Who Do You Say That I Am

125 Pages·2017·0.82 MB·English

SERMON

“Who Do You Say That I Am”

August 27, 2017

Rev. Dr. Eric C. Smith
It’s always interesting when Jesus has questions. It’s always interesting when Jesus has questions,
because you never know whether it’s a real question, whether he really wants to know the answer to
something, or whether it’s one of those Jesus-type questions where he already knows the answer and
he’s just testing you. That is just the kind of thing Jesus would do, right, he would ask you a question he
already knows the answer to, just to see what you would say, just to make you sweat a little bit waiting
to hear whether you got it right. It’s always interesting when Jesus has questions, and he has two of them
right here in this passage, one right after the other. And it’s actually not totally clear whether it’s two
questions, or just two variations of the same question, or maybe even a question and then a follow-up
question. “Who do people say that the Son of Man is,” is the first question. And “who do you say that I
am” is the second one.

“Who do you say that I am” has turned into a kind of shorthand for Christian faith. All kinds of
Christians from the most conservative to the most liberal and from the most eclectic to the most
traditional, all kinds of Christians use this question as a shorthand for something like “tell me what you
believe.” Who you think Jesus is says a lot about what kind of Christian you are. For some, that question
becomes a test of faith: do you agree and confess that Jesus is Lord, do you know the right answer and
can you recite it? For others, that question becomes an invitation to a journey of discovery, with no
particular “right” answer out there, and a variety of possible responses. There are are about two billion
Christians in the world today, and there are probably about that many answers to that question, who do
you say that I am? Two billion different ways to say who Jesus is, two billion different answers to what
might seem like a pretty simple question.

In some ways, this pretty simple question has been the central question of Christianity, but it has never
really been anything like simple. I think there are probably at least five or six different answers to this
question just in the New Testament, who do you say that I am, and dozens more answers in the early
history of Christianity. We, today, have this sense that we are the ones who started disagreeing about
who Jesus was, we who live in the modern era, but Christianity has always had lots of answers to that
question. There has never been one answer for “who do you say that I am.”

I’ve been thinking about something lately, and I bring this up as a way of confessing to you all how
contradictory and unresolved my own thinking is about it. I’ve been thinking lately about how I think
two things are true for simultaneously, two maybe contradictory things. The first thing that I think is true
is that there is no “right” answer to that question, “who do you say that I am?” There is no correct
response. All two billion of us with all two billion of our different answers are all in one way or another
correct. And when Jesus was asking the question to his disciples ,I don’t think he wasn’t fishing for the
correct response, I don’t think he was asking a question he already knew the answer to, I think he was
asking a serious question. I think that’s why Jesus asked the question in the first place: not because he
knew the answer, but because he, too, wanted to know what people would say. He was just as curious as
the rest of us. I don’t believe that there is a right answer. I don’t believe that there’s a correct answer to
be found in the Nicene Creed, or in any confession of faith we could recite together. There is no right
answer to be discovered in the pages of the bible if we just look hard enough; there’s no correct response
waiting for us from any pulpit or any hymn. I’ve come to believe that there’s no right answer to that
question, that there was never meant to be any right answer to the question of who Jesus is, that Jesus
himself was honestly asking when he asked it. I’ve come to believe, like the good progressive Christian
that I am, that there is no right answer, but that our community is enriched when we all give our
answers, diverse and conflicting and creative and contradictory, I’ve come to believe that we are a
1
fellowship of believers whether we all believe the same thing or not. There is no one right answer to that
question, who do you say that I am?

