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Sermon, Theology & Culture

Saying ‘No’ to God

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GOSPEL: Matthew 16:21-28
…22And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” 23But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

What would you say?

What would you say if you were standing in front of the God of all creation, in front of the divine made incarnate in flesh? 

Moses stood in front of the burning bush. Peter stood in front of Jesus revealed as the Messiah. And it didn’t go all that well for either of them. 

Here we are, the last Sunday in August, heading into the back half of this long season of green. This time should be about soaking in those last few days of summer break, the last few days of of that relaxed pace of life before the fall ramp up. And instead, we are far too much in the same headspace as Moses and Peter. Confronted with a world fraught with danger that we would rather avoid. 

This summer, we have been hearing the stories of God’s people in Genesis and we have been hearing these stories of Jesus and the disciples in Matthew. These familiar stories have come to us with fresh ears to hear and eyes to see. It has been enlightening how our story of 2020 is being told along side stories that come to us from the ancient past. 

Last week we began with the book of Exodus and the story of Moses, who was just a baby boy. He is hidden from danger, adopted by princess, raised in Pharaoh’s household. He kills an Egyptian slave master and flees. Eventually he settles in the land Midian, takes a wife and becomes a shepherd.

And it is while living this new life that he comes across the burning bush… and discovers that it is the God of Israel, coming to call Moses back to his people. But Moses isn’t so sure about this idea of God’s. 

Peter on the other hand has just confessed last week that Jesus is the Messiah, in response to Jesus’ question about who people are saying that Jesus is. Yet with Jesus’ words of praise still hanging in the air for Peter’s confession, Peter bungles it up by scolding Jesus for talking about dying. 

You would think that both Peter and Moses, when faced with God in fire and God in flesh, would take a moment to choose their words… but they don’t. 

But why they don’t is a little more complicated than it seems. It isn’t just that Peter likes to put his foot in his mouth. It isn’t just that Moses has a phobia of public speaking. It is that the burning bush and a cross focused Jesus evoke versions of the world that Moses and Peter are trying to leave behind. 

Moses doesn’t just want to avoid speaking to a crowd. He is avoiding his old life, the imbalanced world of powerful Pharaoh enslaving an entire nation. The contrast to the life of luxury in Pharaoh’s court with the suffering of Moses’ people. 

Peter in the same way wants Jesus to avoid the world of the Pharisees and the Scribes. The imbalanced world of the religious haves and have-nots. The risks of facing up against the powerful religious elite who will do almost anything to maintain their power and status. 

Moses has a good life being a shepherd in Midian. Peter has found a good gig following this popular miracle worker around the country-side… Neither want to wake up and face the real world full of death and suffering. 

And so they protest. Moses protests to the burning bush. Peter scolds Jesus. When faced with God’s summons towards the danger for the sake of God’s people, both hesitate and try to stay in the relative comfort. 

And just maybe we understand Moses and Peter in 2020 more than ever before. We have been surviving a great ordeal ourselves. We have and are enduring pandemic. We watched and prayed for the sick, for health care workers, we stayed home for the sake our neighbour. 

And then in the middle of a pandemic, the murder of yet another black man, George Floyd set the world on fire. Protests erupted all over the world and even in our own city. 

Yet that was June. And now it is August… and as the pandemic stays mostly, kind of, almost under control, our world opens up to some semblance of a new normal. Even as we wonder about plans for back to work and back to school and of course back to in-person church. 

At least there is hockey, basketball, and baseball all at the same time. 

It is… or was… almost a world we can live with and be kind of comfortable in. 

And then there was another cop shooting an unarmed Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. And  a big Hurricane slamming into the South-East United States. And there are renewed protests, vigilante shooters barely touched by police, and forget watching basketball, baseball and hockey this week – players are boycotting. 

Then there were the days of record cases numbers and more covid deaths in our province.

And all of sudden it feels like we are cowering in front of a burning bush or an angry Jesus reprimanding us for thinking that we could just stay in that kind of comfortable world we thought we had found. 

So what would you have said? 

How would you have responded to I AM who I AM? 

What could you say to the Christ who says, “Get Behind me Satan” to you?

Peter gets reprimanded by Jesus for thinking of human things and not divine things. 

Moses is informed that his fears aren’t sufficient for shirking God’s call. 

Yet there is more to what the burning bush and Jesus are saying to these two men. There is more than rebuke. And there is more that God in Christ is saying to us. 

As Moses pushes back, the burning bush promises that Moses will be given what he needs to face the future. That God’s plan for Moses and God’s people isn’t just danger and the risk of death. God has more mind, God has a new and different future in store for a people stuck in slavery. And God promises to go along side Moses each step of the way, God promises to provide a community to support Moses and work with him. 

And as Peter pushes back against Jesus’ talk of death, Jesus reminds Peter and the other disciples of the promise at the heart of the incarnation. It isn’t just a promise to wander the country-side doing miracles, being popular with the crowds. 

