September 27, 2020
17th Sunday after Pentecost; Proper 21

Exodus 17:1-7
Psalm 78:1-4, 12-16
Philippians 2:1-13
Matthew 21:23-32

Remember last week we said that the time for Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem was coming soon? Well, it happened in between last week’s gospel reading and today’s. Even though in the church calendar we save that reading until the Sunday before Easter.

So, let’s just take a moment to remember, shall we, because it will help us understand what we read today – Jesus and his disciples have made their way back to Jerusalem for the last time. As they entered, he rode on a donkey with people spreading their coats and palm branches on the road before him. They went to the Temple with people cheering and praising God as they passed by.

And when he got to the Temple, what Jesus saw infuriated him. Some were attempting to make a profit with the holy and sacrificial gifts people brought to God. The Temple leaders weren’t even trying to hide their love of money over God. And instead of looking the other way, Jesus cleared them out.

And then he began to heal the people who had come to the temple not for power or prestige but to be made well. The children witnessing these loving acts of healing cried out in praise and glorified God. They couldn’t help themselves. And Jesus says we should all be like children, seeing God with clear eyes for who God is and not who we’d like God to be for our own comfort.

When Jesus returns to the temple the next day, we get the exchange with the Temple leaders we read today: The chief priests and elders are angry with him. He had received the praise and glory that they so desperately desired for themselves and they wanted him gone. And so they attempt to question Jesus’ authority to teach and heal, to discredit him before the people whom he had healed.

True to his nature, Jesus doesn’t give them pat answers or platitudes to make them feel better about themselves, but he gives them the questions to enable them, if they choose, to look within themselves to the real issues. Jesus knows that true healing begins within us, in our hearts and souls, regardless of the outward image we attempt to put up.

What Jesus’ question reveals in them is their ego-driven need for power over others, that need that causes us to twist the narrative away from the truth in an attempt to keep our outward image of power and prestige in tact. Instead of taking a stand about what they might truly believe, they skirt the whole issue of what Jesus asks and say “we don’t know” to save their image.

Now, We need to be careful when we read of Jesus calling out the religious leaders of his day. We can’t use their sins to make ourselves feel more righteous. We must instead ask ourselves the very questions Jesus asks of them, working out our faith in the fear and trembling that comes with looking deep within, knowing that we will be changed. Changed for the good, changed for the better because we will be transformed into who God intends for us to be. That is how we find true peace and confidence and freedom, knowing God is with us always, loving us.

After confronting them with their lack of commitment in their self-proclaimed faith, Jesus tells them a parable of two sons. One son who says yes to his father and does nothing and one son who says no to his father and then has a change of heart.

Notice there isn’t a third son who does it perfectly – saying yes and doing it. If there were, we could easily say “of course I’d do it like that” and go on our merry way never having looked inwardly to ask ourselves which one am I. If there were the perfect son, we’d miss the whole point of the parable.

And the point of Jesus telling parables isn’t to help us point fingers at others or to enforce our false image of ourselves but to encourage us to do the difficult work of looking inside ourselves to see, with God’s help, where we need to change and grow, where we need to let God transform us.

So, which son are you? Do you say “yes” to God in the words we profess in worship each week and then attempt to leave God out of everything you do all week long?

Or do you start with “no” because you don’t feel worthy or equipped or strong enough to do what God is asking but then change your heart and mind because you know that it is in God that you will be made worthy, equipped, and strong enough?

What causes us to change our minds?
What blocks us from allowing ourselves to be changed?
What allows for our hardened hearts to be broken open?
Do we respond to to change and invitations to grow deeper in relationship with Jesus with resistance or acceptance?
Do our behaviors all week long reflect the words we speak when we come to worship in community?

The good news is that there is always the opportunity to change our mind, to ask God to change our hearts and souls. So even if we’ve been the son saying yes with our lips and no with our lives, we can come to the vineyard to work at any time. And, as we talked about last week, we’ll be welcomed and provided for in the same way as those who arrived before us.

