[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Welcome to the collective table where we celebrate the intersections of Jesus, justice and joy.
This podcast is brought to you by Oceanside Sanctuary Church. Each week we bring our listeners a recording of our weekly Sunday teaching at Oceanside Sanctuary, which ties scripture into the larger conversations happening in our community, congregation, and even the podcast. So we're glad your here and thanks for listening.
[00:00:38] Speaker A: Good morning.
Yesterday I had a very productive schedule planned in which all of my chores were set up and blocked off, from my visit to AAA to getting an oil change to visiting a friend in San Diego. And then I got a text from two of our dying pastors saying, we both have the flu.
We cannot show up tomorrow.
Can you preach?
I do not have a sermon for you this morning.
And I thought about canceling all of those things.
I could write it, but I looked at my spouse and she looked at me and she said, wing it.
But Jason wants a sermon text and he wants a sermon title.
And I did sit in front of my keyboard with my Gmail open and wondered, how would the sermon title, let's see how it goes.
Sit.
So I chose a text and I chose a sermon title, but I don't know if we're going to be faithful to it because we're just going to see how it goes.
We do have a PowerPoint slide with the text though. I think, okay, this will be the most prepared thing I have. I'll read it from the PowerPoint if we got it.
Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea, Philippi.
And on the way, he asked his disciples to who do people say that I am?
And they answered him, John the Baptist and others, Elijah and still others, one of the prophets.
He asked them, but who do you say that I am?
Peter answered him, you are the Messiah.
And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.
Who do you say that I am?
Who do you say that I am?
This text is kind of mysterious because it seems like Jesus is answering a question and that Peter gives him the right answer. And then he sternly orders them not to tell anyone about what they said. And Mark never explains, why does Jesus want to keep this a secret?
In Mark, Jesus is more of an exorcist than he is in Matthew, Luke, or John.
And this there's this odd thing that the demons are the first to make the confession that he's the Messiah.
The demons know who Jesus is before his disciples do. And when the demons that he cast out make the good confession, he tells them, be quiet about it.
And then in other Places in Mark, the disciples see that Jesus is healing people and he sternly asks them to keep it a secret.
And then when Jesus makes the good confession, Jesus says, keep it a secret.
And Mark never explains to the reader what the Messianic secret is about. That's the name for this thing that's happening in Mark, the Messianic secret.
And there's a lot of theories about the, you know, the New Testament scholars come together and why is it a secret?
And does the secret have an answer?
Because if you read this same text in Matthew and Luke, and this is a very conservative, safe thing to say, it is a very conventional New Testament claim to say that Matthew and Luke have taken this story from Mark. They don't like how ambiguous and open ended it is.
And so Peter gives the right answer. And in both, if you've watched the Chosen on Netflix, Anybody?
No? A few. Okay. They've made some good decisions and others. And in both of those, Jesus says, essentially, blessings to you, Simon, son of Jonah, for you did not receive this answer from flesh and blood, but from my heavenly Father.
And it is upon you, Simon Peter, this rock that I will build my church and the forces of death shall not prevail against it.
They cleaned up the story, didn't they?
The New Testament scholar said that Matthew and Luke both kind of agreed to take the Mark story and find a way to clean up the mystery so that it's about Peter being authorized by Jesus to be the rightful person to take the church forward. And so the Messianic question isn't a puzzle anymore.
It's not that I disagree with the Matthew and Luke story and that I don't think that it has its own truth, but that the Mark story doesn't allow us to hear Peter's answer and go, well, that resolves that.
Who do you say that I am?
You're the Messiah.
Now we can move along.
It's a question that is unanswerable. And to be fair to Matthew and Luke, if you read those texts, in both of those texts too, he does order them to not tell anyone what Peter said. The secret is still kind of there, whispered in the background.
If you ever want to join a Zen Buddhist community, and I'm not going to try to convert anyone into Zen Buddhism this morning because Jason and Janelle would not be pleased.
You get to this point where you're meditating and you're learning meditating and you're deepening your practice and that once they get to a point where they recognize that you're serious about meditation. They give you, you a koan.
And the koan is always a question.
And it's a question that seems to have an answer because they're expecting an answer from you.
And that you sit with the question and you meditate with the question and you carry the koan with you in your personal life and in your meditation practice. And then you go through these conversations called dakusan in which you bow and enter this room and you sit before the teacher and they discuss the question with you. And you go back and forth and that you have these stages of dakusan in which you continue to grapple with the answer and finally say the thing that allows them to know your teachers in the zendo, that you've been transformed by the question.
But there isn't a right answer to the question.
And I talked to a guy about it when I got to the point in my own training where I said, I don't really want to do the Cohen thing, I'm an American, I'm in the answer business.
