The way through

Proverbs 1:20-33
Psalm 19
James 3:1-12
Mark 8:27-38

I’m not sure exactly how old I was, maybe seven or eight, and I was on summer vacation at my grandparents’ cabin in the Sierras.  I went for a morning hike with my mother and younger brother on the old stagecoach road that runs along behind the cabin.  After a half –hour or so of walking, we had to scramble down a steep bank onto a wide, freshly-graded road that cut into the old one.   Going on a little further we came around a shoulder of the mountain and out from under the forest cover onto a hot, naked hillside.  It was dotted with stumps of trees and large heaps of bark, branches, and bulldozed earth.  My mother began to cry out in grief and fury.  She started shouting words that I recognized from my father and his carpentry projects, but that I’d never heard her use before.  This was a place she knew, a place she had visited from her childhood, a place she remembered as a cool, green, magical forest.

That day made a strong impression on me, and it wasn’t long after that I created a new imaginary self.  This was not the first time that I’d daydreamed a fantasy life.  As children do, I used to create scenarios in my mind and return to them again and again, making them more and more elaborate until finally it took more energy to reimagine them than the pleasure that they gave, and I moved on to something new.  But this particular fantasy was one of the most vivid I ever had. 

I was the leader of a band of merry outlaws who roamed the Sierra Nevada.  Relying on swiftness, stealth, woodcraft, and cunning, we would appear as if out of nowhere to fire our arrows into the tires of logging trucks, before melting away into the forest without a trace.  Our enemy, The County Sherriff, would use every trick in his book to capture us, but in spite of all his dogs and radios, deputies and helicopters, his stratagems were in vain--we always were one step ahead.

The child, becoming painfully aware of the injustice in the world, imagines himself a hero who can set things right.  He draws on stories like the legend of Robin Hood and retells them to himself in a way that makes meaning of things that are troubling, things that he doesn’t understand.  And something kind of like that seems to be happening in Galilee when we pick up the story of Jesus in today’s passage from the Gospel of Mark.  Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” and they say, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets."

For the common people of Galilee, the words and deeds of Jesus evoke the prophets, who destroyed foreign idols and faced down corrupt rulers, who healed and worked wonders and spoke the words of God.  Jesus awakens the imaginations of people sinking deeper and deeper into debt, people becoming landless laborers or slaves on the land of their ancestors, people crushed by the greed and ambition and violence of vainglorious overlords.  His words and his deeds remind them of the legends of their heroes, and these legends are the memory of hope.  Perhaps Jesus is a prophet like them, perhaps he is one of them, come back to life to deliver his people in their hour of great need. 

But Jesus wants to dig a little deeper.  He wants to know if his disciples have a different idea, and Peter does.  At the time of Jesus’ life Jewish ideas about the Messiah were various and somewhat vague.  And Peter doesn’t say exactly what he thinks he means when he says that Jesus is the Messiah.  But I think we can assume that one thing Peter means is that his master is more than the return of a legend.   He is someone unique.  He is the One we’ve all been waiting for, the one the prophets themselves were waiting for.   He will not just cry out against injustice, he will do something about it.  He will not just predict God’s deliverance of Israel, he will bring the plan to fulfillment.  Jesus is the hero of Peter’s ultimate fantasy. 

So it’s understandable that Peter balks when Jesus starts talking about the fate that awaits him in Jerusalem.  The hero of Peter’s fantasy is not supposed to be rejected by the leaders of the people—he’s supposed to be acclaimed by them, to lead them to put aside their petty quarrels and rivalries and unite under his authority.  He’s not supposed to be killed—he’s supposed to subjugate the enemies of Israel, bringing any who oppose him to their knees, begging for mercy.  And as for rising from the dead; well, fantasy is all well and good, but let’s not get carried away.