We are all equally un-worthy and un-entitled when it comes to God’s kingdom, and God loves each of us as if there were only one of us. We are all equally welcomed into the kingdom if we are willing to do the difficult work of letting God transform our hearts and minds into who God intends for us to be.

The gospel doesn’t make us comfortable in our own way of doing things but brings us comfort as we learn to love others as God loves us, not the sentimental warm and fuzzy love of greeting cards, but the enduring, doing-the-right-thing-for-others-even-when-it-makes-us-uncomfortable, opening-ourselves-up-to-be-transformed-through-the-discomfort kind of love. Love as God loves is always other-focused, never self-centered or self-serving.

Our behavior really does reveal what is in our hearts and souls, regardless of what we may say or the image we may try to project.

True righteousness, God’s righteousness in us, is reflected more in our doing than in our confessing.

In other words, our behavior does reveal what we truly believe. Our actions speak louder than words.

What we say on Sundays isn’t about making ourselves worthy. It is only when we acknowledge that it is God who makes us worthy that we can come together to praise and glorify God for the healing work God does in us. Only then can we go out and reveal the God of Love with all that we are and all that we have and in everything we do. Amen.

September 20, 2020
16th Sunday after Pentecost; Proper 20

Exodus 16:2-15
Psalm 105:1-6, 37-45
Philippians 1:21-30
Matthew 20:1-16

Before we get to the meat of today’s scripture reading, I’d like to set the stage a bit: Jesus is getting near the end of his public ministry. After traveling outside of their home territory to share the good news of God’s love for everyone, they have returned to Judaea and soon will begin their final journey to Jerusalem and Jesus’ death.

Just prior to telling this parable of the land owner, Jesus has an encounter with a rich man who asks “what good deeds must I do to have eternal life?” And their conversation and what the disciples say in response are key to understanding the message of today’s parable.

So, let me tell you the story before the story: This man comes to Jesus with the question of how to possess, how to “have,” eternal life, to live forever. Remember that in most Jewish understanding of the day, there wasn’t life after death. To have eternal life would mean to never die.

Jesus responds by telling the man, “if you wish to enter into life – not eternal life, but just life, the life God intends for us here and now, living on earth as it is in heaven – If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.

And the man, in the spirit of Abraham, tries to negotiate – Which commandments, he asks. Jesus summarizes the Commandments that have to do with our relationships with each other, leaving out the parts about having no other gods but The God.

This isn’t an error on Jesus’ part, he isn’t being forgetful or absent minded or trying to soften the message in any way. He knows the true obstacle for this man is his ego that has lead him to attempt to build his own eternal kingdom through earthly riches.

Jesus instructs this man, in very concrete action, to keep the first commandment: to have no other gods but God. He tells him to sell all he has and to distribute his wealth for the greater good of all, living for the benefit of others. And this grieves the man deeply, because as Jesus responds, “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.”

This encounter prompts the disciples to ask in astonishment, “who then can be saved?” Jesus looks at them and says, “for mortals it is impossible but for God all things are possible.” In other words, we cannot save ourselves but God can.

Jesus comforts his astounded disciples with assurance that by following him, they will receive a gift greater and more glorious than any human idea of reward – they will discover the real purpose of the life God gives us.

And then he says, “but many who are first will be last, and the last will be first” before introducing the parable we read today with “The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner….” which he ends with the same “first shall be last, last shall be first” phrase to set our worldview straight.

The word translated as “landowner” would have carried the connotation of “a wise and generous authority” for Matthew’s listeners, in stark contrast to the man with whom Jesus had just had a live conversation.

This landowner hires day laborers for a fair and proper wage. As the day progresses, he hires more and more people, enabling them to care for their families as well and paying them “what is right.”

This wise and generous landowner isn’t thinking about what’s the least he can get away with in paying these laborers, he’s helping them care for their families in the best way possible, to do his best for them.

