Tasting Death

Sunday, August 28th, 2005
Pentecost +15
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
Matthew 16:21-28

21 From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to erusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. 22 And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, ‘God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.’ 23 But 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.’ 24 Then Jesus told his disciples, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 25 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. 26 For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life? 27 ‘For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done. 28 Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.’

“Some standing here”

What was that again?

“Some standing here”

Will what?

“Will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”

Okay. (!?)

Let’s back up a little bit. We’re picking up right where we left off last Sunday, after Peter’s confession of faith – claiming Jesus to be the Messiah, the son of the living God. Jesus calls him blessed, a rock, and basically pats him on the back.

Next, we have Jesus beginning to explain to Peter and the disciples that he is going to have to go to Jerusalem, suffer, and die, then be raised from the dead on the third day. Peter, having gained a little bit of confidence from his recent exchange, takes Jesus aside and rebukes Jesus “what’s this nonsense about you having to SUFFER?” It is worth noting the tone in which Peter was talking to Jesus, the Greek word that we translate as ‘rebuke’ is the same word used in the rest of the Gospels in reference to demons and evil forces.

Jesus’ response to Peter is about as far from a pat on the back as you can get. Peter remains ‘the rock’ but goes from being compared to a foundation stone to being an obstacle, a stumbling block! Funny how within such a short span of words the same rock can become two radically different things. And Jesus doesn’t call down blessings on Peter, rather, he calls him Satan! So, gee, Jesus, tell us how you REALLY feel about Peter at this point! Don’t beat around the bush, out with it!

Reading scripture is always a daunting task. As Baptists, we’ve touched on one of our best additions to the theological endeavor before: Soul Competency: the idea that each individual has within him or herself the ability to respond to the movement of the Holy Spirit in them through the study of scripture, to enlighten and inform, inspire and challenge. So I am constantly surprised by the way there is a world of meaning in the smallest phrase.

Jesus told Peter he was a stumbling block TO HIM. Jesus was gaining a fuller understanding of what he was in for on arrival at Jerusalem. He UNDERSTOOD the sacrifice he was going to have to make. As we know from the accounts of his prayer in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus did not easily embrace his sacrifice. He struggled with it. Perhaps it was his struggle with the prospect of what was to come that prompted the angry reaction to Peter – the statement about setting his mind on divine things, and not on human things. We tend to react more strongly to things with which we ourselves struggle when we see them in others, or are reminded of those things by others’ comments. And he was trying to convey to the disciples in the short time remaining of just how serious this journey they had begun together WAS. So he tried to spell it out for them when they (and Peter) didn’t get it when he told them what was going to happen to HIM.

‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 25 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. 26 For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?

What does it mean to lose our lives for Christ? How can we lose our life, if we in fact GAIN it in giving it up to the Lord? We sometimes joke about our crosses to bear, but in truth, that is one of the more serious statements we will ever encounter. Don’t get me wrong, I still laugh at the jokes, and don’t want to stop hearing them, but it is important to recognize the depth of the meaning of the term. It is a direct reference to the Cross that Christ bore for us – and our responsibility to do likewise – inasmuch as we are able – for the life of the church.

As followers of Christ, we are called to obey his commands. What does it mean to take up our cross and follow him? You don't have to make up ways to carry a cross...just be honest, loving, compassionate, forgiving, merciful, a servant, and you'll find plenty of crosses.

Leslie and I were joking last night, if I had chosen the Episcopal reading of the passage we could have stopped at verse 26, and be done with it, but NO. So we are back to those pesky last two verses of the chapter:

27 ‘For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done. 28 Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.’

Here’s the issue with these two verses. Verse 27 seems to be a description of the final judgment. However you view that event, or believe it, the imagery is fairly familiar: Son of Man, angels, glory, the Father, and repayment for what has been done. It certainly rings some bells if you’ve spent any time reading or listening to discussions about the book of the Revelation to John, or for that matter, any of the other gospel accounts where Jesus speaks of his return.

The problem comes in with verse 28 following directly behind verse 27. Jesus describes an event that looks like a prediction of the second coming, and then tells the people he’s talking to that some of them ‘will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his Kingdom.’

Can you tell what the problem is?

If he meant the second coming, and it hasn’t happened yet, and all of the people he was talking to have since died, what did he REALLY mean?