Part of the power of this story is that Jesus recognizes the temptation that Peter is putting in his path.  When he says “Get behind me, Satan!” he’s not being insulting.  He’s acknowledging that Peter’s fantasy has crossed his own mind.  He’s remembering a certain encounter he had in the desert, fasting there for forty days after his baptism.  He’s acknowledging a voice that’s always lying in wait for him, always flattering, cajoling, provoking him: “you have a special gift.  Don’t throw it away.  You see how desperate they are—how they only want to follow you, to do anything you ask.  Give them what they want.  You say the first will be last, and the last will be first, so how long do you want them to wait?  Just imagine how much good you could do.” 

But Jesus turns his back on that voice, and turns toward his disciples.  And I like to imagine that in that turning he is turning towards us.  He turns away from the fantasy of power and virtue, and looks to the truth of our experience, and his eyes are the eyes of compassion.  Jesus turns away from the myths of redemptive violence, and toward the reality of weakness and suffering.  And he opens his mouth, and he speaks words of hope.   They are hard words, but that is because sin has made a hard world, and he knows that we don’t need yet another fantasy of escape.  We need a way through, a real way, a way that doesn’t ask us to be superheroes, or to submit to a “great leader” and his cult of personality.   He knows we need a way to go that takes into account who we really are, and how the world really is, and what it is actually going to take to make it all the way to a new world of universal peace and perfect justice.

And we know that way is real because Jesus walks it.  That is his unique, divine mission.  That’s what makes him the Messiah.  The only truly free person in the whole world freely chooses to die as a prisoner.  Only in that way, can he show the prisoners they are captives of a daydream.  Only in that way, can he show the rulers that they are rulers of a lie.  Changing the nameplate on the door of the corner office, changing the pattern on the White House china, these things do not make change.  Change happens when people like you and me wake up from our fantasies of hero-worship, and start taking the slow, simple, sometimes costly steps in the direction of real life. 

Life—in the bodies God gave us.  Life— with the people God gives us.  Life— in solidarity with the poor, the outcast, the unloved, and the afflicted.  Life—that accepts illness, and old age, and death as part of the plan.  Life—in dogged resistance to organized selfishness and the needless suffering it causes.   Life—trusting in the basic goodness of the world and of human beings, and in God’s wisdom to turn even the worst disasters of human folly toward the good.  Life—in daily celebration of the glory of God in the work of creation.  Life, in short, in the footsteps of Jesus.  

     

Grounded in this new and different thing

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

Last Saturday I spoke at the wedding of my cousin Julie at a ridge-top ranch near Calistoga.  She had called me a month or so ago and said that she and Andrew, her fiancée, had talked it over and decided that they wanted a touch of something traditional, even religious at their wedding and would I be willing to provide it.  I said I would..  If it sounds a little vague, that’s because it was.  A subsequent conversation a week or so before the wedding didn’t make it any clearer exactly what I was being asked to do.  But I finally got more specific instructions at the rehearsal on Friday evening. Andrew and Julie’s “life coach”, named Kate, who was officiating, let me know that I was to give an invocation and prayer at the beginning of the ceremony, right after the entrance procession and her opening words of welcome.

So I composed something that I thought would be suitable for the occasion, and at the appointed time I made my way to the front of the assembly and offered it.  It wasn’t a bad place to pray, with Mt. St. Helena filling the horizon behind me, and a flamboyantly-attired collection of my family, the groom’s family and assorted hipster bohemians from San Francisco baking in the sun before me.  I did use the “G”-word, right up front, but I carefully avoided gendered pronouns and I left Jesus out of it.  Basically I invited us all to become aware of God’s eternal loving presence, to give thanks for our blessings, and to pray for further blessings for my cousin and her husband.  It was over in a little more than a minute and then I returned to my place.

If anybody took offense at what I said, they were polite enough not to say so to me.  And several people told me they appreciated it.  In particular, Kate, the life coach, thanked me for helping her get “grounded” as she put it, for the things she had to say, and the role she had to play.  And I was especially touched on Monday when Andrew, the groom, came by with Julie to pick up their dog, which we’d been babysitting for the weekend.  He told me that he hadn’t really anticipated what it was that I was going to bring to the ceremony, or how different it was going to be from what Kate had to say, until I got up there and started saying it.   And he wanted me know that when I did what I did, he realized it was important, and that he would have missed it if it hadn’t been there.

