Sunday, March 8, 2020. Rev. Dr. Scott Ramsey, preaching.Scripture Readings: Genesis 1:26-27; Leviticus 26:12-13; Galatians 3:27-28Sermon Series: Sunday Morning, Monday Morning – Part 2: Covenant/Image of God & Identity

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SERMON TEXT

Today is week 2 of our Lenten sermon series, “Sunday

Morning, Monday Morning,” where we are taking a term or a concept from our

faith tradition, words that we use on Sunday morning and which can sometimes

feel a bit “churchy.” We’re reflecting on the deep meaning that those words

have for our lives in the world during the week, beginning on “Monday morning.”

These are not remote terms that are useful for passing an ordination exam, but

not much else. Rather, these are terms and concepts that can provide us with

grounding and direction and confidence for our lives.

We need this kind of grounding and direction and confidence all the time, but we especially need it during times of great anxiety. And we’re living through one of those times right now – between the fears around the coronavirus, the intense polarization that leads us to see each other as enemies and threats, and what can sometimes feel like the unraveling of society. These are the kinds of times when people turn to their faith, when faith can provide us with security and courage and honesty – not in a Pollyanna kind of way, but in a deep, slow, wise way.

Today we are reflecting on a series of texts that get at the underlying question of “who are we?” with the concepts of the ‘image of God’ and ‘covenant.’ These terms address questions of identity, questions about what it means to be human, questions about where we go to secure and find our identity. It is no secret that these questions of identity arise with acute intensity at certain transitional points in our lives, when we are having to make decisions about how we’re going to live – adolescence is one such time, young adulthood, middle age, retirement, end of life. We can find ourselves asking, “What am I doing here? What do I need to be doing? Do I belong? Who else belongs?”

These questions get off to a big start in our reading from Genesis 1. Right on the first page of the Bible, we hear this majestic pronouncement, which we may have been hearing all our lives so that we miss its astonishing power: “God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness…God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”

You could spend an entire semester chewing on this text. But for the moment, let’s set aside some of the questions that are raised by this text, questions like “who exactly is the ‘us’ to whom God is talking here?” Setting those important – and fascinating – questions to the side, what I want us to notice here is that every person that has ever lived is created in the image of God – all the supposedly good people, as well as all the supposedly bad people; all the people you like, and every single person that you despise; people of every nationality and color and faith and sexual orientation and political affiliation – every person that has ever lived is created in the image of God.

We all bear the image of God in our lives. From the beginning of all that is, from page 1, before we do anything to deserve it, we are marked in some mysterious but enduring way with the image of God. The Latin term for this – I’m not sure that there are a huge number of Latin terms that people need to walk around with, but this is one – the Latin term for ‘image of God’ is imago Dei. “Dei” like ‘deity.’ You bear the image of God. So does the person sitting next to you. So does the homeless person that you’ll drive past at the intersection on the way home. So does the star student in your class. So does the teenager in your neighborhood who’s having trouble finding her way through h