As I was reading in preparation for the message, I read the prevailing thought of scholars, SOME scholars, I should say, who state that what Jesus was referring to in verse 28 was that some of those present, namely, Peter, James and his brother John, were present six days later at Jesus’ transfiguration, and it was THAT vision of Jesus transfigured that they saw before they tasted death that Jesus was speaking of when he mentioned the Son of Man coming in his Kingdom. It was a kind of preview of what the kingdom will look like.

I would love to tell you that that makes perfect sense to me, and that the verse and chapter numbers were added just in the past 500 years, and that it makes SENSE to connect the one with the other. And I wouldn’t be misleading you. It DOES make sense, and it does work better together to connect the two verses that way instead of the other.

But we aren’t always going to have perfect understandings. If the first disciples were slow to understand, we need not be troubled if we are also slow to understand. Spiritual growth takes place slowly and painfully. Our spiritual journey takes a lifetime. Even as we near the conclusion of that journey, our understanding is less than complete. Paul says, "For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face" (1 Cor. 13:12). That is not an excuse for complacency, but does acknowledge our humanity.

So what do we do with verse 27 in conjunction with verse 28? Could Jesus have been talking about something other than physical death? Could he perhaps have been talking about spiritual death instead? John tells us ‘what has come into being in him (Jesus) was life, and the life was the light of all people.’ (John 1:3-4) Could Jesus be referring to HIS life, indwelling, enriching, empowering, encouraging, invigorating, spurring us on, so much so that the death that surrounds us, that yaps at our feet, that we see around us every day, hear about in the news, read about in the paper, THAT death, though so present in this world, will not touch us?
Do we taste death in this life?

We experience death, physical death, in any number of ways. We read of car bombings in Iraq on a daily basis, just last week we read of two plane crashes within a few days of each other. This morning we learned of the death of a woman who graduated from Farnham High school with Edythe. We open the paper Richmond Times-Dispatch on a daily basis, or the Northern Neck News on a weekly basis, and read obituaries for people we know and many more we don’t. We are faced with the death of our bodies on a regular basis.

Can we distinguish hearing of and reading of and living through physical death and the fact that, if we are in Christ, we will not taste spiritual death? Paul speaks of death as sleeping, and that is the image I’d like to leave you with today.

For Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton, What do those words – tasting death – mean? To do that I need to put it in a negative sense. How are we going to be a part of helping people to NOT taste death? It goes back to what John said, “in him was life, and the life was the light of all people”. We are the body of Christ. We represent the Lord Jesus. We are his hands, and feet, his shoulders, his lap. If we are about the business of breaking in the Kingdom of God in this world, then we are conduits. We are avenues of Grace. There are avenues, and there are boulevards, and there are streets, and there are alleys, and there are pathways. Each has a greater or lesser capacity for … traffic, as it were. What would you consider Jerusalem to be? Here’s a hint: our capacity is not defined by our size. It is not defined by the number of people who sit in this room on Sunday mornings. It is defined by the ability of each of us to respond to God’s grace in our lives, but not respond like a mirror. We don’t shine God’s grace back to God, we shine God’s grace to the world around us.

We are called to be God’s people, showing by our lives his grace, the hymn goes. One in heart and one in spirit, sign of hope for all the race. Let us show how he has changed us, and remade us as his own, Let us share our life together as we shall around his throne.

Let’s pray.

On This Rock


Sunday, August 21, 2005
Pentecost + 14
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
Matthew 16:13-20

13 Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, ‘Who do people say that the Son of Man is?’ 14 And they said, ‘Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.’ 15 He said to them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’ 16 Simon Peter answered, ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.’ 17 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. 18 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. 19I 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.’ 20 Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.

Thinking back, it’s hard to imagine NOT feeling the way I felt. But I realize, intellectually, that at some point before then I DIDN’T feel that way, and I came to the full realization of the emotion in the context of a quiet, post-dinner conversation with a couple of close friends.

When the time came to make the statement where and when it counted, I found myself a little short of breath, having forgotten to breathe, and shaky, jittery, for the same reason. There was a cacophony of emotions welling up inside of me, because I knew that what I was going to say was going to have far-reaching consequences, for at least the foreseeable future, if not for the rest of my life.

But I went ahead and made the confession anyway.