In her words at the wedding Kate had many wise and meaningful things to say about Julie and Andrew and their relationship, about the importance of the assembly of family and friends that was there to witness and to offer support for their marriage.  But all of it was on the human level.  There would have been something incomplete about it without the acknowledgment that all of these good and praiseworthy things come to us from God and speak to us of who God is. 

As I reflected on this experience this week I thought about how privileged I am to belong to a community where we get “grounded”, as Kate put it, every week, where the “something different” that Andrew talked about is at the center of everything we do.  And I thought that this might be what Jesus means when he says in today’s reading from Matthew, “on this rock I will build my church.”   

I could contribute that missing piece to Julie and Andrew’s wedding because I’ve learned a little about how to pray.  I’ve come by what I know not by magic, but by regular and repetitive practice.  If I know something about what it takes to help a group of strangers to become a community of blessing, it’s because I have participated regularly for many years in assemblies like this one here.  And if I have a sense of trust and confidence in addressing myself to this “God” character it is because I have come again and again to hear what the Bible has to say about her and to be nourished at her table.

When Jesus asks his disciples “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” they answer him on the human level.  “Well, some say this person, some say that one—but all agree that you are some kind of rerun of one of the great prophets of the past.”  But when he asks “Who do you say that I am?” he’s asking them a different kind of question.  And it is Peter who is able to give a different kind of answer, “You are the one we have waited for from the future, the one who is coming to make everything new.  You can only be understood in relation to God’s own self.”   

Now the point of the story is not that Peter was the contestant with the right answer, and so won the prize.  What matters most is that Peter understood that Jesus wasn’t asking for a right answer, but a creative response.  “Who do you say that I am” is a question for all of us.  What we are being asked to do is not to repeat Peter’s answer because it is the “right” one, but to give our own answer, an answer that says “In you I recognize God.  Whoever I thought God was, whoever I thought I was, you have shown me that there is something different going on.” 

Each person comes to this question, “who do you think that I am?” by a different path.  And we may not always even recognize our response as a faithful one.  When I first came back to church in my late twenties it was the music and the communion that spoke to me, but much of the rest of it, the Creed, the confession, the scriptures, the congregation with its social events and its committees, was an obstacle.  It took me a long time to appreciate that, while I had to answer the question for myself, I wasn’t doing it alone.  It took me a while to understand that he “you” in the question “who do you think that I am?” is plural. 

Peter may have been the first to give Jesus a truthful answer, but later on in the story, on the night of Jesus’ betrayal, he will deny him three times.  It will take the witness of the women at the tomb, and Jesus’ forgiving presence in the resurrection community, for Peter’s answer to become rock-solid.  It is for the sake of that resurrection community, against which the gates of Hades will never prevail, that God revealed to Peter that Jesus is the Christ.  In the same way, any answer we would give is just an opinion about the past, unless it is fitted in some way into this thing we call “the church,” this new and different thing that someday will really be.   

Knowing that we are founded on this rock give us the confidence to give our own answer to the question even if it is provisional, partial, and shot through with uncertainty.   And we can do it in all kinds of circumstances, with all kinds of people, using all kinds of language.  We find ourselves in situations all the time where talking to people about Jesus is not going to be helpful.  But that does not mean that Christ is any less present. 

We don’t worry too much about whether we have the answer exactly right, because the true, objective fullness of who Jesus is has yet to be revealed.  But even with our imperfect faith we can proclaim that he is the Christ because we belong to the body in which God reveals it.  It’s not an idea for us, not a doctrine we try to believe—it’s the ground on which we stand, whether we or not we feel it on any given day.  Sometimes when I make my way along the communion rail putting pieces of bread in your hands and saying “the Body of Christ,” it is your faces, your hands, your postures of prayer that make these words true for me.  And sometimes, for you, it is my saying them.