There are few things as intense and yet as informative as sitting in New York City traffic. As you’re crawling along at racing-snail speeds and cars volley for a few feet of advantage over each other, your fellow concrete jungle dwellers are constantly sharing some very personal and, at times, intimate insights into their lives. How you say? Bumper stickers! I know, it sounds silly but next time you’re stuck in traffic just take a look around. You’ll see national flags, state flags, family crests, blue donkeys and and red elephants, campaign stickers from election cycles gone-by, Confederate flags, clenched fists, pro-law enforcement, anti-abortion and a whole slew of other tell-tale signs of who the people inside the car profess to be and what they hold dear.
It seems that these days “intersectionality” is the new catch-phrase: the rhetoric of politocians and the messages on tv sway individuals to identify themselves by checking off a series of boxes. They want us to identify by race, color, ethnicity, nationality, political affiliation and all the rest; all in the name of so-called “pride”. The only thing this has accomplished is to make us more polarized and more isolated from each other and erased any progress we may have achieved in these last decades.
But what about us? No, I don’t mean what bumper stickers adorn our back bumpers but “who do we profess to be?”; when people ask us who we are, to which bumper sticker do we refer to? What’s our go-to answer? Do we say “I’m a Met Fan”, or “I’m Italian” or “I’m Democrat”? If someone were to ask us to describe ourselves in five simple words, how far down the list would “Christian” be? Would it even make the list? Would anyone know we were Christians by either our profession of it or the fruits of lives?
Now more than ever, it is imperative that, we as Christians, proclaim who we believe to be and we must be who we claim we are! We must not only have the courage to proclaim who be are in boldness and love but have the strength of character to live out this Christian life in plain sight of all men! Fear of stumbling is not a good reason for not proclaiming to be a Christian. We will most assuredly stumble and fall but, with God’s help, less severely and less frequently as the years go by and as we strive to emulate the One in whom we’ve put our trust.
Our loyalty must be first and foremost to Christ Jesus: He is the only thing that gives our lives meaning and context. Our lives must be, as the apostle Paul wrote “a living epistle, easily read of all men”
So, let us not strive to proclaim our allegiance to Christ through catch-phrases or mere stickers: all those things are ancillary and avoid the central theme that connects them all! We need to proclaim ot through the the open-source testimony of our everyday lives, as we live them for Jesus!
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