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September 13, 2009

“Over, From, and For What?” Mark 8:27-38 Rev. Phil Blackwell

      Someone walked into the Temple building with me the other day, looked at the signboard, and said, “What kind of title is that?” “Over, From, and For What?”  I replied, “That’s a Tuesday title.” We begin our work on the bulletin on Tuesdays, and we try to get the title up on the board by noon that day. So, the title always comes first, before the sermon is written. Any time that the title ends up having any relationship to the finished sermon is purely an act of God’s grace.

      Now, if you read into this title the notions of “Lord” and “Savior,” you come up with, “Lord it over what, saved from what, and saved for what?” But to call the sermon simply, “Lord and Savior” seemed to me on Tuesday pretty uninspiring. No one would have walked past the board and wondered, “What’s this sermon going to be about?” So, here we have it: over, from, and for what?

      This is in reference to the question Jesus asks the disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” He first asks, “Who do others say that I am?” And he gets a variety of answers – John the Baptist, Elijah, one of the prophets. But then, “Who do you say that I am?” And we get Peter’s confession of faith, “You are the Messiah,” that is, the “anointed one,” in Greek, “Christ.” 

      Now, I have said several times in sermons that when we confess Jesus the Christ to be our Lord and Savior it is the beginning of a discussion, not the end of it. Behind that lies my impatience with fellow Christians who seem to lack any rigor of faith and assume that once you have said “Lord and Savior” you have said it all. As soon as you confess that, you are “in;” to discuss it further makes you suspect. 

      Of course, we have it right there at the start when the angel of the Lord announces to the shepherds on a Bethlehem hillside, “To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” And yet in the Bible “Lord” is used not only for Jesus but also for God, for master over slave, for the owner of property, and for anyone who has the authority to make a decision. In the Gospel of Mark, the gospel that will carry us all the way to the end of the Christian Year, Jesus is referred to as “Lord” only twice. By the time we get to the letters of Paul the title is used over 200 times. That is to say, it is a title that grew in importance during the formative years of the Church. 

      And “Savior,” also had a rich history before being applied to Jesus. God was the savior of Israel, “the rock of our salvation.” Both David and Samson are saviors versus the Philistines, and even Nero, Christian-hating Nero, is called “the Savior forever,” (obviously, not in the Bible, but in the Roman Empire).

      This simply is to say that “Lord” and “Savior” do not automatically convey meaning about Jesus. We must ask, Jesus the Christ, the Messiah, as Lord – lord over what? As Savior – savior from what, savior for what?

       “Lord” is a negative term in our country. Many of our forebears left other countries in order to get away from the lords of the land, to escape servanthood, to find freedom. So, we tend not to like lords here. I asked Lord Leslie Griffiths, the superintending minister of Wesley’s Chapel, London, if he ever got used to being called “Lord.”  “’ello, me Lord,” ‘a spot of tea, me Lord?” After all, he grew up in poverty in Wales. His lordship is conferred as a member of the British House of Lords; it is not something that he inherited. And now, he is serving Jesus the Lord. He simply smiled, and I realized that he had made peace with it. He had no confusion who was the real lord, but his title has some pretty nice perks to it.

      When Lady Margaret and he stayed with us in the parsonage a few years ago, our living quarters had been undergoing considerable upgrading of all of the plumbing. What was to be a 12-week project now was in its sixteenth month. I said to the foreman, knowing that he was Roman Catholic and maybe a bit of top-down authority might get this moving faster, “Look, the Lord is coming in four weeks. If his bathroom is not done, I will be very upset.” To which the foreman look at me with a look that said, “What kind of Lord do you have that needs a bathroom?” 

      Well, people were killed over the answer to the question, “What do you mean by ‘Jesus is Lord?’” We read in Romans (10:9) that the earliest confession of the Christian faith was, “Jesus is Lord.” But, so was the Roman emperor.  “Caesar is Lord” is all that one had to say as a citizen of the empire, and all would be fine. No hassle, no problem.

      But, no one can serve two lords. Yes, we can coexist in two worlds . . .render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s . . .but when it comes down to an ultimate pledge of allegiance there can be only one lord in our lives. Is it Caesar? Is it Jesus? Those who chose Jesus died by cross, fire, sword, and spear.

      In the early decades of the Church the representatives of the government confronted Polycarp of Smyrna, “What harm is there in saying ‘Caesar is Lord,’ and offering incense and saving your life?” And he replied, according to the story of his martyrdom, “For eighty-six years I have been the servant (of Jesus Christ), and he never did me any injury. How then can I blaspheme my King who saved me?”