It’s an interesting word, confession. If we think in legal terminology, we immediately think of … guilt. If you confess, you are stating that you did in fact commit whatever … crime or misdemeanor of which you are accused.

In religious terminology, we most often, I suspect, think of confession in the sense of the sacrament, one of those duties you have by which you spend time with either a priest or a confessor and … do something similar to what the legal term refers to – confess sins – both serious and less-so – in order to receive absolution for them.

As a matter of practice, we here at Jerusalem who have attended the baptism services that we’ve held over the last couple of years have also witnessed a confession. Just before the candidate is lowered into the water, we ask the congregation to “hear now the confession of faith,” and that confession is proclaimed simply and clearly:

“Jesus Christ is Lord!”

It is the earliest identifiably, uniquely CHRISTIAN statement. It is at the heart of what sets Christians aside from any other religion or faith practice.

It is the statement that early Christian martyrs were asked to recant or deny or risk losing their lives over. For many, it was their last word on this earth.

It was the password written in the sand in the form of a fish by which early underground Christians identified each other through times of persecution. (The fish was said to symbolize the baptismal waters, the loaves and fish that Jesus used to feed the five thousand, and Jesus’ own declaration to the disciples to become 'fishers of men'. The Greek word for fish, icthus, is an acrostic consisting of the initial letters of five more Greek words, which briefly but clearly described the character of Christ and His claim to the worship of believers: 'Iesous Christos Theou Yios Soter' which translates as 'Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior'.)

To say Jesus Christ is Lord is to set the world on its head.

What is it about that statement that would seem to be so counterintuitive … so obviously incorrect to the world at large? In simple terms, it is a refutation of what would seem to be an objective fact. Jesus was crucified. Jesus died. Jesus was buried.
The world stops there.

Most of the time, ANYTHING and anyone stops at the grave. “Jesus is Lord” does not logically follow “Jesus was buried.” And you know what? It’s true. There is a critical intermediate statement: “Jesus rose from the dead.”

It was that critical, pivotal, NECESSARY statement that brought on so much antagonism – and even today, we find folks who still dismiss it out of hand. It simply does not fit into their world view. THAT IS TO BE EXPECTED.

I know there are those who still claim to be Christian and deny the resurrection, and thus the divinity, of Christ, my inclination is to still keep the conversation going with them as brothers and sisters, but to do so with a quizzical look on my face, asking ‘WHY do you still consider yourself Christian?’ To me, faith is at the heart of belief. And it is that step of faith that it takes to say ‘Christ is risen’ that then leads to the confession that we share with Peter in today’s text: Jesus Christ is Lord. Peter’s words proclaimed Jesus to be the Messiah, the Savior of the Jews. When we as Gentile Christians proclaim ‘Jesus Christ is Lord,’ we are saying to Jew and Gentile, to Atheist or Agnostic, to Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and anyone else who would care to listen, that Jesus Christ is Lord of OUR LIVES.

No one and nothing else is.

Supposedly.

When it comes down to it, to say it is one thing. To live it is entirely another matter. Words can indeed be cheap.

So how loud are our actions speaking?

How apparent is it, here, today, in Emmerton and in Warsaw, that Jesus Christ is Lord of the lives of the people who call themselves Jerusalem Baptist Church?

I realize we live in a generally, maybe a better word would be ‘loosely’ Christian society. By that, I mean that we live in a society that is, at least superficially, acquainted with the ‘look’ of Christianity: a church with a steeple every few miles, if not blocks. Groups of people gathering in and around them periodically throughout the week, cars parked in the parking lot, occasionally a special sign standing out front announcing some special event or speaker. Perhaps, as in the case of Jerusalem, the building serves as a polling place during elections, or as a shelter in times of inclement weather, or if it is an inner-city church, as a community center during the week, or a soup kitchen for the homeless.

Those are expressions of what Christianity has come to be expected to ‘look’ like, in a wholesome, benign, community-oriented view of the role religion plays in society, but what does it really truly mean to say and believe that Jesus Christ is Lord? The role we play in society and the role Christ plays in our lives might sometimes strain each other. We endeavor to be good citizens and ‘good Christians’ in a non-intrusive, low-key way.

When you say Jesus Christ is Lord, it means that when you say and believe the same thing, you are given to it. It is not so much a part of who you are, it IS who you are. You are defined by the Lordship of Christ in your life, not the other way around.