That’s the first of those two contradictory things that I believe: that there’s no right answer. But here’s
the other half, here’s the second thing I’ve been thinking about lately: while there’s no right answer,
there do seem to be a lot of wrong answers. I don’t believe that any one person has the truth about Jesus,
but I do believe that some people definitely do not have the truth. This is hard for me, as a progressive
Christian, because I want to say that everyone is on her own journey of discovery; I want to say that
every Christian is following his own truth to whatever conclusions he finds as God leads us each in our
own consciences. I want to affirm that a diversity of opinion about who Jesus is, is a good thing. But one
particular image from the news a couple of weeks ago caught my eye. It’s a well-known image, perhaps
you saw it on TV or in the paper; you can find it on the front of your bulletin. It’s a picture of a police
officer, an African-American police officer, guarding a barrier. The photo was taken in Charlottesville in
the midst of the rally and the protest there; it was taken, actually, not by a professional photojournalist
but by a woman from Philadelphia who was attending the counter-protest, and she posted it on
Instragram and the photo went viral. Behind the officer, behind the line of police protection being
manned by this African-American officer, is a collection of white supremacist people. One of them is
giving the nazi salute. One of them is dressed in KKK garb. Several of them carry flags of various kinds.
And one man in particular caught my eye, because he’s the closest one to the African-American police
officer, and he’s carrying a sign. He caught my eye, so I zoomed in on the sign he was carrying, and that
was the moment when I realized that while I think there are a lot of right answers to the question of who
Jesus is, there are also some wrong answers.

The sign is partially obscured, but the part you can read says this: “Jews are Satan’s children.” The sign
then goes on to list three bible verses, all from the gospels, all direct quotes from Jesus, all presented as
evidence of the claim that “Jews are Satan’s children,” and the sign goes on below that but it’s blocked
by the man’s leg, and all you can make out is the word “masters.” The man carrying this sign has in his
other hand a Confederate flag, and it’s not hard to guess his meaning. This is a little sermon, on a piece
of poster board. This is a creed, or the beginnings of a creed, scrawled in sharpie in messy handwriting.
This sign and this flag together are an answer to that question, “who do you say that I am,” and the
answer seems to be that Jesus is a white man who saves white people, and that Jews are the children of
Satan.

This image stopped me in my tracks, but it shouldn’t have. It shocked me, but I should have been ready
for it, because this is a very old and a very common answer to that question, “who do you say that I am.”
Christians have been saying this for centuries; this might even be one of the most common Christian
answers to that question, historically speaking. For many people Jesus is a rallying point for hatred. For
many people Jesus is not a Jewish man sent from a Jewish God, but instead he is the leader of a
breakaway family, a new people of God formed after God rejected the Jews, a family of God that
includes people of one race and religion and excludes people of any other. For many people, for far
more people than just the ones that showed up to hold signs like this and Confederate flags, for many
people Jesus doesn’t represent encompassing love, but rather legitimate God-sanctioned hate. Jesus is
the justification for saying that Jews are the children of Satan; Jesus is the proof-text for anti-Semitic
hatred and even violence.

2
I hope it goes without saying that this is bad theology and worse biblical exegesis, and if you want to
talk about how badly these verses have been taken out of context we can talk about that, but that hasn’t
stopped people from using them. That hasn’t stopped this from being an incredibly common Christian
response to the question of who Jesus is. We can call it bad theology and we can call it bad biblical
interpretation all we want, but it’s still what many Christians believe, many more than I would have
thought until I started seeing them on my television and computer screens at marches and rallies like this
one. It’s still who some of us say Jesus is. Those are Christians just like us, and I think we have to stop
and think about that and we have to stop and ask what they see in our Jesus. We have to ask why our
religion gives rise to that kind of hatred.

I have a book in my office that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. I bought this book at a used book
sale a few years ago. It’s an old book—it was published in 1859, and it’s a collection of commentary on
the gospel stories. It’s the kind of thing a Christian would have bought to help them read the bible and
interpret what they saw there—“notes illustrative and explanatory on the holy gospels,” is the title of it.
It was written by a man in New York City, and published by a publishing house in Ohio on behalf of the
Methodist Episcopal Church, and it was bought by someone living in the American South. I know that
because of the inscription in the front of the book. There on the first page of the book, “notes illustrative
and explanatory on the holy gospels,” there is written a note. “Confiscated from the Rebels by the
Yankies,” it says, “in 1863 April the 30th.”

