The Big Question

The Big Question

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

August 27, 2017

Scripture: Matthew 16:13-20

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Hello. I’m not much used to public speaking, so please excuse me if I stick pretty close to my written text here. My name’s Simon, but you probably know me better as Peter. Yes, that Peter. The one you call Saint Peter, although trust me, for most of my life I was no saint. The one they named that enormous church in Rome after. Frankly, I’ve never quite gotten that one. That thing is so majestic, so imperial, and so expensive. Trust me, there’s nothing majestic or imperial about me, and I never had any money. I’m just a poor, simple fisherman from Galilee. A modest chap actually, and not all that bright. I mean, it sure took me a long time to really to get it about who Jesus was. You all know how when he was arrested I denied him three times and ran away from him. I’m not too proud about that one; but I did it, and I have to live with it. Matthew says Jesus told me he would build his church on me. I have to be honest here. I sure don’t remember him ever saying that to me; but maybe he did, and I’ve just forgotten. It has, after all, been a very long time since I knew him and followed him around Galilee and Judea. And you’re probably wondering what I’m doing here in Maltby nearly 2,000 years after I died. Well, suspend your disbelief, and don’t worry about it. I’m here.

I’m here because your pastor Tom asked me to come and talk to you about that time when Jesus asked me and the others who we say that he is. Now, that’s a hard incident to forget. I mean, what a question! Who we say he is? Doesn’t everybody know who he is? He’s Jesus son of Joseph, a carpenter from a tiny town in Galilee called Nazareth. And yes, by the time he asked us that question we’d spent a fair amount of time with him, and it sure seemed like he had to be more than a carpenter’s son from Nowheresville. We’d heard him teach, and boy was hearing him teach something! He taught like no one we or anyone else had ever heard before. He taught about something he called the kingdom of God. Matthew often says he called it the kingdom of heaven, but mostly he called it the kingdom of God. Wow, that sure was something different than we’d heard from our rabbis, our teachers of our Jewish faith. He said life wasn’t about being ritually pure. It wasn’t about following a bunch of ancient rules. It was about love. Love! Can you believe it? He said love God, and love your neighbor as ourselves. Wow! O sure, we’d heard the love God part before. That’s the foundational confession of our Jewish faith: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” That’s from our book of Deuteronomy, so we weren’t too surprised to hear Jesus repeat that one. But love your neighbor as yourself? I guess that one’s in the Torah too, but it sure wasn’t prominent in the teaching of the rabbis in our time. And Jesus said everyone was our neighbor. We thought: Really? Are you serious? Well, yes, he was serious. He even said those miserable Samaritans were our neighbor, and we were supposed to love them too. Man was that a hard one to get your head around. Like I said, listening to Jesus teach was nothing like hearing anyone else teach that we’d ever heard before.

And then there were all those crazy things he did that no one should have been able to do. He fed thousands of people with a little bit of bread and a couple of fish. He calmed a storm on the Sea of Galilee that nearly killed us. He even walked on the water of the Sea. I mean, what was up with that anyway? You can’t walk on the surface of a lake, but Jesus did. He even had me doing it, and he rescued me when I started to sink. He exorcised demons. He healed illness. He even brought dead people back to life. He did all these impossible things.

Then he asked us who we say that he is. Well, that question took be aback at first. He’d first asked who “people” say he is, and while some of my friends were answering that one I tried to figure our who I thought he was. Then he asked who I said he was. Well, there was only one possible answer to that one. Now understand. We first century Jewish people had long been expecting someone we called “the Messiah.” In Greek they called him “the Christ,” which means the same thing. We thought the Messiah would be a new King David who would raise an army and drive the Romans into the sea. Now, that sure wasn’t what Jesus was up to. So far from raising an army and attacking our enemy he said that we should love our enemy and pray for them. Say what? Love those blankety-blank Romans and pray for them? Well, that’s what he said. He said never oppose evil with violence. He said resist evil nonviolently, creatively, even with humor but never with violence. He said don’t drive the Romans out militarily, expel them from your heart through study and prayer. So I thought, well, he can’t be the Messiah, can he? He’s not acting anything like what we thought the Messiah would act. But then again. There was something magical about him. There was something even divine about him. He talked about God in a way we’d never heard before. He did things you’d think only God could do. No one else we knew had ever taught like he did or did the things he did. How was I to understand him? How was I to answer his question of who I say he is?