Here’s the dangerous and tricky part. Insofar as we are each different from one another, the Lordship of Christ is going to look different in each of us. sometimes to greater or lesser degrees of difference, but different, nonetheless. Sometimes in small ways, but sometimes in different, more obvious way.

So how are we going to live with those differences?

I believe that question is at the core of how we are going to view our identity as a family of faith, and it is going to color our surrounding community’s view of US as a family of faith – as much as I dislike the concept of litmus tests, if there ever was one that was appropriate, this is it.

Growing up in Chile, I remember hearing testimonies of people who would walk in off the street into a service, and in the course of their sharing, they stated that what drew them to the church in the first place was the love that the members shared among themselves – and with those outside the church. The fact that they were claiming Jesus as Lord of their lives made a difference in how they LIVED their lives.

You may be thinking that I am stating the obvious, but there is a time when the obvious must be restated, reemphasized, re-kindled in our hearts.

And there is a time when we ALL need to be held accountable to what it means to claim Jesus as Lord.

So what does that mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

It means that we are not exempt, either from failing to live out what it means to claim Christ as Lord, or of excelling in that same thing. In other words, we end up on either side of the spectrum. Sometimes we hit the mark, sometimes we don’t.

Please take that as a given, not as a criticism. I’m intentionally using the ‘we’ there.

It is in how we respond to those moments when one or another of us fails that marks us as Christians. Do we respond in judgment, in rejection, or in compassion and sorrow? There is a time for each, as the writer of Ecclesiastes says, and we, as people of a post-Easter faith must live in the light of that understanding – of that Lordship.

My confession was relatively short. I stood and took her hands in mine and said “I tried to think of a funny way to work in the phrase ‘as you wish’ into the conversation, but all I could come up with is ‘I Love you.’

And that, just as saying – and MEANING ‘Jesus is Lord’ when I was 17, has made all the difference.

Let’s pray.

Ins And Outs

Sunday, August 14th, 2005
Pentecost + 13
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
Matthew 15: (1-9), 10-28

1Then Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, 2‘Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands before they eat.’ 3He answered them, ‘And why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? 4For God said,* “Honor your father and your mother,” and, “Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.” 5 But you say that whoever tells father or mother, “Whatever support you might have had from me is given to God”,* then that person need not honor the father.* 6 So, for the sake of your tradition, you make void the word* of God. 7 You hypocrites! Isaiah prophesied rightly about you when he said:

8 “This people
honors me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me;
9 in vain
do they worship me,
teaching human precepts as doctrines.” ’

10 Then he called the crowd to him and said to them, ‘Listen and understand: 11it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.’ 12Then the disciples approached and said to him, ‘Do you know that the Pharisees took offense when they heard what you said?’ 13He answered, ‘Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted. 14Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit.’ 15But Peter said to him, ‘Explain this parable to us.’ 16Then he said, ‘Are you also still without understanding? 17Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? 18But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. 19For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. 20These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile.’ 21 Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. 22Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, ‘Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.’23But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, ‘Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.’24He answered, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’ 25But she came and knelt before him, saying, ‘Lord, help me.’26He answered, ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’ 27She said, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.’ 28Then Jesus answered her, ‘Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.’ And her daughter was healed instantly.

We’ve all had them.

Days when we would rather not have gotten out of bed. Days when it seems like everything is going wrong. Days when either we can’t seem to get anything through our heads or across to anyone we’re trying to explain something to for the umpteenth time. It sounds like Jesus may be having one of those days in this passage.

Sometimes we catch a glimpse of the humanity of Jesus that is SO human that it is in jarring contrast to what we’re accustomed to assuming Jesus was – a loving, gentle savior, always calm, cool, and collected, always ready to rattle off the perfectly appropriate saying or scripture. It is a dangerous thing, to forget the complexity of what is involved in God coming to earth and dwelling among us.

Yes, there is a simplicity to the Gospel that cuts through all the other STUFF that we may want to throw up to defend our lives, such as they are, but there is at the same time the issue of how his humanity – his FULL humanity – played itself out in his ministry.

Exasperation is a fully human emotion … placed by God, and part of who WE are and who Jesus is.

