In the 1970s, my grandmother had a cabin on a private lake in northern Wisconsin, near Rhinelander. The cabin had no electricity and no running water, and hers was the only cabin on the lake. That is not a very entertaining place for a teenager to spend a week, but I did just that when I was 15 years old. I had a lofty goal for that vacation: I was going to figure myself out. I was going to take advantage of that time away from civilization to discover my identity.
This isn’t too surprising – I think it’s what everyone does around that age, in some form or another. Later, I was a counselor at Maple camp for teenagers for more than 30 years, and being around so many teenagers for so many years taught me that when you are 15 years old, figuring out your identity is a full-time job. Sometimes it is almost comical to see young people of that age group trying on identities like hats. A friend of mine told me that one day her teenage daughter announced that she was Jewish. I don’t know if there’s any Jewish heritage in her family, but her parents certainly aren’t Jewish. It didn’t last long.
One reason teenagers spend so much energy on trying to discover their identities, I think, is because we tell them to. They are constantly told to “follow your heart” or “be yourself,” and not being authentic is a sin. The lesson they hear is: the only path to inner peace is discovering who you really are.
When I was trying to do that at age 15, the problem was that I was getting nowhere. Every time I thought of a personality trait that seemed to apply to me, my mind immediately brought up its opposite. “I am a neat person…. except that I’m also extremely messy.” “I am very sociable…. and also a loner.” “I am lazy…. and also very energetic.” “I worry obsessively… and I’m extremely laid back.” After a full week of arduous soul-searching, I gave up and admitted defeat. I couldn’t figure out anything about myself.
Perhaps the trouble was that I was only looking at personality, not other ways to define your identity. For a lot of people, their identity is wrapped up in where they are from, what groups they belong to, what sports teams they support, or their job. Think of what kinds of things people wear on their clothing – is it the name of their state or country? A band they listen to? A team they are fans of? A store they like to shop at? Their political views? A lot of people just make choices like that, and then that’s what their identity is.
Or their identity might come from something they didn’t choose, like their ethnic heritage. Nowadays, they might sign up for a website that traces their genetic lineage, like 23andMe.com. I’ve seen ads on TV about people who thought they were Irish, and did a test like that and found out they were German instead. In my case, I knew I was a genetic blend of Scottish, Irish and English. But that didn’t really resolve my identity questions, because I was also born to American parents, and they registered us as American citizens when we were born.
That means that in England, we were known as the American family. Then we moved to Canada, where everyone thought of us as the English family and made fun of our accents. Then we moved to the United States, where people looked at us as Canadians. So the question of national identity has always been murky to me. I’ve changed accents often enough that I can pick them up and drop them at will – some sometimes involuntarily. In 2003, I went back to Colchester, [in accent] I reverted back to the first accent I ever had - in fact, I was afraid that the locals would think I was making fun of them, but I could barely help myself. And then I visit my friends in Ontario, [in accent] and the Canadian accent creeps back into my voice. It’s part of my roots, eh? It’s given me an ability to imitate other accents too. I can slip into a Scottish accent fairly easily, but it would be fake – even though I have plenty of Scottish blood in me. So, looking back at the different accents I’ve spoken with at different times, there’s a question I can’t answer: which one is my “real” accent?
Egyptian or Hebrew?
So I can empathize with Biblical characters like Joseph and Moses. Joseph, of course, was born in the land of Canaan, and only ended up in Egypt because his brothers sold him into slavery. He began his Egyptian life as a servant, and you can bet that, like me as a child, everyone thought of him as a Hebrew slave. He rose through the ranks, going from servant to prisoner to supervisor of the granaries, and in Genesis 42:6, he is described as the “governor of the land.” By that point he was certainly not wearing his Hebrew clothing anymore. He learned to speak Egyptian, but did he speak with a Hebrew accent? At first, I’m sure he did – but he may have learned to drop it eventually.
