THE DIVINE EQUATION
September 15, 1991
8:30 and 11:00 a.n. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago
Scripture
Philippians 2:1-11
Mark 8:27-33

"He asked them, "But who do you say that I am?!"
~Mark 8:29 (NRSV)

He is the dominant figure in Western Civilization. He is
arguably the single most important person who has ever lived. He
is known today by more people in the world than any other indi-

vidual. Most of the human race measures time from the date of
his birth. Hundreds of millions of people use his name in their
praying, and millions use his name in their cursing. If it were

possible, someone noted, to "pull up out of history every scrap
of metal bearing at least a trace of his name" not much would be
left of the history of Western culture. [see Jaroslav Pelikan,
Jesus Through the Centuries, p. 1] Art, music, education, phi-
losophy, exploration, wars, all of it indelibly marked by the
name in which we gather here on Sunday morning, the name in which
we go about the peculiar and unique behavior Called being a

Who was he? Who is he? "What nature of man is this?" his
contemporaries asked in a mixture of awe and dread and simple
curiosity. It would Seem, after all, that we should know as much
aS possible about one who has so profoundly influenced our Civi-
lization. aAna@ yet there is about hima piercing, demanding
integrity that repels as well as attracts. There is about this
Man something that frightens us a bit. If we saw him Frederick
Buechner speculates, "we might avoid meeting his real eyes... the-

mirrors because for better or worse they threaten to tell us more
than we want to know." {The Faces of Jesus, p. 9] ,
Who was he? Who is he? Why must we always ask that ques-
tion in both the past and present tenses? Harvard psychiatrist,
Robert Coles, in interviewing for his book,.The Spiritual Life of
Children, asked three twelve-year-olds in Tennessee what they
thought it would have been like to know Jesus. One answered:

"I'd have been living ina tent, maybe and I'd be

a fisherman or a farmer. There he'd be and I'd be

listening to him. He was popular then, before he

got in trouble. There were crowds and he was a

---: teacher. people loved. . They must have known he

" would save then: ' they must have known he was

special - not the clothes he wore, It was his

face, I guess, and: what he Said, and how He got to
you." [p. 220]

I loved that. "How he got to you." My guess is he got to
everyone of us in some way or another, and here we are still,
sitting under his gaze and outstretched arms, perhaps still not

quite sure who he is and why we are here, which puts us in very
good company, by the way.

That's what the incident we read this morning is about -

people around Jesus who aren't quite sure who he is or what they
are doing there.

It is in the center of the story - geographically - Caesa-
rea Philippi: behind Jesus of Nazareth and his small group of
friends lies Galilee: the pleasant, rolling hills and small
Villages, the lake, .the local-synagogues,_the months .of teaching
and healing and the camaraderie of traveling together. Ahead
they can see the plain Slowly rising toward Jerusalen.

It is going to be very different ahead. It is also the
center of the story, theologically. Men and women have been
following a teacher. and healer. But now they must decide whether
they will commit themselves to him, because following him, simply
being close to him is about to become very costly.

So he asks them, "What are people saying about me? Who are
they saying I am?" It's the academic question: the safe ques-
tion. They tell him: "Some people think you are your cousin
John, the Baptist. Some even think you are Elijah or one of the
other prophets, dead for centuries, having come back again."

We should like to arrest the dialogue here. In fact, this
is where we Stop ordinarily. We Presbyterians treasure our
tradition of faith moving toward understanding, of believing with
our brains, of mind as well as heart engaged in discipleship, of
knowing and understanding what we believe before we commit to it.
We appreciate thoughtful religion... We are, all of us, amateur
theologians. We believe God wants us to be. We are the ones who
always check the authorities before. we take a stand... And so we
. would prefer: the: dialogue. to’ stop-hereor at least to broaden out
a bit-so-we can organize an Adult’ Forum on the topic of "the
relationship of Jesus of Nazareth to the eschatological and
historical and and political hopes of the Semitic people emerging
under the imperial political economy of Rome."

Jesus, however, pushes. on without pause; from the academic
to the personal. "But you... who do you say that Eoam2?" It-

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became suddenly a high and holy and frightening moment, one that
most of us would prefer to avoid. It's safer to be in that forum
listening to a lecture, taking notes, sipping coffee. He was

forcing them to stand and deliver. It was Peter who said simply,
-"You are the Messiah."

turies for the Messiah, the one who would come in the name of the
Lord, overthrow the enemy and reconstitute the old monarchy. He
- this itinerant rabbi, this unemployed carpenter, this illegiti-
- Mate-son of.Mary... the Messiah?... Preposterous!

Jesus doesn't Say those things. What he does explain is
what is going to happen next. The going will be tough... Some
people are scared the Messiah might come and take away their
privileges. The people who expect a King, on the other hand, are
in for a rude disappointment. There is persecution and suffering
and death ahead. And Peter, the one.who just called him Messiah,
finds that completely unpalatable and starts an argument - takes
him aside to rebuke him. "Look, Jesus," he must have said, "I've
just paid you a pretty big compliment, as a matter of fact, about
as much a compliment as there is. And you're telling me that the
future holds nothing but sacrifice and suffering for you and me?".

