Boldness

This is my fourth sermon as intern at Living Waters Lutheran. I wrote this before knowing the potential of the destruction of Hurricane/Tropical Storm Harvey. Living Waters will be taking up a donation for Lutheran Disaster Relief for the next couple weeks in response to the damage. 

Gospel: Matthew 16:13-20

Grace and Peace to you from God our Loving Creator, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ, Amen

    Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” Who is this guy you’ve been following around? The disciples reply with… Perhaps your relative, John the Baptist, or a prophet of old, Elijah… Someone important anyway…

And then, Peter... Peter that ol rock… Peter speaks up! Peter declares in a loud voice that Jesus is in fact, the Messiah. Jesus responds by blessing him, and saying that upon this rock, Jesus will build the church. Now, some may assume that Jesus was making a pun - Peter after all comes from Petros, meaning Rock… And Peter did sink like a stone a couple weeks ago… And Peter is a stumbling block a little bit later… And Peter is stone-faced when people ask about Jesus after the Last Supper… Okay, that’s enough stone puns for now.

Either way, Peter speaks up, and Jesus says that he will build his church upon the rock. The first line of our Hymn of the Day... that we will be singing shortly, is Built on a rock the church shall stand, even when steeples are falling… Jesus builds his church on the effort of Peter standing up, speaking up and declaring Jesus as Messiah.

Who is Jesus to you? I think that’s an honest question that we all wrestle with from time to time. 

Here are some images of different depictions of Jesus, maybe some you’ve seen, maybe others you haven’t. Different perspectives, some might seem offensive to you. But the artists who depict Jesus in this way, may want to give people a variety of reactions to them. (I showed the congregation images of Jesus, from different perspectives, Native American, African, Chinese, transgender... etc...)

Jesus is generally depicted, in our Upper Midwestern Lutheran world… as this ( a stereotypical white Jesus). The traditional image of Jesus is this guy that looks like a lot of other bearded men with long hair. Look at a college campus, and there are plenty of Jesus-look-alikes around, as well as pop culture. (Chad Kroeger and Obi-Wan Kenobi)

Alright. So there’s a lot of images that we associate with our Messiah. The disciples had theirs, and Elijah and John the Baptizer were important figures in their life. Jesus is important, and Jesus, like Elijah and John… have influence on the people and are change-makers in their world.

The question right now… is Who is Jesus to you? A few years ago, there was a funky 80’s song going around the internet entitled, “Jesus is my Friend”. I won’t show it to you now, but you can certainly look it up when you get home. The image of Jesus as our friend is certainly planted in us when we’re young, with the image of Jesus sitting or walking with children is first introduced to us. Jesus is our big brother, our friend in times of trouble, our protector.

We have plenty of songs about Jesus, in our hymnals and on the radio, plenty of movies, plenty of posts on social media, and then we have the Bible, our Bible… sitting on a dusty shelf somewhere in our house…

Jesus is the Son of God, he had his ministry on Earth, died and rose again. The Apostle’s Creed, the creed most of us had to memorize in confirmation class… portrays Jesus as a baby one sentence,  “I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only son our Lord. He was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary…” and BOOM “suffered under Pontius Pilate”...

Wait… where did all of the Gospels go? That’s skipping like 20 Chapters in the Gospel of Luke. As I heard a theologian say once, Jesus lept out of Mary’s arms, into the hands of Pilate!

And then we move on to remembering his death and resurrection. Oh, and Jesus saves us all through his death. And the story of Jesus remains in those dusty bibles on the shelf, to be brought up in church, and maybe occasionally in conversation.

I ask again… Who is Jesus to you? Somewhere in the skipped 20 chapters of the Apostle’s Creed… is the life and ministry of Jesus on earth, as told by the Gospel writers. All the teaching, and healing, and feeding, and walking and talking… All the parables, all the little nuggets of wisdom. That’s the Messiah Peter was talking about. The Messiah, the one who saves us all from ourselves. Through the Grace, Love and Mercy of God… you and I and the rest of humanity… have been saved from our sin, our pain, our weakness. That’s the Messiah. That’s the Good News.

All too often though, we think that this Messiah is ours alone. Our own personal Jesus. Someone to hear our prayers, etc. Someone to wield against someone else. Those pictures of Jesus I showed you earlier… Some may have been thought provoking, others maybe offensive to some. But, the artists, the communities and cultures that these images come from - these are examples of them proclaiming their faith that their Messiah, our Messiah - cannot be put into a box, one where there is solely one correct version of Jesus.

Jesus is somebody to everybody. We have faith in this somebody, and we can proudly and boldly proclaim our faith in this somebody. The other disciples threw out what other people thought, but there Peter was boldly proclaiming that Jesus is the Messiah, the Anointed One - the one who saves us all from ourselves.

Jesus says that on this rock I will build my church. The passion that Peter shows is the passion that propelled Christianity through history. Be like Peter. Be passionate in your faith. Be passionate in who you are as a beloved child of God. The walls of church buildings are built to maintain structure, to withstand weather, to provide shelter and sanctuary, and to create a space where God’s word is proclaimed, where the promises of God are shown in the living waters of baptism and in the bread and wine of communion. Where community is held, where people experience the beginning, middle and end of their lives, where we say hello and wave goodbye. Our existence is a bold expression of our faith. And here’s the kicker - the church isn’t this building… it’s you. We are the church. We are the church that Jesus built upon the bold proclamation that Jesus is the Messiah. That’s who we are.

I keep asking you, “Who is Jesus to you?” This is a sermon, and you’re mostly white Minnesotan Lutherans, so dialogue in a sermon might not be all that comfortable for you, and that’s okay. I don’t like it either. But I can tell you how I’d answer that question.

Jesus for me, is the Messiah that boldly lives out his faith in God and humanity by preaching and teaching and feeding and healing those, who in the eyes of those in power, Jesus shouldn’t be preaching and teaching and feeding and healing. The folks like the Canaanite woman last week, or the 5000 people a couple weeks before. Jesus is the Messiah who was born into poverty, born a refugee, and lived his life showing humanity what to do when the deck is stacked against you. Even when the deck is in your favor, Jesus the Messiah, the Christ, the Anointed one does what he’s not supposed to for the benefit of those around him, to teach us all how to live, so that we may go and do likewise. Jesus is the Messiah that even when we as humanity make mistakes, when we mess up, when we are in pain, when we lose our loved ones, when we need a loving presence and the arms of our Savior… Jesus the Messiah is the one who saves us from that darkness, because the light of Christ shattered death and shatters the darkness that we live with.

With the darkness of Charlottesville in our recent memory, with the threat of nuclear war seemingly always on the horizon, when our sea levels are rising and people are crying out in pain… We may not know how to respond. What we can do, is we can boldly proclaim in a loud voice that Jesus is our Messiah. Jesus loves you, loves me, loves us all and we are called by this Messiah to go out into our world and help create a beautiful life for us all. Stand with your neighbors when they need you. Go out and be the church. Boldly proclaim to all the world that you are loved. They are loved. Be bold in your faith, for that is the rock on which Christ built the church. Built on that rock, this church shall stand.

    Amen.