When the day ends and their wages are distributed, they all get what they were promised, a day’s wage, and still not everyone is happy. Those who arrived to work first grumble, not because they didn’t receive more than they were promised but because they felt the “late comers” should have been paid less, saying “you have made them equal to us.”

There is a work-reward ethos expressed in their grumbling that still is with us today – you get what you put in. Life is about earning and deserving, in our work and in our relationships. We live in a transactional world.

This goes far beyond the illustrated employer/employee relationship. It is about every human interaction we have – work, family, friends, business, how we see every human being who Jesus would call our neighbor. This story is about changing the worldview that says we enter into relationship with others because of what’s in it for us, that teaches us we should feel threatened when others who we perceive as not working as hard as us get anything for their efforts.

Jesus’ story of the wise and generous landowner turns the work-reward worldview upside down, or better yet, right side up. The kingdom of heaven isn’t about earning and deserving, it isn’t transactional, it is relational. The kingdom of heaven is about gifts and gratitude.

God’s gifts of unconditional love and forgiveness have nothing to do with our earning or deserving but about the divine and generous will of the one who created us.

In God’s kingdom we learn to live by the ethos of gift-gratitude. And this ethos eliminates any possibility of an “us” versus “them” mentality. It reframes our worldview to one of relationship and camaraderie, not competition.

Eternal life – life as God intends for us to live it here and now – isn’t about competing for all we can get but about lifting each other up so we all have what we need. Each and every one of us is the recipient of God’s gracious generosity and we are called to be graciously generous to others in return.

There is no reason to hold contempt for what anyone else has. We are all equal beneficiaries of God’s merciful gifts. We are all equally un-entitled and un-worthy of what God does for us. Our life in the Kingdom is a gift and not a reward.

Instead of grumbling “you have made them equal to us,” the early arrivers should be celebrating the ever growing, ever widening circle of “we” – children of God living in the image of the one who created us in abundant and generous love.

Changing our worldview isn’t easy nor is it comfortable. It can grieve us deeply. It can feel like death.

The good news, the gospel message, in Jesus’ statement the first shall be last and the last first is that EVERYONE is “first” in God’s Kingdom. There is no one who deserves less or more. We are all God’s beloved children. God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.

If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments – Love God with all of your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. To enter into life, we must let go of the obstacles that keep us from seeing everything with a kingdom worldview. To enter into life, we must surrender our power to build our own kingdom and work along side each other with God’s help to build God’s kingdom, following Jesus as we learn to live a life worthy of the Gospel. Amen.

September 13, 2020
15th Sunday after Pentecost; Proper 19

Exodus 14:19-31
Psalm 114
Romans 14:1-12
Matthew 18:21-35

Before we jump in to today’s gospel lesson, I want to back up a bit in the story to the question that prompts Jesus to talk about resolving conflict that we looked at last week and the parable of the unforgiving slave we read today.

As we continue to walk through Matthew’s telling of Jesus’ earthly ministry, in the midst of Jesus’ teaching about the Kingdom of God, his acts of healing and feeding and putting others first, the disciples ask the question “Who is the greatest in the Kingdom of heaven?”

And you know the Jesus Weeps statue In Oklahoma City that looks more like Jesus doing a facepalm? That’s how I imagine him in this moment, but that’s just me projecting my own response onto Jesus.

From our seat in this continuous story of God and God’s people, it’s easy for us to shake our heads and say, “they just don’t get it.” But, I don’t think we really get it either most of the time. As we talked about last week, a lot of folks have decided these Kingdom teachings of Jesus are no longer relevant to us today.

Clearly, though, our way of fighting to the top, thinking only of our own needs regardless of the needs of others, pursuing our own agenda and self-preservation rather than working together for the greater good isn’t making this world a better place.

And who better to look to for learning a better way than the very God who created us and knows us better than we know ourselves? We don’t need the ‘self-help’ section of the bookstore but God’s help in transforming our hearts and minds so that we can be the Kingdom people Jesus teaches us to be.