Please note that the ones who profess belief in Jesus are
the very ones who do not understand the meaning of their beliefs.
Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann writes that "in the United
States there is a Casual indifferent readiness, even in our
increasingly secularized society, to grant the main claims of the
gospel - not to grant them importance. "The gospel," he says,
"is thus a truth widely held, but a truth greatly reduced."
{Finally Comes the Poet, p. 1]

If that describes us, and I think it does, this encounter
and conversation is a disturbing development. [It exposes a way
of thinking about religion in general that is very dear to us.
Our assumption is that our relationship to this strange and
compelling man is primarily intellectual. That is to say, we
want to know who he was. And so we will approach that question
with our full array of intellectual capabilities. We will read

and talk about him as a man in history... We will analyze him
with psychological categories and we will consider his political
behavior... We will attempt to understand his theological con-
text. Our assumption is that Christian faith is a matter of

believing certain ideas about Jesus, When those ideas are con-
densed into a formal statement, the Apostles! Creed, for in-
Stance, .:and we stand-up and say it, our assumption -is that the
saying it, affirming the proposition, is what defines us as a
Christian. And it is important. It's easy to poke fun at our-

marketplace of ideas. But’ understanding ideas about Jesus is not

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the issue finally. No one, John V. Taylor, a British theologian
noted, was ever converted by ideas about Jesus. Conversion
happens out of our encounter with a man.

- Please remember. that Jesus never administered -a theological
‘@Xamination as the entrance requirement to discipleship. When he
pressed them to say who they thought he was, it was not a matter

of orthodoxy.. Rather it was a matter of the willingness to
follow him.

And this little exchange exposes a way of evangelizing that
is dear to us. Evangelism - spreading the word - normally means
convincing people that our religious beliefs are truer than their
religious beliefs. Evangelism means correcting other people's
theology. But what if it is not finally a matter of getting
people to agree to ideas about God. What if, as he proceeded to
tell his friend Peter, evangelism is a matter of faithfully

following by living the life he taught in the world, even when
the going gets tough.

There is a stunning section in Hans Kung's book, Christian-
ity and the World Religions in which the great theologian wonders
how the history of Western Civilization would look today if the
-early Christian missionaries had taught and lived the ethic of
Jesus, the love and justice and compassion he himself taught,
instead of trying to get everybody to disown their religion,
which often meant their culture, and sometimes even their fami-
lies as well, in order to affirm the orthodoxies of the fourth
century Greek-thinking theologians. Kung reminds us that Jesus
"never questioned anybody about the true faith, (nor) asked
anyone to profess his or her orthodoxy. He expects no theoreti-
cal reflection, but an urgent practical decision." [p. 116]

After twenty centuries the Christian church continues to
argue with itself about what it means to be evangelical. Evangel-
ical is the new "hot" word in ecclesiastical circles and it
ordinarily means the hard-sell, strenuous proclamation of ideas
about Jesus in order to convince people to affirm them and sign
up. But what if the good news - the Gospel - is not a series of
truths to be endorsed. What if the good news is that the God who
made us loves us and has created us to live in justice and kind-
ness with one another. What if that's God's agenda instead of
everybody singing out of the same hymnal? If that is the issue,
then evangelism is very simply a matter of ‘loving and serving
other people and doing it not as a way to get into heaven but
because in Jesus Christ we know that is what God wants and ex-
pects. This news about God's love and the life of love Goa

.°, Willis... this.is -truth.. It is the truth about human life.

Christ-like evangelism then does not mean becoming proficient at
marketing Jesus: it does not mean how many souls can be regis-
tered in the great score card in the sky, how many heathens
turned into believers, but how much love and justice and kindness
and mercy is being lived out in the worla in the name of Jesus,

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What Jesus was asking them when he Said, "Who do you say
that I am?" - was not about their theology. He did not want a
recitation of ideas about his identity... He wanted to know if

they were ready to follow. He was asking for commitment not
theological correctness. ;

Can you follow Jesus without understanding him? Of course.
That's what Peter did, what all the disciples did, what faithful
men and women down across twenty centuries have done - stumbled
along behind him without knowing who he was or where he was
going, convinced that he was worth betting one's life on, certain
that his life, his love, was - among all of our life's uncertain-
ties - permanent, unchanging and forever.

The little twelve-year-old boy pondered the way Jesus "gets
to you." And Maybe we can't put it any more adequately than
that. He gets to me. [ Say the creeds. I affirm them as my
own, but they are finally human attempts, very human attempts
which employ the metaphors and images and vocabulary of one point
in time to describe a reality that will not ultimately be pinned

down. They are ways to express how this compelling man "gets to
us";

~ Ways to say that in this man and his life I have occa-
sionally seen what my life is about.

~ Ways to say that in his life I have become aware that
God's love and blessing rests on all life and that in his human-
ness -— humanity is blessed.

~ Ways to help me say that in the life of this man I have
seen what really matters in my life and the life of the world:

things like kindness ana compassion and gentleness and forgive-
ness.

In what I know about this life I have learned the redemp-
tive power of forgiveness, and the miracle that there is no fail-

ure, no betrayal, that is immune to the recreative energy of
love. .

In him I learn that the purpose of my life and yours is the
giving it away, the spending it, for the ones we love, our
Spouses and lovers and parents and children, our neighbors and
Strangers who need us - and that in giving our life away - we

receive it back, blessed, recreated, in a new shape and form and
dimension called eternal.

In him, on occasion, I have seen and believed that the
death that comes to all and will one day come to each, is not the
end but the beginning: that his dying was, in fact, for us.

In him, on occasion, I know there is hope: hope for the
worid: hope for people who live in the middle of grief and
poverty: people who are sick and oppressed... all people,

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In him I believe I can see the meaning of the word God.

Do I know all of that all the time? Does anyone of us? Of
course not. But I know enough of it that it “gets to me":

~enough of.it that -I don't want..to miss it because,-if I-miss this.--

I might miss my own life. I know enough of it that I want to
stumble behind and follow as best I can.

And my guess is that the -same is true for you.

Wherever you are theologically - however many theological
statements you can affirm, whatever your church connections,
hear the most important question anyone will ever ask you: the
question that can save your life...

"You, - who do you say that I am?"

Amen.

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