Then his own brothers came to Egypt to buy grain, and none of them recognized him. Imagine how much of his identity had to have been erased for that to happen. They couldn’t see past all the trappings: the clothing and the finery, his powerful position… and the fact that he spoke exclusively spoke Egyptian. In Exodus 42:23, it describes how the brothers were having a conversation with each other in front of Joseph, but they assumed Joseph couldn’t understand them because he was actually using a Hebrew interpreter. Did he need that interpreter? Or was he just doing that to disguise his true identity? And then comes a little detail that is so poignant: he serves them a meal, and he wants to eat with them but he is not allowed to because, as it says, “Egyptians could not eat with Hebrews, for that is detestable to Egyptians.”
Imagine the crisis of identity Joseph was going through. The focus of the story is on the family relationships - but having these Hebrews show up must have also created huge questions in Joseph’s mind about who he is. Is he a Hebrew pretending to be an Egyptian? Is he an Egyptian who has completely forsaken his Hebrew identity? How hard did he have to work to erase his Hebrew accent? When the Egyptians and Hebrews split up to eat that meal, which room did Joseph want to go eat in?
Of course, a very similar story occurs in the beginning of Exodus, with Moses going through a similar path, born a Hebrew but raised in the Egyptian royal family. During Art Crawl, you may have seen the painting that Rachel Klismith did about young Moses, who is looking back at his Hebrew roots and looking forward at his new Egyptian family, caught between the two. Did he even know that he was Hebrew?
Here I must acknowledge the trouble Cecil B. DeMille has caused for me. I grew up watching the movie “The Ten Commandments” every spring, and assuming it was accurate. It wasn’t until I watched it with the book of Exodus open on my lap that I realized the first two hours of the movie are almost entirely made up - including a dramatic scene in which Moses discovers that he is actually a Hebrew. That is not in the Bible: all it says in Exodus 2:11 is “One day, after Moses had grown up, he went out to where his own people were and watched them at their hard labor. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own people.” It doesn’t explicitly say whether Moses knew the Hebrew was one of his own people; that heritage may or may not have been kept secret from him. But I imagine he had identity issues similar to Joseph.
One reason I chose this subject for today’s sermon, if you hadn’t guessed, is because it is Halloween, a day when people play with their identities and try on costumes. When Joseph wore the clothing of a governor of Egypt, did he feel like he was wearing a costume? Did Moses feel the same? When he clearly chose the side of the Hebrews and faced Pharaoh, he probably wore Hebrew clothing then: did that feel like a costume to Moses?
Halloween is an occasion to think about what a costume is. The simplest definition is probably, “clothing that isn’t who you are - clothing belongs to a different identity.” If a fireman were to come off a shift and go to a Halloween party still wearing his gear, does that count as a Halloween costume? But if wore a fireman’s uniform, it would be a costume.
There is a picture of me when I was about ten years old, dressed up as a hippie for Halloween: wearing a fake mustache and long-haired wig, with bell-bottom jeans. A decade later, that’s pretty much how I looked all the time. If I could get ahold of the clothes I wore back in the 70s, they would be a costume again. The point is: pretend identities can become real ones. Real identities can become pretend ones.
Preoccupation with Self Image
Let me go back to when I was 15 years old, trying to pin down what my true identity was. Looking back on that struggle now, at least I can be grateful for one thing: I did it in private. Thank the Lord there was no social media in 1975.
Perhaps you’ve heard about the recent report that came out showing how harmful Facebook and Instagram and other social media platforms are on the identities of young people. Nowadays it’s almost mandatory for teens and pre-teens to have a social media account, to post pictures of themselves on a constant basis. Teens are image-conscious enough to begin with: social media has magnified this problem tenfold, and has destroyed their mental health in the process.
Hearing about those studies, it sounds like the epitome of what Swedenborg wrote about in Heaven and Hell 341: “preoccupations with our self image.” You could call it an “identity pandemic” - a disease that spreads through the whole adolescent population, and causes untold suffering.
