Who Do You Say That I Am?: A Sermon for 12 Pentecost
12 Pentecost, Proper 16 – August 23, 2020
Sermon by Emily Rose Proctor
Christ the King Episcopal Church
Santa Rosa Beach, FL
But who do YOU say that I am? It is the central question of our faith. The central question of our lives, those of us who claim to be Christian, who aspire to be followers of Jesus.
It was the question asked of me when I came before my presbytery, the Presbytery of South Alabama, early in the second year of seminary, as they prepared to vote on whether or not I should be approved as a candidate for ministry.
Two other classmates from Columbia Seminary were also there being examined, and they had to answer first. I listened to them give the standard orthodox answers, the ones we had heard all our lives, growing up in the church, the ones we knew to be the right answers from our time in seminary. Jesus is our Lord and Savior, fully human and fully divine, the son of God. Everyone nodded in agreement.
Then it was my turn. I took a deep breath and tried to tell the truth about who I knew Jesus to be in a way that wouldn’t get me kicked out of the ordination process. It was not easy. It has never been easy. I hesitate to attempt it even now.
Because the best way I know how to answer that question is to tell you the story of how I came to believe that Jesus really was the Son of the Living God, the Messiah, the one whom I would follow for the rest of my life.
And the truth is that I met Jesus at a gay protest. Now some people may have a hard time hanging in there with me, I understand that, but rest assured that this story and this sermon is first and foremost about Jesus.
The story of my conversion is too long to retell in great detail here, but the abridged version is that at a time when I was comfortably agnostic, I had a mystical encounter with the living Christ at the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church.
I had been selected to serve as the youth advisory delegate for the Presbytery of South Alabama, the summer after my freshman year in college.
Little prepared me for what happened one evening as I passed by a group peacefully protesting my Presbyterian denomination’s exclusion of LGBT people on my way into worship. As I shook one man’s hand, intending to say that I appreciated the peaceful way he was going about his protest, I felt what seemed like centuries of pain and anguish caused by the Church, my Church, wash over me and I heard someone’s voice in my head saying, “Whatever you do to the least of these, you do unto me.”
And without a doubt, I knew that voice to be the voice of Jesus, the Jesus whom just seconds before I hadn’t believed was anything more than an interesting character in an ancient storybook. I still get chills every time I think about it or tell it.
That strange experience was just the beginning of a process by which I came to firmly believe that Jesus was exactly who my church had always said he was: my Lord and Savior, fully human and fully divine, the son of the Living God. That process involved the deep study of the Bible and the study of my own Reformed faith tradition. It involved recognizing the power and presence of the Holy Spirit in lives, relationships, and vocations of those the Church has not always welcomed. It involved rediscovering the radical and compelling person of Jesus.
By the end of my sophomore year, I knew that I wanted to spend the rest of my life helping others discover the life-changing Good News of God’s love for us in Jesus Christ—a love more powerful than sin, more powerful even than death. A love that would take on human flesh—poor flesh, oppressed flesh, brutalized flesh—to be with us and to reveal to us the true nature of God’s power and God’s love.
It was a strange way to come to believe in Jesus—too dramatic and evangelical and, well, Jesus-centered, for my secular liberal friends to be fully comfortable with… and too accepting of gay people for most of those who were unapologetically Christian to stomach. But for me, that was part of how I knew it really was of God. It didn’t fit neatly into any of my existing lenses on the world. It surprised me, it changed me, it came with a cost.
Indeed the more I learned about the Living God, and the Living God made flesh in Jesus, the more in keeping with that God’s character and history this odd revelation of mine seemed. When I read the story of Peter’s conversion to the idea of Gentile inclusion in Acts 10, it felt like reading the template for my own conversion story.
Now Christians today are in a much different position than Peter and his fellow disciples were that day in Cesarea Philippi. Most Christians today can easily rattle off who it is that others say that Jesus is. We say it every Sunday in the Nicene Creed…or the Apostle’s Creed, if you’re Presbyterian. One Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God…crucified, dead, and buried…on the third day he rose again…
For most of us, the process of confirmation…even ordination…is a test of our ability to regurgitate what it is that others say about who Jesus is… but this passage looks us dead in the eye and asks each one of us, “but who do YOU say that I am.”
How we answer that question matters. It mattered then and it matters today.
Is Jesus the one who locks the gate or who stands outside it with those who have been excluded?
Is Jesus the one who blesses us with health, wealth and security or who asks us to take up our cross and follow?
