Park Slope United Methodist Church

Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” And they answered him, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.” And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.

Then he began to teach them that the Son of God must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?” Mark 8:27-38

When I was up in my first church, in Lakeville Ct. I would often sit out in the back yard to write. Once a month the woman next door would be out clipping her hedges. The first time I saw her, she leaned over the hedges, pointed her clippers at me and said, “Do you believe Jesus is your Lord and Savior.” I said, “Hi, my name is Herb,” and hesitated for a second to collect my thoughts. She apparently got impatient and said, “Well, obviously not!” and she stormed away.

I thought, this is going to be an interesting relationship.

The next month I was sitting in the yard, she leaned over the bushes with her clippers and said, “Do you believe Jesus died for your sins” I said, “Do you mean, did he die because of sinfulness, or that he died in the midst of his effort to teach us the radical grace and forgiveness of God, if so, yes.” She said, “who made you a preacher anyway?” And stormed away.

By the third month it finally dawned on me that she always clipped her hedges on the first day of the month, and I worked in my kitchen.

On one hand, I appreciated her inquisitiveness. I appreciate people who aren’t afraid to ask questions and wrestle a bit. On the other had, I suspected she was looking for one very clear doctrinal answer, and anything outside that answer was going to condemn me to hell. There are questions asked out of curiosity or searching, and there are questions ask in the sole effort to trip someone up. One is the helpful kind.

But the other thing that crossed my mind was that the church has never had one answer to any of those questions, nor do we need to. The church doesn’t need absolute doctrinal conformity. We need a spaciousness in our theology about Jesus, allowing for differences and emphasis. After all, even the four gospels themselves don’t all agree on exactly what Jesus was about. One of the things I really love and appreciate about the Bible is that it allows four somewhat divergent views to stand together side by side. The editors of the Bible didn’t feel the need to neaten things up, making all the gospels completely agree.

The Biblical writers allowed the different stories to live side by side trusting that somewhere in the midst of all that we would come to know who Jesus is. The Bible makes no claim to be critical history with one voice and one answer to life’s questions, but rather, it is reminiscences from different perspectives at different points in history. The truth to be found it in isn’t in the simple factuality of all the stories. The truth is garnered from the stories, in embracing and wrestling with their diversity.

When it comes to Jesus, we can have some different views, but we can all come together. Brian McLaren, a popular evangelical who is slowly turning evangelicalism on its head, has written a book called Generous Orthodoxy. I love that phrase -generous orthodoxy. Beyond some baseline claims, we have to realize that everything else we say is provisional.

Jesus asked the disciples what other people were saying about him. What’s the word out there on the street?

Some say you’re John the Baptist come back from the dead.

--Yeah, I’ve heard that.

Some people say you’re Jeremiah.

--Someone mentioned that to me.

Some say you are Elijah, that’s pretty common view.

--Interesting.

But then Jesus turned to them and asked, what do you say? Not, “what do most people say, but what do you have to say about me?” It was an important question to ask. Maybe Jesus asked it because he knew that sometimes you just don’t know what you believe until you are forced to say it out loud or write it down. Some day it will be asked of you, “who do you say Jesus is,” and it will be good to be ready to share whatever faith you have within you – to offer what little truth you know.

Or maybe Jesus asked them the question because, often, until you have articulated what you believe it holds no claim on you, requires nothing of you. Don’t figure it out and you don’t have to do anything.

Jesus often asks questions, there are over 150 questions recorded that Jesus puts to the people. He asks us the questions to probe what we are doing, questions to help us face who we are and what we are about. He puts the question to us to help us discern who we are, where we are going, and what we most truly believe.

If I told you to pull out a piece of paper and write at the top “Who is Jesus?” what would you write? We all have some answer; we all have some images of Jesus. Some of them are the images we learned as children in Sunday school which have proved troubling and we don’t’ have anything to replace them with. Sometimes we dismiss Jesus on the basis of what we knew about Jesus at age six. Some of us have never examined the evidence for ourselves.

One of my main goals in preaching is to gain a fresh hearing for Jesus, especially among those who believe they already understand him. Because what happens sometimes is that presumed familiarity has led to unfamiliarity. Jesus is sometimes obstructed by clouds of well-intentioned misinformation.

But ultimately, rather than give you my answer to the question I’d rather challenge you to answer the question for yourself because that’s the only answer that matters. Is he Messiah? If that’s what you think, what does that mean? Jesus clearly didn’t’ fit into what a Messiah was expected to be. Messiahs were supposed to have power, were supposed to take charge, were supposed to set things right and free the Jews from political expression. But Jesus refused to stiff arm anybody. He refused to dominate or to take up arms.

Is he Savior? OK. But what is he saving us from and what is he saving us to? Some people clearly had no interest in being saved. When Jesus said the poor are precious and the rich are in big trouble, only those on one side of that equation found it intriguing.

Is he Teacher? Surely, but is that all?

