Who Do You Say That I Am? — A Call to Confession

Our scripture this morning comes from the Gospel

according to Matthew, the 16th chapter.

Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi,

he asked his disciples, who do people say

that the Son of Man is?

And they said, some say John the Baptist,

But others, Elijah, and still others, Jeremiah or one of the

prophets. Jesus said to them, but who do you say

that I am? Simon Peter answered, you are the Messiah,

the Son of the living God. And Jesus answered

him, blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah,

for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you,

but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter,

and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades

will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys

of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth

will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on

earth will be loosed in heaven. Then he sternly

ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was

the Messiah. This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

If you ever wonder what I get up to when I'm not here at church,

there are a few things. I like hanging out with my family, playing with the

girls. I like watching baseball or going for runs. But there's

2 other things that I really enjoy doing, and those are hobbies of

watching movies and reading books. So, you could

imagine that some of my favorite scenes in movies are

when the hero goes to the library. And often

it's a scene like this, right? They're often like detective movies.

The detective, he goes to the library, he's been, you know, working on this case

for weeks and the pieces are just starting to come together.

And he goes to the library and you see him walk through the stacks of

books and periodicals and he's pulling stuff off the shelf,

and he walks to a table, and he's got a big stack in his hands

and sets them down. And then the hero pages through the books

or newspaper articles, you know, jotting down a note here,

muttering to himself. I like when they show the clock,

right, and it shows like a certain time, and then it's like way later.

And at some point the night security officer or librarian

comes over and Tells the detective that, you know, it's closing up.

And they say, just let yourself out. Just let yourself out.

I'm bringing that up because I tried to recreate that exact scene

as I prepared for this sermon. I sat down, not at the library, but in

my house, which has a lot of books in it, and I

pulled a bunch off the shelves and set them beside

me. Because I had one question that I needed answered.

I needed one bit of information, one answer that would just

bust this sermon wide open, you know?

So there I am, brow furrowed, pen tapping on the page,

jotting a quote down here, a line down there, muttering over and over to myself,

who do people say that the Son of

Man is?

Is? That's the first question Jesus

asked the disciples in our Gospel reading, and the disciples tell Jesus a

number of answers. They say that people

are saying that he is perhaps John the Baptist.

This is particularly who Herod thought Jesus was, because it is Herod

who beheads John the Baptist, and then he hears stories of this guy out in

the wilderness preaching, and he thinks, Has John the Baptist come back?

They say, some think, Jesus, that you are the prophet Elijah.

This kind of makes sense, the holy prophet from the Old Testament whose return—

he didn't actually die, he just like went up to heaven and

so there's this thread of tradition that says that he's just waiting

to come back. And some say he will return to reestablish

God's kingdom on earth. And would reappear before the great day

of the Lord. Is this

who Jesus is? Others think Jesus is some

other prophet of old. Matthew gives us

the prophet Jeremiah who shared Jesus' tone

of warning Jerusalem about coming judgment, and both

Jeremiah and Jesus, they suffer persecution for speaking God's truths.

There are some parallels there. Maybe he is Jeremiah, come back to life.

Who do people say that the Son of Man is?

I like when Jesus asks a question. I think it's

probably good practice that we should try to take Jesus at his

word and try to answer it.

So, I was hoping that I could get a bit

closer to the truth about Jesus than

the disciples and their answers do, and that's why I got my books. I got

them off the shelf, a selection of hundreds

of years of Christian thought and witness.

Who do people say that the Son of Man is?

And here's what I found, and I started with the basics. The first book,

the book that I grabbed was, it's called the Augsburg Confession.

And this is particularly important for Lutherans, right? This— the Augsburg Confession,

if you haven't heard of it, is one of the founding documents of the Reformation.