The Messiah, that Peter has just named, has come into the world for the salvation of God’s people. For their salvation from danger, sin and death entirely. The Messiah is on the road to confrontation with religious and political authorities, on the road to confront the danger, and to do something about it, to transform it by ushering in the Kingdom of God. By reconciling the great “IAM who I AM” with all creation, by undoing the power of death through the promise of New life found only in the One who us the source of all life, by declaring that after the death on Friday there will be resurrection on the third day. 

And so Moses and Peter are reminded that their comfortable enough worlds are not God’s intention. So we are reminded that this moment of being just comfortable enough to live is not God’s intention for us. 

God’s promise is that danger, sin and death are not the great powers of this world. That they are not the ultimate authorities over us. 

God’s promise is the very place of salvation. The promise given to the Israelites who escape slavery and find the promise land, and those who don’t, those didn’t make it out of Egypt, those who didn’t leave the wilderness are still bearers of the promise. 

And Christ’s resurrection promise is the very place of salvation. The promise given to those who became the witnesses of the resurrection and those who have not seen but hear the good news are still bearers of the resurrection promise. 

And God’s promise to us, in the midst of a world on fire, a world battered by storms, a world rife with fear is given to us who have heard the good news, and those who have yet to hear, those who hear but doubt, those do not hear at all. 

For you see God’s promise transforms us, just as it has transformed God’s people from the beginning. For God’s promise declares that right here and right now, that the dangers, sufferings, sins and death of the world will not define us. Whether we follow, whether we protest and push back against God’s call, whether we long for the small bit of comfort that we can find, or whether we take up our cross and follow Christ into the future. 

God’s promise re-defines and returns us to God. God’s promise that declares that we belong to the God of creation and life, the God resurrection and new life. 

God’s promise is life for people born into sin and death. God’s promise is life for Moses, Peter and or us.  

And today, we might protest and push back against this promise of life in favour of comfortable death… But God makes and bestows the promise none the less. Moses leads God’s people out of slavery, Peter follows his teacher to the cross, and God promises to carry us through this ordeal as well. We might not all see the other side, but in the promise God has already given us salvation. 

Salvation found in promise.

Sermon

‘Course Jesus isn’t safe. But he’s good.

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It has been a while since my last post, but I am hoping to get back into posting after a few weeks of holidays. Welcome to 2015 on The Millennial Pastor. In the meantime, here is my sermon from today. See you around. 

Mark1:14-20

Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”… (read the whole reading here).

Sermon

“Then he isn’t safe?” said Lucy.

“Safe?” said Mr Beaver; “don’t you hear what Mrs Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe.

Today, we pick up the story just 14 verses into the Gospel of Mark. In the last two weeks we have heard the story of Jesus’ Baptism, and last week Jesus called Philip and Nathaniel. Today, he continues the call to Andrew and Simon, to James and John sons of Zebedee.

As this story comes 3 weeks after Epiphany, it seems to continue with the Epiphany theme. Epiphany tells the second half of the Christmas story. At Christmas, Christ is revealed to us as the child born in a manger – Christ revealed in flesh. On Epiphany Jesus is revealed to the Wisemen come to meet the Messiah born in Bethlehem – Christ revealed as the Son of God. Today, as Jesus calls these new disciples, he seems to be continuing his Epiphany journey, revealing himself as the Son of God.

But before Jesus calls these fishermen to follow him, he does something else interesting. He preaches his first sermon. The first words that Jesus speaks in the gospel of Mark are:

“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

The Kingdom of God has come near.

That sounds simple enough to our modern Christian ear.

But for the Jews that Jesus was preaching to, it was radical. And it was radical because the Kingdom of God was something that didn’t feel near. God was NOT close by. God was far away. God was too righteous, too holy, too big and powerful, to come near to sinful human beings. That was the whole point of the temple of Jerusalem. God lived in the centre, in the holy of holies, and people needed to be purified in order to come near to, to access God. God was dangerous, unsafe. Being in the presence of God would make anyone of us drop dead. The annual tradition of Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, was based on this idea. Some poor priest was send to the Ark of the Covenant at the centre of the temple to purify it of the sin of the people that had accumulated over the year. The priest was sent with a rope tied around his foot, in case he dropped dead being in God’s presence, so that his body could be pulled out.

This holy and righteous God was unsafe and dangerous, being near to God was not necessarily something to be sought out.

And yet Jesus comes preaching, “The Kingdom of God has come near.”

Jesus preaches a radical and dangerous message. One that upset the way the people understood their world, one that made their world unsafe. One with God near by.

eye-of-aslan“Is he a man?” asked Lucy.

“Aslan a man!” said Mr Beaver sternly. Certainly not. I tell you he is King of the wood and the son of the great emperor-beyond-the-sea. Don’t you know who is the King of the Beasts? Aslan is a lion – the Lion, the great lion.”