So we have the setting. We’re still following the story, after the death of John the Baptist, after the feeding of the 5,000, after the walking on water, after the healings that Jesus performed in Gennesaret. None of these events took place in a vacuum. Word got around, as it always does, by word of mouth, and I suspect in a surprisingly short amount of time, for the limited technology available in first century Palestine.

These incredible miracles have just happened, and Jesus has been healing people in numbers – not just here and there, in isolated incidents. And what do the Pharisees and the scribes do? They try to divert the attention from the wonders that have been witnessed and experienced and point out that the disciples are breaking the rules by not washing before eating. Jesus lets loose on them. Can you hear it in his words? (read v 7-9)

Jesus then turns to the people to whom he’d been ministering, and the lesson begins. Only the disciples are more concerned at how the lesson reflects on the Pharisees and scribes than they are on the actual lesson itself. They seem to get so agitated by how upset Jesus’ comments made the Pharisees that they didn’t hear what Jesus was saying, so much so, that we find Peter, who just that morning had walked on water, asking Jesus to explain it to them again – you can almost hear him saying “ah, sorry Jesus, I got distracted there for a minute and missed what you said … something about blind guides? Could you repeat that for us?”

Jesus’ answer leaves nothing to the imagination. In his earlier statement, he says it fairly plainly, but … in a way that is … acceptable in mixed company. This time around, there’s none of that, in fact, Jesus gets graphic: “are you still without understanding” seems to have been a nice way to translate what in the Aramaic is surely something closer to “did I stutter? Whatever goes into your mouth passes through your body and comes out smelly at the other end?? It’s what comes out of your mouth – the words you speak, that are the true reflection of what is inside your hearts and minds. THAT is where your righteousness or defilement is determined. What you eat has very little to do with anything.” He goes on to list, after starting with evil intentions, he lists or alludes to the breaking of the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth commandments. If you need to look it up, compare the list in verse 19 with Exodus 20: 12-16. He’s saying that all those horrible things don’t come from outside our bodies, they come from inside our hearts. THAT is where they are born.

As we’ve studied, both in Sunday morning Bible study, Wednesday evenings, and throughout our discipleship times, the focus of the religious practices of the Pharisees and Sadducees had been lost. They had lost sight of the whole reason God had called them into relationship with God’s self: for fellowship. In so frantically trying to dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t’, they lost sight of the very one who’s presence they were intended to seek: God. And in losing sight of the purpose, their hearts became hardened to the reconciliatory message of the Gospel.

Then, as quickly as it happens sometimes, Jesus leaves and goes further north, into Syrian territory. We have a situation that is echoed later by the woman who was possessed by a spirit of divination, whom we read about in Acts chapter 16 a couple of Wednesdays ago, who followed Paul and his companions around for days, crying out “These men are slaves of the most high God, who proclaim to you the way of salvation!” Here in Matthew we have a gentile woman calling Jesus by a name that would mean much less to a Gentile than to a Jew in those days – “Son of David” – the name for the Messiah. And just like the possessed woman would several years later, this woman does not let up. There is something to be said for the mothering instinct, the drive that would make a woman humble herself, go to the extreme she does, to do something for her demon-possessed daughter. It gets to the point that the disciples even urge Jesus to send her away, because she is such a bother.

What happens next is hard for me to read. Current sensibilities cringe at the way the Gospel has Jesus inferring that the woman before him is comparable to a dog begging for scraps at the table, when he has seemingly more important people to tend to in the house of Israel. Our sense of equality, if not, simple politeness, rears back at the suggestion.

But let’s look a little more closely at the event. Are there similar situations we can point to in the scriptures? Yes, several times throughout the Old Testament we have Prophets convincing God to do something other than what was originally intended. This is similar in that Jesus states first that he was only sent to the lost sheep of Israel. The woman insistently asked for help, and Jesus responds with what is harsh in today’s language: it’s not fair to take the children’s food and give it to the dogs. Then comes the turning point. The woman takes Jesus’ own analogy and turns it around: even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.

Growing up, we had two dogs, one after the other. Neither of them were inside dogs, so we didn’t have to worry too much about it, but on those summer mornings when we ate breakfast out on the patio, under the wisteria canopy, we invariably had Rascal sitting at our feet, begging for anything we would give him. And he WOULD take ANYTHING. He knew where the good food was, and he also knew where to go to get it. ME. I probably shared more breakfast food with Rascal over the 5 years I stayed in the house before coming back for college than I can recall, but it was his insistence that ended up breaking me down.