And if you're looking for the definitive statement as to what Lutherans believe

about our faith, this is it. And it

says under Article 3 entitled Son of God, this is

just a snippet, it says, Jesus is true God,

true human being, who truly was born,

suffered, was crucified, died, and was buried in

order both to be a sacrifice not only for original sin but

also for all other sins. It goes on from there, talks about the resurrection

and the ascension. It's pretty good, concise,

simple, orthodox in its belief.

Okay, next answer. Instead of the 16th century

in Germany, which is where the Augsburg Confession comes from, I was, I was like,

let's go all the way back. Let's go back to the 4th century,

closer to the time of Jesus, when the church was— this is a century

when the church was putting a lot of pen to paper, spilling a lot

of ink about who this person Jesus is. Lots of debates, lots of heretics,

and one of the most famous theologians of this period is this guy named Saint

Athanasius, and his answer comes from one of his

most famous works entitled On the Incarnation,

and it's a little tiny book. And you wouldn't know it, but a lot

of what's in that book informs what we say about who Jesus is

today. And in this, he says Jesus is

the renewal of God's image

in humankind so that through Jesus humans

might once more come to know God. All right,

it's a little more confusing, thanks. 4th century.

Alright, who's next? I wanted something like

real basic, so I went to this book called,

it's like a dictionary, it says Who's Who in the New Testament and

it's alphabetical and I went to the letter J for Jesus and

this is a more historically grounded modern-day response

and that resource, this dictionary says, Jesus is

universally recognized to have been the Jewish rabbi who

in the period before the destruction of the temple by the Roman armies gathered

disciples by teaching, was condemned as a troublesome imposter by

priests and other leading men among the Jews of Jerusalem, though his

own disciples believed him to be the Messiah.

Like I said, well-researched,

historical, scholarly, modern.

And maybe the best for last. This is a poem, a little

dose of poetry here for ya, from Saint Bernard of Clairvaux

from the 12th century and then translated into English by my favorite poet,

the 19th century priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. So this is a poetic

feast for the senses about Jesus.

The poem goes like this.

Jesus, To cast one thought

upon makes gladness after

he is gone, but more than honey and honeycomb is

to come near and take him home.

No music so can touch the ear, no news is heard of

such sweet cheer, though half so dear there

is not one as Jesus.

God the Father's Son. Ah, yes,

poetry.

What do you think? Case cracked?

Mystery solved? Any of

these do it for you? Any of these forensically researched answers that

you particularly like? You know, founding document of the

Reformation, text from the early church, an encyclopedia of the Bible.

And a medieval poem translated by a 19th-century priest.

Take your pick. What do you like? Maybe you have

a favorite. Maybe none of these do anything for you.

What they do all have, what they have going for

them, is that they are all correct.

In a literal sense, all of them describe Jesus

in accurate terms depending on the context and motivation of the author.

But I think I've neglected one book, haven't I? That was

sitting amongst the others, the Bible,

right? You know that one? The Bible, it's full of descriptions that

answer our question. I don't do this a lot,

so please humor me, it's going to get a little interactive here. I'm so sorry

to those of you who just like want to sit there, it's a little interactive.

Here we go. If we're going to answer Jesus's question, I need your

help. I'm going to start off by listing a

few of the ways Jesus is referred to in the Bible, either by himself or

by other people. And so I'm going to start with a couple and then

I want, I really do, I want you to do this, I want you to

shout them out, all right, but I'll give you a few to start. Okay,

yeah, Emmanuel, Good Shepherd, the Way,

Bread of Life, And I got a bunch more, but don't put them on the

screen yet. Don't put them on screen yet. Okay, here we go. Interaction. How else

is Jesus referred to in Scripture? Son of God.

The King. Christ. Yeah, that's a title. That's not his last name.

Christ. Jesus Christ means anointed one, whatever. Hey,

what else? What else? Man of Sorrows.

Hmm. Alpha. Yeah.

And Omega. Yes.

Son of Man.

Prince of Peace.

I Am. Yes.