And he pointed out, and this guy, you know, he went to Japan, he was much farther along in this than me. He said a koan is like a key.
And the reason they're trying to get to know you is they're trying to find out how your ego works, how your intellect works, how your need to be certain and to resolve things work. And so they give you a koan that's like a key designed to unlock your ego.
It's not about the answer to the koan, it's can you wrestle with this question long enough until your intellect gives up on it, until you just realize that there isn't an answer, that you stop asking it totally. And then the non answer will be realized to you. And if that answer frustrates you, that's part of the process.
If you've ever seen those people at the end of a marathon that they can't run anymore and they're like crawling, have you seen the exhausted people in those desert races?
The mantra is to get you to just crawl and to collapse and trying to intellectually figure out the koan. Until then, you have to rely upon a deeper part of yourself.
And so in this non sermon sermon that I'm coming up with in the moment, I'm trying to invite us into thinking, who do you say that I am?
Is the Jesus Cohen.
One of the Cohens that they give people? The most famous one is, you know it, right? What is the sound of one hand clapping?
But the one I really like is what was your original face before your parents were born.
It forces you to grapple with a contradiction.
A, there's the contradiction of what was your original face, but then before you were born, you didn't have a face before you were born. It's a question that asking you to engage in a mystery.
The Jesus calling is inviting us to answer it.
But because our sensei isn't dead, he's alive, he continues to ask us that question in different stages of our lives.
Because the Jesus koan is like the Japanese Zen koan.
Every person must have their own answer to must come from deep within you.
The answer to what was your original face before your parents were born?
And for every person in this church, I'm trying to suggest, who do you say that I am?
Has to be deeply personal to how you are experiencing and where you are finding the face of Christ in this particular chapter in your life.
It can't be the same for you as it is for me.
And if you're like me, that you were raised in a dogmatic Christian tradition in which scriptures give us the answers and this scripture means a certain thing, this is gonna. The kind of mystery and ambiguity and uncertainty of this is going to make us feel a little itchy because the idea that we're all going to have a different answer to the question, who do you say that Jesus is?
It makes us uncertain of.
Well, think about it this way.
How many of you came from a church tradition in which you recite a creed?
I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth. That's kind of our way of saying, we're all on this, at least this set of convictions together. Right.
Born of the Virgin Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate was crucified.
So our way of saying, we can all agree on this. Right? Right.
And this is a Disciples of Christ Church.
I have been a pastor of a Disciples of Christ Church in which we had elders who said publicly, I don't know if I believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus.
And then we had other elders that say, I believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus.
But because we could all agree that Jesus was the animating question, we learned to just live with not needing to control which creeds we could recite and which ones we could not.
Because we could agree that the question was, who do you say that I am?
The oldest thing that the disciples of Christ founders, those that from like 1790 to 1810 early America said is on unity's essential, on the unifying question, we are together. But on all of our differences, grace and charity and the unifying is essential is Jesus Christ is Lord. And on all the other stuff about how to interpret Scripture and whether or not we baptize infants or baptize adults, or whether or not we interpret a text this way or that way, whether or not we're going to be gracious with each other and we're going to struggle with each other and we're going to know that we're going to disagree.
So let's think about the Jesus Cohen who do you say that I am?
And how it confronts us in different chapters of our lives and how it's not about coming up with the right answer, but it's about being transformed by the question.
I think that the best questions don't have answers because questions that have answers, well, I don't know.
We're just spitballing this thing, right?
Do you know a person in your life, a friend or family member, that really does believe that they have most of it all figured out?
I'm not asking you to judge their answers, but they really have a bit of confidence that the meaning of life and what it means to be good and what we're doing here and what human beings are for, they pretty. They've nailed it.
How do you experience them as a friend or family member, a person who believes that they really have essentially got the answers versus a person who says, I'll live into the mystery, I'll bear the uncertainty.
I'll struggle with the question.
I guess a sermon should have a part 2.
What are some dimensions of how we do this? Koan practice?
The Jesus Cohen who do you say that I am not? What are possible answers? Because it's not that kind of question.
It's a reverent question.
It's a transforming question that it forces us to give up on our intellect as a way of managing the mystery of what it means to be here?
What are ways in which Jesus confronts us in the world?
What are pockets of the world in which the face of Jesus comes to us and confronts us with the question, who do you say that I am?
Who do you say that I am first?
Well, let me pause real quick and say the obvious ones. I think we pretty much agree on Scripture, which raises more questions. I don't know. The longer I read the Bible, I have more and more questions and not less and less.
The more that thing where Jesus says the eye is the lamp of the body and if your eye is filled with darkness, how deep is that darkness? Does anybody here know what that means?