The kids try to do the puppy dog eyes today when they REALLY want something from me, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t, but it is always a struggle.

It is hard to say no when you love someone.

I think Jesus may have been compelled by his love, combined with the woman’s persistence, as well as her cleverness. It is interesting to note that Jesus uses the same response, “Let it be done” as he did with the Roman Centurion and his son in chapter 8 of Matthew.

So what does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

This week we had our Vacation Bible School. Most of you were aware of it, many of you participated in it in some way. Most of the children who came are children we know. Some attend church elsewhere, but some don’t. We tend to focus, to gravitate naturally, on and to those with whom we have something in common. Children who know the language, know the routine, as it were. The ones who know what is expected of them. It is harder to do that with people and children who come from a background that is devoid of those same touchpoints, those who DON’T know where the Old Testament or the New Testament are, those who DON’T almost automatically know that correct, the ‘Church’ answer to the questions, those who DON’T know what is appropriate and inappropriate to say and do ‘in church’. A tantalizing thought is that, in his humanity, Jesus was discovering his purpose as he went along. Perhaps this, along with the encounter with the Roman Centurion, brought Jesus to the point of realizing that it WASN’T just to the children of Israel that he was bringing the good news of the Kingdom. So we’d LIKE to say, along with Jesus, “we’re here for the people who know … or SHOULD know”, but with Jesus, we are compelled to go beyond that, beyond the safe confines of this room, out into Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth … and take the Kingdom of God with us, TO them.

Let’s pray.

Ghost … Holy Ghost

Sunday, August 7th, 2005
Pentecost +12
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
Matthew 14: 22-33

22 Immediately he made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. 23 And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, 24 but by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them. 25 And early in the morning he came walking toward them on the sea. 26 But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, ‘It is a ghost!’ And they cried out in fear. 27 But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, ‘Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.’ 28 Peter answered him, ‘Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.’29 He said, ‘Come.’ So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus. 30 But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, ‘Lord, save me!’ 31 Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, ‘You of little faith, why did you doubt?’ 32 When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. 33 And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, ‘Truly you are the Son of God.’

The bumper sticker says it all: “Think you’re perfect? Try walking on water!”

It is interesting that in our culture, even today, it is an almost universally recognized reference.

Walking on water only happened once, and we have before us who it was and when: Jesus, in the passage for today, immediately after having preached the sermon on the mount and feeding thousands of people with two loaves and five fish. Parallel stories are in two of the other Gospels: Mark chapter 6, beginning in verse 45, and John, chapter 6 as well, beginning at verse 16.
Last Sunday we read about one of the most famous miracles that Jesus performed; the feeding of the five thousand. Our passage this morning picks up right where we left off, in fact, the very next verse. The people have eaten, everyone is satisfied, and the disciples have collected 12 baskets full of leftovers from the bread and fish that was what was for supper.

Jesus tells the disciples to climb into the boat and go on ahead to the other side of the lake, towards Capernaum and Bethsaida, about three or four miles by water, and HE heads back up the mountain to spend some time alone and in prayer. If you remember from last week, that was what he was intending to do before the crowds descended on him.

As the night progresses, the disciples have been rowing and working to get to the other side, but a wind has come up, and is battering their little boat and tossing it around in the waves. It is NOT helping them get to where they are heading. They exhaust themselves trying to make headway against it. It gets so bad, that the disciples begin to fear for their lives. At some point early in the morning, they look towards shore and see Jesus walking towards them.

What was their reaction?

“It’s a Ghost!”

And they were even more afraid. (I get a mental image – 7 grown men in a boat screaming like little girls …)

How did Jesus respond?

In the same way that God responded in the Old Testament any time God made God’s presence known, in the same way that the angel greeted the shepherds, in the same way that we find so many other places where people encounter the divine presence and don’t expect it: “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”

As Christians, we claim to be a people of faith: living by faith, believing in Christ, trusting in the Lord. An essential part of our faith believes in the ongoing presence of the Lord in our lives, individually, through the Holy Spirit and through the physical presence of the faith family with which we associate.