There is a lot contained in that inscription; there is a story there that I would love to hear told but which
is probably lost to time. But what has seized me about this book is that it was a book about the gospels,
taken by the Union from the Confederacy. I can imagine the book being taken from the body of a
soldier, or from a captured encampment, or from an abandoned house. Why they chose this book to take,
I don’t know, and why that action seemed worthy of commemoration in an inscription, I don’t know
either. But it got me thinking about that moment in history and the question of who Christians say Jesus
is. It reminds me of the words of Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address: that both sides of the
Civil War “read the same bible and pray to the same God, and each side invokes that God’s aid against
the other.” This book of notes on the gospels came from a time and a place where people were enslaved
and a great war was being raged to keep them enslaved, and I can only imagine that the “rebel” owner of
this book saw no contradiction between that practice of slavery, that business model of slavery, and who
Jesus is. One could claim to own other humans, or at least be on the same side as people who claimed to
own other humans, and still own and cherish a devotional book about Jesus. Again, this should not
surprise me; intellectually I know it must have been true. But it’s striking to see it in such physical
terms, an inscription on a book of notes on the gospels, confiscated from the Rebels by the Yankies in
1863.

We could multiply examples. Christians have fought wars in the name of Jesus, believing him to ride out
into battle ahead of them. Christians have slaughtered Muslims, slaughtered Native Americans right here
in Colorado at Sand Creek and elsewhere, Christians have slaughtered other Christians believing that
their actions were rooted in who Jesus is. Christians have stockpiled wealth because of who they say
Jesus is; Christians have subjugated women because of who they say Jesus is. Christians have rejected
family members and condemned people to hell because of who they say Jesus is, or maybe I should
switch my pronouns, and say that we have done all of these things because of who we say Jesus is.
Because, and this is the truly horrifying part of this, because in some sense we own all of these actions.
We read the same bible and sing the same songs and worship the same God and confess the same Christ
3
as all manner of slaveholders and warmongers and misogynists and homophobes and money-
worshippers and anti-Semites and conquistadores and colonizers. We share a Christian family with the
people behind some of the worst actions of humanity, past and present. We cannot claim that our hands
are clean, because no matter how much we denounce and decry them, we are still linked together. We
are all answering that same question, who do you say that I am?

It’s tempting, given all that I have just said, to go on to argue that Christianity is bad. It’s tempting to
look at all the things done in Jesus’ name, to look at all the atrocities perpetrated in the name of God, to
hear all the answers to who Jesus is, and conclude that the church is just not worth it. I have friends who
have done just that; every time some charlatan preacher goes on TV to spew hate while clutching a
bible, every time someone starts talking about a “white Christian nation,” every time someone says in
the name of Jesus that Jews are the children of Satan, I have friends who are there ready to point out the
hypocrisy and hatred at the bedrock of the Christian faith. And it’s hard to argue with them. I have to
admit they have a point. It’s tempting to throw in the towel, to call it a day on this church thing, to hand
Jesus over to the racists and the homophobes and the anti-semites and go find something else to do with
our time. I have friends who have done just that, and they seem pretty happy over there, not having to
argue with the worst kinds of Christians about who we say Jesus is.

But I just can’t do that. I just can’t cede Christianity to the bigots and walk away, I just don’t seem to be
able to let it go, even when I want to, and I bet you can’t do it either, or you wouldn’t be here right now.
There are lots of wonderful things to do in Colorado on a sunny summer morning; there’s brunch to be
eaten and hikes to be taken and games to be watched and naps to be had, but you are here, and I bet you
are here because you just can’t let it go either. I bet you are here because you can’t see a man carrying a
confederate flag and a sign full of bible verses and just let that guy get to say who Jesus is. I bet you are
here because you can’t let the answer be that Jesus is the savior of white people only; I bet you are here
because you won’t let Jesus be only for the straight or the wealthy or for men or for whoever stumbles
upon the one correct creed. You are here because you know who Jesus is, even if you haven’t found the
right words for it; you are here because you know that God is not all about that nonsense in the picture
on the front of your bulletin; you are here because when Jesus asks who do you say that I am you say
love. You’re here because all around you, to your right and your left and ahead and behind, all around
you there are people who, like you, know that Jesus cannot be abandoned to small-mindedness and
prejudice and hate. You’re here because church is the place where we can start to say no to all the
violence and bigotry that has bubbled up in our world. Church is where we can start to say who we say
that Jesus is, and from here, we can go and tell the world. Amen.