If Your eyes are filled with darkness, then how deep is that darkness?
I've been struggling with that one since I was 21.
But it does invite me to ask something about my eyes and how I see the world. And if the way of I'm seeing the world isn't inviting in the darkness.
The question of the Scriptures don't give us answers.
It asks us to wade deeper into the waters of who we are before God.
In that text case, do we see the world in a way that is inviting in light or inviting in darkness?
Maybe that's what it means.
We all agree here we just took communion that part of the way in which Jesus confronts us in the world is through the rituals and life of worship in the church.
What if Jason and Janelle said, or, I don't know, what if just a member of the church said, you know, the crackers and the juice thing, it's a little bit laborious.
It's expensive.
Not really, but it has a cost.
What if we just put up the PowerPoint of the cracker and you just look at it and you think about what it means to body of Christ and we all kind of. And then we put up the PowerPoint slide of a cup of juice and you think about what it means for this to be the cup of his blood.
But instead the church, century after century, has said, you gotta actually get up there and look somebody in the eyes and exchange the bread and chew it. And no, not a metaphorical PowerPoint slide cup, a real cup, and you have to drink it.
Part of the way that Jesus confronts us with the question in the world is in doing the rituals and life of worship. We do learn something about Jesus in taking communion and in being embodied with each other and handing a piece of bread to another person and saying, this is the body of Christ, something happens there.
The face of our rabbi comes to us and the question is posed to us again, who do you say that I am?
It's weird.
The second dimension, in addition to the Scriptures and the worshipful, sacramental, ritualized life of the church, is that for me, can't speak for you.
The face of Jesus comes to us in the form of the best art that really moves something in us.
Have you ever watched those, I don't know, America's Got Talent or whatever, where random people just show up and we just have to wonder if they're good or not good at something.
And that the most watched scenes on these shows that are now in Australia and Britain and around the world is when an unassuming person who usually has a modest appearance and who obviously comes from a very like, modest place in the world, stands up there and you can see the anxiety of people, of the faces of the crowd going, oh gosh, don't mess this up.
And then they just masterfully nail it and people cry.
Have you ever wondered about why that's the response?
Why some hidden person in plain clothes putting it all out on the line, nailing a piece of beauty makes people who don't even know them cry.
I think it's religious in a way that I don't know how to articulate.
God comes to us in the best art and in the best of beauty.
When I think about some of the most spiritually moving pieces of art that really just bring me to a point of shuddering. It's not explicitly Christian stuff.
There's like this Max Richter piano piece.
If you've seen Hamnet, it plays at the end.
I think that's the only piece of music I want played at my funeral.
Somewhere in that sad melody, I feel the man of sorrows, the tearful rabbi, come to me.
It's a piano piece that doesn't really ever end. It could keep on going into a chain.
And somewhere in that question, I almost can hear an unspoken lyric. Who do you say that I am?
Jesus comes to us in the scriptures and in the worship and the rituals of the church. And Jesus comes to us in the best art that moves us in ways that is hard for us to understand.
Thirdly, Jesus comes to us in strangers.
If you come from a Bible thumping tradition, as I do, this is an old Bible thumping theme, that when strangers come to you, as the author of Hebrews says, some of you have entertained angels without even knowing it.
The strangers that come to Abraham's doorstep to tell him that his wife will have a child, he doesn't know that they're angels and that the way that we receive strangers in the world is part of the way that Jesus comes to us and says, who do you say that I am?
Henri Nouwen, this beautiful Catholic priest who wrote mostly in the 80s and 90s.
Person who dealt with deep sorrow.
He said that whenever you receive a stranger into your life, a person that you don't know, maybe they're asking for something and maybe they're not, you initially feel like you are giving something to them.
But in the most sacred moments in which we deal with strangers in our lives, it's actually them that's revealing something and teaching something to us.
The way that we deal with strangers in our lives.
Sometimes is us receiving angels when we didn't even know.
I spoke with this woman once, my ex wife's mother.
And I didn't know at the time that this medical condition that she was dealing with, a mystery condition, would kill her.
It would take her life a short time later, shortly after the divorce.
But she told me this story while we stood in the backyard in which when she received the diagnosis, she was just flattened and hollowed out.
And she went into the hospital elevator and she stood there and a middle aged woman came into the elevator. And the way that Jerry explained it to her is that this woman looked at her and she had this realization that this woman knew everything about what she had just been told by the doctor. And the woman said, you will be able to bear with this, but not alone.
And then the woman stepped out of the elevator into a covered parking lot and Jerry stepped out of the elevator to try to find her and she wasn't there.
