Just do it
Commentary
In the 1980s, Nike challenged athletes (and would-be athletes) with this straightforward motto: Just do it. The phrase -- and the surrounding advertising campaign -- caught fire with the public. Nike put distance between itself and its competitors, and a new generation of can-do attitudes was born.
The appeal of Nike's slogan and accompanying campaign should be encouraging to us as pastors and preachers. People were clearly attracted to the no-nonsense, no-excuses, hard-nosed, and challenging quality of the message. And, although the televised images that illustrated the slogan suggested pain rather than comfort, strenuous effort rather than relaxation, sacrifice rather than self-indulgence, the viewing public seemed to welcome the challenge and the sense of empowerment.
Mind you, Nike's message and its effectiveness does not lead me to the conclusion that we should imitate and borrow from them. Rather, it leads me back to our most basic heritage as Christians: discipleship.
Serving God and following Christ, as revealed in the Old and New Testaments, is a no-nonsense, no-excuses business. We may think that people prefer to hear that "softly and tenderly Jesus is calling." We may be surprised to discover that they're glad to hear Jesus say, "Just do it."
Exodus 3:1-15
By the Sea of Galilee, we see Jesus call out to Peter and Andrew, "Follow me," and "immediately they left their nets and followed him" (Matthew 4:20). It reads as a three-verse transaction.
Then, by contrast, there is the case of Moses. God calls him, and one-and-a-half chapters later, Moses still hasn't signed on the dotted line. Then, we read still another chapter and more after that, and a Bible with subtitles will list yet another passage under the heading, "God calls Moses."
Moses was not a quick sale. He required convincing. He raised a number of concerns, and the Lord addressed each one, in turn.
That the Lord was so patient in trying to include Moses in this mission is all the more remarkable when we consider the events that followed. The Israelites are, indeed, freed from their bondage in Egypt, but that is due to the slow, eventual response of the Pharaoh and his officials to the plagues sent by God. There were ten plagues in all, several of which were inimitable and inexplicable. And so, when the deliverance is completed on the far side of the Red Sea, there is little doubt that the whole thing was God's doing. Even Pharaoh (Exodus 9:27) and his officials (Exodus 8:18-19) grudgingly come to that conclusion at points along the way.
Now if the whole miraculous liberation is God's doing, one wonders why Moses was essential to the process. The Lord even said to Moses that he himself had "come down to deliver [the Israelites] from the Egyptians" (3:8). So if the Lord had come to do it, why did he need Moses' help? Do we doubt that God could have done the whole thing by himself? He created the universe and everything in it ex nihilo by speaking it all into being. Did he really need an old stuttering shepherd to accomplish this task?
This is, cover-to-cover, a strange and marvelous theme in scripture: God's preference for including human beings in his work. Surely he could do it all -- and do it all better -- without our "help." In this particular instance, the human partner was reluctant to help, but God insisted. He insists on our help.
Moses' first objection -- "But who am I...?" -- is a classic, human response. How often have we declined God's call, in ways little or large, because we think we are unqualified. It has the apparent virtue of humility, but upon further review we discover that the underlying reality is actually a vice: self-centeredness. God was calling Moses to assist him in freeing his people. God, and God's people, were the primary subjects, but Moses' insecurity promoted Moses to a place of primacy.
It might seem like pride to suggest that there is something about me worthy of doing God's work. On the other hand, it may be equally self-centered to suggest that there is something about me that permits me to decline God's call.
The major, recurring theme in this passage is the identity of God. It is here that God reveals his name to Moses -- "I AM WHO I AM" and "I AM." But that is not how God introduces himself to Moses. Rather, at the front end of the encounter, the Lord introduces himself as "the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob."
Here is a great truth about our God: before we know him by his name, we know him by someone else's name. Before we know him personally, we know him through some person.
For me, before I knew the Lord for myself, I knew him as the God of my mom and dad; the God of Dan, my youth leader; and the God of Steve, my Sunday school teacher. Before this God belongs to us, he belongs to someone we know. And, he comes introducing himself by the people we have in common. This is another example of God's preference for using people to do his work.