On the church website the Social Action section begins, “was Jesus the first revolutionary? Some of us think so.”

Who do you say he is? Messiah, Savior, Lord, shaman, teacher, friends, prophet, prince of peace?

Now, as you try and answer that question, don’t be too alarmed if you cant’ nail it down. Even those of us wrestle with the question regularly find it difficult, because Jesus is sometimes downright incomprehensible; he is often enigmatic, ambiguous. From the very beginning, who Jesus was, what he was about, was far from self-evident. There were people stood face-to-face with Jesus and said, “This is God incarnate.” There appear to be many more who said, “This man is nuts.” Although I think that for most of us, the biggest issue isn’t that we’ve listened to Jesus and found him incomprehensible; it’s that we’ve listened to him and found him too damned difficult.

But let me also add that the best way to get to know him is to follow what little you know of him. It sounds a bit counter-intuitive, but if you wait till you have Jesus all neatly summed up, and categorized, and figured out, you’ll get nowhere. But if you begin with whatever little thing you do know and understand, and faithfully struggle to follow that, it will be enough. Because what happens is that when we lean into and live into what we do know and can do, we discover more and can follow more, and become firmly planted on the journey.

I do believe that Jesus was sent by God. I believe that Jesus came as an expression of the love of God, among other religions and expression of God. I believe Jesus offers himself as a doorway into the life that is truly life. I believe he gives us an image of God’s nature. It’s because of Jesus that we can say, “this is the way God is”; not cruel and judging and harsh, but caring and lifting and loving, no boundaries. But beyond that I honestly want to fudge. Virgin birth, divinity? Nailing down those dogmas aren’t critical to me. It may not be the answer you want to hear from your pastor, but I freely admit that I am more or less a befuddled follower of Jesus Christ. I can’t explain how Christ is present in communion, I only know that I cannot imagine my life without him or without that holy meal.

Can I offer one more point, will you indulge me? I think Jesus asked that question for one other reason, to test whether they were ready for the most difficult but essential part of his teaching. What starts out as an innocuous question ends up as a radical and challenging description of the Christian life. We must take up our crosses.



One brief one word of explanation. Jesus isn’t referring to those unpredictable tragedies and storms of life which just blow into our lives, that we have to react to because we have no choice. “My bad back is my cross to bear.” It’s true you have to bear it but that isn’t what Jesus was getting at. Jesus clearly is referring to something that we pick up and bear because of our commitments.

What he is saying is that that way to fullness of life is in living a life for others. Very often, in living a life for others, you get involved in other’ people’s lives and crises and misfortunes and oppression. And in doing so we will face pains, discouragement, opposition, seeming insurmountable challenges, and maybe even danger. You may risk being smeared, you may risk money, or a job. You may even risk, rarely, even life itself.

We can try to protect ourselves, being very deliberate in letting some people into our lives and not others. We can be very cautious about what we say yes to. We can stick to our well worn turf of activities we already know, but in the end it may not be what gives you joy, or meaning. A life worth living can’t be a life that is neatly protected.

I read a really provocative statement by Biblical scholar Walter Bruggeman. When Jesus tells Peter he has to face the cross, Peter says,” Oh no way,” and Jesus says, “get behind me Satan.” Bruggeman says, “Just ponder what Jesus is saying here. That the locus of satanic power is in playing it safe.”

I’m going to chew on that for a few weeks. Jesus isn’t telling us to go and be a daredevils and walk into danger. He is just telling us to live a life that matters, a life that pours itself out for others, wherever that may take you.

I read a story by another minister (William Willimon, Pulpit Resources) who of walking around the campus of Harvard and stumbling across a talk by a representative from Teach America who was visiting the campus. Teach America tries to recruit talented college graduates to go into some of the nations’ worst public schools.

One woman stood up in front of the group of students. A larger group than one would have imagined to come out to sort of thing.

The woman said to them, “I can tell by looking at you that I have probably come to wrong place. Somebody told me this is a BMW campus and I believe it by looking at you. Just looking at you I can tell that you are all a success. Why would you all be on this campus if you weren’t successful, if you were not going to successful careers on Madison Ave. or Wall Street. And yet, here I stand, hoping to talk somebody into giving away your life in the toughest job you will ever have. I am looking for people to go into the hollows of West Virginia, into the ghettos of South Los Angeles, and teach in some of the most difficult schools in the world. Last year, two of our teachers were killed while on the job.”

“And I can tell, just by looking at you, that none of you are interested in that. So go on to law school or whatever successful thing you are planning on doing. But if by chance, just some of you happen to be interested, I’ve got these brochures here for you to tell you about teach America. Meeting’s over.”

With that, the whole group stood up, pushed into the isles, pushed each other aside, ran down to the front and fought over those brochures.

From that I learned and important insight, that Jesus already knew: People want something more out of life than even happiness. People want to be part of an adventure. People want to be part of a project bigger than themselves.