4
SERMON

“Who Do You Say That I Am”

August 27, 2017

Rev. Dr. Eric C. Smith
It’s always interesting when Jesus has questions. It’s always interesting when Jesus has questions,
because you never know whether it’s a real question, whether he really wants to know the answer to
something, or whether it’s one of those Jesus-type questions where he already knows the answer and
he’s just testing you. That is just the kind of thing Jesus would do, right, he would ask you a question he
already knows the answer to, just to see what you would say, just to make you sweat a little bit waiting
to hear whether you got it right. It’s always interesting when Jesus has questions, and he has two of them
right here in this passage, one right after the other. And it’s actually not totally clear whether it’s two
questions, or just two variations of the same question, or maybe even a question and then a follow-up
question. “Who do people say that the Son of Man is,” is the first question. And “who do you say that I
am” is the second one.

“Who do you say that I am” has turned into a kind of shorthand for Christian faith. All kinds of
Christians from the most conservative to the most liberal and from the most eclectic to the most
traditional, all kinds of Christians use this question as a shorthand for something like “tell me what you
believe.” Who you think Jesus is says a lot about what kind of Christian you are. For some, that question
becomes a test of faith: do you agree and confess that Jesus is Lord, do you know the right answer and
can you recite it? For others, that question becomes an invitation to a journey of discovery, with no
particular “right” answer out there, and a variety of possible responses. There are are about two billion
Christians in the world today, and there are probably about that many answers to that question, who do
you say that I am? Two billion different ways to say who Jesus is, two billion different answers to what
might seem like a pretty simple question.

In some ways, this pretty simple question has been the central question of Christianity, but it has never
really been anything like simple. I think there are probably at least five or six different answers to this
question just in the New Testament, who do you say that I am, and dozens more answers in the early
history of Christianity. We, today, have this sense that we are the ones who started disagreeing about
who Jesus was, we who live in the modern era, but Christianity has always had lots of answers to that
question. There has never been one answer for “who do you say that I am.”

I’ve been thinking about something lately, and I bring this up as a way of confessing to you all how
contradictory and unresolved my own thinking is about it. I’ve been thinking lately about how I think
two things are true for simultaneously, two maybe contradictory things. The first thing that I think is true
is that there is no “right” answer to that question, “who do you say that I am?” There is no correct
response. All two billion of us with all two billion of our different answers are all in one way or another
correct. And when Jesus was asking the question to his disciples ,I don’t think he wasn’t fishing for the
correct response, I don’t think he was asking a question he already knew the answer to, I think he was
asking a serious question. I think that’s why Jesus asked the question in the first place: not because he
knew the answer, but because he, too, wanted to know what people would say. He was just as curious as
the rest of us. I don’t believe that there is a right answer. I don’t believe that there’s a correct answer to
be found in the Nicene Creed, or in any confession of faith we could recite together. There is no right
answer to be discovered in the pages of the bible if we just look hard enough; there’s no correct response
waiting for us from any pulpit or any hymn. I’ve come to believe that there’s no right answer to that
question, that there was never meant to be any right answer to the question of who Jesus is, that Jesus
himself was honestly asking when he asked it. I’ve come to believe, like the good progressive Christian
that I am, that there is no right answer, but that our community is enriched when we all give our
answers, diverse and conflicting and creative and contradictory, I’ve come to believe that we are a
1
fellowship of believers whether we all believe the same thing or not. There is no one right answer to that
question, who do you say that I am?

