“[After Christ is baptized] The Word that had most recently come from the mouth of God was, “This is my beloved in whom I am well pleased.”  Identity.  It’s always God’s first move  Before we do anything wrong and before we do anything right, God has named and claimed us as God’s own.  But almost immediately, other things try to tell us who we are and to whom we belong; capitalism, the weight-loss industrial complex, our parents, kids at school-they all have a go at telling us who we are.  But only God can do that.  Everything else is temptation.  Maybe demons are defined as anything other than God that tried to tell us who we are.  And maybe, just moments after Jesus’ baptism, when the devil says to him, “If you are the Son of God…” he does so because he knows that Jesus is vulnerable to temptation precisely to the degree that he is insecure about his identity and mistrusts his relationship with God.

So if God’s first move is to give us our identity, then the deveils’ first move is to throw that identity into question.  Identity is like the tip of a spool of thread, which when pulled, can unwind the whole thing.”

-Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix