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The Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost
Grant us, O Lord, not to mind earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to cleave to those that shall abide; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (Proper 20)
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The Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost
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Scripture citation(s): Mark 8:27-38
A Sermon by
Fr. Andrew
on
Mark 8:27-38
✛
Recognition
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I had the good fortune to know slightly a legendary woman in Britain. All the last century, until she died some years ago, she had captivated and convulsed and scandalized and enslaved both men and women by her astonishing beauty with an extraordinary honesty and wit. She was utterly refreshing, alarmingly unpredictable, and had one vanity; shortsightedness, which she never advertised with glasses or contact lenses. So her glorious face would turn blankly right at you until by something you said or a gesture familiar to her she had pinned your identity. There was a horrifying occasion which she told against herself: at a grand diplomatic reception a quietly spoken woman turned to her and talked of this and that. Something in the voice warned my friend. She realized she was talking to The Queen and swept into a deep curtsey, saying as she did so, “Do forgive me, please, Ma’am! I didn’t recognize you without your crown on.” What The Queen replied isn’t recorded.
Recognition can come as a shock, glad or unpleasant. One of the great barriers to recognition is the habit we all have of a preconceived notion about someone. In our mind’s eye, she may be tall. So we are predisposed to consider tall women, and when this small woman comes into view, we are not ready and recognition is delayed, perhaps disastrously. I saw a poignant sketch in a review some years ago of a young sailor who had been getting letters from a woman. She had written faithfully and he had built in his mind’s eye this picture of a pretty young thing. They had agreed to meet. She would be carrying a flower, and sitting on a certain bench in a park they both knew. A little old lady, carrying a flower, came and sat on one end of the park bench. The young sailor appeared and sat on the other. The lady held her flower, high. The sailor glanced, but looked away. He got up and left. He left the unrecognized writer of those letters crushed and alone. He hadn’t recognized her.
People run into this difficulty with Jesus. He asks his disciples, “Who do people say I am?” People, his own brothers included, fail to recognize his Messiahship. There are lots of conjectures. If he doesn’t observe the Sabbath, as some say, he cannot be a man of God. If he is a drunkard, as some say, he cannot be anything very much. If he is a crowd seducer, a lying demagogue, as others accuse him of being, his claims have no weight. Some take him for a prophet. The common people listen to him gladly, much to the frustration of both the aristocracy and the academics who dislike each other, but hate him worse. People are making guesses. His claims are outrageous. They offend the Establishment. They intrigue the proletariat.
Listen to what Mark records about this (Mark 8:27): “When Jesus had come into the districts of Caesarea Philippi he asks his disciples, ‘Who do men say that I am?’ They said, ‘Some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, others one of the prophets.’ He said to them, ‘And you – who do you say that I am?’ Simon Peter answered, ‘You are the Christ, the anointed one.’
Note what the common people who listened to him gladly did when they assessed him. They put him at the top with their popular list of famous people who knew many of God’s secrets. John the Baptist was a contemporary name, whose fame had reached them for saying sharp and uncomfortable things as he heralded the coming of a new age with a man greater than he, the laces of whose shoes John was unworthy to untie. Perhaps this was he, the latter-day Elijah, historically the prince of the prophets, the one they knew had the honored place of immediate herald to the messiah, the prophet for whom they always left a chair empty at the Passover in case he turned up. Or could it be Jeremiah, spoken of with such awe by the founders or the Pharisee movement, Or one of the Prophets, perhaps. They cast him in the role of one who came before the Messiah’s arrival. They all, every one, had failed to make the connection.
So Jesus puts the question to his group. “Well, that’s what they say. What do you say?”
Silence. And not uncharacteristically, Peter jumps in. Peter, the great initiator, the man with no more brains and possibly less than some of his partners in the enterprise around Jesus, but with an extraordinary if erratic courage of his convictions, and occasional insight.
There are times in our lives when we are surprised to hear ourselves saying what we say. I suspect that this may have been such an occasion in Peter’s life. From his lips tumbles his inspired confession, “You are the Christ.” Peter has recognized Jesus for what he is. In that instant of recognition, we, all of us, are in a new ball game. For this ball, this rounded earth, this globe, has its God walking on it in man’s clothing. Within this man’s chest cavity beats the heart of God who created the world.