Romans 12:9-21
When teaching classes on the parables of Jesus, I have suggested a distinction between "descriptive" and "instructive" parables. Descriptive parables are those parables designed simply to portray how things are -- or, more specifically, how the kingdom is. So, for example, Jesus' parable of the mustard seed (Matthew 13:31-32) describes what the kingdom is like, but we do not walk away with a sense of "to do." Instructive parables, meanwhile, do send us away with an assignment -- like the "go and do likewise" that brings the parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) to an explicitly instructive conclusion.
Some folks, I have discovered, have an appetite for teaching and preaching that is descriptive. They enjoy the abstract, and perhaps run the risk of being purely theoretical. They want to know how it is. Others, however, are more pragmatic, and so they prefer preaching and teaching that is instructive. They are eager for practical application. They want to know what to do.
For those who prefer the instructive, those who want to know what to do, this week's epistle selection will make them feel like a child in a candy store.
By my count, this one passage features 26 verbs that have the form or effect of an imperative. Nine of them are constructed as imperatives in the original Greek, and seventeen others are second-person, plural participles in the Greek, having the impact of imperatives.
There's no fair and adequate way to deal with 26 different instructions on a single Sunday morning, so my instinct is to categorize the instructions into broad themes.
The first theme I see is that of our relationship and response to evil. Ever since our first parents had "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil" growing in their neighborhood, this has been an issue and point of instruction for God's people (see, for example, Genesis 2:17).
References to evil bookend this passage. Paul instructs the Christians in Rome to "hate what is evil" at the beginning, and then "not (to) be overcome by evil" but to "overcome evil with good" at the end. Paul's word to the Romans at this point, incidentally, would have been apt counsel to Adam and Eve as they stood pondering the fruit of that infamous tree.
In our day, the greatest challenge to hating what is evil may be the prior problem of identifying what is evil. Neither the church nor the world, it seems, has unanimity on the diagnosis of evil, so we cannot agree on what to hate, what to avoid, what to overcome. This problem is not altogether new, of course. Eve manifestly did not recognize the evil before her, either (see Genesis 3:6).
Just as the passage begins with a command to hate evil, it concludes with another extreme term and belligerent image for our relationship to evil: overcome. The Greek verb behind our English "overcome" is nikao. The name of the goddess of victory in Greek mythology, Nike, is a cognate of this verb. It is a word used to describe conquest, and therefore it assumes conflict. It is a recurring word and theme in the brief letters at the beginning of the book of Revelation (2:7, 11, 26; 3:5, 12, 21).
Paul assumes a conflict between Christians and evil, and he doesn't permit pacifism or neglect in this matter, for the choice seems to be to "overcome" or to "be overcome."
The fallen human tendency, of course, is to go to war against people. Conflict is almost always personalized for us. We need to know whom to blame, who's at fault, at whom to be angry, who's the villain. In Paul's call to arms here, a certain kind of combative personality will likely think in terms of the people -- or groups of people -- who need to be opposed and overcome. When Paul writes to the Ephesians about our battle as Christian soldiers, however, he notes that "our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places" (6:12).
In between the harsh directives concerning our response to evil, we read Paul's gentle instructions concerning our response to people. That, then, becomes the second great theme of this litany of imperatives: our relationship and response to other people.
The counsel here is so peaceful compared to the aggressive and antagonistic tone discovered in the earlier theme. Interestingly, there is no apparent distinction made between believers and non-believers, between those in the church and those in the world. While the "good versus evil" theme is highly dualistic, that paradigm does not translate into an "us versus them" mentality in our treatment of people.
Love and affection; honor and hospitality; generosity and sympathy; harmony and peace: these are the pretty colors that Paul uses to paint the picture of how we should relate and respond to others. Even those who persecute should be blessed, and those who do evil to us should not be repaid in kind.
Paul's instructions here, of course, are very reminiscent of Jesus' teachings in the Sermon on the Mount. It is all part of the larger "kingdom mentality," which pulses through the New Testament, and which should inform our churches and our living today.
Matthew 16:21-28
Our Gospel Reading begins with the phrase, "From that time on." In order to understand what begins to happen from that time on, it is essential for our congregations to be clear about just what that time was.
In the immediately preceding episode, Jesus had his pivotal conversation with the disciples about who he was. He asked first who people were saying that he was, which seems to have been a question the disciples felt qualified to answer. They were plainly familiar with the scuttlebutt and speculation, and they repeated it eagerly. When Jesus asked next, however, who they -- the disciples -- said that he was, only one man stepped forward with an answer.
