Identity, Judgment and the Unity of Passover

Well, happy Sabbath! And thank you, Mrs. Roudenbush, for that beautiful melody and those meaningful, those meaningful words.

What is your identity? What's your identity? And how was it formed? How did you form this concept of who you are and what you are? We think we know how we form our identities, and we think we have a process, but it's actually probably different than what you think it is. Let me tell you about some five-year-olds and how they form their identities. I want to tell you about...there's a study done in 2012. It's called Consequences of Minimal Group Affiliations in Children. It's exciting, right? Consequences of minimal group affiliations in children. Well, here's what they did. They brought a bunch of kids in, not as a group, but one at a time. They'd bring kids in, and they'd show them a red coin and a blue coin, and they'd put them behind their back and mix them up. They'd say, okay, you pick one.

And whichever one they picked, that was the color that was assigned to them. Red, blue, and they'd put them in a shirt. Red t-shirt, a blue t-shirt, and now you were team red or team blue, whichever it was. And they'd take the kids and they'd sit them down and they'd run them through a series of tests. They would do tests where they sat them down and they showed them a screen with two kids on it, one in a red shirt and one in a blue shirt, and they'd say, for each of these kids, tell us on a scale of, like, I really don't like this person, two, I really like this person, scale of one to six. They said, tell us what you think of each of these people. And the kids would go through and tell them, and then they'd do things. They'd put up a screen, same screens, red and blue. They'd say, well, you heard about somebody that did something. They'd tell them a good thing, or they'd tell them a bad thing, and they'd say, which of these kids did it? The kids would pick. And what they found is pretty shocking. They said, five years old, being assigned team red or team blue, you were very heavily biased toward your red team or your blue team.

When they asked, how do you feel about these kids? On average, you would rate kids at about a 4.3 if they were in your group, and about a 3.8 if they were not in your group. And that's factoring for gender, for other things. It's purely red, blue. You're randomly assigned a group, red or blue, and this is what you'll pick. This is what you'll be a part of. And you start to identify with that group. You take on that identity, and you start to form opinions about the other group. This is one of many studies that have been done. Starting back in the 70s, there were some earlier studies, down in the 50s even, that started to explore some of these ideas. In the 1970s, a string of studies was done that came to be known as what's called the minimal group paradigm. And it's been repeated hundreds of times in hundreds of studies, and it's not just five-year-olds that think this way, it's teenagers that think this way, and it's adults that think this way. We all think this way. This is how humans operate. This is our default mode. This minimal group paradigm, it shows that it's basically just in our nature to form group bias. That's what we do. It's our default. And we form these biases even around trivial distinctions, even around random distinctions. We form biases.

It's how we're wired. And then what we do is we make judgments around the people around us, and we form our identity based on those judgments. This is... it's all interesting.

This is all... you can say, well, okay, great, that's some study, that's fine. But we're here on the Sabbath, where we're talking about these studies. These studies are just...

they're just sort of modern validations of principles that we understand biblically, and things that we have seen for thousands of years. Let's go to 1 Corinthians. We're spending most of the sermon today in 1 Corinthians. Let's go to 1 Corinthians chapter 1. It's nice that we live in a time where we have some of this... we have people out there who are researching and doing studies and coming up with this data that essentially validates what we understand about human nature from the Bible. We don't need to shy away from it or anything like that. We can look at some of these things and say, oh, yeah, there are principles here that we understand, and they're just being demonstrated to us and maybe quantified in either interesting ways, if you're one of those data nerds, or maybe in boring ways, if you're not. But we see it demonstrated, and we see principles here. Let's go to 1 Corinthians chapter 1 and verse 10. 1 Corinthians 1 and verse 10. Now I plead with you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment. Here we're reading this first letter to Corinth, and the church in Corinth, we find, was not in a good place. They were not in a healthy place. We see in 2 Corinthians that they turn things around, it seems. They improve. But here, this first book of Corinthians, we see a church that's fairly broken, fairly fractured, and their record is on record. We get to read about all of their dirty laundry, and we see that they had divisions among them. Corinth was a church that was a mixture of Jews and Gentiles.