Note one thing. This glorious recognition did not save Peter from making more than a fool of himself several times, later. It did not, at that stage, guarantee a loyalty to the man he recognizes as the Christ of God, the Messiah. There were shameful things ahead for Peter, and bitter humiliations. But the disciples are presented here, and now, with Peter’s recognition of Jesus as the Christ. Perhaps he says what some are thinking. But he goes ahead and says it. He makes the natures of Christ, human and Divine, a spoken reality to his companions.
Discovery. Recognition. Articulation. What Peter finds himself doing and saying has something to say to the church today, to you and to me. When we meet together, not to worship but to confer, when the diocesan Convention is held, or when representatives of the whole Episcopal Church foregather for the General Convention every three years, our self-consciousness as an institution becomes evident. Management and conservation problems preoccupy the officers of every institution; and ours, the institution of the Episcopal Church, is no exception. We debate and argue and disagree and vote and speak passionately about our housekeeping problems, sometimes at the expense of articulating why we are here in the first place: to proclaim Jesus as Christ, to make him a recognizable reality to the people who belong to us and to those who are still outside our doors. The people outside will rarely be attracted to an organization which does things well so much as by a family alive with a grasp of the reality of Christ’s life. The job, as I see it, of this place, which has to be managed and conserved in order to function efficiently for its beauty in some way to reflect the glory of God, the job is to make a proclamation loud and clear that what we are interested in is Christ Jesus: Christ crucified for New York and the world, risen for New York and the world, and to challenge the people of New York and the world to commit their lives to Jesus as Savior and Lord. We have, in other words, to be evangelistic.
I am constantly awed by people’s sense of commitment to their job. Listening to those words will be lawyers I know, working often sixteen hours a working day. It is not that people are unused to commitment or unwilling to give it to their professional lives. It is that people, men and women, are strangers to spiritual commitment. It is that, in our case as a Church (with a capital “C”), we haven’t yet tapped that source of energy which commitment brings with it. And we should have. Commitment not the mind-washed approach of the fanatic, deaf to reason, blind to the need for accommodation, impervious to consideration. I am not referring to the religiously obsessed who won’t change their minds and can’t change the subject. No. Commitment. That is what Christianity is about. And where force, in which the powers of the will and intellect and physical capabilities are engaged because the soul is intrigued, liberated because it is enslaved gladly and without guilt, generously and without counting. All the juices are flowing, all the blood is racing, because the soul is enjoying a love experience. Not obsessed. Still less, besotted. Released into love, with all the marvelous characteristics that the love experience brings to the surface of a life.
Harness this power of commitment to the machinery of the Church and its force for good would not only be noticeable, but unstoppable. I am not alone in the discomfort I feel at some of the things said at the last General Convention a week or two ago. The Church, like us as individuals, is responsible for the impressions it creates. What are those impressions? Fierce individualism; scant regard for Church history: a spirit of isolationism. I could be wrong. I often am.
Like the people around Jesus we are confused about Christ’s role. We see it in human terms, stark terms: human rights, women’s rights, gay rights; human justice; world peace; global health challenges; response to terrorist threats; the chaos in Iraq. And all this is right. It is right to apply Christ’s role to the immediate and clamant human situation. He is involved in all the suffering and deepwater daily confronting us. But we have to proclaim Jesus as Lord; the Christ; his role in the Godhead. He is the Savior of the world and that is Peter’s insight and his declaration. Discovery. Recognition. Articulation. Our job is articulation: saying whom we have by faith discovered and recognized.
There is work to be done by the Church, and I should like this place and its great and loving family to do it together. To help people beyond our doors as well as within our ranks to reestablish the eternal priorities to proclaim Christ’s reality. Proclamation rather than speculation that the world’s wisdom should be listened to by that Church, and its message tailored to where folks might like themselves to be at the moment. I’m not advocating archaism. I’m not advocating a siege-mentality. I’m preaching that the Church has things to say, both old and new, about the Christ whose life fills the world, who waits to be recognized for who he is. Those things about him often run counter to the way we assume things to be, to the way we have accepted them as being. Because he is God as well as man, as Peter recognized and confessed, things are not always what they seem with Christ, and people stand in desperate need of being told.
Let’s do it, for Christ’s sake.
