That Pesky "Who?" Question

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Matthew 16:13-20

The questions we ask shape our drive - our desires and pursuits in life.  It starts at an early age.  Children who ask questions like “What are stars?”, “Can I run faster?”, or “Can I sneak a bowl of chocolate chips without getting caught?” will pursue different paths in life than the child who sadly has to ask questions like “What’s wrong with me that other kids don’t want to play with me?” or “How can I do my hair so that people will see me as pretty?”  I call these kinds of paradigmatic questions “driving questions?”  

Organizations also have driving questions as well.  If an insurance company’s foundational question is “how can we provide our clients with the best affordable coverage?”, it will do business differently than the insurance company who strives to answer the question: “How can we produce more bottom-line profit?” 

Churches too have driving questions.  We ask questions like, “How can we get more people to attend church?” or “What’s wrong that people don’t come to church anymore?” or “What’s wrong with us that people don’t attend our church?”  Our preoccupation with those last two questions is helping to feed the demise of the North American Church.  They may seem like good questions to ask, but they are a symptom of group depression and point us in the wrong direction.

In our Matthew passage this morning Jesus presents us with two questions that I think we would better spend our time pondering.  The first is “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” and the second is, “Who do you say I am?”  These are versions of what I call the pesky “who” question.  There are two versions of that question: the less personal and less powerful version which simply “Who is Jesus” and the more personal and powerful “Who are you, Jesus?”  The first question has us simply looking for information about Jesus.  The second one puts us in a relationship with him.  In that question we find the renewing of our minds that transforms us.

Take the Apostle Paul for example.  His story begins with him being a zealous up-and-coming Pharisee who had it in for the followers of Jesus.  His answer to the “Who is Jesus?” question was quite blatantly that Jesus was a blaspheming false prophet and his followers needed to be reined in at all cost.   But then one day as he was on a trip from Jerusalem to Damascus going to arrest Christians, something happened that started him asking “who are you, Jesus?”.  Jesus appeared to him in a bright light and confronted him about why he was persecuting Jesus’ followers.  At that moment Paul started to ask a new driving question, “Who are you, Lord?”.  We have to appreciate that there was only one person that a Jew, especially a law-abiding Jew, would call Lord and that was God.  He’s suddenly come to the conclusion that somehow Jesus is Israel’s God, his God.  Paul then spends the rest of his life as Jesus’ “Apostle to the Gentiles” preaching the Gospel and planting churches all over the Mediterranean world and he spent a great deal of his time suffering for Jesus and the church.

 “Who are you, Lord?” was Paul’s driving question.  In his Letter to the Philippians he makes this evident.  He wrote that letter from prison while under the imminent threat of execution and in it he very adamantly sums up his life’s purpose.  He writes: “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead” (Phil. 3:10-11).  “I want to know you, Jesus?”  Is that the question that’s driving our lives?  As churches, are we driven by the question of “How can we help people come to know Jesus?”

Back to Matthew, this little period of question and answer comes as the climactic answer to a driving question the disciples began to ask back in chapter 8 when Jesus calmed the storm.  If you remember Jesus was sleeping soundly in the back of the boat.  The storm was raging.  The disciples were afraid for their lives.  They awakened Jesus with the accusation that he doesn’t care that they are going down.  So, he got up and rebuked them for their lack of faith: “Why are you afraid, you of little faith?”  He calmed the storm.  The sea became utterly still.  The disciples became utterly amazed and they began to ask “What sort of a man is this that the wind and the sea obey him?”  ‘s starting to sound like that pesky, “Who are you, Jesus?” question.

The next few months they have to struggle with this question as they wander around the Galilean countryside and points beyond.  They see Jesus cast out legions of demons.  He heals the paralyzed, the lepers, and the blind.  He teaches about the Kingdom of God.  He confronts the Pharisees about their hypocrisy.  He even raises a young girl from the dead.  He sends them out on a mission and they do these very same things.  The Kingdom of God is at hand, even their hands.  Upon returning, Jesus feeds upwards of fifteen thousand people with two fish and five loaves of bread.  He walks on water and calms a great windstorm.  There again in a boat on a calm sea they come to their answer.  What sort of man is this that the wind and the seas obey him?  Well, worshipping him, they confess, “Truly, you are the Son of God.”  