It was a very cosmopolitan city, you might say. They had people from all over. There's indication that there was some nobility in there. There were probably also slaves. There were a mixture, again, merchants and commoners and people from all over. And so you can understand, if we can make these sorts of divisions based on really trivial things, well, we can certainly form divisions on less trivial things, and we see that happening here in Corinth. Verse 11, For it's been declared to me, concerning you, my brethren, by those of Chloe's household, that there are contentions among you. It's interesting that he calls out Chloe's household as they're the people that tattled on everybody, but he says, he says, it's declared to me that there are contentions among you. Now I say this, that each of you says, I am of Paul, or I am of Apollos, or I am of Cephas, or I am of Christ. We see them doing their group identities, right? There's this sort of identity politics that's happening. They're saying, well, you know, Paul's my guy, and I don't know about those Apollonians. They're a little weird. They've got some ideas, you know, or Cephas, well, he's really got it together. All these other guys came later, and I don't know. I don't know about them.

And then there's the guys who say, well, I'm of Christ, you know, and maybe elevating themselves a little bit. We don't know. We weren't there. We can guess, right? But what he's saying is that they were doing the thing that humans do. They're just doing what humans do. Red shirt, blue shirt, right? And if we don't have red shirt, blue shirt, we find some other distinction and we say, oh, well, you know, I really like this guy. This is, this is, he's my guy. It was a man named Henri Tajfel who did many of these studies in the 1970s, and out of his minimal group paradigm studies, he developed a theory that he called social identity theory, and it's been proven out pretty well over time. The theory basically says this. It says that we, when we look at the world, we categorize ourselves and others into groups, right? And not just within the room here, right? But the world in general.

We look out there and we go, oh, okay, well, there's those groups in that group, and, you know, and in the church at large, right, you know, there's that group and here's this group.

So we categorize ourselves and our others into groups. We identify with the groups that positively reinforce our ideas about ourselves. Oh, this group? Yeah, I really like what they're about, and me and that group? Yeah, we gel. I like that. And then we compare our groups very favorably against those other groups that we didn't identify with. Well, these are, this is my group, and we're pretty cool. That group's kind of weird. That group's just outright bad. That group? Ah, they're okay, but, you know, nothing interesting going on over there. Our group, though? We're good, right? We get judgy. That's what we do, right?

We tend toward judgment. Now, that's not to say, we're not here picking on anybody today. All we're doing is we're looking at it and we're saying, this is what human nature does. This is just our default mode. This is how we operate, right? If somebody says, redshirt, blue shirt, your brain is just wired to say, yep, I'm a redshirt guy, blue shirt, color weirdos. Back in 1 Corinthians 1, verse 13, is Christ divided? That's the question we want to ask leading up to Passover. Is Christ divided? Because we get to this question, and the way Paul writes it, he says it in such a way, is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized in the name of Paul? He's very clearly making this case in a way that says, of course not! No! He's making this argument rhetorically, and our answer to Paul here is supposed to be, okay, of course not. But 2,000 years of history, it's very hard to give that dogmatic no and say, well, of course not, I don't think. You look at the things that have been called Christianity for the last 2,000 years and the amount of fragmentation in those, and obviously we understand not all of that is Christianity. Some things hijack the name of Christianity, and there's not a lot we can do about that. But even within Christianity itself, even those of us who understand what the Church of God is, you look at it and when Paul says, you know, when he asks this question, you go, ah, well, you know, is Christ divided? Let's explore that today. Let's look at that. Let's talk about that some. Because if you notice in verse 12, right, their division was about identity.

I am of Paul. I am of Paul, of Paulos. I am of Christ. They had an identity problem.