Is Jesus the one who will crush our enemies or offer them the broken bread of his body?
In the gospel reading for today, we heard Peter give the “right” answer and be praised for it, but just two verses later, he takes Jesus aside and rebukes him for claiming that the Messiah would undergo suffering and death. The idea is so foreign to his and our concept of power and victory, that he can’t even hear the part about resurrection.
I think perhaps one of the biggest temptations that Christians faith is to claim Jesus as a savior whose sole purpose is to prevent us from suffering or to relieve us from it. Of course we want a savior like this, who wouldn’t?
This is the kind of savior we are looking for when we turn to painkillers or alcohol for relief or invest all our time and energy in our own well-being, self-improvement or pleasure. This is the kind of savior we are looking for when our whole focus spiritually is on getting to heaven or having our specific prayer requests answered.
But this kind of savior tends to lead us away from the suffering of others, rather than towards it. I don't think I could do my job at Caring and Sharing if this is who I believed that Jesus was. If I believed that suffering and death were a sign of God’s disfavor or absence or of a person’s lack of faith, I could be a chaplain to no one.
There’s a quote by Paul Claudel that I keep pinned up in my office: “Jesus did not come to explain away suffering or remove it. He came to fill it with his presence.”
That Jesus himself was subject to suffering and death—did not avoid it—did not protect his followers from it—allows God in Christ, and by extension the body of Christ, to be present with suffering in a way that those focused on avoiding suffering and death cannot be.
In times like these, when so many are suffering and dying…from Covid-19 and other diseases, from violence, from poverty and natural disasters… that the Messiah is also the crucified one seems to me to be really important to know and proclaim.
If we let go of the idea of Jesus as a kind of personal magician doctor, then is perhaps equally as tempting to claim Jesus to be the kind of savior who will enact justice by protecting us from and eventually punishing or destroying our enemies, be they foreign powers, liberals or conservatives, non-Christians or criminals, or that family member who betrayed us.
This is the kind of savior that most of our politicians promise to be because they know how appealing it is to most of us. But this is the kind of savior who would have destroyed Rome and restored sovereignty to Israel, who would have called down fire on the towns that rejected the disciples, who would have cut down every soldier who came to arrest him that night in Gethsemane.
But the God revealed to us in Jesus Christ chose to die rather than kill, chose to heal rather than wound, chose to forgive rather than punish. In times such as these when the temptation is so strong to segregate and name call and double down on our political, national, or religious convictions…it matters that Jesus came to us riding on a donkey, not on an imperial war horse.
It matters that Jesus put one who denied him three times in charge of feeding his sheep. It matters that Jesus said of the ones who crucified him, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.”
When someone I love or am trying to help, in their frustration or stress turns on me and is ugly and accusatory, it matters who I say that Jesus is. It is Jesus who inspires me to take a deep breath and remind myself that each person I encounter is a beloved child of God, even if they are lashing out in pain, or doing something I wish they wouldn’t in an attempt to cope or survive. It is Jesus who reminds me that only those without sin may cast a stone.
Finally, if Jesus is no savior at all but only an interesting character in an ancient storybook, if Jesus is only a good teacher, an ethical person, and not the resurrected Son of the Living God, then everything may well be for naught. Why not live for one’s self only if death is more certain and more powerful than God? How quickly would fear of death or a numbing sense of meaninglessness take over my life if I believed Jesus’s own story ended with crucifixion. It is only a living resurrected Christ that has the power to rescue us from a life of fear and futility.
In a minute or two we will all join together in the Nicene Creed. We will answer the question of who Jesus is in the words of those gathered in the 4th century at the Council of Nicea. But what the people we will encounter later today, and tomorrow, and the next day, what they will be more interested in is who do WE say that Jesus is? And what difference does that make in our lives… and in the lives of our neighbors…and in the world.
Who do I say that Jesus is? The Messiah, the son of the Living God, Love incarnate and a refining fire, healer and truth teller, comforter of the afflicted and afflicter of the comfortable, crucified and resurrected, reconciler-in-chief, the one who defeated death by choosing it over violence, the one who defeated sin by forgiving sinners, the one who takes us into his own body through suffering and death and out the other side into new and eternal life.
If you think about it, every new day, every new encounter, gives us a chance to answer Jesus’ question: But who do YOU say that I am?
No one can answer that question for us. And how we answer…with our words, yes, but more importantly with our actions… well, it can change everything…