Something that should profoundly strike us here is that when the disciples asked the pesky “who” question of Jesus, he answered them.  The answer came as they witnessed him at work in their midst and as he involved them in his ministry.  They found themselves changed by him.  

In my humble opinion, we do not spend enough time asking “Who are you, Jesus?”  Sadly and profoundly, “Jesus, who are you?” is not the question that drives our lives, mine included, and the ministry of our churches.

We spend a lot of time in our watered-bogged boats saying “Jesus, don’t you care that we are perishing?”  But we don’t stop to ask, “Jesus, who are you?”  We have our beliefs and the stuff we know about Jesus and having that we simply don’t think to ask our Lord the personal question, “Jesus, who are you?”  We seem to have missed the point that we are supposed to be being transformed by the Holy Spirit to be more and more like Jesus.  We are good, faithful members of churches but to actually call us Jesus’ disciples...well there's a difference between being a member of a religious institution called a church and being a disciple of Jesus who wants to know who Jesus is and to be like him, to know him in his sufferings, his dying to self, his resurrection.  

Disciples are students of who Jesus is as a person present in our lives.  He isn’t simply a historical figure from 2,000 years who taught us stuff we would call truth.  "Who are you?" is a relational question.  Learning who Jesus is happens in relationship.  Praying the who question is a good place to start.  It is good just to sit and ask the empty spot on the couch next to you “Jesus, who are you?”  

When we read our Bibles, we should read them with the expectation that Jesus is going to share himself with us as we reflect on what we read.  There’s more to the Bible than just history and teachings about God.  We call the Scriptures "living" for a reason; through them he speaks.  

It’s also good to have a handful of friends that you meet together with and on a regular basis to talk about what the Lord is doing in your life.  Seeing others be encountered be Jesus helps us to know it when we ourselves are wrestling with the Lord.

Finally, Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to bind us to himself so that we might be in an unbreakable relationship with him.  He is in our “being” and we are in his.  The first thing Jesus is going to reveal to us about himself is that he is the beloved Son of the living God.  And since the Holy Spirit binds us to Jesus at the level of our very being this revelation Jesus gives to us of himself comes with us also knowing ourselves to be beloved children of God.  It is good for us to sing Jesus loves me this I know, but it would be more accurate to sing God the Father, almighty Maker of heaven and earth loves me in Christ this I know by the presence and touch of the Holy Spirit, but lyrically that’s just a hard one to put to music. 

“Who are you, Jesus?” is the most important driving question we can ask.  He will answer it and the answer will change us each.  It will change our churches.  Ask it.  Amen.

Everybody Is Sacred

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Matthew 15:10-28

Sacred, what does sacred mean?  Similarly, what does it mean to defile something?  For most of us, this sanctuary is a sacred place as opposed to a common place.  It’s a place set aside for special use by God…pulpit, pews, baptismal font, Bibles, hymnals, stained glass, high ceilings reaching to heaven…all add to the sense of sacredness.  But then there’s that something more.  We’ve likely had experiences here of God’s closeness or of God speaking to us.  This is a God-place.  In the Old Testament the Temple was the place where Heaven and Earth overlapped and were open to each other.  We come to a church sanctuary seeking that openness.

For many, the most sacred feature of this sanctuary is the communion table.  We feel uncomfortable if it is used for common purpose.  When we use this table, the Lord's Table, we like to do so in a way respectful of what it is.  We cover it with a white shroud-like tablecloth and we place upon it silver plates and a silver chalice.  We use fresh bread and we fill the chalice with wine and then, gathered around this table, we share a holy meal, a meal shared that is in some way a testimony to and a participation in Jesus and his giving his life that we may live.  This table is sacred to us.