Unity, division, is about identity, and identity is shaped by judgment. It's shaped by our judgment about the people around us. We like to think that we actually just form an identity based on ideals and ideas, right? But often what happens is we make judgments about the world around us, and then we kind of align our identity to conform with those judgments that we've made. In a sense, you're forming your identity with every judgment you make about every person you know. So it's a constant thing that's happening. Our identity is always shifting a little bit, because every time we make judgments about a person or a group or a hypothetical group of people, you know, in a lot of these tests, a lot of these experiments that they've done, the people that individuals are making judgments about are people they've never seen or met. They're purely hypothetical people. Sometimes there's not even a picture. It's just a hypothetical person, a hypothetical group. But when we make judgments about other people, about other groups, and I mean that in all the senses, in the largest sense and in the smallest sense, when we make those judgments, we're actually shaping our identity.

It's almost automatic. It just happens by default, because that's our nature. First Corinthians chapter 3. Let's go over to chapter 3. First Corinthians chapter 3 and verse 3, he says, For you are still carnal. Carnal is not a word that we tend to use a lot every day. I don't know about you. Carnal is a word that almost feels a little more like church speak. When you hear that word, you know you're probably either at church or talking about church, or reading something church-related. Otherwise, not a word we use a lot. It just means, think of it as meaning, this is just human. This is just human nature. Other translations will say fleshly. But even there, that can be a little misleading, because it really just means this is what the human mind does. It's just our automatic. And it's not something that we need to be overly defensive about or anything. Obviously, we're trying to not have that mind. But it's good to look at it and be able to say, okay, something that is carnal and fleshly, that is going to be our default. That's going to be the automatic thing that we do. And so understanding what we tend to do, understanding our trend, is important and is valuable. And so when he's talking to them here, he says, You are still carnal. For where there are envy, strife, and divisions among you? Are you not carnal and behaving like mere men? See, when you do those things, it's just you're just being human. You're not being Christ-like. You're being human. This is because this is what humans do. Verse 21. Verse 21. Paul tells us the remedy to those who are saying, Well, I'm of Paul and I'm of Apollos, and this is my group, and I'm a redshirt, and they're blue shirts. Verse 21. Therefore, let no one boast in men, for all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or things present or things to come, all are yours, and you are Christ's, and Christ is God's. There he calls out our identity. He says, You are Christ. That's your identity.

That's who you are. Is that what you think of when you think of your identity? I am Christ.

If you've been baptized into His death, in that sense, He owns you. You are His. You know, elsewhere we see it framed in different ways. We're His bride, or we're heirs with Him, or we're citizens of His kingdom, but however you look at it, we are His. We're not our own. We're told that as well. We don't belong to ourselves, and so we don't really have a claim on ourselves. We are His. You and I are Christ's.

And we affirm that every year with the symbols that we take. Let's go over to chapter 10.

First Corinthians chapter 10 and verse 16. The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ? Communion is a word that's sort of been hijacked and has religious overtones, too. But communion here just means sharing. It means fellowship. It's a communal thing. In the West, we're a little resistant to the idea of anything communal. We've got some communists among us that we love. But we think about...we've been trained politically to say, okay, well, the West, we're this way. And communal things, that's this other culture.

That's this other political thing. That's this other style of things. And so we don't do anything communal here. We're very individualistic. But there is a communal aspect to what we do and what we believe that he's talking about here. This is a communal thing that we do together, communally. Because those things, these symbols that we take, they identify us as a people. Verse 17, for we, though many, are one bread and one body. For we all partake of that one bread. These are the symbols that declare us as His when we renew our covenant.

When we take those symbols together, we do it all together. It's something that we come together and we do once a year as His people on that one night and we take it. There's nothing quite like that. In everything else that we do over the Holy Day calendar, there's nothing quite like that event. Because it's supposed to bring us all together as one people, as one body. And that's our identity.

1 Corinthians 11. Let's go down the page a little bit. Verse 18. 1 Corinthians 11 verse 18. He's picking on them again. Again, we're going to see some of their dirty laundry, but He's picking on Corinth. 1 Corinthians 11.18. For first of all, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you and in part I believe it. For there must also be factions among you that those who are approved may be recognized among you. He says there are going to be divisions. There are some that were among them that were not.