Peter spoke up. That was, of course, typical -- it seems that Peter was always speaking up and saying something. I knew a man who used to joke about his wife, "She's seldom right, but never in doubt." Peter has something of that same charm. He was always giving voice to what he thought and felt, even though sometimes -- as in our Gospel passage this week -- he had to be corrected.
In the preceding episode, however, Peter was absolutely correct. When Jesus asked the disciples who they said he was, Peter answered, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God" (Matthew 16:16). That possibility had surely crossed the minds of the other disciples. It had probably been the topic of some whispered conversations among them. But Peter was the first one to make it a proclamation rather than a speculation, a statement of faith rather than a matter of curiosity. And Jesus assured him that he was right: "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven" (Matthew 16:17).
Now it's out there: who and what Jesus is. It's not public knowledge yet, of course, but it has become common knowledge among the disciples. It is "from that time on" that Jesus began to speak with them candidly about what was ahead for him.
What was ahead was Jerusalem; the climax of the growing opposition to him among the Jewish leaders; his suffering and death. What was ahead was the cross. Jesus first spoke to the disciples about what was ahead just after they had become clear about his identity.
Those two pieces are inseparable, and Jesus knew it. The disciples could not understand his suffering and death apart from the fact that he was the Messiah, and they could not understand his messiahship apart from his suffering and death.
They tried to, however. Peter initially tried to think of Jesus' role as the Messiah apart from the suffering and the cross. He saw them as incompatible with one another, and so he objected, "God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you." But Jesus was quick and no-nonsense in correcting that misunderstanding.
Jesus' rebuke of Peter has a fascinatingly cosmic quality to it. He does not merely say, "You don't understand, Peter; let me explain it to you." Rather, Jesus makes two grand statements, and in the process he evokes God, Satan, and humankind -- the three characters in the biblical drama.
The paradigm suggested by Jesus' statement is crucial and consequential for us as his contemporary followers. He says, "Get behind me, Satan! ... you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things." The statement presents with the possibility that something about us -- what we think, our understanding, our motivations, our goals, and more -- can spring from and resemble any one of three sources: satanic, human, or divine.
We may gain insight into the satanic approach from the earlier episode in Matthew's Gospel where Satan tempts Jesus (4:1-11). One of the three temptations is this offer: "All (the kingdoms of the world) I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me" (4:9). That the kingdoms of the world should become Christ's is plainly God's plan (Revelation 11:15), but not by this means. Perhaps that is the satanic element in Peter's paradigm: that Christ should be the Messiah without the cross. To ostensibly seek God's will while trying to bypass God's way is a diabolical approach. It is of Satan.
The human way of doing things, meanwhile, is always a calculation that begins and ends with self-interest. If this or that option proves too costly to me, then I reckon that I should steer clear of it. And Peter's response to the prospect of Jesus' unjust suffering reflects such a human calculation.
Then there is Jesus' way of doing things -- the characteristics of the divine. Submissive, obedient, selfless, sacrificial, focused on God's will and committed to God's way. These are the proofs of "setting your mind ... on divine things."
Finally, having affirmed that he is the Messiah, and having explained what it will mean for him to be the Messiah, Jesus moves at the end of the passage to the natural next step: what it will mean for them to follow this Messiah. Their discipleship must be like his messiahship: selfless, obedient, and sacrificial, but all the while assured of the victory and reward in the end.
Application
The appeal of the Nike ad campaign for athletes and would-be athletes is its no-nonsense message. Meanwhile, disciples and would-be disciples should find that same no-nonsense message in this week's lections, but with ten times the stakes.
If the Nike campaign were my starting point for this Sunday's sermon, I would use the company name as a natural tie-in to the Romans passage, since Nike comes from the Greek word that Paul uses to talk about overcoming or being overcome by evil. Paul's exhortation is reminiscent of the hard-nosed kill-or-be-killed mentality of warfare. Overcome or be overcome. It's simple and straightforward. It's cut and dried. Just do it.
The challenge to follow and obey is illustrated twice in the episode from Exodus. In the character of Moses, we see a person trying to make excuses, trying to back out, and we see a God who will have none of it. Imagine with your congregation what would have been different if God had not kept challenging and pushing Moses.