That’s the first of those two contradictory things that I believe: that there’s no right answer. But here’s
the other half, here’s the second thing I’ve been thinking about lately: while there’s no right answer,
there do seem to be a lot of wrong answers. I don’t believe that any one person has the truth about Jesus,
but I do believe that some people definitely do not have the truth. This is hard for me, as a progressive
Christian, because I want to say that everyone is on her own journey of discovery; I want to say that
every Christian is following his own truth to whatever conclusions he finds as God leads us each in our
own consciences. I want to affirm that a diversity of opinion about who Jesus is, is a good thing. But one
particular image from the news a couple of weeks ago caught my eye. It’s a well-known image, perhaps
you saw it on TV or in the paper; you can find it on the front of your bulletin. It’s a picture of a police
officer, an African-American police officer, guarding a barrier. The photo was taken in Charlottesville in
the midst of the rally and the protest there; it was taken, actually, not by a professional photojournalist
but by a woman from Philadelphia who was attending the counter-protest, and she posted it on
Instragram and the photo went viral. Behind the officer, behind the line of police protection being
manned by this African-American officer, is a collection of white supremacist people. One of them is
giving the nazi salute. One of them is dressed in KKK garb. Several of them carry flags of various kinds.
And one man in particular caught my eye, because he’s the closest one to the African-American police
officer, and he’s carrying a sign. He caught my eye, so I zoomed in on the sign he was carrying, and that
was the moment when I realized that while I think there are a lot of right answers to the question of who
Jesus is, there are also some wrong answers.

The sign is partially obscured, but the part you can read says this: “Jews are Satan’s children.” The sign
then goes on to list three bible verses, all from the gospels, all direct quotes from Jesus, all presented as
evidence of the claim that “Jews are Satan’s children,” and the sign goes on below that but it’s blocked
by the man’s leg, and all you can make out is the word “masters.” The man carrying this sign has in his
other hand a Confederate flag, and it’s not hard to guess his meaning. This is a little sermon, on a piece
of poster board. This is a creed, or the beginnings of a creed, scrawled in sharpie in messy handwriting.
This sign and this flag together are an answer to that question, “who do you say that I am,” and the
answer seems to be that Jesus is a white man who saves white people, and that Jews are the children of
Satan.

This image stopped me in my tracks, but it shouldn’t have. It shocked me, but I should have been ready
for it, because this is a very old and a very common answer to that question, “who do you say that I am.”
Christians have been saying this for centuries; this might even be one of the most common Christian
answers to that question, historically speaking. For many people Jesus is a rallying point for hatred. For
many people Jesus is not a Jewish man sent from a Jewish God, but instead he is the leader of a
breakaway family, a new people of God formed after God rejected the Jews, a family of God that
includes people of one race and religion and excludes people of any other. For many people, for far
more people than just the ones that showed up to hold signs like this and Confederate flags, for many
people Jesus doesn’t represent encompassing love, but rather legitimate God-sanctioned hate. Jesus is
the justification for saying that Jews are the children of Satan; Jesus is the proof-text for anti-Semitic
hatred and even violence.

2
I hope it goes without saying that this is bad theology and worse biblical exegesis, and if you want to
talk about how badly these verses have been taken out of context we can talk about that, but that hasn’t
stopped people from using them. That hasn’t stopped this from being an incredibly common Christian
response to the question of who Jesus is. We can call it bad theology and we can call it bad biblical
interpretation all we want, but it’s still what many Christians believe, many more than I would have
thought until I started seeing them on my television and computer screens at marches and rallies like this
one. It’s still who some of us say Jesus is. Those are Christians just like us, and I think we have to stop
and think about that and we have to stop and ask what they see in our Jesus. We have to ask why our
religion gives rise to that kind of hatred.

I have a book in my office that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. I bought this book at a used book
sale a few years ago. It’s an old book—it was published in 1859, and it’s a collection of commentary on
the gospel stories. It’s the kind of thing a Christian would have bought to help them read the bible and
interpret what they saw there—“notes illustrative and explanatory on the holy gospels,” is the title of it.
It was written by a man in New York City, and published by a publishing house in Ohio on behalf of the
Methodist Episcopal Church, and it was bought by someone living in the American South. I know that
because of the inscription in the front of the book. There on the first page of the book, “notes illustrative
and explanatory on the holy gospels,” there is written a note. “Confiscated from the Rebels by the
Yankies,” it says, “in 1863 April the 30th.”