There are some that were not. There are some that were among them that were probably not with it, you might say. But He says those who are approved among you may be recognized among you. Therefore, when you come together in one place, it's not to eat the Lord's Supper. For in eating, one takes his own supper ahead of others, and one is hungry, and another is drunk.

They didn't understand why they were coming together. They didn't understand their identity, and that this event was the thing that was proclaiming their identity. That it was the thing that was declaring who they were. They didn't get that. They thought they were coming together for who knows what, right? But it was a very different event for them than what God had intended.

Verse 23, For I received from the Lord that which I also delivered to you. So He's going to reset them here a little bit and remind them. Here is what this event is about. That the Lord Jesus on the same night in which He was betrayed took bread, and when He had given thanks, He broke it and said, Take, eat.

This is my body which is broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me. In the same manner, He also took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood. This do as often as you drink it in remembrance of me. For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death till He comes. He says, You're proclaiming His death until He comes. And you're not proclaiming it. You know, when we come together and do that, we don't proclaim it and like broadcast it out to the world, right, as some proclamation for everybody to see.

And we don't just come together and proclaim it as a historic event. Oh, here's the thing that happened. And so, we're just making sure that people remember that this happened. We're proclaiming that this event happened for us. When you take the Passover, you're proclaiming that that is your saving event.

That's the thing that defines who you are. That's your covenant that you are refreshing, renewing in a sense. It's your identity. You're saying, This is who I am. This is what I am. I'm Christ. And I'm going to take these symbols and proclaim in that sense your faith in what He did and in who you are and in the fact that He owns you. So that's our identity. That's what these symbols are about, is remembering Him and proclaiming Him as the one that we belong to. But we still have this judgment problem, because we still remember. Our automatic default is to say, Okay, well, but now I'm going to judge the people around me, the groups around me.

I'm going to discern, try to figure out my group, their group, elevate my group. We'll be better. How do we fix that? How do we address that problem? Our identity, remember, is going to be shaped by our judgment. But our identity can shape our judgment. If we turn it around a little bit, our identity, who we are, should shape how we judge the world around us. It should shape how we judge other people and how we interact with other people. Verse 27, still here in 1 Corinthians 11.

Therefore, whoever eats his bread or drinks his cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of the bread and drink of the cup. Verse 31, For if we would judge ourselves, we would not be judged. Examine yourselves. Judge yourselves. When we understand our identity, then judgment gets turned around, and rather than turning our judgment outward, it starts with ourselves. We examine ourselves, who we are. We judge ourselves for what we are.

Judgment starts within. But then, what about the outside? How do we extend that further?

Because we're still going to default to judging other people in a human way. Let's go over to the book of James, because the book of James has some really great guidance on judgment.

Verse 2. We're talking about our human nature, and how humanly our brains will just want to go. And our brains will default to making sure that we feel good about ourselves above these other groups, above these other people, above whatever is out there. But we don't want to be led by that spirit, by that way of thinking. We want to be led by God's Spirit.

We want God's Spirit to guide us. Sometimes what we need is we need to be planting these principles in our heads so that we understand when God's Spirit gives you a nudge in this direction that you recognize, oh, this is the direction. This is the way we want to go. That's why He gives us His Word, is so that we can take those principles and plant them in there. And when God's Spirit nudges us in a direction that we recognize from Scripture, we go, oh, yeah, this is the one. This is the thing I need to act on, not the human tendency that I'm going to default to. James 2. These are some of these principles that we need to implant. Verse 1, Again, this is just the human style of judgment. We default to being partial. We default to showing favoritism toward the people that we want to identify with. And he's just saying, have you not fallen back into that trap when you do this? Here it's over wealth and status, but as we've seen, it can be over anything. It can be over really dumb things. We can show partiality and favoritism over the most trivial of things, down to redshirt, blueshirt.