Then, there is the picture of discipleship that Jesus paints. It is not a picture of comfort and self-indulgence. Rather, it is a picture of commitment, strenuous effort, and sacrifice. Thus, we are challenged, along with the people in our pews, to "Just do it."
An Alternative Application
Matthew 16:21-28, "Long-Term Investments." I'm not sure if my four-year-old daughter understands what I'm doing when she goes to the bank with me. Does she understand the difference between a bank and a store? In both instances, she sees me giving my money to a person behind a counter. The only apparent difference is that, at the store, I get something for my money. At the bank, I walk away, apparently empty-handed.
What my little girl does not understand yet, of course, is that when I give my money to the cashier at the store, my money is gone -- it's not mine anymore. When I give my money to the teller at the bank, however, my money is still mine, and it grows!
The kingdom and discipleship teachings of Jesus, particularly in the Gospel of Matthew, encourage us to have a big-picture understanding of how we spend or invest our lives. To the extent that we spend on ourselves and invest in this world, we'll lose what we have, though we feel at the time that we're getting something for our investment. But, when we spend our lives on Christ and invest in his kingdom, it seems in the present to be all loss, but we are guaranteed a rich return in the end.
Preaching The Psalm
Psalm 105:1-6, 23-26, 45c
This is a psalm of salvation-history. It relates, in narrative fashion, the principal high points of the Lord's covenant relationship with Israel. We have seen a slightly different cut of this psalm on August 7 (Proper 14). The selection appointed for that day made special reference to the perseverance of Joseph, through his descent into slavery and his eventual rise to power in Egypt. Now, the inclusion of verses 23-26 focuses our attention on God's selection of Moses to lead the now-enslaved Israelites to freedom.
Verse 25 presents certain theological difficulties. The Lord turns the hearts of the Egyptians to hate the Israelite slaves. God is portrayed, here, as the master puppeteer of human history. It is hard to envision a place for human freewill, when God is on the scene in such a way, managing human emotions so thoroughly.
Yet for Israel, envisioning such an all-powerful, interventionist God is not the cause of despair; rather it is a tremendous source of hope. The Psalms -- which were edited into their final edition around the time of the Babylonian exile -- are calculated to speak to a people who are feeling both powerless and hopeless. If the Lord is managing even their sufferings for the sake of Israel's salvation, then the violence and struggle that have hitherto seemed terrifyingly random are now laden with meaning.
Pastorally speaking, does this line of reasoning work in the modern era? Does it comfort our parishioners suffering with chronic illness, unemployment, or family turmoil to believe that God is in control even of these painful events? It's a difficult line of reasoning to present.
One who tries to do precisely that is Roman Catholic spiritual writer Ron Rolheiser. In a recent Internet column, he shares the story of a woman who found herself sitting in the back of a church one day, with a cast on her lower leg. She had been visiting her sister, who lived near a major ski resort. On Sunday, her sister invited her to go to church with her. The woman went skiing instead.
She broke her leg on the slopes. On the following Sunday, when her sister asked her once again to go to church with her, she agreed. She had nowhere else to go, really.
As it so happened, the designated readings for the day were about Jesus, the Good Shepherd. It also happened that the regular priest was away, and a visiting priest from Israel delivered the homily. The priest could not possibly have seen this woman, nor could he have known she was sitting there in the back pew with a cast on her leg. He began his homily by telling of an ancient practice among shepherds in Israel, one still in use today -- a practice that sheds light on the meaning of the phrase, "Good Shepherd." Sometimes, early in the life of a lamb, a shepherd may sense that this one particular animal is going to be a congenital stray -- that it will always be drifting away from the flock, where it could be injured or die. In such cases, the shepherd deliberately breaks the leg of the lamb, so he has to carry it until its leg is healed. By that time, the lamb has become so attached to the shepherd that it never strays again.
"I may be dense," said the woman -- after hearing this sermon -- "but, given my broken leg and all these coincidences, hearing those words woke something up inside me. I have prayed and gone to church regularly ever since!"
"In the conspiracy of accidents that make up the ordinary events of our everyday lives," writes Rolheiser, "the finger of God is writing and writing large. We are children of Israel, children of Jesus, and children of our mothers and fathers in the faith. We need therefore, like them, to look at each and every event in our lives and ask ourselves the question: 'What is God saying to us in this?' The language of God is the experience that God writes inside our lives."
