William H. Willimon - "Who Do You Say That I Am?" (August 22, 1999)
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| - | 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 |
