13 Now when Jesus came to the area of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Human One is?”
14 They replied, “Some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the other prophets.”
15 He said, “And what about you? Who do you say that I am?” 16 Simon Peter said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
17 Then Jesus replied, “Happy are you, Simon son of Jonah, because no human has shown this to you. Rather my Father who is in heaven has shown you." (Common English Bible)
“Whole: A
Movement for Unity in a Fragmented World,” Week Five
A Harvard graduate writes her first novel. I say that sentence, and to me, and probably
to you as well, the images of the writing process that come forth are of laptop
computers and various sheaves of paper containing different drafts, of
coffeehouses where they know your order by heart, of endless phone calls
between your agent and your editor to make sure everything is set just so…
None of this, not even a bit, was the case for
Annette Lu’s novel, These Three Women. Why?
Because Lu, a Taiwanese woman who, after giving a speech demanding
Taiwanese independence from the People’s Republic of China, was found guilty of
violent sedition by China and served nearly six years in prison. And while in prison, she wrote These Three Women, which was picked up
into a made-for-TV movie in 2008, on her ration of toilet paper from her jail
cell while incarcerated, using her washbasin as a sink so as to not attract
undue attention from her guards…and knowing that China has an awful human
rights track record with their prisoners and especially with their prisoners of
conscience like Lu, she probably faced even greater dangers than that.
Now, Annette Lu is a two-term Vice President of
Taiwan, and has survived an assassination attempt, been acquitted of
politically motivated corruption charges, and is still engaging in hunger
strikes and action because, in large part, of sheer force of will.
Purity of heart, Soren Kierkegaard says, is to
will the one thing. It is from that sort
of faith that the world is changed, hopefully for the better. It is the sort of faith the world, then,
demands of us, and it is the sort of faith that Jesus Christ Himself demands of
us, because He first demanded it from Peter, here in Matthew 16. And in so doing, He created the sole
profession of faith ever required to be a disciple of Christ, a profession that we believe easily but live out far more difficultly. And that is what we are going to be talking about today as we wrap up our current sermon series.
This is the first of two sermon series primarily
for the summer; this one took us through June and today, we wrap it up with its
final installment. It is based off of a
book written last year by Rev. Dr. Sharon E. Watkins, who has served for the
past eight years as our denomination’s General Minister and President. As such, she is one of the most visible
pastors in our tradition; she has written in magazines and newspapers, preached
at national prayer services, and been interviewed by just about anyone you can
imagine about what exactly the Disciples think about this or that (trick
question: we never think exactly the same about anything).
Pastor Sharon has used this widespread pulpit of
hers to proclaim her vision, which she finally put into a book by the same name
as this series, and the name comes from the preamble to the design of our
denomination: that we are called to be a movement for wholeness in a fragmented
world. In a world broken apart by
sectarianism, prejudices, and hatred, we as Disciples are meant to be a
movement for making humanity whole but to make ourselves as persons whole. But what does that even look like? Well, that is what the book she has written
is for. We are going chapter by chapter
through the book, with texts paralleling it from Matthew’s Gospel, and to start
off with, we talked about the nature of the Lord’s table, before moving on to
the theme of welcome and then wholeness and moving into wholeness. Today, we’ll be going on to the chapter
entitled “Disciples of Christ,” which isn’t about our denomination
specifically, but the statement that title makes, to say “I am a disciple of
Christ,” with from this excerpt from that chapter in Pastor Sharon’s book:
Jewish
tradition had taught for generations about a “messiah” who would come to save
the world. In Hebrew, “messiah”
literally means “anointed one.” In most
cases in the Hebrew Bible, it refers to the Davidic king who sat on the throne
in Jerusalem, who was anointed with ceremonial oil upon his election as king…By
the time of Jesus, many Jews thought that a messiah would rise up like David or
Cyrus (the
Great, the emperor of Persia who conquered Babylon) to free them from the Roman Empire.
Some thought this Savior would usher in a new age and rescue not only
Israel but also the whole world…The Greek word for messiah (transliterated into
its English form) was Christ.
People
began to experience the resurrected Jesus as the living Christ, the one who
fully represented God’s desire for a world made whole, starting with their own
lives. They experienced His promise and
presence as a liberating reality, freeing them from hopelessness and from fear
of death…in all this they found a saving, liberating new reality. They began to call Him Jesus the Messiah, or
Jesus Christ. In the Syrian city of Antioch,
the disciples of Jesus began to be called “Christians.”
A saving, liberating new reality that frees you
from hopelessness and from your fear of death.