There is a lot contained in that inscription; there is a story there that I would love to hear told but which
is probably lost to time. But what has seized me about this book is that it was a book about the gospels,
taken by the Union from the Confederacy. I can imagine the book being taken from the body of a
soldier, or from a captured encampment, or from an abandoned house. Why they chose this book to take,
I don’t know, and why that action seemed worthy of commemoration in an inscription, I don’t know
either. But it got me thinking about that moment in history and the question of who Christians say Jesus
is. It reminds me of the words of Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address: that both sides of the
Civil War “read the same bible and pray to the same God, and each side invokes that God’s aid against
the other.” This book of notes on the gospels came from a time and a place where people were enslaved
and a great war was being raged to keep them enslaved, and I can only imagine that the “rebel” owner of
this book saw no contradiction between that practice of slavery, that business model of slavery, and who
Jesus is. One could claim to own other humans, or at least be on the same side as people who claimed to
own other humans, and still own and cherish a devotional book about Jesus. Again, this should not
surprise me; intellectually I know it must have been true. But it’s striking to see it in such physical
terms, an inscription on a book of notes on the gospels, confiscated from the Rebels by the Yankies in
1863.

We could multiply examples. Christians have fought wars in the name of Jesus, believing him to ride out
into battle ahead of them. Christians have slaughtered Muslims, slaughtered Native Americans right here
in Colorado at Sand Creek and elsewhere, Christians have slaughtered other Christians believing that
their actions were rooted in who Jesus is. Christians have stockpiled wealth because of who they say
Jesus is; Christians have subjugated women because of who they say Jesus is. Christians have rejected
family members and condemned people to hell because of who they say Jesus is, or maybe I should
switch my pronouns, and say that we have done all of these things because of who we say Jesus is.
Because, and this is the truly horrifying part of this, because in some sense we own all of these actions.
We read the same bible and sing the same songs and worship the same God and confess the same Christ
3
as all manner of slaveholders and warmongers and misogynists and homophobes and money-
worshippers and anti-Semites and conquistadores and colonizers. We share a Christian family with the
people behind some of the worst actions of humanity, past and present. We cannot claim that our hands
are clean, because no matter how much we denounce and decry them, we are still linked together. We
are all answering that same question, who do you say that I am?

It’s tempting, given all that I have just said, to go on to argue that Christianity is bad. It’s tempting to
look at all the things done in Jesus’ name, to look at all the atrocities perpetrated in the name of God, to
hear all the answers to who Jesus is, and conclude that the church is just not worth it. I have friends who
have done just that; every time some charlatan preacher goes on TV to spew hate while clutching a
bible, every time someone starts talking about a “white Christian nation,” every time someone says in
the name of Jesus that Jews are the children of Satan, I have friends who are there ready to point out the
hypocrisy and hatred at the bedrock of the Christian faith. And it’s hard to argue with them. I have to
admit they have a point. It’s tempting to throw in the towel, to call it a day on this church thing, to hand
Jesus over to the racists and the homophobes and the anti-semites and go find something else to do with
our time. I have friends who have done just that, and they seem pretty happy over there, not having to
argue with the worst kinds of Christians about who we say Jesus is.

But I just can’t do that. I just can’t cede Christianity to the bigots and walk away, I just don’t seem to be
able to let it go, even when I want to, and I bet you can’t do it either, or you wouldn’t be here right now.
There are lots of wonderful things to do in Colorado on a sunny summer morning; there’s brunch to be
eaten and hikes to be taken and games to be watched and naps to be had, but you are here, and I bet you
are here because you just can’t let it go either. I bet you are here because you can’t see a man carrying a
confederate flag and a sign full of bible verses and just let that guy get to say who Jesus is. I bet you are
here because you can’t let the answer be that Jesus is the savior of white people only; I bet you are here
because you won’t let Jesus be only for the straight or the wealthy or for men or for whoever stumbles
upon the one correct creed. You are here because you know who Jesus is, even if you haven’t found the
right words for it; you are here because you know that God is not all about that nonsense in the picture
on the front of your bulletin; you are here because when Jesus asks who do you say that I am you say
love. You’re here because all around you, to your right and your left and ahead and behind, all around
you there are people who, like you, know that Jesus cannot be abandoned to small-mindedness and
prejudice and hate. You’re here because church is the place where we can start to say no to all the
violence and bigotry that has bubbled up in our world. Church is where we can start to say who we say
that Jesus is, and from here, we can go and tell the world. Amen.

4