I’d actually been pondering the question of who he really is for quite some time. I mean, how could I not given everything I’d seen and heard from him? It had started to dawn on me. He wasn’t anything like the Messiah we’d expected, but what if? What if we’d been wrong all along about the kind of Messiah God would really send us? I couldn’t deny that Jesus was totally unlike anyone else I’d ever known. No one else had ever known anyone like him before either. Who did I say he was? I could answer he was Jesus of Nazareth. I could have answered he was a great rabbi, a great teacher. I could have agreed with people we’d heard who said he must be Elijah returned to earth or the reincarnation of one of the prophets. All of those answers sounded true in ways, but none of them really got to who this Jesus of mine really was. So I gave him the only answer I could that didn’t sound inadequate. I said “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

Now that really was quite a confession on my part. You all probably take it for granted that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. After all, you grew up hearing that he was precisely that. You are products of a two millennia long tradition that says he is precisely that, but we weren’t. Not back then. We didn’t know the Messiah, the Christ, would come in our lifetimes. We didn’t know that we would become his disciples. We didn’t know that he would be a friend of ours. Yet I couldn’t deny that he had come. I couldn’t deny that I was his friend and perhaps his closest disciple. I mean, Wow! When I finally got it that Jesus was the Christ it sure changed my life. Yes, I betrayed him at the end of his life, but he forgave me for that after he had risen from the grave. He said to me Peter, feed my sheep. So that’s what I tried to do. It cost me my life like it cost Jesus his, but that was such a small price to pay for the privilege, the honor, of being a disciple of the Christ, the Son of the living God.

Do you folks really get it what great good news it is that precisely Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God and not someone else? Jesus as the Christ turns our world upside down, but it does it in the most awesome ways. The Messiah, the Christ, we were expecting would have been a very worldly figure, a worldly king with a worldly army. The Messiah, the Christ, we got was a prophet not of war but of peace. He was a prophet not of hatred but of love. He was a Savior not only for the rich and powerful but most of all for people like you and me, good folks basically but people of no great account in the world. He didn’t say to us join my army and kill or be killed. He said join my movement and find a meaning, a purpose, a joy you never knew you could have. He said yes, you’ve made mistakes; but none of your mistakes can or ever will separate you from God’s love. He said follow me, and you will become God’s tools on earth working to build nothing less than the kingdom of God. He said follow me, and you will come to know an eternal life you never thought was possible. He said follow me, and nothing in your life will ever be the same. It will be so much better than you ever thought it could be. Not because you’ll be rich by the world’s standards but because you will be rich in spirit, rich in the knowledge and love of God; and that’s the only kind of riches really worth having. He said follow me and you will be born again. You will become new people, people living the way God created you to live, not for yourselves only but for all of God’s people and all of God’s creation.

Do you folks living so long after Jesus and I lived really get that? I hope you do, but here’s the thing. The only way you can really get it is by living into it. Don’t convince yourselves it’s true, then live it. Live it, and you will come to know its truth not with your mind only but with you whole being, mind, heart, and spirit. Live it, and you will know that there is no other way worth living. I hope you get that. I really do, for it is the greatest good news there ever was or ever will be.

Well, that’s what I have to say to you. I thank Pastor Tom for asking me to come talk to you. I don’t suppose you ever thought you’d meet me in person. After all, I died a long time ago; but as they say, nothing is impossible for God. As I leave you I pray that you will truly know Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the Living God. Know it with you minds, but know it too with your hearts. Give your spirits to him, and you will find life like you never knew life was possible, both in this life and beyond this life. Thanks for listening, and God bless. Amen.