All that Jesus does and says and all that he shows and teaches us tells us there is no one individual “greater” than any other in God’s kingdom because we are all equally worthy in God’s eyes – we are, each and every human being, worthy to be God’s child, of infinite value. God loves each of us as if we were the only one.

Life – and love – in God’s kingdom isn’t a competition but a companionable journey in which we are all to do what is ours to do and join together in who God calls us to be. This is how we participate with God in making this world a better place for all of us.

Following our lesson last week on how to work through conflict from a place of mercy and grace rather than retaliation and revenge, Peter asks the follow up question I’m sure many of us would have asked in his place: “So, just how often are we to go through this? If we are to love the ones who aren’t behaving, just how many times do we have to forgive them before we can cast them aside as not worth our time?”

Now, I may have taken a bit of poetic license in that quote, but you know that’s what was really behind Peter’s actual words.

When Jesus gives the answer “seventy seven times” he is not telling us to keep score but to always be willing to forgive. This particular number would have brought to mind for those listening the story in Genesis of Lamech, Cain’s great-great-grandson, boasting about killing a man for striking him and twisting God’s action of protection for Cain into a life of unchecked personal vengeance for Cain’s descendants.

To illustrate the point of abundant forgiveness, Jesus tells them a story, a parable to help us all see ourselves as participants in and not passive observers of God’s story.

It’s important to notice that Jesus introduces the parable with “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to,” not “forgiveness is like” or “there once was a king.”

Jesus isn’t giving us a technical checklist so we can claim goodness through our own behavior, but a way of living that reveals who God is – a life framed by mercy and love.

The amount the slave owed in this story is more than he could have earned in a lifetime, an incalculable amount of money. A talent was about 6000 denarii and a denarii was a day’s wages. So try to imagine all those zeros – about six million days wages, not even Methuselah lived that long! An incomprehensible debt, forgiven in mercy. And yet this man refused to forgive even a minute fraction of this amount in a debt owed to him.

In all of his teaching about the kingdom of heaven, Jesus gives us situational references to how we fulfill the greatest commandment of loving God and our neighbor as ourselves; Jesus is teaching us how to live that little rule he gave us that we’ve relegated to posters in a kindergarten classroom: “treat others as you would like to be treated.”

The Golden rule speaks of governing our own behavior towards others, not trying to manage other’s behavior for our benefit. All that Jesus teaches us about how to live into our relationship with God and each other is about changing our own hearts and behavior.

Jesus teaches against our attempts to manipulate or control others behavior toward us so that they “deserve” our best. Jesus teaches that we give our best towards others regardless of their behavior.

Each of us is called to model the gift and blessing of God’s forgiveness. We are to forgive as we’ve been forgiven by God.

Forgiving isn’t about “fixing” the other person or making them behave within our defined framework, forgiving is about allowing God’s love to heal us.

Forgiving doesn’t require the other person to even know we’ve been offended by their behavior. Forgiving requires that we make the choice not to be offended by what others do.
It isn’t about accepting bad behavior but accepting the value and worth of every human being regardless of their flaws and responding to them accordingly.

Jesus’ teaches us about how to live with abundant mercy and grace because God offers us the same.

Living in God’s kingdom is about treating others as Jesus does tax collectors and sinners by welcoming them into a loving, Jesus-centered community so we can all learn to be other-focused as we follow Jesus.

Accountability and Mercy go hand in hand. We are each accountable for examining where we need growth and maturity and modeling for each other how this is done.

The point of Jesus’ numbers isn’t a scorecard but to say that forgiveness isn’t quantifiable; it isn’t about earning points or winning. Seventy-seven times and ten thousand talents both symbolize uncountable amounts, an abundant supply of mercy and forgiveness and love.

Loving others as God loves us doesn’t involve score-keeping and counting; it is the way Jesus calls us to live on earth as it is in heaven, journeying together, lifting each other up, weighing our own behavior, and letting God shape our hearts and minds into Kingdom people. Amen.