Well...let me see if I can push your sense of the sacred here a bit.  What if instead of a white shroud-like table clothe, I use a red-checkered gingham, picnicky tablecloth or something tie-dyed or camouflage?  That would catch your eye, I'm sure.  What if instead of bread on a silver plate, I put out a simple carton of Timbits and replaced the chalice with a Tim Horton’s coffee extra large double-double?  I bet you would say to yourselves, “this is OK for the purpose of a sermon illustration, but don't take it any further.”  Well, let’s say I do.  What if I placed the Timbits onto the silver plate; and what if I poured the coffee into the silver chalice?  What If I proceeded to lead you in the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving and said the words of institution and presented these doughnut holes to you as the body of Christ given for you and this coffee as the blood of Christ shed for the forgiveness of your sin?  

Well, I think that just might do it.  I just might have defiled this meal.  I'm pretty sure that if I were on your side of the table that I would feel offended.  So, you don't have to worry about me ever doing that.  Even though the Lord's Supper consists of the basic everyday elements of bread and wine, it should not be reduced to the mundane, especially the commercialized mundane, by the use of Timbits and Tim Horton's coffee.  That would defile the Supper for me.  It would no longer be for me the Lord's Supper.  But…if it was somebody’s last celebration of this meal and Timbits and Tim Horton's coffee were all we had, no doubt, I'd use them and I think you would too.

Well, I've led you folks through this little exercise on sacred things and how to defile them to come now to the point of saying that it is one thing to talk about sacred things and places and our feelings of being offended when they are defiled and an entirely different thing when the same discussion is had with respect to persons.  All people - no matter their race, ethnic background, sexual orientation, social class, religion, or nationality – all people are sacred.  All people are sacred because together we all share God's purpose of bearing the image of God in his creation in our relationships with each other and with the creation.  

The image of God is really quite beautiful.  God is a loving communion of persons – God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – persons giving themselves to one another so selflessly that their love cannot be contained and must spill forth and enliven all things.  The image of God in us is that we too are persons in relationship who together should be reflecting this image of loving communion of persons into God’s good creation in the way we do relationships and community.  But…unfortunately, this beautiful image of God that God created us to share in and reflect forth into God’s very good Creation has been defiled by us.  We’ve contracted a disease of mind which is traditionally called sin (and we need a better word for it because that one has been overused by judgementalitsts, so much so that it is difficult to take it seriously anymore).  Sin is our inclination to be overly self-oriented to the extent of being twinged with a desire to be gods ourselves.  So, rather than simply and joyfully bearing the image of the loving communion of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit in remarkably beautiful relationships and communities of abundance, the image is marred.  We hurt.  We hurt ourselves and others.  Our communities suffer violence and scarcity. 

Every human being and every human relationship is sacred, but like a communion chalice filled with Tim Horton's coffee we are defiled in our hearts and that defilement spills forth making everything we do to be common rather than sacred, serving our own purposes rather than God’s.  This is so even when our intentions are good.  There is nothing we can do that is not in some way self-serving rather than Christ-serving and neighbour-serving even when we are carrying out what we are called by God to do.  Ask any minister what it is like to preach.  Any good intentions I might have here in this task is tainted with ego and people pleasing.  So, because of God’s image in us, all people are sacred, yet we have all defiled ourselves and defile others.

Well, stepping into Matthew here and looking at this Canaanite woman, if there is one lesson she can teach us, it is precisely that God regards all people as sacred; that there is no one too defiled or unclean whom Jesus won’t regard as an equal.  There is a prejudice lingering around in the background of this story against this Canaanite woman.  A religious of regarding another person or peoples as defiled and defiling is always at the heart of prejudice.   The way Jesus interacts with her brings the prejudice to light and in the end brazenly brings out the truth that all people are sacred.

