Scripture Lesson: Matthew 16:13-20

Sermon Transcript for August 31, 2008

By Pastor Bob Coleman and Pastor Andy Kinsey

Pastor Bob: Some people joke about pastor’s working and we only have to work on one day a week, right? You’ve heard that before.

Pastor Andy: I’ve heard that before.

Pastor Bob: Yeah, ok. This is Labor Day Weekend; so just to let you know, we’re going to take a break today. We are going to sit down. This is our way of taking Labor Day off.

Pastor Andy: That’s right. I don’t mind taking a seat. But I warn you, I’ll have a hard time remaining seated.

Pastor Bob: Yeah, well we’ll see.

Pastor Andy: Ok.

Pastor Bob: Actually, we are going to work on our second part of the Trinity this week. We are going to do it together and share together in a way—well, you’ll see how we are going to share. But first of all, I enjoyed singing those songs. They’re some very special ones—Fairest Lord Jesus, I remember learning as a child, in particular. But I have a little bit of a problem with the third one. I know it was “O Come All Ye Faithful”, and I get the connection. We are talking about Jesus and the birth of Jesus and that’s a good Christmas-time Advent hymn, but “True God of True God”?

Pastor Andy: Yeah, what do you think of that?

Pastor Bob: Sounds like seminary all over again.

Pastor Andy: That’s right.

Pastor Bob: “Light from light eternal”? “Lo, He shuns not the Virgin’s womb”; I sort of understand that. “Son of the Father, begotten, not created”; sounds like theological babble to me.

Pastor Andy: Theological babble? Bob, come on!

Pastor Bob: Well, explain it.

Pastor Andy: I’ll do my best.

Pastor Bob: All right.

Pastor Andy: “True God of True God, Light from light eternal, Son of the Father, begotten, not created”. Now that’s heavy stuff. We sing it; we celebrate it, but we worship the Lord because of that, what God has done in Christ. You know, persons have gone to their death singing those words, confessing those words, confirming those words that Jesus Christ is God’s only begotten Son. It comes right out of the Nicene Creed, “True God of True God, Light from light”, but also from Scripture itself. John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.” So yes, that’s some heavy stuff. We affirm it, we believe it, we’re going to share what that means as we go through our time this morning. Because when we talk about the Trinity, we must speak about the Second Person of the Trinity: Jesus Christ, God’s only begotten Son.

Bob, last week when you were sharing, I heard you say several things about the Trinity, especially about God as Creator and God as Father, Abba. Bob, I was listening to your sermon!

Pastor Bob: I realize that. Thank you.

Pastor Andy: Good. The question is, “Were you listening?” This week we are going to talk about Jesus, Joshua. In your sermon last week, Bob, you said that as Christians we believe God is the Creator of the universe, the One who, as The Apostles’ Creed affirms, is “maker of heaven and earth”. The God we worship has made all that is and has created us in His image.

This man has a wonderful gift of taking pictures and photographs. And I was moved last week when he showed to us the pictures and the verses and brought those together for us. And they were a reminder to us of how majestic and beautiful God’s handiwork is and of how we, as God’s children and God’s people, are a part of God’s creation. That part I remember very well.

But you also shared, Bob, how this Creator God is also very personal, very relational. You stated how the Creator is also like a Father, a Daddy, a parent who embraces us, loves us, relates to us, wants to love us as His children. And again and again you shared how throughout the Bible God relates to us as Father--One who forgives, One who redeems.

And this is what makes the Christian faith so unique: God is Creator, and yet, God is also Father. This goes to the heart of the Holy Trinity: God has been revealed in three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and yet God is one. No other world religion makes that claim and worships God in this way. That’s one of the things that makes Christianity so unique: the Holy Trinity.

But there is another thing that makes Christianity unique. And that is Jesus, or as we have noted—Joshua. That’s Hebrew for Jesus. It simply means the One who saves. Now that may sound very obvious; it may sound even redundant. And we may even go, “Well, duh, that’s right. It’s about Jesus.” Well, I want to share something with you. There would be no Christianity without Jesus. There would be no gospel without Jesus!

I think we would be surprised how we may take that for granted. I think we may even be surprised to know that there are churches that don’t spend a great deal of time lifting high the name of Jesus Christ. I think that’s crucial. It’s crucial because we believe that Jesus was not simply a great historical figure in the past. We believe He was God’s one and only Son.

Let’s go back to John 3:16. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.” Martin Luther, the great Protestant Reformer, said that John 3:6 is the gospel in a nutshell: “For God so loved the world, He gave…” And God’s only Son, Jesus, is the One who saves us. Jesus is God in the flesh. That’s what Incarnation is all about.

Pastor Bob: That’s another one of those seminary terms.

Pastor Andy: That’s a seminary term. No, that’s a good church word. Incarnation! Say that with me: “Incarnation”. Beautiful word. Scripture again, John’s prologue to the Gospel—“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us…full of grace and truth.” (John 1:12-,14)

Bob, I’m going to pull out a book for you this morning. Joyce tells me you memorized this.

Pastor Bob: Ah, the Discipline.

Pastor Andy: And when he talks in his sleep, he recites The Book of Discipline.

Pastor Bob: Don’t believe it.