September 6, 2020
14th Sunday after Pentecost; Proper 18

Exodus 12:1-14
Psalm 149
Romans 13:8-14
Matthew 18:15-20

I hear a lot these days that the gospel just isn’t relevant to live in the 21st century, that the teachings of a middle eastern man from over 2000 years ago has nothing to do with the way we live today. And, when we don’t accept Jesus among us, that’s true.

Jesus didn’t come to fit into the culture in which he was born. He didn’t teach the disciples to fit in to the culture they lived in. He doesn’t teach us how to fit into our culture. The teachings of the middle eastern, brown skinned man from 2000 years ago have nothing to do with the way we live when we choose to live as the world teaches.

Jesus came to teach us how to be the people God intends for us to be – people living in healthy relationship with God and each other. Relationships in which we are other focused, seeking the greater good of all rather than our own individual interests and agendas.

Jesus didn’t come to be the popular one but the one who speaks the truth of unhealthy relationships people create for themselves and their unhealthy approach to God and religion, whatever century we find ourselves in.

Jesus teaches both on the cultural level and the personal one. We each have to do the difficult and sometimes painful work of letting our own faults be healed so that we can be together as community in healthy relationship.

Think back over the Sunday readings and sermons this summer: we’ve talked about tending to our own soul’s soil and abundantly scattering the seeds of love.
We’ve talked about seeing the infinite value in all human beings as God’s children.
We’ve talked about the true treasure of God’s kingdom and how our behavior reveals what we truly value.
And, we’ve talked about not conforming to the ways of this world and letting ourselves be transformed by God’s love so that we can bring heaven to earth.

Jesus, the great healer, didn’t just heal physical ailments and deformities. Jesus heals our hearts and souls as well.

And in today’s gospel reading, Jesus talks about how to handle conflict with direct and loving communication. I can’t think of anything more relevant for us today than this topic.

We’ve become angry and in our anger we can only see how to destroy something or someone in an effort to alleviate our anger. As a nation, as a society, as a culture, as a community, and as individuals, we are lashing out at anything or anyone.

We are angry and we want to feel better and looking outside ourselves is far easier than looking in. And, it is far more damaging to our society, our relationships, and ourselves.

When we bring one person down in our undefined anger and we still don’t feel better, then we have to bring down another and another and we continue to destroy our own heart and soul in the process.

We like to think that churches are free of this type of conflict, or at least we are very good at pretending it doesn’t exist. We’ve decided to ignore that conflict happens in church because we want people to think we are nice, and that’s the most unhealthy response to conflict there is.

The first step in a healthy response to conflict is to say “we have conflict”. It’s like being an addict, the only way to begin resolving the problem is to admit there is one.

Often however, in our “nice church people” attempt to deny any conflict at all, we then attack the one who is trying to resolve the issue by pointing it out in the first place.

We’d rather stay in our unhealthy ways because we know these ways and they are comfortable and they don’t require us to change anything. It’s like saying “I’m used to my limp so why do I need to have the surgery to fix it?”

We keep putting pretty coats of paint on the facade and ignore the cracks in the foundation.

And so Jesus teaches us how to face the conflict and how to work through it in a loving and healthy way.

Jesus address the ways we are tempted to deal with conflict and offers us a healthy, life-giving alternative to these temptations:

First, Jesus makes it clear that avoidance and evasion are not the answer. He tells us to talk to each other, honestly and openly, with the agenda to build up rather than tear down.

Second, when someone causes us offense, we don’t gossip – we don’t start with talking about the person, but we address the issue directly with the person who offended us, one-on-one. This respectfully gives both of us a chance to discover if perhaps it was just a misunderstanding and to explore the real cause of the bad feelings without embarrassment or shame. Triangulation and gossip are corrosive to our community, the opposite of healthy and life-giving.

