Who are we?

With lines marking the repairs, the pot was missing some pieces.  It was a pale sand color with designs of black faded to gray.  It was unremarkable until you read the museum's label which told me it dated to 100 AD.  Then it became a valuable remnant of an ancient people, recovered from an ancient land marked by juniper forests and skies so blue it is almost unbelievable.


For hours I wandered among displays of deerskin clothing and handmade arrows and bows.  I learned the history of people who irrigated up to 10,000 acres of desert and then dispersed so quickly and completely that they were erroneously named the disappeared people.

They tell of their birth out of the earth, nurtured by the water, made one with the earth of their origin and endlessly connected with the ancestors who made them uniquely themselves. In spite of all the efforts (mistaken, often cruel) of the dominant culture to erase their identity, they are themselves.  They remain.  They will one day be the ancestors.

You cannot walk the land without knowing you are walking in someone else's history, people who live in this world deeply rooted to the earth that birthed them.  They have worked hard to pass on their language and traditions, the skills and knowledge that have come to them through the centuries...not as relics in a museum or curiosities to amuse and amaze.  They do this work so they will never forget who they are, and so they can continue to live authentically as the people that earth and rain made them....even if it is in a 20 story high rise.

Are we those people?  Those of us who are followers of Jesus.  Has the dominant culture decided we are inconsequential relics of a past better forgotten?  In the pressure of history moving forward, are we losing our identity because we have lost the core of truth of what it means to be the baptized ones?

Have we been holding on to the wrong things, things which will become both burden and prison?    Are we clinging to the peripherals and abandoning the Jesus who is the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end?

What does it look like to live authentically as a follower of Jesus, one who looks to the Divine Creator as the source of all life, now and to come? Who is this Divine Creator?  How does Jesus live out the powerful life giving force of forgiveness and grace?

How do we live that way too?

Who are we?