“ooh!” said Susan, “I’d thought he was a man. Is he – quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.”

“That you will, dearie, and no mistake” said Mrs Beaver; “if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.”

“Then he isn’t safe?” said Lucy.

“Safe?” said Mr Beaver; “don’t you hear what Mrs Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe.”

Most of don’t worry about dropping dead when we come forward for communion, or when we walk behind the Altar. Yet, like the Ancient Hebrews, we too feel far away from God in our own way.

For the Ancient Hebrews, it was that God was too big, too righteous, too holy for human beings.

But for us, it is that we are too unrighteous, too small, too unholy for God.

As a pastor, one of the most common concerns that pastors hear from church people and non-church people alike is about not being good enough. We might not think that God is too good, but we often think we are too bad, too sinful, too flawed for God. So many of us sit in the pews and wonder if God would listen to our prayers. We wonder if God cares about someone like us and all the things we have done in our life. We believe that we have done things that are unforgiveable.

For many Lutherans, it is why we prefer pastors to pray, just incase God ignores a sinner like me. It part of why we hesitate to have communion more than 4 times a year, just incase it becomes corrupt by having regular contact with us. It is why we wait for children to be confirmed before they commune, in case they aren’t good enough.

But most of all, we worry that the selves we present to the world, the selves that we hide – our flaws and imperfections, our history and our baggage, the selves that cover up our shame and weakness… we worry that God sees our true selves. The naked, vulnerable, shameful versions of our selves.

And so while we might not be frightened of dropping dead in front of God, God is just as unsafe for us. For us it is not dropping dead, but dying of shame. Of being vulnerable and exposed in front of God.

This God. This God who is bringing the Kingdom near in a wild and untamed kind of way, is unsafe.

And still Jesus preaches his message.

“The Kingdom of God is near to you.”

And for the people of Ancient Israel, the wild, untamed, unsafe Jesus of Mark, declaring that the Kingdom is near is also declaring a world changing, life altering message. The Kingdom of God is near, not hidden away in the holy of holies of the temple. The King is near, the King who is too holy, too righteous for sinful humanity is coming near anyway. The King doesn’t care about holy or unholy, clean or unclean, this King wants to be with the people.

And so while the Kingdom coming near might have been unsafe, it might have resulted in death, it was also radical, transformational, it was incredible. The great king wanted to be near to humans, to you, to me. This is a King who cares about and is concerned with people. One who breaks the rules of clean and unclean, breaks the rules of lawful and unlawful, of righteous and unrighteous.

It is no wonder the disciples just drop their nets and follow. They were experiencing the presence of God like never before. Maybe they didn’t know in their heads just who Jesus really was, but in their hearts they must have been seized by nearness of God.

6a00d8341ec10c53ef00e54f60744f8834-800wi“Is he a man?” asked Lucy.

“Aslan a man!” said Mr Beaver sternly. Certainly not. I tell you he is King of the wood and the son of the great emperor-beyond-the-sea. Don’t you know who is the King of the Beasts? Aslan is a lion – the Lion, the great lion.”

“ooh!” said Susan, “I’d thought he was a man. Is he – quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.”

“That you will, dearie, and no mistake” said Mrs Beaver; “if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.”

“Then he isn’t safe?” said Lucy.

“Safe?” said Mr Beaver; “don’t you hear what Mrs Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”

Course he isn’t safe. 

But he’s good. 

He’s the King, I tell you. 

Here is the thing about being safe. It is safe to God stay in the holy of holies, to keep God at distance. And it is safe to keep God contained in neat and cozy Sunday morning church services.

But this morning, God isn’t safe.

Jesus is not preaching a safe sermon. Jesus is preaching a dangerous sermon.

The Kingdom of God has come near.

The Kingdom is near and we are left exposed, sins and all.

The Kingdom is near and God can see our shame and weakness.

The Kingdom is near and we cannot hide our true selves.

And so we come together, come to this place to meet the King who has come near to us. And we confess our sins, we reveal our need for love and forgiveness. We openly admit that we do not have life figured out, that we need God’s Word of eternal life. We declare that we are the hungry masses, that we need to fed by God’s body and blood.

And Jesus comes near to us.

Untamed, wild, unsafe, lion-like Jesus comes near.

And our lives, our worlds are changed.

Jesus comes near and changes us. Transforms us.

Jesus comes near and forgives us.

Jesus comes near and speaks a word of life to us.

Jesus comes near and feeds us with the Body of Christ.

Today, we hear Jesus’ first sermon. We hear Jesus revealed again and again to us. Revealed in flesh, revealed as the son of god, revealed as coming near. Today, we hear an unsafe sermon, one that threatens to knock us dead, or least to make us die of shame.

‘Course he isn’t safe.

But Jesus is Good.

Jesus is the King I tell you.

And this unsafe, untamed God might just make us die, but also shows us untamed and wild New Life.

Amen.