August 21, 2005 - 14th Sunday After Pentecost - Father Andrew Green

FIRST READING: Isaiah 51: 1-6
PSALM: 138
SECOND READING: Romans 12: 1-8
GOSPEL: Matthew 16: 13-20

I had this intense desire to do a sermon on, "They will die like gnats". I thought it probably wouldn't be the most welcoming of sermons that we could do here at St. Paul in the Desert, so, trust me, you are not going to get that one! But you are going to get a sermon that is all about the kinds of questions that we are expected to answer.

I spent a lot of my life thinking that it was about getting the right answers. In fact, if you ask my family, they will give you, in spades, how much I like to be right about things. Early on in my life, I confused being right with being kind of godly, so I knew that, if I was a priest - the priests that I knew always had the right answers - so, if I was a priest, I would probably have right answers, too. And, if I had enough right answers, then maybe, just maybe, God would love me. Well, I don't really think that anymore, but it was an experience in Seminary that changed that for me about 22 years ago, when I was working in a hospital. I was a chaplain in the hospital, and I found myself holding the hands of people who were watching loved-ones die, or who, themselves, were dying. I found out that I was in an environment in which nobody was asking for right answers. They just wanted relationship, and they wanted someone whose presence they could count on - and it changed my life.

Jesus is asking questions. It might sound like He is giving His disciples some sort of a mid-term - they were not ready for the final yet - but some sort of a mid-term after a couple of years with Him. So, He asks them, "What's the buzz out on the streets? Who do people say that Jesus is?" And, I can just see the disciples raising their hands. "Some say, John the Baptist". Now, those were the folks who had been listening in on Herod, because, just about three chapters ago, Herod cut off John the Baptist's head; and he sees Jesus taking John the Baptist's place as kind of the Prophet who is reminding people of what is righteous, and what is right, and what is real justice in the world. And then, there are the folks who think Jesus is the Prophet Elijah come back. Now, I don't say come back from the dead, because Elijah didn't die, right? What happened to Elijah? This is quiz time! He was taken up into Heaven on a fiery chariot, right? So, evidently, he didn't die, and, as a side-bar, who is the other person that shows up in the New Testament from the Old Testament whose death we are not sure about, either? Moses. Moses, because he got to look at the Promised Land, but not cross over. They said he was dead, but nobody knows where he is buried. Just a little tidbit for you.

So, they are saying, Elijah and John the Baptist, and they are saying all sorts of things about who other people say Jesus is. And then He gets real personal. I don't imagine Jesus pointing too often, but I could see Him pointing and saying, "Who do you say that I am?" And like Peter often does, Peter jumps to the front and answers first, probably before anybody else had a chance, and he said, "You are the Christ; you are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God!".

Somebody at the Saturday night service last night was talking to me. As they walked in, they introduced themselves, and they said, "Yes, you know, in the Bible, there are no last names". And so, what I want you to know is that Christ is not Jesus' last name. It is a title, and so this particular lesson is very important, because Peter says, ""You are the Messiah" - that is Hebrew; Christ is Greek, the same word. Jesus, the Christ, not Jesus Christ. O.K.? It is not His last name.

Peter says that. He makes that claim about Jesus, but we will find out in the next few verses after this passage that Peter hasn't a clue about what he just said. He got the right answer, but he didn't know what it meant. So, here I found myself as somebody who has spent their life trying to be the one who got the right answers, so I would get the better place in Heaven, closer to God, whatever it might be, and then I see Peter getting the right answer but not having a clue about what that right answer meant.

I think it is instructive. The Kingdom of God is not a Kingdom in which you are quizzed at the beginning, and, based on the number of right answers you give, you are given a place in Heaven. It is not like you get 60%, and you are in; 70%, and you get a better condo; 80%, and you are right up there at the head table - it is nothing like that.

Those questions are not about how we get close to God, but the questions are very important for us, because the questions really are not about rightness and wrongness, they are about what our intention is with our relationship with God. Because the one thing that I am sure Peter was very clear on is that he was committed to Christ - that he was committed to Jesus, and that he was His follower - and his answer, more than anything else, lets us know about how important that relationship was between them.