      To say that “Jesus is Lord” is to make the ultimate claim that he is the lord over everything else in our lives . . . over other authorities, over our work, over our relationships, over our thoughts and deepest hopes. This does not mean that we ignore rules and regulations, that we slough off at work, that we neglect our relationships, or that we stop thinking and stop dreaming. Rather, it means that we subject all of our life to Jesus to be judged. Do we keep our political and civic allegiances in bounds? Is our work directed toward doing good? Are our relationships life-giving to others? Are our thoughts noble and our dreams lofty? This is the lord who said, “Above all else love God and love your neighbor.” Does that command rule in our lives?

      There are places in the world right now where Christians are dying because they confess “Jesus is Lord.” Our prayers are with people of faith who are being persecuted for what they believe. But, perhaps the even greater danger for many of us is that of cooptation, that our allegiances have been coopted by lesser authorities.

      It all changed with Constantine. When he absorbed Christianity as the official religion of his realm, the danger went from being a Christian confessing Jesus as Lord to being a non-confessor. The story is epic: on the Eve of the Battle of Milvian Bridge, October 27, 312, Constantine while praying sees a cross of light above the sun bearing a Greek inscription translated as “conquer by this.” In a dream that night Christ appears to him and instructs him to inscribe all of the shields with the cross to safeguard his army against the enemy. And so, the Church and the State became wedded. The greater danger for us as Christians in our country in our day, I suspect, is not persecution but cooptation. 

      What do we mean when we say “Jesus is Lord?” That needs always to be a rich discussion among us. Jesus as Savior . . . no less complicated, but “from what” is obvious. We say it every time we have Holy Communion. “Holy are you, and blessed is your Son Jesus Christ. By the baptism of his suffering, death, and resurrection you gave birth to your church, delivered us from slavery to sin and death, and made with us a new covenant by water and the Spirit.” “Delivered us from slavery to sin and death,” that is the death of the human spirit which results when we do and say hurtful things, or when we refrain from doing and saying the right things. 

      So, yes, Jesus the Christ saves us from our sins. Would it not be unbearable if life were a matter of accumulating one burden after another without any place to lay them aside? We would be crushed by the weight. The altar is the place to lay those gripes and grudges, those regrets and sorrows, those hatreds and hostilities aside, simply to give them to God as our offering. That is what Jesus as Savior allows, more than allows, insists.

      Jesus saves us from our sins not in the sense that we will never sin again. We all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, the scripture observes, and we all will sin again. Jesus does not take away our human proclivity to sin, but in him the crushing weight is lifted so that we can confess, offer restitution, and get on with our lives.

      John Wesley called this “justification.” You know how we justify a margin or justify a brick wall with a plumb line, bring it into line; well, we are brought back into line with God’s good intentions by the love of Jesus that calls us back into a relationship with God. 

      Our grandson broke a little ceramic knick-knack we had sitting out on a living room table.  It was there for the children to enjoy, but he broke it. We did not know it until we discovered it was missing. Well, he had been so horrified with breaking it that he took all the pieces and hid them under a woven bag in a closet. He could not bring himself to confess to what he had done. But when it was out in the open, and we retrieved the pieces and glued it back together, all was restored. I hope that the weight has been lifted off his conscience.

      We know that feeling, hiding because of what we have done. Jesus calls us from the crushing weight of our sins, which is death to us, to a new life. But that is not enough.  We are saved from something so that we might be saved for something. We are saved so that we might live a life, day by day, that matters. This is what Wesley called “sanctification.”

      That is kind of a strenuous term.  “Sanctified,” “holy” – that sounds a bit too religious for most of us. We do not want to stick out as being “holier than thou;” we just want to live good, honest lives. Well, some of you may remember from a sermon a few Sundays ago that Wesley reduced this rarified term to a three simple rules: do no harm, do good, and stay close to God. That is what we are saved for.

      When you look at the contents of the United Methodist hymnal you will see an anthropology of grace inherent in the hymns of Charles Wesley, as well as explicit in the preaching of John Wesley. We start with prevenient grace, God’s grace that comes before we even know that it is at work in our lives. We only recognize it when we look back at our lives. That leads to repentance, a self-awareness that our lives fall short of God’s best hope for us.

      God’s grace, then, saves us from the sins of our past. Remember, justifying grace.  This leads to a newness of life, being “born again” some might say, which then results in a life well-lived.  Sanctifying grace.

      Jesus the Christ saves us from sin for abundant living. Being saved from sin is not enough. It is like the front porch to the house, Wesley said.  It is the entrance way to the real goal, living within the household of God. Personally stay close to God through prayer, worship, scripture reading, faithful conversation, and a disciplined life. Publicly serve God by doing what is right, telling the truth, working for justice, offering mercy, loving others, and testifying to the beauty of creation. When we live public lives of this sort then Jesus becomes not only our savior, but also the savior of the world.

      So, “who do you say that I am?” Jesus the Christ is Lord and Savior, lording it over all other authorities in our lives, saving us from sin, and saving us for faithful living.  Over, from, and for. Who do you say that he is? Let us keep the conversation going. Amen.

Philip L. Blackwell
The Chicago Temple
September 13, 2009