Lord”’. His role was to prepare the ground for Jesus.

When a member of the royal family is coming to an event all sorts of preparations are made. It is said that the late Queen thought the world smelt of fresh paint There is wonderful footage of Queen Elizabeth visiting a mine in 1958 dressed in a white boiler suit – it remained spotless, showing just how well the mine had been cleaned! Nowadays the preparations are more likely to be about security, searching the premises for anything untoward. When the Israeli ambassador came to Bishopscourt a few years ago, I was amused by his staff checking our house the day before! The preparation for Jesus was no less thorough, but of a more profound and spiritual nature.  By introducing baptism, John was declaring the need of not just individuals, but Israel itself to turn to God in readiness for the coming of the Messiah. By using the words that he is “preparing for the coming of the Lord”, he is identifying Jesus with God himself. That inevitably led the to the question posed to Jesus “Who are you” that he would spend the final 3 years of his life answering by his words and actions.

For all his special birth, his identification with the Old Testament prophecies and his radical new practice of baptism John knew that he was fundamentally unimportant. He was not even worthy to help Jesus take off his sandals, a menial task for the lowest servant. John did not shrink from his calling, he did not worry about being not good enough, not having the right skills or getting it wrong. But nor did he develop an overinflated sense of his own importance.  He showed genuine humility.

What would be your response to that question, “Who are you?” For most of us we would start by answering with our names, which say quite a lot about us. Generally, they indicate ethnicity – a man named Singh conjures up a different image from one named Maguire. They can reflect our parents – in the world of celebrities the name Kardashian, for instance, immediately recalls the whole family. Then you might state your role: “I’m with the police”, I’ve come from St Margaret’s church”, “I’m Charlotte’s Mum”. But none of this defines us. Many of us have changed our surnames, we have had different roles throughout our lives, but we stay the same person.

Our DNA is unique to us (unless we have an identical twin) but neither does that define who we are. In 2016 a reporter from the Daily Telegraph became aware of gossip that Archbishop Justin Welby’s father was not Gavin Welby, but the former private secretary to Winston Churchill, Sir Anthony Montague Browne. He suggested to Justin Welby that he took a DNA test to resolve the matter, and Archbishop Justin, who was confident that Gavin was his father, agreed to take the test. The results came back to show that his biological father was in fact Sir Anthony Montague Browne,  with whom his mother had had a brief affair just before she married Gavin Welby. Justin, and his mother, now 86, were both stunned. After only a few days to gather his thoughts, the story broke, and Archbishop Justin made a public statement. He spoke of the dependence on alcohol of both his mother and her husband, who died in 1977, and his admiration for his mother in overcoming her addiction. He alluded to the messiness of his early life and the support of his grandmother, then explained that his faith, not his genetics gave him his sense of identity. He said, “I know that I find who I am in Jesus Christ, not in genetics, and my identity in him never changes.” He knows himself to be adopted into the family of God. When every family secret is revealed, and every human legacy weighed in the balance, relationship with the Saviour Jesus Christ provides the only safe anchor in an unpredictable world.

The question of identity was also central to the faith of St Francis. He spent long hours praying, “Who are you O, God? And Who am I?”. Richard Rohr, the Franciscan priest says that “What You Seek Is What You Are”. To search for God is to search for our true selves. We cannot find God outside of ourselves unless we find him first within. Our first duty is to love God, to look within to find him in our hearts. Then we know that we are one with God, and therefore we are also one with each other, and with the whole created order. earth and planets, waters, all growing things, animals, humans, angels, and God. We are already connected to everything – we don’t need to do anything. Coming to church, praying, reading our Bibles and serving others all help us to enter deeper into the knowledge of who we already are. They are a response to, and celebration of the truth that lies at the heart of reality. Our separation from God and each other is an illusion, and to quote Rohr again, “When we find peace in our hearts, we will bring peace to the lives of others. When we abide in the beauty of Christ, we will see beauty everywhere”. We do not need to strive. Jesus invites us “not to be good, or to believe the right things, but to be in love”.

John the Baptist experienced the call of God as an overwhelming desire to point to Jesus as the one who was to come, and he recognised his own insignificance. Justin Welby knows that he is a child of God – no other identity matters. Francis of Assisi, in his later life swapped the mantra “Who are you O, God? And Who am I?” for “My God and my all” and Richard Rohr knows that silent meditation leads him to find God within himself and to recognise the truth of the unity of all things. They have all found answers to the question “Who am I” that pointed beyond themselves to God. To inquire who we are, is not a self-centred focussing on ourselves, but to find within our deepest being both our own nothingness and God himself. So ask that question of yourself, “Who am I”.