William H. Willimon - "Who Do You Say That I Am?" (August 22, 1999)
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
- | The third reading is from the Gospel according | 0:05 |
to St. Matthew, the 16th Chapter. | 0:07 | |
Now when Jesus came into the district | 0:15 | |
of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, | 0:17 | |
"Who do people say that the son of man is?" | 0:20 | |
And they said, "Some say John the Baptist, | 0:24 | |
"but other Elijah, and still others, Jeremiah | 0:27 | |
"or one of the prophets." | 0:31 | |
He said to them, "But who do you say that I am?" | 0:33 | |
Simon Peter answered, "You are the Messiah, | 0:37 | |
"the son of the living God." | 0:40 | |
And Jesus answered him, "Blessed are you Simon, | 0:42 | |
"son of Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed | 0:45 | |
"this to you, but my father in heaven and I tell you, | 0:48 | |
"you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church | 0:53 | |
"and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. | 0:57 | |
"I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven | 1:01 | |
"and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven | 1:05 | |
"and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven." | 1:09 | |
Then he sternly ordered his disciples not to let anyone | 1:14 | |
know that he was the Messiah. | 1:17 | |
This was the word of the Lord. | 1:21 | |
Thanks be to God. | 1:24 | |
- | Thanks be to God. | |
- | It was exam time and | 1:33 |
Jesus gave a one question | 1:36 | |
examination of his disciples. | 1:38 | |
Who do you say that I am? | 1:43 | |
And only one of his disciples got it, Peter. | 1:47 | |
You are the Messiah, the son of the living God. | 1:52 | |
One of the things you learn to love about students | 2:00 | |
is when they are giving the exam, | 2:04 | |
when they are questioning you | 2:10 | |
because sometimes students don't know any better | 2:13 | |
than to ask such basic, | 2:18 | |
fundamental questions. | 2:22 | |
The younger the student, the better. | 2:26 | |
And sometimes they are these basic questions | 2:29 | |
that maybe we thought we answered a long time ago | 2:34 | |
and have settled down with some comfortable answer, | 2:39 | |
or maybe it's a question that we stopped asking | 2:43 | |
a long time ago because we were afraid | 2:48 | |
there wasn't really an answer. | 2:52 | |
And sometimes students don't know any better | 2:56 | |
than just to ask. | 2:59 | |
A student asked me to explain to her the difference | 3:02 | |
between Christianity and Judaism. | 3:07 | |
She's in love with a law student who's Jewish | 3:11 | |
and they're thinking about marriage, and how will they deal | 3:15 | |
with the difficult differences? | 3:20 | |
I assured her that I had known people who marry lawyers | 3:25 | |
and they go on to have happy marriages. | 3:28 | |
(congregation laughing) | 3:30 | |
Just kidding. | 3:35 | |
(congregation laughing) | 3:37 | |
The differences that trouble her are the differences | 3:38 | |
between two disparate faiths. | 3:41 | |
Well, we discussed rituals, of festivals, beliefs, | 3:44 | |
and then she asked a fundamental question. | 3:48 | |
"When it comes down to it," she said, | 3:53 | |
"What is the one thing that makes | 3:55 | |
Christians Christian?" | 3:59 | |
The answer is not potluck dinners or WWJD bracelets | 4:05 | |
or pushy preachers. The thing that makes us | 4:10 | |
Christian is Jesus. | 4:15 | |
Jesus Christ is Christianity. | 4:19 | |
Other faiths have love, other faiths have beliefs | 4:26 | |
about the good and the true, but | 4:30 | |
Christianity has Jesus. | 4:36 | |
If God had kept aloof from us, if God had only given us | 4:39 | |
the book, we would have the bible, | 4:44 | |
but we wouldn't be Christian, we would be another | 4:48 | |
noble philosophy of life or a system of ethical virtue, | 4:52 | |
but what God did, | 4:58 | |
we believe, is to come among us | 5:01 | |
in the flesh as a Jew from Nazareth named Jesus | 5:05 | |
or more Hebraically, Joshua, | 5:11 | |