Verse 9, But if you show partiality, you commit sin. He says it very plainly. When we have that mindset that just tends toward our in-group, favoring our in-group, over our out-groups, he says, you've committed sin. It's favoritism. It's partiality. He says, that's sin. And you're convicted by the law as transgressors. So how do we overcome that? That's just our default way of thinking. So how do we get past that? James gives us a little bit of insight here. Let's jump back up to verse 5. James 2 and verse 5. We'll just look at two principles, two ideas, two ways that he talks about being able to combat this tendency that we have. Verse 5, he says, Listen, my beloved brethren, has not God chosen the poor of this world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom, which he promised to those who love him? He's saying, he's telling them, has God not chosen the poor of this world? And you have to go, yeah, I guess so. I guess he has. I guess he's chosen.

And it begs the question, well, who else has God chosen? It's really hard sometimes to know who God has chosen, isn't it? You'll see people walking the doors and you go, really? God chose that person? And it turns out that, yeah, God chose that person. You go, all right. Okay, cool.

Sometimes we do the opposite. We look around and we go, oh, yeah, God's definitely chosen that person. And he's definitely working with that group or this person here or that person. It turns out he wasn't ever working with them at all, right? And surprising, surprising sometimes when people that we think God has been working with, they take off because he never had been working with them. They looked like it, but he never had been. The point is it's really hard for us to see that. It's really hard for us to discern who God has chosen. We don't know. So how do we say, how do we approach that? He's saying, you know, he's chosen the poor of this world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom, which he promised to those who love him. We know from Scripture that God wants all people to come to repentance. So really what James is encouraging them to do is take the long view. Take the long view. We don't know who God has chosen, but we know that in the end God wants everybody to come to repentance. And when you take the long view, you can say, well, maybe this person is somebody that is going to come to repentance someday.

Maybe now, maybe at this time, maybe in the second resurrection. We don't know, right? But somewhere down the road, maybe this person is going to be a part of the in-group.

Maybe the in-group is everybody. God says that's his intent. His intention is that all people are included. Everybody is part of the group. So that broadens your circle a little bit.

Your in-group has to be pretty big. It has to be pretty expansive. It includes everybody. It includes people who are antagonistic toward God. It includes people who... It's important to distinguish between things like... There is a difference between spirit-led people and God-fearing people. There are people who are God-fearing people who try to study this Bible and understand it to the best of their ability, right? And their minds are shrouded. Satan has cast a veil, and God has simply not drawn them yet. It doesn't mean that there are out there horrible people working against us. It means they don't understand some things, right? They're God-fearing, but they're not yet spirit-led. But maybe someday, if you take the long view, someday those are going to be spirit-led people too. So take the long view. Second thing we can do, we see in verse 12.

James 2 and verse 12, he says, so speak and so do as those who will be judged by the law of liberty.

Say, wait a second. I'm going to be judged also? I don't get to just judge the world around me.

I also am going to be judged. Aha! I see. There's something then that there's some responsibility on me, he says. For judgment is without mercy to the one who has shown no mercy. He's reminding them, by the way, you get judged too. And by the way, for you and me, it says elsewhere that the axe is already at the root of the tree. We're already being judged. God is already judging us.

We are being judged. What kind of judgment do we want to receive?

Notice his closing statement, because this is powerful. Mercy triumphs over judgment.

Is mercy going to triumph over judgment in your life?

What he implies here is that it really depends on you. Are you going to be the kind of person that shows mercy, that extends mercy, that sees that the group that God wants to include is everybody, and that he's willing to extend mercy to everybody.

In the context here in James, right, he's talking, remember, he's using as an example the rich and the poor that come in, and one gets favored over the other. He's saying in this context, mercy means that you recognize when somebody might be a little bit of an outsider. They might look or feel like they're a little bit of that out-group, and mercy in that context is not about even forgiveness of a wrong. Mercy is simply making an outsider feel like an insider. That's mercy.

Right?