We bear the Jesus Cohen in the scriptures, in the worship, in the ritualized life of the church.
We are confronted by the face of Jesus in the best of art that moves us.
And we are addressed by the Jesus of the Jesus Cohen in the strangers who show up unexpectedly.
Finally, not the only way, but the last way. I found middle age in which Jesus is coming to me is in my friendships.
Do you have a best friend.
Or do you have the most important friendship that you've ever had, even if that person is no longer with us?
I'm 45 and I'm heterosexual, so this is a weird thing for me to say. I'm making a new friend.
The statistics say that my demographic doesn't really do that.
And I just met this guy and he likes things that I don't really connect with.
And he is really scarred by the church and religion and he kind of knows about this thing I do on the sidelines and for reasons I can't explain, for the first time in like nine years, I'm making a new friend with this person.
And he doesn't like the movies that I like and he reads these kind of like romantic erotica novels that I don't understand.
Santa Claus is Coming to Town. You know, I think I know what that one's about.
But in making a new friend you have to decide, am I going to take this person as they are and accept them as they are?
Am I going to allow this person to judge me?
Am I going to be honest with them?
If they show me a part of their lives that is maybe ugly or confusing, Will I be loving enough to accept it?
Will I allow this person to maybe criticize me? Or will I be so vulnerable that they might decide in the future they don't want to be my friend anymore?
I want to suggest that our friendships are part of how Jesus comes to us and reveals himself to us and asks us to be a better friend of the world. Because, after all, he and his disciples are in the friendship business together.
I have called you my disciples, but now I call you my friends. His words to them in the Last Supper and in trying to find out how to be a good friend to this person with whom I have some things in common and don't.
I'm in this weird kind of I feel like a kid again.
I want this person to, like, respect me, but I don't want to have to pretend to be a different person than I am.
I want to know how to support this person who's going through a painful divorce.
But I don't want to impose myself on them and give them advice and make them feel like I'm trying to fix their situation.
Friendships are messy.
I'm trying to be good at it.
Part of how Jesus comes to us in the world, inviting us to be his disciples, is as we grapple with friendships, we realize that Jesus can transform us into being the kind of friend we need to be in the moment by trusting in the power that is outside of ourselves.
Friendship's kind of an art.
It requires improvisation and creativity.
Jesus comes to us in the scriptures, the worship, the liturgy and the sacraments of the church. Jesus comes to us with the Cohen through the best of the art and the music that moves us. Jesus comes to us in the form of strangers and how we receive them. Jesus presents the Jesus Koan to us.
Who do you say that I am? As we grapple with the difficulty of being a friend to a person, not knowing the best way how to do it.
I know this because I stood on the steps at 9:30 and talked to a few members here that a lot of people are troubled this week because they've been watching the news.
Two Americans were.
I don't think that it's necessarily important that they're Americans. It's important that they're humans. Two human beings in the United States were shot by ICE officers this last month.
And a lot of us are asking the question to ourselves, what's the right thing to do?
What is the best response from the church at a time like this?
How am I supposed to feel about this?
What if these types of conflicts come to my doorsteps and embroil my neighbors.
And I don't know if there's a right answer to that.
But my feeling is if we return to the Jesus who do you say that I am?
That we will grapple with that question and be transformed by it and creatively engage the uncertainty of it in ways in which we become the answer.
To the dilemma of our current epoch, of what the church is to do in a time of great tumult and fear and anxiety.
That's the non answer answer.
Because Jesus in his parables doesn't tell people how to solve the parable.
He just says sit with it.
And at different times and at different places, I think the same parable will have different answers as in different times and in different places. The question of who do you say that I am? Must have different respect responses from us.
That's what the best questions do.
They invite us further into mystery.
Because one of this thing that I'm starting to learn at this stage in my faith life is that Jesus of Nazareth is not a historical puzzle to be sold. He is a mysterious teacher inviting us into a path in which we give up on the solving business.
Jesus isn't a test that has answers.
He is a costly dance of the student teacher relationship we're being called into.
And I'm grateful that I don't have to answer that question alone.
I'm grateful that I can engage in the great question of who do you say that I am?
People like you.
Because the great question, the best questions are best held together.
I'll invite our musicians up.
And I want to take a moment of silence for you to sit with the very personal nature of the question, the you part.
Who do you say that I am?
And to recall that.
Musicians invite us into something that is better than the answer business.
Musicians invite us into awe.
Artists invite us into reverence.
Melody invites us to just sit and accept the power of beauty on its own.
And that's a pretty good posture with which to deal with a Cohen like who do you say that I am?
[00:37:43] Speaker B: Thank you for joining us for this Sunday teaching, no matter when or where you're tuning in.
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