Third, Jesus tells us not to create echo chambers of grievance – seeking out those we know we can convince to agree with our grievance even if they themselves were not a part of the original offense, secret meetings to discuss such topics as “what are we going to do with her” or “how are we going to make him do it our way.” The true goal of these types of secret meetings is never reconciliation but revenge. So bring in a witness who can point out the common ground necessary for building healthy and life-giving communities.

Fourth, if talking directly with the individual or with a witness hasn’t worked, we can’t stay within our like-minded gang of grievance. The next step is to bring the offense before the entire community, including the one who caused the offense in the first place. All points of view are included, keeping everyone accountable. With a diverse group of listeners, we are less likely to exaggerate our “side” or to omit or alter key details to make us look better or the other person look worse. It helps us keep resolution as the goal, not revenge or retaliation.

And finally, Jesus warns against throwing the offending person out. When the goal becomes excommunication even before we begin communication we are focused on retaliation not resolution. If someone in the community continues in dysfunctional behaviors, removing their toxicity may be the only answer but it is always a last resort.

The church is a place of mission and ministry, a community in which we are to look outwardly to see where we need to be sharing God’s love at all times. And so, Jesus tells us to treat self-focused, emotionally unhealthy individuals as he does tax-collectors and sinners – we welcome them to stay in our community to learn to be Christ-centered people, serving God and others with all that we have.

No one is exempt from God’s grace. No one is excluded from Jesus’ mission of love and God’s beloved community.

Conflict happens. It is happening. As the church we are the ones who are called to model relationship building resolution, not corrosive retaliation and coercion. With all that is happening, this is more relevant today than perhaps any other time in our history.

How we live within the relationships of our church community reflects our hearts – light or dark. Our behavior toward others either reveals heaven or the ways the world.

We have the choice to bind ourselves to heaven or earth.

We can choose to say that the gospel is no longer relevant and ignore Jesus’ teachings about living in relationship with each other. Or we can embrace the life-giving, loving, liberating way of God and let ourselves be transformed into the people God created us to be, with full awareness of Jesus in our midst at all times. Amen.

August 30, 2020
13th Sunday after Pentecost; Prop 17

Exodus 3:1-15
Psalm 105:1-6, 23-26, 45c
Romans 12:9-21
Matthew 16:21-28

This week’s gospel and sermon are part two of last week’s. Last week we gave Peter full marks for answering Jesus’ question “who do you say I am” with “you are the Messiah.”

But in this week’s reading, we learn that Peter hasn’t fully grasped what God meant when God promised to send The Messiah, despite spending three years as a disciple of Jesus.

Peter and the other disciples had grown up under a government who ruled by violence and force. They’d been taught that the one with the biggest sword wins. So, we can’t be too hard on them for thinking this is the kind of savior God would send – a person who could build an an empire and an army with weapons in order to take power by force, to kill the ones who kill, to oppress the ones who oppress, to control the ones who controlled.

But this type of deliverance is centered on revenge and retaliation, not love and redemption and reconciliation. Forceful deliverance does not coincide with anything Jesus has taught them and shown them.

It is so incongruent with Jesus’ teaching that Jesus labels Peter’s words as from Satan himself. Seeking to achieve forceful power and control isn’t just a misinterpretation of God’s will, it is not even within the realm of God’s kingdom.

What Peter and the disciples had failed to understand is that Jesus’ form of subversion is far more powerful than any sword.

If you attempt to defeat those who have oppressed you with a bigger fist than theirs, then you are destined to live with the fear that someone else will come along and do the same to you one day. This method of power mongering is self-centered, and self-serving, and grounded in fear. Wanting to be “more powerful” than the next guy means that what you really want is power over someone else.

Jesus comes along and takes power and control out of the equation all together and replaces it with service and humility and unconditional love. This is a revolutionary idea that they’d never heard before.