If you see and you judge and you discern that somebody looks like out-group and you make them in-group, right, you've extended mercy. It's really interesting.

These studies about minimal group paradigm, it begs the question, well, how do we fix this problem? How do we fix the fact that we just default to being biased about things? What's the cure? It's interesting. There was one study that was done in the 50s, and it was teenage boys at a camp, and they kind of cultivated this in-group, out-group thing. The two groups didn't actually know each other. They didn't interact, but they were able to develop this in-group, out-group bias among these separate groups.

Then they thought, okay, well, how do we fix it? How do we fix it? They tried different things, but they found you don't fix it by mingling. They tried to get everybody together to have dinners together, and that didn't work. They thought, okay, let's let them have some fun together, watch a movie. They get them together and watch a movie together, and that didn't work.

The thing that fixes it is that you've got to give a group a problem that's so big that they need each other. That's what fixes it. They said something like, you know, you guys gotta dig a ditch. There's 200 yards here to there, and we're gonna lay some pipe.

Well, now if you've ever had to dig in the earth, you know that's the worst thing that you could ever have to do. Digging ditches, especially in this soil that we have here, is pretty horrible.

And so if you go from needing 10 guys to do it, and you've got 20 guys to do it, and now you can all get out there and dig the stitch together, and it goes a lot faster, right? Well, that's how you bring people together. You just throw some big horrible problem at them where they need each other, and now all those biases, they kind of disappear. It's like, well, I guess we really do need each other. Someday, we know, someday, it's prophesied. Satan and this world are going to be so violently against us as God's people that we're gonna need each other, right? All of us. And I think, you know, will we laugh or will we cry, right, about some of our current state? Will we look at ourselves and how we are now and just kind of laugh at the things that we allowed to bias ourselves against each other, right? To separate. Because at that time, it will be very clear. And the reason it will be very clear is because our identity will be clear.

At that time, you'll either have the mark of this world system or you won't. You're either in that group, right? You're a part of this world system. You're on the inside. You can buy and sell.

You can do all the things that that system will grant you. Or you're on the outside.

We're gonna be on the outside, right? And we're all gonna be on the outside together.

And we're all really gonna need each other.

So is Christ unified? That's that big question we've got to come back to. Let's go to 1 Corinthians 12.

1 Corinthians 12 verse 12.

For as the body is one and has many members, but all the members of that one body being many are one body, so also is Christ. For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, slaves are free, blue shirts or red shirts, and have all been made to drink into one Spirit. For in fact the body is not one member, but many.

We are in fact not one member, but and we're not one thing or one type of thing. We're many.

We're many members, many things, many functions, and one body.

In the last few months in my work I've had the opportunity to work a little bit with Mr.

Gary Petty and he and I were talking about this. I've learned that he's somebody that if you have a hard question and you take a hard question and you put it in front of him, it's like you've given him a meal that he's excited to eat. He likes these hard questions. I said, you know, I wrestle with this scripture that talks about, you know, is Christ divided? He said, yeah, I've wrestled with that one. He said years ago he called Bob Dick about it and they talked because they wrestled with it. We all kind of we do. We wrestle with it. But what he shared and I think what Gels exactly with what we read here in 1 Corinthians 12, he said, you know, unity of the body looks like it looks like this collective attribute. It looks like something that we all have or we don't.

But he said it's not. It's or maybe not just that, but it's also an individual attitude.

Unity is an individual attitude. One person at a time. And that's what we read here.

It's really one member at a time.

And so, yeah, until eventually, as we read in Ephesians, until we all come to the unity of the faith, we'll all get there. But it's an individual attitude, individual perspective, because we are one member. Each of us individually are just one member of this greater body. But we are one body.

So is Christ divided? No. He's one body.

But understand, understand that your identity is in Jesus Christ. You are Christ.

That's your identity. Let's put away partiality. Let's put away our human judgment.

Let's put on an attitude of unity. And then let's come together to observe God's feasts.

As many members, one body.