All right, all right, you can relax. You can relax. That was good. That was

good. Here, all right, put them on. Here's the ones I came up with.

Well, I didn't come up with them. They're in the Bible. Christ.

Christ, Lord, Savior,

Master, Logos, Son of God, Son of Man, Son of David,

Lamb of God, New Adam, Light of the World,

King of the Jews, Rabbi, Comforter,

Healer, Messiah, Alpha and Omega,

Redeemer, Chief Cornerstone, I Am, King of

Kings, the Way, True Vine,

And then I have to do this one like Handel's Messiah, I only hear the

music. Wonderful Counselor, Almighty God, the Everlasting

Father, the Prince of Peace. Sorry, Spence, I butchered that.

Anyway, these are the names that Scripture says

the Son of Man is. What do we think?

Sermon cracked? Case closed?

Do we know who the Son of Man is? Who this Jesus is yet.

In some ways, yes,

but also in one very profound way,

no.

I've left out a key question.

We've been so focused, busy figuring

out who other people say that the Son of Man is that we've

neglected the second question Jesus asks.

Verse 15, right after the disciples give their first

answers, Jesus asks, but who do

you say that I am?

That's where the rubber meets the road, doesn't it?

It's nice; it's nice to know what other people have to say about Jesus.

It's how we know anything about him at all, right? At some point

in our lives, we hear about Jesus, the great stories of our faith.

At church, from our parents,

grandparents, when we take those books off our shelves and we

read about our faith. That's why I did that exercise

at the, you know, the first half of this sermon, right? Reading how

other great thinkers of the faith have answered the question is important,

but there's this part of our Christian faith that

asks who Jesus is to you.

And this isn't some magic phrase.

You know, we're not searching for the perfect answer here that,

you know, I don't know, maybe we found in a book we really like and

we say it and it makes us a Christian. No,

it's actually way more important than that.

When Jesus flips the question from,

who do people say, to,

who do you say that the Son of Man is,

he is looking for us to answer in a way that

will transform our lives,

right? Not just regurgitate stock answers.

But transform us.

And if you're like, Pastor Dan, how's that going to work? What does that even

look like? We actually get an example of that.

The first person in the Bible to answer this question of Jesus is Simon,

and he responds, you're the Messiah,

the Son of the living God.

And here's how Jesus responds to this confession.

Jesus affirms Simon's answer and

then tells him that his life, because he answered,

is now going to change. And this happens

in a real concrete way. Jesus says, I'm going to

give you a new name. Not just

Simon, but Peter,

the rock,

a new identity.

And Jesus says, with this new name I commission you to

go and live as if what you said about

me is really true, tangibly,

empirically, objectively true. Jesus tells him,

Go and build my church.

Go do what is good.

Go prevail against the evil in this world.

Go act in a way that reveals this

radical proclamation of who you say I am.

I mean, friends, what— Would that we do the same,

right, that our proclamations of who Jesus

is in our lives would change, would change us and

change our worlds forever.

Just think about Peter,

his church,

how the world was changed forever.

Would that all of our professions of who Jesus is transform

the way we live our lives every day.

Now, it's one thing, it's one thing to say who Jesus is or

to read someone else's response to the question.

It is another to say in our very living

and being in this world who Jesus is.

In a world that cries out for Christians to be more like Jesus,

more like the Jesus we profess with our lips,

this is all the more important.

So one last time,

who do you say that Jesus is?

Answer, and then go and

Amen. Would you pray with me?

Holy God, who You are,

Who you were when you lived among us in

this world, who you were on that cross,

who you were that day you rose from the grave,

it is who you are throughout the ages.

A God whose life transforms the lives

you encounter. Come to us this

day, O Lord, in our prayers and in our

praise, in our regrets and in

our sorrows.

Come and let your very presence transform

our lives that we may confess who

you are with our lips,

and live who you are in our hearts.

May your word and witness be our guiding star this

and every day. It is in

your blessed and holy name that we pray.