The appeal of Nike's slogan and accompanying campaign should be encouraging to us as pastors and preachers. People were clearly attracted to the no-nonsense, no-excuses, hard-nosed, and challenging quality of the message. And, although the televised images that illustrated the slogan suggested pain rather than comfort, strenuous effort rather than relaxation, sacrifice rather than self-indulgence, the viewing public seemed to welcome the challenge and the sense of empowerment.
Mind you, Nike's message and its effectiveness does not lead me to the conclusion that we should imitate and borrow from them. Rather, it leads me back to our most basic heritage as Christians: discipleship.
Serving God and following Christ, as revealed in the Old and New Testaments, is a no-nonsense, no-excuses business. We may think that people prefer to hear that "softly and tenderly Jesus is calling." We may be surprised to discover that they're glad to hear Jesus say, "Just do it."
Exodus 3:1-15
By the Sea of Galilee, we see Jesus call out to Peter and Andrew, "Follow me," and "immediately they left their nets and followed him" (Matthew 4:20). It reads as a three-verse transaction.
Then, by contrast, there is the case of Moses. God calls him, and one-and-a-half chapters later, Moses still hasn't signed on the dotted line. Then, we read still another chapter and more after that, and a Bible with subtitles will list yet another passage under the heading, "God calls Moses."
Moses was not a quick sale. He required convincing. He raised a number of concerns, and the Lord addressed each one, in turn.
That the Lord was so patient in trying to include Moses in this mission is all the more remarkable when we consider the events that followed. The Israelites are, indeed, freed from their bondage in Egypt, but that is due to the slow, eventual response of the Pharaoh and his officials to the plagues sent by God. There were ten plagues in all, several of which were inimitable and inexplicable. And so, when the deliverance is completed on the far side of the Red Sea, there is little doubt that the whole thing was God's doing. Even Pharaoh (Exodus 9:27) and his officials (Exodus 8:18-19) grudgingly come to that conclusion at points along the way.
Now if the whole miraculous liberation is God's doing, one wonders why Moses was essential to the process. The Lord even said to Moses that he himself had "come down to deliver [the Israelites] from the Egyptians" (3:8). So if the Lord had come to do it, why did he need Moses' help? Do we doubt that God could have done the whole thing by himself? He created the universe and everything in it ex nihilo by speaking it all into being. Did he really need an old stuttering shepherd to accomplish this task?
This is, cover-to-cover, a strange and marvelous theme in scripture: God's preference for including human beings in his work. Surely he could do it all -- and do it all better -- without our "help." In this particular instance, the human partner was reluctant to help, but God insisted. He insists on our help.
Moses' first objection -- "But who am I...?" -- is a classic, human response. How often have we declined God's call, in ways little or large, because we think we are unqualified. It has the apparent virtue of humility, but upon further review we discover that the underlying reality is actually a vice: self-centeredness. God was calling Moses to assist him in freeing his people. God, and God's people, were the primary subjects, but Moses' insecurity promoted Moses to a place of primacy.
It might seem like pride to suggest that there is something about me worthy of doing God's work. On the other hand, it may be equally self-centered to suggest that there is something about me that permits me to decline God's call.
The major, recurring theme in this passage is the identity of God. It is here that God reveals his name to Moses -- "I AM WHO I AM" and "I AM." But that is not how God introduces himself to Moses. Rather, at the front end of the encounter, the Lord introduces himself as "the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob."
Here is a great truth about our God: before we know him by his name, we know him by someone else's name. Before we know him personally, we know him through some person.
For me, before I knew the Lord for myself, I knew him as the God of my mom and dad; the God of Dan, my youth leader; and the God of Steve, my Sunday school teacher. Before this God belongs to us, he belongs to someone we know. And, he comes introducing himself by the people we have in common. This is another example of God's preference for using people to do his work.
Romans 12:9-21
When teaching classes on the parables of Jesus, I have suggested a distinction between "descriptive" and "instructive" parables. Descriptive parables are those parables designed simply to portray how things are -- or, more specifically, how the kingdom is. So, for example, Jesus' parable of the mustard seed (Matthew 13:31-32) describes what the kingdom is like, but we do not walk away with a sense of "to do." Instructive parables, meanwhile, do send us away with an assignment -- like the "go and do likewise" that brings the parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) to an explicitly instructive conclusion.