So, each of us needs to think about our answer. Who is Christ to you? Who is Jesus to me? What is the relationship that that talks about for each of us?

I have a friend, who is actually the Godfather of all of our children, and he was raised in the Covenant Church, and then, as he was a teenager and a young adult, he was in the Baptist Church, the American Baptist Church. Now, he is an Episcopalian. He likes to get around! But he complained that, as he was growing up in the Baptist Church, every sermon was preached as if it was being preached to people who had never heard of Jesus. Every sermon that he heard was inviting him to turn his life over to Christ, as if he had never done it before! We grew up in the same town, and we knew all of the same people; and it wasn't a Church that got lots of new people every week. So, week after week, the same hundred folks were being invited to just come on up to the altar, "and we will do one more verse, just in case there is somebody who is ready!" That is a big difference between that kind of religion, that kind of denomination, and our faith as Episcopalians, Anglicans, and, to some extent, Catholics. We believe that having that right answer about Jesus, having decided you want to have that relationship with Jesus, is simply the beginning. It is not the be-all and end-all. When you say, "You are the Messiah, and I am going to follow You", you are getting yourself into something, the course of which you have no clue about.

St. Paul gives us some understanding of this. St. Paul is talking to the Church in Rome. In the beginning of the 12th Chapter, where we start out, in just the second verse of that, Paul says, "Don't be conformed to the world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you might know what is true, what is good, and what is perfect". Let's translate perfect as "full" - what is good; what is true; what is the fullness of God.

Our coming to terms with who Jesus is in our lives - our coming to terms with whether we want to be in that relationship with the Christ - is simply the beginning for us. It is the beginning and the opening commitment into a life of transformation. We are invited to gradually and to, day by day, be transformed more and more into the person whom God has called us to be. We don't say "yes" to Jesus, and then, immediately, we are now a perfect person. We don't say "yes" to Jesus, and, immediately, we have all the right answers. We don't say "yes" to Jesus, and our life, from then on, goes perfectly.

We are people who say "yes" to being a part of the transforming life that God's Spirit is building in each one of us, and the transformation happens on at least two levels. The first level is that personal level. It is as we grow to understand who Christ is that we begin to kind of critique our own lives. We begin to find things that are out of kilter with that relationship that we have said is the most important to us, and God leads us to begin changing those things. We begin to expand our horizon, and look about, and begin to see that it is not just about me and my relationship with God, it is about me and my relationship to this world. And so, we begin to think about larger issues of justice beyond our own lives.

There is another level, and that is the level of the Church. In Paul's letter to the Romans, more than anything else, it is about how that Church relationship is being transformed. Not only are we, as individuals, to not be conformed to the world, but be transformed; so are we, as a Church, to be transformed by God's Spirit. The Church we are today is not the Church we will be in five years, or maybe not even next Sunday. My hope is that the Church we are today is characterized by an openness to relationship with the Christ, by an openness to engagement with our world, and by a commitment to justice, to freedom, to peace, and to becoming a Church that can stand up for those who have no voice in our world.

Paul has an agenda. Paul's agenda is that he wants to get around the whole Mediterranean. There are places that he believes God has called him to go and preach the Gospel, and he needs the people in Rome behind him. He knows that he can't do it by himself, so it is critical for him. The people in Rome were fighting about whether they were Jewish or whether they were Christian, whether they were educated or uneducated, whether they were rich or poor, whether they were spiritual Christians or not, and he needed them to be united in their commitment to Christ, so that they could support that mission of God that was happening all around them. He is just one example.

So, just as Paul, I invite you and I invite myself to be people who, because of our relationship with Christ, when we are asked that question, "Who do you say that I am?", we can say, "You are my Lord; You are the Messiah"; and we can say that we want to be in relationship with Him and then be ready to engage that journey - that journey of transformation that says tomorrow will not look the same for us as today. The place that God is leading us is a place that we may not even know about yet, but we trust that God will lead us and will lead us as God's Body in the world - as Christ's Body in the world - to that place.

So, I invite you to join me on that journey of transformation, that journey that is leading us to be more and more the people, individually, and the Church, as a whole, that our Lord Jesus, the Christ, has called us to be.

AMEN