The prejudice against this woman is a blatant religious prejudice.  In Jesus’ day it was the prejudice Jews had for Gentiles.  The same prejudice that is a driving force in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict that persists today.  The converse of which we would call anti-Semitism.  The Jews believed themselves to be the sacred ones, those set apart for God's special purpose and use in the world.  God had established a special relationship with Israel, calling them his own people giving them the Land and the Law.  The Gentiles were the people of all the other nations, and especially the first inhabitants of the Land God gave to the descendants of Abraham.  In the eyes of the “especially” religious of Israel, Gentiles were just common, not sacred, and for the most part defiled by their idolatry and defiling to be in contact with.  For some Jews back then just touching a Gentile would make you unclean, defiled, not worthy to come before God.

We should notice where this encounter happens. Jesus has actually gone outside of the borders of Israel into Gentile country (southern Lebanon today) which was something someone dead set on serving Israel’s God would never do.  He’s left the Holy Land and there this Canaanite woman comes to him and does this odd thing of worshiping him and begging him for help as if he were a god.  Her daughter is possessed by a demon and she wants her set free.  If you remember your Old Testament, Canaanite women were about as defiling as you could get.  They were always leading the Israelites astray into idol worship which involved temple prostitutes and through seducing Israelite men into marriage.  

The woman’s act of worshipping and praying to Jesus has an ironic twist to it.  This epitome of defiling defiledness, this Canaanite woman, “that woman” to quote Bill Clinton, she apparently recognizes Jesus as being somehow God in the flesh when the religious authorities and even Jesus' disciples aren’t seeing that.  She worships and prays to him.  She bows before him, calls him Lord, and says “help me”.  She wants her daughter set free from demonic possession and only God can do that.  This Canaanite woman recognized that Jesus was in some way God and the only hope for her daughter’s deliverance was him showing her mercy.  His disciples, on the other hand, wanted to send her away because she was this unclean, Gentile woman bringing shame to Jesus and to them by making an annoyingly loud scene and moreover any contact with her might defile them.  Frankly, they were treating a human being as if she were an unwashed cup to a Pharisee all the while not realizing that it was the prejudice coming forth from themselves that was defiling to them and to her.

Admittedly, Jesus’s response is at first glance troubling.  He has to realize that she knows who he is but he is uncomfortably silent towards her.  He seems to ignore her as a person.  Then he basically tells her that he didn’t come to help her kind, only the Jewish kind and then he calls her a dog, not worthy of the help she was begging for.  At second glance, I think Jesus does this to show his disciples what their prejudice looks like and to make them notice that this Gentile woman was seeing in him what they themselves were having difficulty seeing and what the religious authorities could not see at all – Jesus is the Lord and we each need his help.  Jesus is showing what prejudice looks like just like Archie Bunker showed North America what prejudice looked like back in the ‘70’s.

The woman very wittily and maybe even sarcastically responds to Jesus’ calling her a dog and steals the show.  “Yes, Lord, even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their Master’s table.”  Or, “I may be a dog, but I’m still worthy to eat at your table, Lord.”  Outwitted and prejudice exposed, what should we expect Jesus to say in response?  We would expect the situation to escalate.  But Jesus takes another route.  Instead of angrily dismissing her, he validates her fidelity to him.  “Woman, great is your fidelity!  Let it be done for you as you desire.”  Israel’s God is not exclusively Israel’s God and no matter who you are and no matter what the prejudices and stigmas are against you and your people, God regards all as his own.  All people are sacred.  

All people, every Timbit so to speak, are included in being a part of bearing God’s image in God’s very good Creation.  In this sin broken world, the marred image is healed and restored when fidelity to Jesus awakens.  Jesus loves us each, “Jesus loves me this I know” as the song goes.  But we must be mindful that “me” is inclusive of everybody and that we are being prejudiced if we believe and act otherwise.  All people are sacred and, indeed, all people are scarred and so also the image of God that we all bear together is scarred.  Our healing is found in fidelity to Jesus who is ever faithful to us.  The image of God in us becomes clearer as we live the way of the cross; the way of unconditional, selfless, even sacrificial love which is hope in God embodied.  This is a task made easier if we let our prejudices be exposed and accept the simple fact that all people are sacred.  Amen.