Some folks, I have discovered, have an appetite for teaching and preaching that is descriptive. They enjoy the abstract, and perhaps run the risk of being purely theoretical. They want to know how it is. Others, however, are more pragmatic, and so they prefer preaching and teaching that is instructive. They are eager for practical application. They want to know what to do.
For those who prefer the instructive, those who want to know what to do, this week's epistle selection will make them feel like a child in a candy store.
By my count, this one passage features 26 verbs that have the form or effect of an imperative. Nine of them are constructed as imperatives in the original Greek, and seventeen others are second-person, plural participles in the Greek, having the impact of imperatives.
There's no fair and adequate way to deal with 26 different instructions on a single Sunday morning, so my instinct is to categorize the instructions into broad themes.
The first theme I see is that of our relationship and response to evil. Ever since our first parents had "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil" growing in their neighborhood, this has been an issue and point of instruction for God's people (see, for example, Genesis 2:17).
References to evil bookend this passage. Paul instructs the Christians in Rome to "hate what is evil" at the beginning, and then "not (to) be overcome by evil" but to "overcome evil with good" at the end. Paul's word to the Romans at this point, incidentally, would have been apt counsel to Adam and Eve as they stood pondering the fruit of that infamous tree.
In our day, the greatest challenge to hating what is evil may be the prior problem of identifying what is evil. Neither the church nor the world, it seems, has unanimity on the diagnosis of evil, so we cannot agree on what to hate, what to avoid, what to overcome. This problem is not altogether new, of course. Eve manifestly did not recognize the evil before her, either (see Genesis 3:6).
Just as the passage begins with a command to hate evil, it concludes with another extreme term and belligerent image for our relationship to evil: overcome. The Greek verb behind our English "overcome" is nikao. The name of the goddess of victory in Greek mythology, Nike, is a cognate of this verb. It is a word used to describe conquest, and therefore it assumes conflict. It is a recurring word and theme in the brief letters at the beginning of the book of Revelation (2:7, 11, 26; 3:5, 12, 21).
Paul assumes a conflict between Christians and evil, and he doesn't permit pacifism or neglect in this matter, for the choice seems to be to "overcome" or to "be overcome."
The fallen human tendency, of course, is to go to war against people. Conflict is almost always personalized for us. We need to know whom to blame, who's at fault, at whom to be angry, who's the villain. In Paul's call to arms here, a certain kind of combative personality will likely think in terms of the people -- or groups of people -- who need to be opposed and overcome. When Paul writes to the Ephesians about our battle as Christian soldiers, however, he notes that "our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places" (6:12).
In between the harsh directives concerning our response to evil, we read Paul's gentle instructions concerning our response to people. That, then, becomes the second great theme of this litany of imperatives: our relationship and response to other people.
The counsel here is so peaceful compared to the aggressive and antagonistic tone discovered in the earlier theme. Interestingly, there is no apparent distinction made between believers and non-believers, between those in the church and those in the world. While the "good versus evil" theme is highly dualistic, that paradigm does not translate into an "us versus them" mentality in our treatment of people.
Love and affection; honor and hospitality; generosity and sympathy; harmony and peace: these are the pretty colors that Paul uses to paint the picture of how we should relate and respond to others. Even those who persecute should be blessed, and those who do evil to us should not be repaid in kind.
Paul's instructions here, of course, are very reminiscent of Jesus' teachings in the Sermon on the Mount. It is all part of the larger "kingdom mentality," which pulses through the New Testament, and which should inform our churches and our living today.
Matthew 16:21-28
Our Gospel Reading begins with the phrase, "From that time on." In order to understand what begins to happen from that time on, it is essential for our congregations to be clear about just what that time was.
In the immediately preceding episode, Jesus had his pivotal conversation with the disciples about who he was. He asked first who people were saying that he was, which seems to have been a question the disciples felt qualified to answer. They were plainly familiar with the scuttlebutt and speculation, and they repeated it eagerly. When Jesus asked next, however, who they -- the disciples -- said that he was, only one man stepped forward with an answer.
