| Sermon for Sunday, February 6, 2005 WHO IS THIS JESUS??5th in a series on The Heart of Christianity; What is the Christian Life All About? By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz Scripture: Mark 8:27-30 27 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?" 28 And they answered him, "John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets." 29 He asked them, "But who do you say that I am?" Peter answered him, "You are the Messiah." 30 And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him. I was flipping through the TV channels late one night last week and saw a TV preacher who made a promise to his viewers. He was offering a chance to own your home debt free. His scheme was this: send him a check that equals one monthly mortgage payment and some things will happen in your life so that you will be able to pay off your home in the next twelve months. He said this had happened to him so he knew it would happen to you. I thought afterward that maybe the way his house got paid off was that he got other people to send him money like this. He promised all this and then he prayed at the end, and the obscene part was that he prayed in the name of Jesus and said that Jesus decreed this would happen. It was another example to me of how Jesus has been misrepresented and misused so often that most of us do not know who Jesus is – especially the Jesus who was the Nazarene teacher and prophet and healer and savior. Jesus has gotten lost in so many churches that we would not recognize him if he were here. One biblical scholar, Raymond Brown, says that Jesus is so unknown to us and is so troubling to conventional religion and conventional life that if he came back the first thing we would do is to kill him. I agree. Jesus is a stranger in the midst of his own people. That is on the front of your bulletin today. You begin to ask church members some questions about Jesus and we find we know very little about this one we sing about and pray about. I have offered you a chance in today’s bulletin to test that idea. There is, on the back of the discussion questions for today, a true/false survey. I encourage you to take that home, fill it out, look up the scripture references – they may surprise you – and talk about it with some other people. There are a couple of questions that are a matter of opinion and you may not agree with my ideas about that, but this can be a springboard for us to learn about and follow Jesus Christ. I will have the answers on the web site at the end of the week. The first thing to emphasize today is that most of us do not really know Jesus of Nazareth, that his personhood – especially his humanity – and his teachings have gotten lost even in the community of faith that should know him best. The second thing to say about Jesus is that in the eyes of the first century authorities – both religious authorities and political authorities – Jesus was a troublemaker. He did things and said things that were upsetting to the authorities. He was offering a first hand relationship with God instead of a religion of ritual and going through the motions. He broke the law about what was Ok to do on the Sabbath. He forgave people’s sins. And most troubling of all, he associated with the wrong kind of people – not just associating with those sinful, impure people, he even ATE with them!! The teachings and the example of Jesus had the effect of undermining and subverting the prevailing religion and the prevailing politics of his time – and of our time! Christianity is the only one of all the current world religions that can say that both of its foremost leaders were so controversial that they were executed by the government! Both Jesus and Paul did and said things so upsetting that the political authorities had to kill them! Jesus dies because his notions of justice and faith were so different from and so threatening to the powers that be that they plotted and succeeded in overcoming him – for a while. He is still controversial, and if you have not been made a little uncomfortable by Jesus you may not have understood him. Beware of all greed, he said, because a person’s true life is not made up of what we own no matter how much we have. Blessed are the peacemakers. Those who live by the sword will die by the sword. Do not forget the humanity of even your enemy. Be compassionate with all people just as God is compassionate. If you are not able to forgive, you will not be forgiven. Let the one of you who wants to condemn and to judge be sure you yourself are sinless before you cast the first stone. Do not worship power and status and prestige; do not aim for those yourself; instead learn to be a servant leader. These words are countercultural and subversive in a culture where Paris Hilton and other empty headed celebrities are role models. Jesus will undermine any culture that worships appearance, affluence, and achievement. And when he asks us in the Lord’s Prayer to pray for God’s will to be done and for God’s kingdom to come [through us] that is a dangerous prayer because the kingdom of God is different from the kingdom of any state or country – even our own country. Jesus saved his hardest words for folks like us who thought they belonged in the inner circle with God. He saw them becoming self righteous and narrow and thinking that the circle of God’s family was pretty small and he earned their wrath because he drew the circle bigger than they did. We will learn more about the Jesus of the gospels in June when we start a sermon series that leads us through the earliest of the four gospels, the gospel of Mark, and for several months we will all just read the gospel of Mark together and meet the Jesus of Mark’s gospel. You may get some surprises. Jesus has many millions of admirers but he doesn’t ask people to admire him. He never asks people to worship him as I read all four of the gospels – I could be wrong about that. I think when people want to worship him he always points beyond himself to God. What does he invite people to do? He invites us to follow him—that is what it means to be his disciple. It means that we will follow him and act like he acts and imitate him in his passion for the least and the last, in his passion to put God at the center of life and trust God that everything else we worry about falls into place after that. If we do follow him, if we do move from being his admirers to his followers, we will be changed. We will be made uncomfortable first, and then we will be changed. And we will find that the old values we thought were important were not so important after all. We will be able to give the answer Peter gives to Jesus’ question, “Who do you say that I am?” What does Peter say? You are the Christ; the one God has sent to lead us to LIFE!! I am a passionate follower of Jesus—not the warrior Jesus of the Bible-distorting Left Behind books, not the passive meek and mild Jesus of our fifty year old Sunday school images, but the radical, life changing Jesus we meet when we read our Gospels and are just drawn to him. And I want more and more people to see and know and to follow that Jesus. There is one final thing to say about Jesus. Wherever there was food, Jesus was there! Jesus seemed to love dinner parties! The first thing that John’s gospel tells us about Jesus is that he went to a wedding—a seven day feast in Jesus’ time—and he made sure that the wine didn’t run out and the best is saved for last. He would eat with anybody—the status conscious Pharisees, the despised tax collectors like Matthew and Zaccheus. Jesus loved to share life over food. The story of the feeding of the 5000 shows up in all four gospels—to say that Jesus is able to sustain us and nourish us and give us the bread of life. In fact, in addition to all of the other words that the Bible uses to talk about Jesus: the light of the world, the good shepherd, the vine, the door, one of the most important images is the one we have inlaid in our altar table. Jesus said, “I am the bread of life and whoever come to me will not be hungry.” We will experience his sustenance at our communion table this morning, and this table is open to anyone who wants to follow Jesus. Amen. |
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