a name which means God saves. | 5:15 | |
We believe that the peculiar way God saves | 5:20 | |
is Jesus. | 5:27 | |
It's our astounding claim that when we look at this | 5:31 | |
Jewish carpenter's son from Nazareth, we see as much | 5:35 | |
of the almighty God as we ever hope to see, | 5:39 | |
this one who was born strangely and lived briefly | 5:44 | |
and died violently and rose quite unexpectedly. | 5:49 | |
This one is | 5:54 | |
the great revelation of God, is God. | 5:58 | |
Now we can sympathize with those folk who look at Jesus | 6:04 | |
and see only a noble teacher | 6:08 | |
or a great, moral example | 6:12 | |
or a wild-eyed proto-Marxist revolutionary. | 6:15 | |
After all, from the very beginning, from the very beginning | 6:20 | |
as today's gospel reminds us who Jesus was | 6:24 | |
and what Jesus was about | 6:29 | |
was not self-evident. | 6:33 | |
There were people who stood face-to-face with Jesus | 6:36 | |
and said this is God incarnate, | 6:39 | |
but there were many more, | 6:45 | |
many more who said this man is nuts. | 6:49 | |
So from the very first, | 6:54 | |
from the first that God | 6:57 | |
came to us as Jesus, it meant that lots of people | 7:00 | |
just didn't get it. | 7:04 | |
Jesus frustrated people's expectations | 7:07 | |
for how a messiah was supposed to be and supposed to act. | 7:11 | |
Jesus had a way of not directly saying who he was | 7:16 | |
and today's scripture, after Peter gets to the point, | 7:21 | |
"You are the Messiah, the son of the living God," | 7:26 | |
Jesus tells him, "Well, don't tell anybody about it." | 7:28 | |
You wonder why. | 7:33 | |
Scholars say well, maybe Jesus wanted more time | 7:35 | |
to keep laying out his program | 7:38 | |
and how different he was | 7:42 | |
from conventional Messianic expectation, maybe. | 7:44 | |
Jesus didn't walk around with a sign on him | 7:50 | |
saying son of God. | 7:52 | |
Messiahs were supposed to have power. | 7:56 | |
They were supposed to take charge and they were supposed to | 8:00 | |
set things right, fix all of our problems, but | 8:02 | |
Jesus refused to stiff arm anybody | 8:09 | |
into following him. | 8:12 | |
He refused to dominate, he refused to take up arms | 8:15 | |
or seize political power. | 8:19 | |
No wonder that looking at Jesus' life, | 8:24 | |
many people would say that Jesus | 8:28 | |
is one of history's most noble failures. | 8:31 | |
Sometimes when alumni ask how many students | 8:38 | |
do you get out on Duke Chapel on a Sunday morning? | 8:42 | |
I say, "Probably a good deal more than Jesus | 8:46 | |
"got for his sermons." | 8:49 | |
It wasn't just that God came to us, | 8:54 | |
it was that God | 8:59 | |
came to us as Jesus. | 9:00 | |
He just didn't look like we thought God was going to look. | 9:05 | |
He didn't act like we thought God ought to be God. | 9:08 | |
Eventually, Jesus was executed | 9:15 | |
for doing the things he did | 9:20 | |
and saying the things he said. | 9:24 | |
He wasn't killed for walking around saying, | 9:27 | |
oh, by the way, I am God. | 9:30 | |
No, Jesus was killed for | 9:36 | |
being Jesus. | 9:41 | |
He was killed for saying things like, "This is God's way, | 9:43 | |
"the poor are precious and the rich are in big trouble." | 9:48 | |
That's why we asked the counter tenor today | 9:55 | |
to sing the anthem in Latin, | 9:57 | |
thinking that if we sung it | 10:01 | |
in Latin, then maybe you wouldn't get it. | 10:03 | |
Those are nasty things to say to a bunch | 10:07 | |
of people like us. | 10:09 | |
He's filled the hungry with good things | 10:10 | |
and rich people, he has sent empty, away. | 10:13 | |
Jesus said things like that all the time. | 10:18 | |
He said, "Caesar isn't God, despite the claims | 10:21 | |
"of his spin doctors." | 10:25 | |
Not everybody who cries Lord, Lord | 10:27 | |
is gonna get into the kingdom. | 10:30 | |
In fact, speaking of the kingdom, whores and tax collectors | 10:33 | |
are gonna get in there before you do. | 10:36 | |
You just don't say things like that to people | 10:41 | |