Can you imagine how terrific and radical such a reality would that have
to be if you were in the circumstances of, say, Annette Lu, or of Nelson
Mandela, imprisoned for 27 years on Robben Island? It doesn’t even have to be as dramatic as
that—how much of a shift in your reality would that be if you had just been
laid off from work, or just evicted from your home, or just been diagnosed with
a terminal sickness?
Think of how much saving, how much liberating,
how much freeing you would still need, and desire, and crave in the depths of
your bones.
That is the sort of saving we talk about with
Jesus the Anointed, Jesus the Messiah, Jesus the Christ: it is meant to change
our lives, turn our worlds upside-down, make everything seem new, all of it.
But it is also something that often takes us a
long, long time to arrive at, because it is that big. Being a disciple of Christ doesn’t mean just
being converted. Paul’s story didn’t end
with his change of heart on the road to Damascus; there are nearly 20 chapters
more of Acts after that moment to detail his post-conversion life, belief, and
deeds, because Paul didn’t arrive at who he was right away. It took time, lots of time.
Similarly, Peter doesn’t actually get around to what he himself believes about Jesus right away here in Matthew 16—he sort of hems and haws, saying “Well, some say you’re John the Baptist, some say you’re Elijah, and still others say you’re Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” It’s like Peter just started playing Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and he’s blowing his ask-the-audience lifeline on the $100 question: Who do you say that Jesus is?
Which is why Jesus then repeats the question
right back to Peter: “And what about you?
Who do you say that I am?”
This time, Peter has the cards: “You are the
Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
There’s that word again, Messiah. In Greek, it’s “christos.” For the first time ever in the Gospels,
someone is explicitly calling Jesus not simply Jesus, or Jesus of Joseph, or
Jesus of Nazareth, but Jesus the Christ.
Jesus, the expected messianic heir who Jewish tradition says will save
the world. Jesus, the one who has been
waited for and sought for so long we forgot what He would look like.
Because even now, I think, we forget who He
really is, or was—what He really was about.
He was God made flesh, yes, but He was God made flesh for a very
specific purpose: to stop us from hating and hurting one another and instead to
love and trust in Him. The wonderful,
painful irony in that is that we achieved that by first hating and hurting Him
and continuing to hate and hurt each other.
It’s more or less the same now, only we hate and
hurt each other while claiming to still love Him.
How else do you explain a world in which we say,
“I love you” to someone, but still say, “I am okay with you being treated as a
second-class citizen?”
How else do you explain a world in which we say,
“Blessed are the poor, but only if you’re virtuous enough to be worthy of our
assistance?”
How else do you explain a world in which we allow
our own faith to be so imperfect and frankly shallow—and this includes my own—as
to not hold one another in the regard in which Jesus held Peter? It is one of the things that drives me nuts
about by own faith, I am always bargaining with God to let myself off the hook,
when Peter is emphatically not let off the hook, not by a long shot.
We can say that we have professed a faith in
Jesus Christ, but are we actually disciples of Him? Do we actually follow His teachings, radical
and unreasonable though they may be?
What on earth are we to do with this collection of His delusions, His
unrealistic fantasies that the poor and meek will inherit the earth and the
kingdom of heaven, that God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble,
that Jesus came not to save the righteous, but to save sinners?
What on earth are we to do with that
embarrassment of a document, the New Testament?
Maybe, just maybe, we are meant to start living
by it, not simply saying that we believe in it.
Belief is easy. It’s the easiest
part. The hard part is what comes
afterwards. For Peter, after this
profession of faith comes denying Jesus, enduring the crucifixion, and
ultimately, being crucified to death himself some thirty years after his Lord
and Savior. Even as he stumbles to his
own profession of faith initially in Matthew 16, it is everything that comes
later that will really try and test that faith.
And so it is with each of us. There is nothing about being a disciple of
Christ that entails an easy life or a materially wealthy life or even a long
life. We don’t get to demand those sorts
of strings to come attached with this covenant that we have made with God
through Jesus Christ. Sometimes, it will
be we who must write our life’s story on toilet paper while imprisoned due to
others’ hatred.
What being a disciple entails, then, is an
understanding and relationship with God, for, as Jesus says to Peter in
response to Peter’s belief, it is God “who is in heaven (who) has shown you”
this truth.
In turn, God shows us that truth as well. But we have to be willing to live according
to that truth, not merely according to our profession of faith in the source of
that truth. Because God’s truth, that as
John says we are meant to love because God first loved us, demands nothing less
of us.
May it be so.
Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longivew, Washington
July 5, 2015
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