Scripture: Matthew 16:21-28
You may have gathered from the fact that the scripture this morning is from Matthew that I am moving on from Jeremiah. And if you gathered that, you would be somewhat right, but only somewhat. There are actually lots of things still on my mind from Jeremiah, but one in particular that is left over from the reading last week that I want to talk about this morning. It happens to dovetail in my mind with the Matthew reading you just heard, which is one of the lectionary scripture readings for this morning.
I guess I should warn you that this is not a sort of lighthearted, upbeat kind of topic that part of me says would be nice for a holiday weekend before we get too deeply into the fall season and all the things that lie ahead of us. But oh well. That’s where my head and heart are this morning, for better or worse and for whatever reasons, so I’m stuck with it, and therefore so are you.
You may remember…well, you may remember but you probably don’t—I certainly wouldn’t expect you to…but in the reading from last week Jeremiah was not a happy camper. Actually even if you weren’t here last week and don’t have a clue what the reading was about, you could probably guess that in the reading last week Jeremiah was not a happy camper. Right off, I can’t think of anywhere in the book of Jeremiah where Jeremiah was what you would call a happy camper. But in the reading last week he was especially not a happy camper. As in: “O Lord, you have seduced me…you have overpowered me…and you have prevailed…For whenever I speak, I must cry out, ‘violence and destruction’, and the word of the Lord has become a reproach and a derision for me all day long…cursed be the day on which I was born! The day when my mother bore me, let it not be blessed! …Why did I come forth from the womb to see toil and sorrow, and spend my days in shame?”
You see what I mean. It’s not that Jeremiah has a few things that are troubling him. He’s having some major issues…with life…and with God. And he’s feeling persecuted…by God. Seduced, he says at first, but not seduced in a pleasant way but seduced as in taken advantage of. Overpowered, he goes on to say. Jeremiah is miserable. His whole life is miserable. God has made his life miserable. Jeremiah would be only too glad to retire from the job of prophet. Jeremiah would be only too glad to retire from God altogether, but he finds that he can’t. “If I say, ‘I will not mention God or speak any more in God’s name,’ then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.”
This is just one passage where Jeremiah complains out loud about the ways God has come into his life, where he makes it very clear that God has not exactly been treating him in a warm, fuzzy manner and that consequently his feelings about God are not exactly warm and fuzzy either, thank you very much. And that reminded me of a thought I came across way back when I was just beginning to think about Jeremiah. The first scripture I dealt with was in chapter 1, which deals with the call of Jeremiah, when God was first entering his life and telling him that he had something in mind for Jeremiah. Jeremiah says, as so many have said before and after him, “Oh, God, really you’re making a mistake here. I won’t be very good at this. Why don’t you just go find someone else? It’ll work out better all around.” And God says essentially, “Look here now Jeremiah. No excuses. Don’t tell me how you’re too young or anything like that. I’ll give you words and strength and whatever you need. I’ll be there. So don’t be afraid. I will be with you.”
The Nobel Prize winning Jewish author Elie Wiesel has a chapter in one of his books about Jeremiah. Writing about this initial encounter between Jeremiah and God, Wiesel says that he imagines that when God said to Jeremiah, “Do not be afraid,” Jeremiah did a double take. Afraid? Did you say, “Do not be afraid”? Did I say anything about being afraid? What are you saying here? Do I have something to be afraid of? Is there something here you’re not telling me? God’s apparent words of assurance, “do not be afraid…I will be with you”, Wiesel points out probably did not sound all that reassuring from where Jeremiah was sitting. More like ominous. If God is telling Jeremiah not to be afraid, it must be because God sees something in Jeremiah’s future that Jeremiah might be afraid of. And as it turns out there was plenty in Jeremiah’s future that might have given him pause if he had known what was coming. Threats, isolation, imprisonment, accusations from every quarter that he didn’t love his country and that anyone who associated with him didn’t love their country, endless video clips that made him look like a raving maniac who didn’t love his country. As it turns out, this little exchange between Jeremiah and God, where God tells Jeremiah not to be afraid, though innocent sounding, was the beginning of a relationship that turned out not to be always comforting to Jeremiah…to put it mildly.
All of this has caused me to reflect that what was true for Jeremiah is also true, in at least some ways and to some degree, for us as well. Our relationships with God are not always warm and fuzzy. God is not always an inspiring, comforting, reassuring presence in our lives. To put it more bluntly, God is not always someone we are happy to have hanging around.
Of course God is sometimes someone we are happy to have in our lives. We speak, perhaps too casually but sincerely, of seeking God, and we hear gratefully the scriptures that speak of our yearning for God, and of God’s loving, yearning for us. And we know that God’s presence in our lives can indeed be an inspiring, comforting, reassuring, strengthening, empowering, healing presence. Those are the truths about God that are the most popular truths. Those are the truths about God that, inevitably and understandably, are focused on in churches, including Sojourners and including in my own preaching. This is not a criticism, exactly, and certainly not a criticism directed primarily at others.