And like last week, Paul in his letter to the Romans offers up an excellent sermon on how we follow Jesus and subvert the powers of this world, giving us a thorough checklist of Kingdom behavior, and explaining what we talked about last week – not conforming to this world but beings transformed by God:
Let love be genuine;
hate what is evil,
hold fast to what is good;
love one another with mutual affection;
outdo one another in showing honor.
Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit,
serve the Lord.
Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer.
Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.
Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.
Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.
Live in harmony with one another;
do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly;
do not claim to be wiser than you are.
Do not repay anyone evil for evil,
live peaceably with all.
never avenge yourselves,
Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

That last one is key – overcome evil with good.

Jesus didn’t come to create a worldly empire. He came to bring the Kingdom of Heaven to Earth and offer an alternative to the empires of this world.

Jesus didn’t come to build a building for his followers to gather in every week and then live by their own design the rest of the week. Jesus came to create a Church made of people, living in this world but not conforming to it.

World powers since Constantine have tried to rewrite this and force fit Jesus’ Way into their own narrative of power, serving up the gospel as a side dish to their agenda rather than as it is meant to be – a completely alternative way of living.

And churches as institutions run the same risk when we try to conform to or look like the world to attract others, when we water down the gospel message to “be nice” or to make ourselves comfortable.

For many, church has become a competition to see who can have the most people in the pews on any given Sunday, who can put on the best “show”, or who can bring in the most money. All of which have to do with our own need for power and none of which belongs in Jesus’ narrative of living on earth as it is in heaven.

Worshiping together in community is a critical means to an end, but it isn’t the end. It is a piece of our ongoing continuous spiritual formation that equips us to BE the church, the people of God, revealing Heaven on Earth by the Way of Love with all that we are and all that we have.

Jesus teaches that we, each of us, needs to be transformed by God’s love because that is God’s plan for overcoming the forces of this world – a collective group who know that only love can drive out hate, that only light can penetrate darkness, and who approach the world with an open hand of love rather than a closed fist of power.

And so, Jesus makes it personal, telling us to take up our cross, deny ourselves, ask ourselves the question: who do I try to control or hold power over by my behavior?

When we take up our cross, we can no longer hold onto the sword we think necessary to vanquish our enemies.
When we deny ourselves, we can no longer hold power over another human being.
When we follow Jesus, we can no longer follow anyone who isn’t also following Jesus.

Following Jesus means we set our eyes on God, not on any thing of this world.
Following Jesus means we let go of our desire for power and control.
Following Jesus means we let Jesus shape and transform the way we see the world, rather than letting the world define how we should see Jesus.

When we lose the self-centered, closed-fisted attempts to control the life the world promises us and turn to follow Jesus, we find the other-focused life of loving God and our neighbor gaining the life God had intended for us all along.

Following Jesus is our true religion, being continually nourished with God’s goodness so that we bear the fruit of the kingdom with good works for others.

And so, take heart, do not be afraid – Taking up our cross is always followed by resurrection!

Denying ourselves doesn’t mean hating ourselves because when we following Jesus we learn to love even ourselves!

Following Jesus is the life we are created to live and the life in which we are most truly ourselves – beloved children of the loving God. Amen.

August 23, 2020
12th Sunday after Pentecost; Proper 16

Exodus 1:8 – 2:10
Psalm 124
Romans 12:1-8
Matthew 16:13-20

Who Do You Say That I Am?

10 Years ago, the summer of 2010, I spent 12 weeks in chaplaincy training – all seminary students are required to do this thing called Clinical Pastoral Education. It’s on the job training with a group of others in training with classes and group sessions, and yes, limited amounts of patient visits. At it’s best it is part of the process that enables us to evaluate with great intention what we think we know about following Jesus, who God is, and who we are in relationship with God. At it’s worst, it’s designed to break your spirit. It depends on the supervisor.

As part of the pre-work for our training, our supervisor had us write a spiritual autobiography which she expected to be at least 10 pages long. We wouldn’t be allowed to begin without it in her hands at least two weeks prior to our start date. I did manage to resisted the urge to start with “to begin my life at the beginning of my life …” although I may have tweaked the margins a bit to get to the full 10 pages which showed I do not turn out to be the hero of of my own life.