and get tenure. | 10:43 | |
(congregation laughing) | 10:45 | |
And Christianity, being a Christian | 10:48 | |
is about following Jesus | 10:52 | |
and doing the same things he did | 10:57 | |
and saying the same things that he said. | 11:00 | |
Certainly, we don't all succeed. | 11:06 | |
You can read today's Gospel as | 11:11 | |
a astounding success | 11:15 | |
that like, Peter got the point or you can read | 11:17 | |
today's Gospel as well gee, 11 other disciples | 11:21 | |
didn't get the point. | 11:26 | |
It isn't easy following Jesus because he's Jesus. | 11:30 | |
He warned us upfront that his way was narrow. | 11:36 | |
"A lot of people who put their hand | 11:41 | |
"to the plow look back," he said. | 11:42 | |
Time and again, Jesus said things we wish | 11:47 | |
he had not said. | 11:51 | |
I don't know what he was getting at when he said, | 11:54 | |
"Hate your mother, hate your mother-in-law." | 11:58 | |
I don't know what he meant when he said, | 12:04 | |
"You want to follow me? | 12:07 | |
"Great, go sell everything you have | 12:08 | |
"and give it to the poor and follow me." | 12:10 | |
Well, to be honest, I know what he meant, | 12:15 | |
but I don't like it. | 12:18 | |
For most of us, it isn't that we've listened to Jesus | 12:22 | |
and found him incomprehensible, | 12:25 | |
it's that we've listened to Jesus | 12:30 | |
and we found him darn difficult. | 12:31 | |
So somebody came out of the chapel one Sunday morning | 12:36 | |
after the service and said, "I know that you would never | 12:38 | |
"want to hurt anyone with something you said | 12:42 | |
"from the pulpit, but I was really hurt and offended | 12:45 | |
"by what was said today." | 12:48 | |
For just a moment, I stepped back and I said to myself, | 12:50 | |
"I wonder where you would have gotten the notion | 12:54 | |
"we don't want to hurt you." | 12:56 | |
(congregation laughing) | 12:58 | |
Lady, this thing is about Jesus. | 12:59 | |
It's gonna get bumpy along the way, okay? | 13:01 | |
Being Christian is about that challenging | 13:09 | |
lifelong struggle to be friends with Jesus | 13:12 | |
and it isn't easy. | 13:17 | |
That's why we began this service | 13:17 | |
with a confession of sin. | 13:19 | |
We don't always get it. | 13:22 | |
We can't always follow him closely. | 13:23 | |
It's about that journey, | 13:28 | |
it's about the struggle | 13:33 | |
to be friends with Jesus and maybe more difficult, | 13:34 | |
to risk letting him be a friend to us. | 13:39 | |
It's about a relationship. | 13:46 | |
I think it was Richard Niebuhr who said that conversion | 13:50 | |
into this faith occurs | 13:54 | |
when the God whom you thought was your enemy, | 13:58 | |
an enemy to be feared, | 14:03 | |
is really found out to be the friend | 14:07 | |
to be loved. | 14:12 | |
We love God | 14:15 | |
because we believe that God first loved us | 14:18 | |
in Jesus, | 14:21 | |
so Christianity is not first an adherence | 14:25 | |
to a set of great ideals, of ethics. | 14:28 | |
It's not the ability to comprehend a system | 14:34 | |
of great ideas, philosophy, | 14:37 | |
it's a way of life, | 14:42 | |
it's a way of walking behind Jesus, | 14:43 | |
trying to keep up with him, being in relationship | 14:48 | |
because we really believe | 14:53 | |
not only that God came to us and that God spoke to us | 14:54 | |
and Jesus, we believe God is with us, | 14:58 | |
with us. | 15:04 | |
If Easter hadn't happened, who would still | 15:07 | |
think about Jesus? | 15:11 | |
Much of his teaching was unoriginal, his inheritance | 15:14 | |
from the faith of Israel. | 15:17 | |
He wasn't particularly effective in getting his program | 15:21 | |
across to his followers, | 15:23 | |
but when he came back to us, | 15:28 | |
oh, even from the dead, | 15:30 | |
we then say that Jesus, | 15:36 | |
who he was, and he taught, and what he did | 15:38 | |
had been vindicated by God. | 15:42 | |
That's what those early Christians meant | 15:45 | |
when they exploded into the world shouting, | 15:48 | |