This is not a criticism, exactly, because those truths we’re talking about are truths. God does come to us in all sorts of good, positive, uplifting, life affirming ways. I know it to be true, for example, that as we get lost in the beauty of a sunset, not notice its beauty and comment on it, but as we get lost in the beauty of a sunset that we can also feel like we are drawing closer to the mystery and the holiness that is behind and within that beauty. And I don’t really mean to belittle such a feeling by referring to it as warm and fuzzy. It can in fact be a profound reminder of our oneness with all of creation and the giftedness of our lives. The presence of God at such times can renew us in very real ways. I know that to be true. I know it to be true that God has seen people through difficult times, has seen me through difficult times, even as a kind of nameless presence we don’t know how to speak of at the time but who as we look back on it we can say it was God who saw us through because we know we didn’t do it by ourselves. I know it to be true that God can bring healing where healing didn’t seem possible, not so much by taking away the wounds and the hurts of our living but by turning them into something more, by making them a source of compassion and adding to what we have to offer to others. I know it to be true that God can be found here in this room on a Sunday morning, not automatically and not every Sunday and not because the preacher or the choir are at their best, or because the hymns are your favorites, but because God is in the faces of the people gathered here in all our imperfections and brokenness and holiness. And whenever that something happens that allows us to see God in the faces around us, it strengthens and inspires and renews and heals. I know that to be true. I know all that to be true, and much more.
I also know that it is not the whole truth about our relationship to God. God is not always, the last line of our first hymn notwithstanding, our maker, defender, redeemer, and friend. God sometimes comes into our lives in ways where we may feel God more as an enemy than as a friend, or if not an outright enemy then at least a holy troubler, a troubler of our consciences, troubler of our too easy affirmations, troubler of our willingness to make our peace with the world as it is, troubler of the waters of our lives, troubler of our souls. God is all those things too, and more. And the issue here is not whether we have a right view of God. It is not about God; it’s about our relationship to God, and if we focus only on a God who comforts, strengthens, forgives, and heals, then we are not fully open to God and we turn our relationship to God into a half-truth.
That God does not always come to us in ways that we would think of as friendly, in ways that we are just really happy about, or even in ways that are necessarily inspiring or inspiriting is testified to by many places in scripture, including of course in Jeremiah and in the Matthew reading for this morning where Peter and Jesus have this little exchange that begins with Jesus telling Peter that he “must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering…and be killed…” Peter responds, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you,” at which point Jesus famously replies, “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.”
One way of interpreting this passage certainly, the most usual way, I think, is to see it as an example of how people misunderstood Jesus, misunderstood what his purpose was, misunderstood the kind of messiah he was going to be. Peter had just confessed that he had come to see Jesus as the expected messiah, and the messiah was not supposed to be someone who was to go to Jerusalem to be killed. The messiah was someone expected, by some anyway, to liberate the Jewish people from oppression, like Moses had, someone who, either by military or miraculous means would throw out the Roman occupiers and bring the Jewish state, the Jewish culture, the Jewish faith to its rightful and intended destiny. Or at the very least, the messiah would surely be someone who, at some point, would reveal himself as the great God-sent, God appointed, God-inspired spiritual leader that he was and everyone would understand his greatness and his glory. Maybe it would even happen that a whole bunch of mega-churches would immediately spring up to demonstrate the size of his following and the power of his teaching.
But instead, Jesus said simply that we was going to Jerusalem where he would suffer and die (and be raised again, but Peter didn’t pay any attention to that part). In any case, Peter couldn’t imagine such an end for the messiah. And this has given preachers an opportunity to talk about Jesus as someone sent by God to be a sacrifice for the sins of humanity, or perhaps as someone sent by God so committed to sacrificial love and non-violence as a way of life that he had to end up as a victim of the world’s violence, or perhaps in some other way that in any case Peter didn’t get. Something like that is how this passage is usually approached, and that’s all well and good. It’s certainly a legitimate and possible way to approach the passage.
But I’m seeing an additional way to think about that passage this morning. I’m seeing a kind of a sub-text here that’s not so much about Jesus and whether he was this kind of messiah or that kind of messiah and about Peter’s misunderstanding of whatever kind of messiah Jesus was, but that in the end is not about Peter or Jesus but about us. I’m thinking that what really scandalized Peter was not the fact that Jesus was upsetting his preconceptions about the messiah, but that Peter was thinking that if God can do this to Jesus, God could do it to me. If God could ask Jesus to suffer terribly and die an inglorious death, then what might God ask me to do? It wouldn’t have to even be that drastic to be pretty upsetting. And then Jesus goes and says, “If any want to be my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” What might that mean? Whatever it might mean, it’s not necessarily a call to something that we might already have in mind for ourselves or that we are sure to welcome with open arms. God doesn’t always enter our lives as a friend.
Or as an enemy either, because of course that is not the point, and what I am wanting to say this morning is not some severe message that we are called to be heroic cross bearers or some kind of martyrs for the faith. That’s not mine to say. I don’t know enough to say in what way you may be called or I may be called. None of us do. But I do have a hope that I will be open to the call of God, even if that call is not something I have already thought of for myself, and even if what God calls me to do, or even to think about or struggle with is not all that comforting, even if at first it doesn’t sound like such a great idea to me. Being open to God, just being open to God, to all of God, is, I’m thinking, a pretty big order. I’m working on it. Amen.
Jim Bundy
August 31, 2008