But does it stop when you reach adulthood? Of course not - just as Joseph and Moses suffered their identity crises in their adulthood. Although Heaven and Hell 341 is from the section where he is talking about children in heaven, it’s clear that preoccupations with our self image can be a lifelong problem that only gets worse with time. If your identity was tied up with youthful beauty, your problems will grow worse with every passing year. Do you remember Dick Clark, who called himself “the world’s oldest teenager”? I saw him on television doing his usual New Year’s Eve celebrations a few years before he died and it was painful to watch: an old man who couldn’t let go of an identity that just didn’t fit anymore. I didn’t know him personally, so I don’t know if he was preoccupied with his self-image. But imagine that he didn’t want to stop doing those New Year’s Eve broadcasts because that’s what he saw as his worth to the world.
But reading Heaven and Hell, one thing emerges clearly: whatever your identity was on earth, not much of it remains after death. You will still love what you loved, you will retain your personality, you will be the same person on a deeper level. But you will no longer be American, or Minnesotan, or a Vikings fan; you will forget what job you used to have, what accent you spoke with, what music you listened to, what clothes you used to wear. You will forget what your body used to look like. All the external facets of your identity will fall away.
So if your identity was defined by any of those things, it will be gone in the other world. To put it another way, if you think of your identity as a treasure that you have built up – well, it is an earthly treasure that will fade away. All that energy you put into storing up that treasure will be wasted.
That thought may not be enough to keep you from becoming preoccupied with self-image, so the real beauty of that sentence from Heaven and Hell 341 is that it shows us how to be freed from that cage. The key is innocence, which is defined not as the absence of having committed sin, but as the willingness to follow the Lord instead of ourselves. That is the true lesson from today’s service: if you find yourself in the cage of preoccupation with your image, reputation or identity, the solution is not to search harder to find your “true” identity. That will just dig you deeper into the trap of following yourself. “Innocence is wanting to be led by the Lord and not by oneself.” That says that “following your true heart” is not as good as it is made out to be – it is just being led by yourself, which is the opposite of innocence. People who invest too much energy into finding themselves think that it will bring them peace in the end, but it sounds like it won’t.
We need an identity. But we don’t get one by creating one out of nothing, like a Halloween costume. We don’t get one by searching deep inside ourselves for that authentic core. We get it by being innocent - being willing to be led by the Lord. It says in the sentence after that one I’ve been focusing on, “To the extent that we are freed from this self-image, we gain an identity given by the Lord.”
It is like an old fable about searching for a treasure. Searching harder and harder only creates obsession and chains of bondage. But if we can stop searching, we are given a treasure by the Lord. The identity we are given by the Lord is the true treasure; it is what will bring us peace.
When I was an angst-ridden 15-year-old, instead of asking “Who am I?,” I would have been better served asking questions like, “How can I serve the Lord?” “How can I love others?” And most of all, “What kind of angel can the Lord turn me into?”
Amen
READINGS
Old Testament Reading: Genesis 43:26-32
When Joseph came home, [his brothers] presented to him the gifts they had brought into the house, and they bowed down before him to the ground. He asked them how they were, and then he said, “How is your aged father you told me about? Is he still living?” They replied, “Your servant our father is still alive and well.” And they bowed down, prostrating themselves before him.
As he looked about and saw his brother Benjamin, his own mother’s son, he asked, “Is this your youngest brother, the one you told me about?” And he said, “God be gracious to you, my son.” Deeply moved at the sight of his brother, Joseph hurried out and looked for a place to weep. He went into his private room and wept there. After he had washed his face, he came out and, controlling himself, said, “Serve the food.” They served him by himself, the brothers by themselves, and the Egyptians who ate with him by themselves, because Egyptians could not eat with Hebrews, for that is detestable to Egyptians.
New Testament Reading: Matthew 6:19-21
“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Reading from Swedenborg: Heaven and Hell #341
Innocence is the vessel of everything heavenly, and therefore, children’s innocence is a matrix for all the affections for what is good and true. Innocence is wanting to be led by the Lord and not by oneself, so that the extent to which we are in innocence determines the extent to which we are freed from preoccupations with our self-image. To the extent that we are freed from this self-image, we gain an identity given by the Lord. The Lord’s identity is what is called the Lord’s righteousness and worth.
