Sunday Sermon - The Rev Joshua Daniel, PH D (Aug 23, 2026)

[00:00:01] Speaker A: The holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, according to Matthew. [00:00:06] Speaker B: Glory to you, Lord Christ. [00:00:09] Speaker A: Now, when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, who do people say that the Son of man is? And they said, some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets. He said to them, but who do you say that I am? And Simon Peter answered, you are the Messiah, the son of the living God. And Jesus answered him, blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. And then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah. The Gospel of the Lord. [00:01:16] Speaker B: Praise to you, Christ. At this time we invite children ages 3 through 10 to go with Katie for our story time. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and redeemer. Amen. There is a famous semi true story about a Wiley Seminary professor's last year teaching. She taught New Testament for 20 years at the seminary, and she was not well loved. At the end of her class, she'd give the hardest test the seminarians would take as students. For the last 19 years, the final had always only ever covered the book of Romans. So difficult was the test that the seminarians over time had narrowed what they prepared for. So detailed and so exacting was the test that their tradition had become to not study up on every book from St. Paul, but to just drill down on what they could retain from Romans. After all, in 19 years, the final had only ever covered one book. As you can imagine, as the students filed in for her final final exam, they turned over the paper before them and found a question not on Romans, but on Second Corinthians. Every student failed that test but one. One student sat there and wrote as fast as she could the entire allotted time. This is how she started the paper. She wrote, honestly, I can't tell you much about Second Corinthians, but here's what I know about Romans. I've tried something like that. It didn't work out too great. But, you know, we've just heard the disciples get their final exam from Jesus. First question, who do others say That I am. Second and even harder question, who do you say that I am? Even though Peter gets the answer right, you are the Messiah, he says. Jesus commands them not to reveal his identity until after the resurrection. The sense we get from these interactions is that even if the disciples have the right words to describe Jesus, they don't really understand what they're witnessing. They don't really understand whom they've encountered. Jesus more or less says to them, until you see the full thing, till you see me on the cross, until you see me break bread, after I've risen from the grave, until you see me forgive my enemies, you won't really understand what you are saying when you say Messiah. But guess what? Even after the resurrection, we, the church that has followed the disciples, we've had a hard time understanding what Jesus being the Messiah means. We struggle with this. One of my favorite orienting facts about the Bible is that the name Israel was first used in Genesis 32 after Jacob wrestled with an unknown divine figure. Israelite literally translates to a people who struggle with God, a people who struggle with God. So struggling with Jesus, that's a good and holy thing that puts all of us on the path of faith. And as a church, we've really struggled with this one. Was he really the Messiah? Was he really the Son of God incarnate himself, holy as God is holy? One of the ways we try to weasel our way out of this difficulty is to say that Jesus himself never explicitly claimed to be God. This argument suggests that though Jesus claimed to be the Messiah and claimed to be the Son of God, that he was God incarnate was something the church ginned up, later invented many years after his death. This is to turn Jesus into mostly a moral teacher and the church into mostly a moral society, a genius who definitely had special status, but not divine. The problem with this account is that we find mostly the reverse problem in the New Testament. All through the Gospels, all through the earliest letters of Paul, the earliest writings about Jesus, all assume he is a divine agent. We see in Paul's letters that the very first house churches were already worshiping Jesus, worshiping him. Paul writes that in Jesus we see not just the presence of God, but the fullness of God. And in each of the Gospels, we see Jesus use language of himself that others, if he wasn't God, took rightly to be blasphemous. He said of himself, not just in the Gospel of John, but also in Mark and Matthew and Luke, that he himself is the great I am the very language God spoke to Moses in the burning bush. Again and again, Jesus puts himself in the place of God. So the earliest descriptions and reactions to Jesus was to consider him a divine agent. That was the default. What the first disciples in the very early communities that Paul wrote to actually struggled with was that this divine agent also somehow suffered pain. What was truly shocking to them was not that Jesus was somehow God's Son, but that Jesus. Jesus also appeared fully human, fully experiencing that which the divine, according to them, should not be able to experience pain and suffering and loss. That is not a part of the divine life. So they would say. It is a controversy to our ears, but it is mostly true to say that those who knew Jesus personally, what they really struck with was not his divinity, but his humanity. We'll see next Sunday Peter's reaction to Jesus telling them that the kind of Messiah that he is must be one who suffers. And not only that, if we are to follow the divine servant, we must also be willing to suffer. All right. One of the most fun parts of my job here is that it affords me to get to know so many, many of our youth. Last summer, one of them had recently returned from their first year of college. They asked me to lunch, and when we sat down, they took a long note from their backpack and said, I've written 14 questions for you since I've left St. Columba's and I hope you'll answer them. But as I know you, we'll probably only get to 5. The first question, and most of them revolved around this central difficulty, was, doesn't our belief in Jesus put us fundamentally at odds with other religious belief systems? How can we respect the dignity of all people and also believe that Jesus was not a way, but the way to God? Oh, those are tough questions. I just want to pull back here for a second and say, seeing our children struggle in these ways is a blessing. Clearly, this youth takes what we say in this space seriously. Church is not just history class, not just a moral community. What we commit ourselves to here, we should absolutely wrestle with in the real world. How do we actually take these crazy ideas and beliefs and live them out in practical ways in our schools and life and work among our friends and family and neighbors? And just to make this a little bit more complicated, when Jesus asks, who do you say that I am? Part of the problem that Jesus invites his disciples to reflect on today, by extension all of us is our liturgy treats Jesus as incarnate. Our liturgy invites you and me today to worship Jesus, to receive him as the fullness of God as a matter of utmost integrity. If we see Jesus just as a moral teacher, we should struggle with this. And if the disciples could only see Jesus as a divine figure, as someone removed in some ways, not fully present in the material world, they should also struggle to see Jesus in the Eucharistic bread and wine, a body scarred and broken and healed. The God who suffers. All of this is to say this question that Jesus asks this morning. I struggle with it. The disciples struggle with it. So serious is it. Jesus asks all of us to wrestle with it and to answer it sincerely. Top line thought. This morning, when we push Jesus to either be less God or less human, we miss the mark. The promise of the incarnation is to hold these two things in tension forever. And so with boldness, I ask you today this question that echoes through eternity. Jesus Christ, who is he to you? Where are you all on this? This community, our church is built around Jesus and for him. Struggling with this question about his identity does not put you outside this community. Let me say that again. Struggling with the identity of Jesus will never put you outside of this family. Here we should all be struggling with it. As Jesus firmly and clearly declares to be a member of this family, to be called his brother or sister, all you have to do is commit yourself to a life of goodness, commit yourself to the life and the will of God, to love mercy, to do justice, to walk humbly. The long road of faith, the struggle and the joy and the agony is to bring this question close to our hearts day after day. If it were real to us, what would it change? This Jesus Christ figure? How do you see him? Where do you see him? Where can he take you? How today will you confess him as Lord? Amen.