Peter spoke up. That was, of course, typical -- it seems that Peter was always speaking up and saying something. I knew a man who used to joke about his wife, "She's seldom right, but never in doubt." Peter has something of that same charm. He was always giving voice to what he thought and felt, even though sometimes -- as in our Gospel passage this week -- he had to be corrected.
In the preceding episode, however, Peter was absolutely correct. When Jesus asked the disciples who they said he was, Peter answered, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God" (Matthew 16:16). That possibility had surely crossed the minds of the other disciples. It had probably been the topic of some whispered conversations among them. But Peter was the first one to make it a proclamation rather than a speculation, a statement of faith rather than a matter of curiosity. And Jesus assured him that he was right: "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven" (Matthew 16:17).
Now it's out there: who and what Jesus is. It's not public knowledge yet, of course, but it has become common knowledge among the disciples. It is "from that time on" that Jesus began to speak with them candidly about what was ahead for him.
What was ahead was Jerusalem; the climax of the growing opposition to him among the Jewish leaders; his suffering and death. What was ahead was the cross. Jesus first spoke to the disciples about what was ahead just after they had become clear about his identity.
Those two pieces are inseparable, and Jesus knew it. The disciples could not understand his suffering and death apart from the fact that he was the Messiah, and they could not understand his messiahship apart from his suffering and death.
They tried to, however. Peter initially tried to think of Jesus' role as the Messiah apart from the suffering and the cross. He saw them as incompatible with one another, and so he objected, "God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you." But Jesus was quick and no-nonsense in correcting that misunderstanding.
Jesus' rebuke of Peter has a fascinatingly cosmic quality to it. He does not merely say, "You don't understand, Peter; let me explain it to you." Rather, Jesus makes two grand statements, and in the process he evokes God, Satan, and humankind -- the three characters in the biblical drama.
The paradigm suggested by Jesus' statement is crucial and consequential for us as his contemporary followers. He says, "Get behind me, Satan! ... you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things." The statement presents with the possibility that something about us -- what we think, our understanding, our motivations, our goals, and more -- can spring from and resemble any one of three sources: satanic, human, or divine.
We may gain insight into the satanic approach from the earlier episode in Matthew's Gospel where Satan tempts Jesus (4:1-11). One of the three temptations is this offer: "All (the kingdoms of the world) I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me" (4:9). That the kingdoms of the world should become Christ's is plainly God's plan (Revelation 11:15), but not by this means. Perhaps that is the satanic element in Peter's paradigm: that Christ should be the Messiah without the cross. To ostensibly seek God's will while trying to bypass God's way is a diabolical approach. It is of Satan.
The human way of doing things, meanwhile, is always a calculation that begins and ends with self-interest. If this or that option proves too costly to me, then I reckon that I should steer clear of it. And Peter's response to the prospect of Jesus' unjust suffering reflects such a human calculation.
Then there is Jesus' way of doing things -- the characteristics of the divine. Submissive, obedient, selfless, sacrificial, focused on God's will and committed to God's way. These are the proofs of "setting your mind ... on divine things."
Finally, having affirmed that he is the Messiah, and having explained what it will mean for him to be the Messiah, Jesus moves at the end of the passage to the natural next step: what it will mean for them to follow this Messiah. Their discipleship must be like his messiahship: selfless, obedient, and sacrificial, but all the while assured of the victory and reward in the end.
Application
The appeal of the Nike ad campaign for athletes and would-be athletes is its no-nonsense message. Meanwhile, disciples and would-be disciples should find that same no-nonsense message in this week's lections, but with ten times the stakes.
If the Nike campaign were my starting point for this Sunday's sermon, I would use the company name as a natural tie-in to the Romans passage, since Nike comes from the Greek word that Paul uses to talk about overcoming or being overcome by evil. Paul's exhortation is reminiscent of the hard-nosed kill-or-be-killed mentality of warfare. Overcome or be overcome. It's simple and straightforward. It's cut and dried. Just do it.
The challenge to follow and obey is illustrated twice in the episode from Exodus. In the character of Moses, we see a person trying to make excuses, trying to back out, and we see a God who will have none of it. Imagine with your congregation what would have been different if God had not kept challenging and pushing Moses.
