Who Do You Say That I Am?
A Sermon by Lee McKenna duCharme
Third Sunday of Easter
Scripture Lessons Exodus 1.8–22; Matthew 16.13–20; Romans 12: 1,2, 9, 10, 14-17, 20, 21
The drama
of the great revolt of the people of
Removed from their homes along the Egyptian border, the Hebrew people are put to work in the new Pharaohs’ monumental, military and storage building projects. Typical of increasingly specialised and stratified societies of the ancient Near East, rulers make use of massive numbers of forced labour known as the corvée.
The brutal work and the long days of the corvée yield the desired facilities and fortifications desired by their Egyptian masters; but it does not break the spirit nor the reproductive capacity of the Hebrew people. They keep having babies. Their numbers continue to increase. New measures of checking their strength are needed.
A new decree is issued. Midwives to the Hebrew women are to strangle or drown a newborn male; females, being of less value, are permitted to live. But these uppity women quietly refuse to comply with the orders of the powerful. Noticing that the Hebrew population continues to grow, both male and female, the pharaoh summons the midwives for a dressing-down suitable for such insubordination.
Not only refusing to comply, the midwives resort to dissembling, fiddling a bit with the truth. Well, these Hebrew women, you know, they’re not like your prissy Egyptian women who need so much help to get the job done. These Hebrew women are up and about and back to chores by the time we get there – which, of course, makes it much more difficult to grab their new born sons away from them for the purposes of murder. They’re vigorous, after all. Pharaoh scatters them from his presence in disgust and anger.
A third strategy is now proposed: since the Hebrews won’t dispose of their own, it is now up to the Egyptians to keep an eye on the pregnant ones and report in when there’s a sudden loss of weight. Today the king would have likely set up a pregnant-neighbour watch or a snitch line or TIPS programme. The second chapter of Exodus goes on to tell how one of those Hebrew male babies slips through the neighbourhood peepers and, ironically, into the palace of the pharaoh for raising up.
Who do you say that I am? Jesus asks. The disciples give it a think. Well, some say John the Baptist come back to life. Others say Elijah or Jeremiah or some other prophet.
OK, says Jesus. That’s other people. Who do you say that I am?
Depending on how one sifts and sorts through the various narratives of Jesus’ life, it would seem that we are hearing here from a group of disciples who have spent perhaps as many as two years in the company of Jesus. The gospels are filled with the sometimes comic stumblings and misunderstandings of this inner circle who rarely seem to get it, to figure out what this Jesus movement is all about. Here in the 16th chapter of Matthew, there seems to be a breakthrough, at least for Peter. You are the Christ, he says, the son of the living God.
But, like many of the shards of light that seem to briefly illuminate their understanding, darkness and confusion follow quickly. Soon Jesus will rebuke Peter for his failure to understand that suffering and death are the logical outcome of everything he has been doing and saying; he will rebuke Peter for wanting to erect flashing signs and a souvenir stand on the mount of transfiguration. Faithless and perverse he will soon call them. The question still hangs for the asking – and the answering: Who do you say that I am?
Twelve centuries before Jesus asked the question, the midwives were providing their own answers. Who do you say that I am? In this story in which we find the interpretive plumbline against which to measure all other passages that seem to prescribe acquiescence to and compliance with government, no matter what, they give their answer: Because we fear God above all, we will not do as the king of Egypt commands us; we will let the male children live. In defiance of the king. In defiance of evil. In service to God. The God we understand our God to be. The God we know. In their story we have the earliest textual example of civil disobedience.
I can remember many times arriving at military or paramilitary checkpoints in places like Colombia and El Salvador and Mexico and telling tales; dissembling about who I was, where I was going, who was with me, what I thought about the violence or the war or the government. This is not a about lying as a good thing. Like the story of the midwives, this is about defiance of evil, a refusal to comply with evil – and the service of God. It is about answering that question that never goes away: Who do you say that I am?
