Christian identity

I won't beat around the bush. The question of Christian identity is hard. This questions pertain to the extremely tricky question of what it means to be a Christian. Is it what you do that makes you a Christian? Is it your values that make you a Christian? Is it your beliefs that make you a Christian? All of those questions could be said to somehow be said to be the leading question of what being Christian mean. But then we have missed something.

And I know this hurts our egos quite a bit, but this "being Christian"-thing? It ain't just about you. It is something so much more. 

You can't be a Christian on your own, you just can't. Because when God became man in Jesus Christ, it was not to create little faithful individuals all around. There were so many of those already in 1st century Palestine so that they were pretty much an export commodity. No, it was to create a community. Sure, Jesus came to save individual sinners, but for what? Was it so sinners could start ticking the right boxes in the great multiple-choice test of faith? No, it was so sinners could become a part of the Resurrection and the Life, the Kingdom of God. And that's what baptism is about. 

Baptism isn't there in order for people to show how nice and Christian they are. It's so they can enter into the holy community that Jesus Christ created through his resurrection from the dead. Jesus was baptised by John the Baptist, and then proceeded to bitch-slap the entire natural order as we percieve it, by dying and then coming back from the dead, full of Life. When we are baptised, we share in that completely barrier-shattering and wonderful Life with capital-L as then we too die, with Jesus, and are resurrected, with Jesus, and we become something other than a mere believer. In one way, we are changed as a person. It is only then that we become part of the Church. Not as individual believers, like it's a common interests club of holiness, but as One. One Body. The Body of Christ.

I think, that being a Christian is not about anything that we sinners do. It's about to whom we belong. That we are all part of the life-giving Body of Christ. And God wants you there, in his Body. Explore your faith and question it. Learn from the Scripture and speak to the wise and ask those ego-hurting questions that so few dare to ask. And when you're ready to, you can be baptised and become One with Christ, and with me and all other holy sinners.

God's waiting. He's patient.