Let’s ask ourselves a serious question: Can we truly believe that Jesus is with us always (Emmanuel), even when all evidence suggests he is not? The impression we get from the text is that the disciples, even after having watched Jesus perform the miraculous feeding just a few hours earlier, lost sight of the fact when they were confronted with the overwhelming nature of … nature, in this case, and we have the disciples in a boat, on a lake, tossed around with very little control over where they were going.

One of the oldest symbols for the church is a ship. In fact, the part of the sanctuary in which the congregation sits and stands during worship is referred to as the ‘nave’. Nave comes from the Latin “Navis.” which means, literally, “boat” or “ship.” We are, as a group, as a congregation, as a family, all in this ‘boat’ called ‘Jerusalem’ together. Sometimes, the seas around us are calm. Sometimes, they are not so much. And there are times when the storm we are struggling through is of our own making. That is the nature of the church. Some would say that is the nature of the Baptist Church, but I am fairly certain that we wouldn’t have to look very far to find that all congregations to one degree or another suffer from self-inflicted storms now and then. It is interesting that the word used by Matthew to describe what the boat was going through was the word ‘basanizo’, which means tortured or tormented. A word that is more descriptive of what a PERSON would go through, rather than a ship or vessel of some kind.

If you remember from our studies in Mark, there’s another piece to this passage that echoes other passages found throughout Mark: the word ‘immediately’. It was the first word in verse 22, it appears here again, and once more just a couple of verses further down. That ‘immediately’ brings to mind for us what Mark seems to be conveying in his Gospel, that things were happening all the time, that Jesus and his disciples were on the move, stopping here, immediately going there, then suddenly over to this other place, a pack in motion.

In the middle of the storm, when the disciples cry out in fear, Jesus doesn’t immediately calm the storm. He immediately speaks to the disciples and tells them to take heart, I am he, do not be afraid.

There are times, and I’ve done this many times, when, in the midst of a crisis, my first prayer will be for God to wipe the cause of the crisis away completely. It’s almost an instinctual thing. Remove the danger. Take away the problem, the pain, the agony. When maybe what God wants is for me to go through the pain, through the struggle, in order to move closer to him, to be more like him.

And we have Peter’s action. Peter’s stepping out of the boat to go to Jesus. As I’m sure most of you have heard before, As long as Peter focused on where he was headed, he kept going. It was when he was distracted BY the storm – the wind, the waves, the rain, and the clouds that he began to sink.

How many times over the years have we looked back and realized how distracted we’ve become from what our most important calling has been?

Let’s back up a little in the passage. Jesus tells the disciples to get in the boat and go to the other side of the lake. He had a purpose for sending them on ahead, perhaps to meet someone, or to begin telling people of his coming. It is, if you will, a small commission. In fact, if we read on after the selected text, we find that Jesus did in fact spend some time in Gennersaret, and healed a whole slew of people. Long and short, he needed them to go on ahead of him to spread the word.

The storm blows up and they become frightened. They become distracted. They can’t seem to handle the crisis. How often have we had that happen in our own lives as individuals, as a church? We begin a project, set aside time and funds, and somewhere down the line, we get sidetracked by something else that has come up, by a conflict that makes us give up on that first goal?

Peter’s stepping out of the boat was an act of courage, and faith. In the midst of the conflict, the raging wind, and the crashing waves, he began to get his bearing again, and they led him straight to Jesus.

What happened next? We all know because we all identify more with his sinking than with his walking. He began to notice the wind and the waves and he became afraid again.

Grace steps into the story in the next word uttered by Peter: “Lord, save me!” And here we find another echo from Mark: Jesus IMMEDIATELY reached out his hand and caught him.

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church?

The word from the gospel is that even in the midst of squabbles, in the midst of conflict, in the midst of tensions and storms blowing from either outside OR inside, we can STILL call on God. We can STILL call to Jesus, and our call would do well to be “Lord, save me from myself, make me more like you!” We can’t expect to always be successful. We are, as I’ve said before, still human, with human weaknesses and frailties, but we have an arm to grab hold of, a hand to hold, that is more than capable of pulling us up out of the stormy seas that our lives can so often become and bring us to stand alongside him, and alongside each other.

And that is what God has called Jerusalem to be – disciples, standing alongside each other – to strengthen and encourage, as well as to hold each other accountable – but to be on this journey TOGETHER.

All the disciples remained in the boat, and they were still heading in the same direction. May we go and do likewise.

Let’s pray.