Sermons

Saying Who He Is

John Wilkinson                                 Third Presbyterian Church  January 11, 2004, (9:00am)                               Mark 8:27-30

As many of you know, the Session has endorsed a new Sunday morning schedule, beginning on Leap Year Sunday, February 29, three weeks from today. This “tweak” to things is the result of conversations that began nearly four years ago and the very important work of a Christian education task force.

Essentially, what we are doing is pushing out the edges just a bit. Our first service, which will continue to be held in this lovely space, will begin at 8:30. Our second service will be moved a bit later, to 10:45. What will happen in between is an enhanced adult education time that does not compete with either worship service. Some other things will happen in that middle hour as well, giving us a little breathing space and more opportunities for more people to do more things.

I am more than a little aware that those of us who currently gather here at 9:00 will need to adjust things a bit. Some of us are delighted by an 8:30 a.m. offering – up at the crack of dawn anyway, ready to move on from worship to seize the day. Others of us aren’t quite as delighted, for the obvious reasons.

Since many of are here right now, I’d like to offer two sets of words. The first is, thank you. Thank you for two things. Thank you for sharing your opinions on this with me, and others. Our commitment to this place as a community comes into play when we differ from time to time, and I have been grateful that opinions have been shared, from all points on the spectrum.

So thank you for sharing, and thank you for giving this new thing your support, primarily for the second reason that I want to share. It is about who we are as people of faith, and less so about time and schedule. We are called to learn and grow, to mature and develop, as long as we are breathing. We somehow have thought that our learning ends when we stopped attending Sunday school as children, but we really know better, and so I would urge all of us who attend worship service Number 1 at Third Presbyterian Church to consider adding adult education to your Sunday morning menu. We might set our alarm clocks a bit earlier. That’s what I’ve been working on. Or, we may set them a bit later, attending adult education first and then migrating to the second worship service of the morning. It’s not bad either.

Our worship, though, is enhanced when we learn and are formed together. You will meet new and interesting people, I guarantee that. And, your faith will be deepened, your imagination stretched, and our life together as a community of faith will be strengthened.

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In many ways, the Bible is organized around a set of questions. Moses asks the voice in the burning bush for a name. The prophet Micah asks, “What does the Lord require of you?” Pilate inquires of Jesus, “What is truth?” And this question, perhaps the most central to our faith, perhaps the most pointed in our current moment.

Three gospels, Mathew, Mark and Luke, tell the story, each slightly differently. We hear Mark’s today. Jesus is walking from village to village with his disciples, doing all the things that will get him into trouble. Healing. Teaching. Challenging convention. They are engaging in the idle chat of travel. Jesus knows that people are talking, that the crowds whisper and buzz at the edges, that the disciples mingle with the growing gatherings.

There is talk, and Jesus is slightly curious. So he asks his leadership team. “Who do people say that I am?”

Mark’s is the leanest and sparest of all the gospels. I have often wondered what the disciples thought before they spoke. Was Jesus looking for a certain answer? How honest should we be? Does some Donald Trump-like possibility lurk, that by somehow saying the wrong thing I might get fired from my disciple position? We know nothing of that.

Some say that you are John the Baptist. Some say that you are Elijah. Others say that you are one of the prophets. All of these were good and adequate answers. All of them, in fact, suggest that the people gathering around Jesus were “getting” what he was about. The transformative nature of the message. Pointing to God is a radical way. God’s disappointment in the way that things were, and God’s hope in the way that things might be.

In many ways, it is the key question for the 21st century church as well. It shapes our identity. It shapes who we are as we relate to other religions. Both the question and the answer allow us to search for, and find, meaning. We are formulating new answers to this question, and we are searching for ways, and sometimes struggling for ways, to articulate these new answers while holding on to what we have always believed, for years and decades and centuries.

New opportunities, the wild possibilities suggested by The DaVinci Code, Time and Newsweek’s persistent attention, Mel Gibson’s movie “The Passion of the Christ,” force us to ask the question yet again.

Theologian William Placher’s thinking on these things has been as helpful as anyone’s for me. In his recent book called Jesus the Savior, Placher suggests that who Jesus is best understood through the rhythm of his life. Incarnation, his birth. God taking on human form. And ministry. His amazing preaching about the reign of God. His healing of those whom the rest of the world, including he religious community, neglected. The cross. His death. The last supper. The willingness to meet death head on for our sake, to endure pain and shame. And resurrection. Conquering death. Life eternal.

That rhythm – birth, ministry, death, resurrection – suggests the pattern by which we might know Jesus and might make him known.
Given our earlier conversation about education and learning, it’s not a bad place to start. It’s what I’ve been telling people who have asked me about the Mel Gibson movie. Read the book first. That is to say, familiarize yourself with the gospel story before experiencing Gibson’s telling of it.

It’s what I tell people, and myself, every time we seek to engage in ecumenical, and especially interfaith dialogue. Read the story. Know it. Be aware of its clarity and also be aware of its fuzziness. Know the broad shapes of our theological tradition. Know what we have said about Jesus in light of the big questions about salvation, about other religious traditions, about forgiveness, about who he is and what he does, about what we calls us to do.

Of this morning’s passage, Placher reminds us that Jesus is both message and messenger. He speaks with authority, authority that no one else seemed to carry. Part of that was determined by how he said what he said. But a greater part was determined by who he was. People encountered God in Jesus. Something was different. Authority. Authority in his words and his deeds, what he said, how he said it. The deep truth of his message, its life-changing impact. Even those who did not yet know what would happen to him sensed something different. And we sense something different now.

I like to think that the lessons of the last 2000 years of thinking about Jesus encourage us to think new things, or more to the point, to think of old things in new ways. The word “orthodoxy’ means “right words,” or “right thinking.’ It’s an important understanding, as long as our quest for orthodoxy does not limit our ability to think new things, to use the minds and hearts God gave us to advance the conversation about who Jesus is and what he does.

We have fussed and fumbled for many centuries about something called “atonement theory,” for example, about how Jesus’ death unites us again with God after our relationship had been broken. Traditional atonement theory somehow paints God as a cold and cruel judge. So now, while our relationship with God is certainly broken, and while we believe that Jesus is the one who reconciles that relationship, we evolve in our thinking about the nature of God, the nature of our sin, the nature of Christ’s dying and living to make us whole people of God.

We will spend a significant season very soon, the Lenten season, on these things, perhaps more so than usual. Worship, education, discussion. Read the story again, and again. See Mel Gibson’s movie, and let’s discuss together. Be open to interfaith questions and dialogue from across the broad bound of the Christian family. Be ready to venture answers, when asked, “Who do you say that I am?”

But even more so, be ready to live that answer out in the world, by reflecting the radical message of God’s transforming love, in your living and dying, in your giving and receiving. Because saying who he is about so much more than getting the words right. It is about living out who he is in every moment of every day, God’s love incarnate, full of grace and truth. Amen.