From these pages, and the pages of the 4 other student chaplains in our summer group, our supervisor formulated who we were and fixed these personas in her mind, with gorilla glue apparently, because never once in actually meeting and working with us over the 12 weeks that followed, did she deviate from her initial notion of who we each were.

People often come to a new relationship with prewritten narratives of who we “should’ be for them.

People often come to Jesus with prewritten narratives of who they want him to be.

So, continuing on our walk with Jesus as Matthew tells the gospel story, we are now with Jesus and the disciples in Caesarea Philippi, a Roman settlement near a temple built by Herod the Great and dedicated to the Emperor Augustus, who gave himself the title “Divi Filus” Son of the Divine.

Standing in the proverbial shadow of this temple dedicated to a self-proclaimed god of human origin, Jesus asks his disciples, “who do people say that I am?” The People have a variety of answers, all of which try to fit Jesus into something, or someone, that they are already familiar with. Just as the disciples could easier believe it was a ghost rather than Jesus walking on the water, the people can easier believe that this teacher is a reincarnated prophet of old, even though God had promised them a deliverer.

If they can fit Jesus into their own already written narrative, then they don’t have to change the way they see their world or the way they think about their world.

And then Jesus makes it personal – he turns the question to the disciples: “but what do you say?”

And Peter, blessed Peter who shows us first hand that Jesus calls us with all of our faults and foibles, in our God created humanness, to serve God’s Kingdom, Peter gets it right: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” (But, as we’ll see next week, he still struggles to rewrite his own narrative of who Jesus “should” be. For now we’ll give him full credit for his answer.)

In our Old Testament lesson we read today, we see God’s people resisting the narrative of others – as the Egyptians tried to oppress the Israelites into who they wanted them to be, a group of people they owned and controlled completely, the Israelites resisted. Exodus 1:12 tells us, “the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread.” The midwives did all they could to resist the evil of the Egyptian government that said some people are less than human and can be own and controlled. Moses’ parents did all they could do to resist. Even Pharoah’s daughter chose not to conform to her father’s way of thinking and took the baby Moses as her own son.

Like the Israelites, Jesus didn’t conform to who others wanted him to be but lived the life he came to live, the life he shows us we can live if we let go of what the world says life is all about.

In Paul’s letter to the Romans, he gives it to us plainly: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God– what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Not “perfect” in the sense that we must be perfect but perfect in that God is perfect and in seeking to do God’s will we reveal the Good and Perfect God to the world.

God created each and every one of us in the divine image and Jesus came to show us a different way to live. We spend an awful lot of energy trying to create God in our own image and fitting Jesus into our own way of living. In a sense, we have become our own oppressors.

The tighter we cling to the ways of the world the more we oppress in ourselves the love and compassion that comes from the image of God at our very core. We have the choice to bind ourselves to God or to this world.

We are created to live in relationship with God and each other, grounded in love and compassion and grace. This is where we find the freedom God promises us. This is how we are delivered from the anger and hate and violence of this world.

But don’t tell anyone. What a crazy thing for Jesus to say! Why would he say such a thing?

For several reasons, one of which is that Jesus prefers to reveal who he is by actively loving people as God loves us – unconditionally and uncompromisingly. Jesus also knows that Peter and the others haven’t fully let go of their ideas that God’s promised Messiah is to be a military style victor who fights violence with violence instead of justice, reconciliation, and grace. More on that next week when we get to part two of this sermon.

Between now and then, spend time with Jesus’ questions: Who do you say that Jesus is? Do you try to fit Jesus into your own narrative or do you pray for the eyes to see and ears to hear who God really is and who we are called to be in our relationship with God?

Make time this week to ponder Paul’s words from the letter to the Romans. And if it begins to make you uncomfortable, call me or someone else you trust and talk about it. We are on this journey of transformation together, bound together by Jesus’ love. Amen.