Here in this church, in this city and this country, what does that mean? What answers do we have? As Jesus’ disciples were discovering in their journey with him, the central quality of the reign of God the Incarnation heralded was and is justice, right relationships. In their initial response to Jesus’ question – Who do people out there say that I am? – it is clear that there is a general recognition of a prophetic quality to Jesus’ ministry. Just as the ancient prophets preached strong words against institutions – religious, political and economic – that had lost their way, forgotten their primordial mandate to serve the spiritual, political and economic needs of people to become self-serving, self-enriching and self-empowering at the expense of the many – so, too, Jesus brought parables of judgement to the powerful, parables of exposure to systems of exploitation and oppression.
Who do you say that I am? What parables of God’s reign are we creating and preaching with our lives in answer to that question? What litanies of resistance mark our work and our worship, our eucharist and our economics, our prayer and our politics?
There’s a passage in Paul’s letter to the church at Rome, twelfth chapter—Therefore, brothers and sisters, present yourselves a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable unto God . . . Therefore, because of everything that has gone before, the eleven previous chapter of this long letter and the whole Jesus story itself, therefore, keeping all of that in mind – what is required of you is nothing less than your whole selves. Present your bodies, your whole selves, a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. Nothing less will do. This is your spiritual worship. Even as you live and move in the world, do not be conformed to the world—the word ‘conformed’ in the Greek meaning do not be squeezed into the world’s mould—wanting what the world wants, doing what the world does – but be transformed, and thus able to discern the will of God. Nothing less will do; nothing less is acceptable.
Recently, in a liturgy in a setting somewhat less formal than a church sanctuary, I alluded to this verse and then climbed up on to a table to make the point. Present yourselves a living sacrifice, all of you. All of me. It’s not a matter of: OK, you have can have my Sunday mornings and my quiet time and my choir practice; but you can’t have my investment portfolio or my leisure time or my vote or my decisions about what I’m going to wear or drive or eat or play at. You can have my ‘spiritual’ life and my ‘moral’ life (whatever that means), but you can’t have my political, social or economic life.
Who do you say that I am? Messiah Christ of bits and pieces? Or Messiah Christ of all? A Jesus veneer on what I was going to do anyways? Or a whole new way of looking at the world that changes everything?
One of my favourite theologians of the Old Testament writes: Being a Christian is not about being nice or doing nice things. There are lots of people out there already doing lots of nice things. No, being a Christian is about seeing the world with new eyes. And, once having seen that world with the eyes of the One who created it, who loves it and weeps over it, we cannot but take up the task of turning our own lives into models of correspondence, lament-shaped, hope-filled parables of God’s reign. Already and not yet.
Who do you say that I am? Our lives give answers at every turn of our day.
• I say that you are Creator of all creation: therefore I will not despoil or violate your creation, its lakes, its rivers, its air, its creatures and I will refuse politics that commodify and products that destroy our earthen home.
• I say that you are Prince of Peace and commander of enemy-love: therefore I will not comply with policies and practices of killing and retaliation.
• I say that you are grace-giver, of endless mercy: therefore I will forgive; I will refuse evil means even as I resist evil ways.
• I say that you are the God of the Sabbath and of the Jubilee: therefore I will ask of the earth an economy of just enough.
• I say that you are inclusive embracer of all your children: therefore I will transgress lines of separation that keep U.S. American from Cuban, straight from gay, the well-sheltered from the homeless—that crown the one with laurels of righteousness, patriotism and prosperity and demeans the other with economic embargo, pariah thorns and invisibility.
Francis Aquinas is attributed with a gentle quote: Preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words.
Who do you say that I am? The question is not reserved for some gateway experience in the future: it is posed and answered every day of our lives. You see those Christians? the neighbours once said of the members of the new Jesus movement. You see those Christians? You can tell who they are. They love. You can tell them by their love. Oh yeah . . . and they turn the world upside down.
Benediction
Beloved people of the Beloved community:
May the truth of God explain your lives;
May the grace of God fulfil your lives;
may the forgiveness of God renew your lives;
may the love of God bless your lives.
And you go with the blessing of God who can do all things,
of Jesus Christ who reconciles us and makes us whole,
and of the Holy Spirit, restless movement of hope among us.
One God. Amen
Choral Amen