"Christ is risen, he is risen indeed!" | 15:51 | |
Easter was like God reaching in and saying to us, | 15:56 | |
in case you've ever wondered | 16:01 | |
whether or not Jesus was truly, | 16:04 | |
truthfully revealing my will for the world | 16:08 | |
with all of his talk about forgiving enemies | 16:13 | |
and loving the unlovable and reaching out to the lost, | 16:16 | |
well, be assured this is exactly the way I see it. | 16:23 | |
When Jesus speaks, I'm speaking. | 16:28 | |
When you look at Jesus, you're looking at me. | 16:32 | |
When you pray to Jesus, you're praying to me. | 16:34 | |
The one who hung the sun and flung the planets | 16:40 | |
in their courses, this one | 16:45 | |
has come among us in Jesus. | 16:49 | |
Now I know this seems an astounding assertion | 16:55 | |
to those who have not experienced it, | 16:59 | |
but Christians really believe that Jesus is present with us, | 17:03 | |
walks with us, is closer to us even | 17:09 | |
than we are to ourselves. | 17:11 | |
This summer, I've been rereading Augustine's Confessions. | 17:16 | |
Someone wrote a book recently entitled | 17:21 | |
Augustine and the Invention of the Modern Self. | 17:23 | |
"Augustine with his searching, relentless gazing upon his | 17:29 | |
soul invented the modern sense of the self," | 17:34 | |
the scholar says. | 17:39 | |
Augustine wanted to find out about the world. | 17:42 | |
How did he found out about the world? | 17:45 | |
By rummaging around in himself. | 17:47 | |
We modern people are accustomed to that. | 17:50 | |
We say look in yourself for the answers. | 17:53 | |
We got sophomores who wander around saying | 17:56 | |
I'm trying to find myself, I'm trying to discover myself. | 17:58 | |
And we owe this, says this scholar, to old Augustine, | 18:03 | |
who in the 4th century picked through his own soul | 18:07 | |
for a couple of hundred pages, | 18:10 | |
but if you read | 18:16 | |
the Confessions, you find out that's not quite right. | 18:17 | |
Augustine begins by saying, "I'm going to tell you | 18:22 | |
"the story of my life," but after a few pages, | 18:25 | |
you realize this is just a sly way of saying | 18:30 | |
I'm gonna tell you the story of God's life. | 18:33 | |
You become aware that Augustine is saying less | 18:37 | |
of I and me, and my, and much more of you, | 18:39 | |
thou, God. | 18:44 | |
Augustine says during his youthful indiscretions, | 18:48 | |
during his climb up to the top of the academic ladder, | 18:54 | |
he said, "I thought I was, I was desiring, | 18:58 | |
"and I was looking, and I was searching," | 19:01 | |
but when he was converted, he realized surprise, | 19:03 | |
it was God that was looking and searching for him. | 19:07 | |
He says, "I was searching everywhere for you oh God, | 19:13 | |
"only to find that you had been searching | 19:18 | |
"everywhere for me." | 19:22 | |
That's a presence I'm talking about | 19:28 | |
the Christians learn to name as risen Christ. | 19:33 | |
So we say a prayer, we break open a loaf of bread, | 19:39 | |
we have a sip of wine at the Lord's table | 19:44 | |
and we really believe Jesus is with us. | 19:49 | |
In fact, Jesus said if just two or three of you | 19:53 | |
will show up on a Sunday, I'm there. | 19:56 | |
And there are many more than that here. | 20:02 | |
So what makes Christians Christians? | 20:06 | |
It's Jesus. | 20:10 | |
We're here not because like the rest of the country, | 20:13 | |
we're searching for more meaning in our lives | 20:15 | |
and we discovered Jesus. | 20:18 | |
Rather, most of us were minding our own business | 20:22 | |
and from out of nowhere, he found us, | 20:24 | |
or we were just biding our time, we were trying | 20:29 | |
to make it through the Sunday service without dozing off | 20:31 | |
and he grabbed us, or we stood and we just were gonna sing | 20:34 | |
a hymn and only to sit down after the last note | 20:37 | |
saying I believe. | 20:41 | |
You really are Messiah, | 20:49 | |
son of the living God. | 20:52 | |
It's all about Jesus. | 20:58 |