Recently I was asked to speak at the national conference for the Association for Christians in Student Development (ACSD). The organizers asked me to give a theological account for the work of student development and to show how the themes of the conference connected to the good work of student life. Here is the fourth installment of the six talks I gave on June 10-13.
Session 4 The Good Work of Identity Formation
For most of my
time in college, I felt totally lost. I went to San Jose State, where I was able
to pursue my life-long dream of playing football. Even with success, I was
totally empty.
Strangely, the
most profound feeling of emptiness came after one of the best games I ever played.
I remember standing on the Orange Bowl logo at the fifty yard-line, shaking
hands with Gino Torretta, the Heisman trophy winner that year. I was a freshmen;
I got my first start; and we played the number one team in the country, the
University of Miami. We lost the game, but we played them tough for three
quarters. And I had twelve tackles, and it seemed like an amazing start for a
promising career. But in spite of all of that, as I stood on the iconic Orange
Bowl logo, I felt totally empty, totally lost, wondering whether this life goal
of mine was worth anything in the end.
What was most troubling
was that the deep feeling of emptiness did not go away. Like a cloud, it hovered
over me for two years, haunting me each morning when I woke up, and covering me
as I went to practice each day. But that all changed when I encountered God
through Paul’s letter to the Romans. I stumbled upon Romans 12.2: “do not be
conformed the patterns of this world any longer, but be transformed by the
renewal of your mind so that you can discern what God’s will is.” Suddenly the
cloud disappeared. I knew that the reason why my life was so empty was because
I was seeking my identity from things that have no permanence, no anchor. Paul
was opening the door for me to receive my true identity, one who belongs to God
and who is made to know and do God’s will.
But it was a community of other believers, fellow
college students that heard and responded to that same call, that taught me how
to live out Romans 12.2, how to receive this identity that God was giving to
me.
This passage in
Romans comes at a climactic point in the overarching argument that Paul has
been making in his magisterial epistle. For eleven chapters he has been trying
to help his readers understand their identity in Christ. Here in Romans 12 he
begins to reflect upon how this identity gets worked out in everyday life. He
begins this section of Roman with two foundational assumptions about Christian
identity: First, he asserts that there the
goal of life is “discerning God’s will”—orienting our work around the will and
work of another. This we might say is our vocation. The second assumption of
this passage is that our vocation is lived out in a context in which we are
being directed away from our true calling in life, to orient our lives around
another. Our default position is “to be conformed to this age” (the Greek word
often translated as ‘world’ or ‘age’ in this passage really means something
more like ‘patterns, standards, or assumptions of the age that we live
in’). In Paul’s mind this default conformity to the age we live in
deforms our humanity because it detours us from our calling.
The sort of life that the Apostle
Paul calls us to in Christ is antithetical to the way our culture is forming
us. For Paul, our identity is not something that we must construct, it is
something that is given to us by God, something that we must receive as a gift.
Our truest self is only to be discovered outside of ourselves as we orient our
lives to the life and will of another.
But this conception of
self-identity runs contrary to the way the world is conforming us today. We
live in a “me-centered” world.
That is not to say that our modern age is overly selfish or narcissistic—at
least not more than in any other generation. Instead, the modern self has been conformed
to create its identity without reference to anything other than desire and
preference. “[I]n contrast to previous ages, modern culture denies that one can
become an authentic person or experience fulfillment in life by conforming
to anything outside of preferences and desires. Instead we are taught that our
self-worth and happiness depend on reconstructing ourselves according to our psychology.
And the project of redesigning ourselves necessitates that we continually break
free from the web of social relationships and expectations that would otherwise
impose an alien identity on us” (Highfield,17). In this framework of understanding
what it means to be human, most people in the modern age feel that God is
actually a threat to their wellbeing. Most people that walk on to our campuses,
even Christians, have been conditioned to question, not whether life in Christ
is true, but whether it is good.
But what has the modern self done for us? Where has it taken us? Has
this new way of understanding who we are and why we are here delivered on its
promises of dignity, freedom, and happiness? No. The fact is that there is an
enormous disparity between the inflated assumptions of the modern self and the
reality of the world we have made for ourselves in the modern age.
I have worked at LETU for 12 years and have seen the radical and
shocking decline of the emotional and mental health of young adults as they
enter college. And as a pastor I witness firsthand the struggle that most
people have to keep their head above the waters of anxiety, despair, sadness,
and the seeming futility of life. In my experience, there has been a radical
decline in quality of life in the past twelve years--in relationships, sense of
purpose, and ability to give attention to things that matter.
The modern self, the self that we
are becoming if we are not being intentional about our formation, is in
competition with God. And the self that has no resource outside of itself only
has three possible options in response: (1) we can defiantly resist; (2) we can
try to figure out how to use God as a means to our end (God as a technology, if
you will); (3) or we can try to ignore or bracket out God as we pursue our
sense of dignity, freedom, and fulfillment.
One of the ways that God heals this brokenness, this
lostness of our age is through campus life. Campus life oriented around the
work of Jesus Christ is a gift to the world. And this gift is given to equip us
to reach out and draw in those who are broken, lost, and searching. In the
work that you are doing, God is giving you the opportunity to show the goodness
of conforming our lives to the will and work of God, to put flesh and bones on
the message of hope and healing that we proclaim. As those who have been
reconciled to Christ, we need to think of campus development as refugee work. We have a refugee crisis. We are working with
students who have been displaced by the modern notion of self, by the dead-end conforming
assumptions of our age, and by the unintended disruption of technology that
leaves us with no place to anchor ourselves, no place to call home in any
permanent way. We are not in a culture war, rather we have been enlisted to
take part in a rescue mission that is accomplished through divine hospitality!
This is what the whole letter of Romans is about. In Romans
15.7, Paul brings his argument to a climax with the exhortation: “Welcome one
another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.” Identity formation
is not a solitary act. It takes a community, a village. Welcoming others into
fellowship with God and his people is the means by which God transforms our
sense of identity, it is one of the ways in which we renew our minds. Dr Perry
Glanzer will put some flesh on this in his keynote address this afternoon. As
you prepare for his address, take some time to discuss or reflect on the
following: what can you do this coming academic year to create spaces for
students to learn their identity in Christ, to find their true home?
Prayer: Father, we give you
thanks for the welcome home that we have received through your Son, Jesus
Christ. Empower us to extend that same hospitality to those you have placed in
our midst; strengthen our communities in this age of tribalism and division, so
that we can bear witness to the home we have in you, and so that we can come to
better understand who we are because of the work you have done in and through
Jesus Christ. —for your glory and for our healing. Amen.
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