Then, there is the picture of discipleship that Jesus paints. It is not a picture of comfort and self-indulgence. Rather, it is a picture of commitment, strenuous effort, and sacrifice. Thus, we are challenged, along with the people in our pews, to "Just do it."
An Alternative Application
Matthew 16:21-28, "Long-Term Investments." I'm not sure if my four-year-old daughter understands what I'm doing when she goes to the bank with me. Does she understand the difference between a bank and a store? In both instances, she sees me giving my money to a person behind a counter. The only apparent difference is that, at the store, I get something for my money. At the bank, I walk away, apparently empty-handed.
What my little girl does not understand yet, of course, is that when I give my money to the cashier at the store, my money is gone -- it's not mine anymore. When I give my money to the teller at the bank, however, my money is still mine, and it grows!
The kingdom and discipleship teachings of Jesus, particularly in the Gospel of Matthew, encourage us to have a big-picture understanding of how we spend or invest our lives. To the extent that we spend on ourselves and invest in this world, we'll lose what we have, though we feel at the time that we're getting something for our investment. But, when we spend our lives on Christ and invest in his kingdom, it seems in the present to be all loss, but we are guaranteed a rich return in the end.
Preaching The Psalm
Psalm 105:1-6, 23-26, 45c
This is a psalm of salvation-history. It relates, in narrative fashion, the principal high points of the Lord's covenant relationship with Israel. We have seen a slightly different cut of this psalm on August 7 (Proper 14). The selection appointed for that day made special reference to the perseverance of Joseph, through his descent into slavery and his eventual rise to power in Egypt. Now, the inclusion of verses 23-26 focuses our attention on God's selection of Moses to lead the now-enslaved Israelites to freedom.
Verse 25 presents certain theological difficulties. The Lord turns the hearts of the Egyptians to hate the Israelite slaves. God is portrayed, here, as the master puppeteer of human history. It is hard to envision a place for human freewill, when God is on the scene in such a way, managing human emotions so thoroughly.
Yet for Israel, envisioning such an all-powerful, interventionist God is not the cause of despair; rather it is a tremendous source of hope. The Psalms -- which were edited into their final edition around the time of the Babylonian exile -- are calculated to speak to a people who are feeling both powerless and hopeless. If the Lord is managing even their sufferings for the sake of Israel's salvation, then the violence and struggle that have hitherto seemed terrifyingly random are now laden with meaning.
Pastorally speaking, does this line of reasoning work in the modern era? Does it comfort our parishioners suffering with chronic illness, unemployment, or family turmoil to believe that God is in control even of these painful events? It's a difficult line of reasoning to present.
One who tries to do precisely that is Roman Catholic spiritual writer Ron Rolheiser. In a recent Internet column, he shares the story of a woman who found herself sitting in the back of a church one day, with a cast on her lower leg. She had been visiting her sister, who lived near a major ski resort. On Sunday, her sister invited her to go to church with her. The woman went skiing instead.
She broke her leg on the slopes. On the following Sunday, when her sister asked her once again to go to church with her, she agreed. She had nowhere else to go, really.
As it so happened, the designated readings for the day were about Jesus, the Good Shepherd. It also happened that the regular priest was away, and a visiting priest from Israel delivered the homily. The priest could not possibly have seen this woman, nor could he have known she was sitting there in the back pew with a cast on her leg. He began his homily by telling of an ancient practice among shepherds in Israel, one still in use today -- a practice that sheds light on the meaning of the phrase, "Good Shepherd." Sometimes, early in the life of a lamb, a shepherd may sense that this one particular animal is going to be a congenital stray -- that it will always be drifting away from the flock, where it could be injured or die. In such cases, the shepherd deliberately breaks the leg of the lamb, so he has to carry it until its leg is healed. By that time, the lamb has become so attached to the shepherd that it never strays again.
"I may be dense," said the woman -- after hearing this sermon -- "but, given my broken leg and all these coincidences, hearing those words woke something up inside me. I have prayed and gone to church regularly ever since!"
"In the conspiracy of accidents that make up the ordinary events of our everyday lives," writes Rolheiser, "the finger of God is writing and writing large. We are children of Israel, children of Jesus, and children of our mothers and fathers in the faith. We need therefore, like them, to look at each and every event in our lives and ask ourselves the question: 'What is God saying to us in this?' The language of God is the experience that God writes inside our lives."