Pastor Andy: There are some of you here, I know, who have read the book from front to back. Am I correct John?

Pastor Bob: No, you picked the wrong one.

Pastor Andy: I picked the wrong one. Okay. Well, anyway, The Book of Discipline for United Methodists is our church book of canon law. It’s how we organize the church and understand the mission of the church. But as United Methodists, there are the teachings of our church there, what we call doctrines: the Articles of Religion, the Confession of Faith. And both of those sources affirm with Christians around the world that Jesus Christ is God’s eternal Word. Let me quote to you, “Jesus Christ is truly God and truly man, in whom the divine and human natures are perfectly and inseparably united.”

Incarnation—Jesus is both human and divine. Now that’s important. We don’t believe that Jesus was just some nice guy long ago who dies a cruel death. Actually, dear friends, that’s very boring! Instead we believe that Jesus is God’s Word to us, the One who saves us from our sin, the One who came down from heaven “for us and for our salvation”. And as my grandfather used to say, “That’s where the rubber hits the road!” That’s what it’s all about. And the reason it hits the road is because it raises a basic question about who we are and who God is. It also raises a very basic question about a word that many people don’t want to talk about and don’t want to say. It’s a three-letter word. What is it? SIN!

No sin, no Savior! If you don’t believe in sin, if you don’t believe in the reality of sin, if you don’t believe you are a sinner, if you don’t believe you have fallen short of the glory of God, there is really no need for us to talk about the Savior! Does that make sense?

Pastor Bob: Yes it does and I can see it coming.

Pastor Andy: You can see it coming?

Pastor Bob: You’re going to let me talk about sin.

Pastor Andy: You get to talk about sin. I knew you would take over.

Pastor Bob: You had all the fun.

Pastor Andy: I had all the fun. There you go.

Pastor Bob: Well, that’s a little bit like the lady who was in church. The preacher was going through a whole list of sins--the sin list we like to call it, in Ephesians and other places. And the preacher was talking about this sin, that sin, “thou shalt not kill, steal” whatever. He finally got to gossip and the little lady got quiet back there. She said, “Now he’s gone from preaching to meddling.”

The problem with sin is that it usually is somebody else’s and not ours. But even more so, it’s been, by the title of the book by Karl Menninger in 1973, who is a psychiatrist, a counselor. And in a whole realm that was really kind of surprised, because he looked at the whole setting of human race, and the frailties and failures of it. After extensive survey in that, the Dr. Menninger concluded that there is something basically wrong with the human race whether one uses such terms as crime, or wrong doing, or mental illness. Well, he basically said as a counselor and title of his book, Whatever became of sin?

Even sometimes a church doesn’t talk about sin in its very direct and clear way. We can talk about hurricane relief; we can talk about helping people who are in crises. All well and good! But we can also see a change that still is true today some 35 or 36 years later. But it appears that people would rather describe their brokenness as a shortcoming, sort of a personality quirk. “I made a mistake; I didn’t sin.” More of a failure but not necessarily a sin. Antisocial behavior, yes! But these are accounted for dysfunctional family backgrounds, the environment that you grew up in, lack of educational opportunities—these are what cause people to do things that are bad but not necessarily calling them sin. Even racial discrimination, various other conditions, we count as blaming us for who we are. Like the old Flip Wilson—“The devil made me do it.” Or even less than that is “Well, my family made me do it.” “If the government would just apply more programs, we could fix these bad problems that are out there.”

And what Karl Menninger said, “but we need to call it what it is”. If we label it as some kind of a dysfunction, then we may try to fix it with medicine and such. If we label it as a crime, then we think we’ll just incarcerate people and that will take care of that. What Dr. Menninger said is “a sin is a sin”. But it seems that when you take sin out of our daily life, it takes away a sense of responsibility plus it takes away the whole reason for Jesus for Jesus Christ, the Savior. You can’t avoid that if you understand fully that Jesus is Savior, saving us from something, just like a fireman rushes in to a building and saves someone from the fire. Jesus Christ is the Savior of us, you and me included. We don’t get a pass on this. Pastors are not somehow immune from it.

There is even a phrase back in that day that had a good side to it. It was “I’m okay; you’re okay”. But what it led to be was “I’m okay; you’re okay to do whatever you want to do”. And that led to what we now call the “Me” generation.

Dr. Menninger also said that really at the heart of sin is hate, hatred. You hate what God is telling you to do or not to do. You hate other people for what they have done to you or for you. And even hating yourself. The germinal word for Dr. Menninger was “sin”. But sometimes the church is that. That’s where we can not correct our ills by just incarcerating people. We can not correct our ills just by therapy alone.

There is a book by John Scott called Confess Your Sins. And he quotes Jack Winslow, who is the head of the British Mental Institution. And his quote, Dr. Jack Winslow’s is “I believe I could dismiss half of my patients tomorrow if they could be assured of forgiveness.” And the only one and the only place where you can get assurance of forgiveness is God through Jesus Christ. Wesleyans developed a term called “prevenient” grace, in fact, which is even more touching to us and more inspiring because it means that even before you know of Jesus, you are forgiven. Prevenient grace—grace that comes before you are even born. God has forgiven you, has forgiven me.

But if you don’t recognize that you need forgiveness, what good is that? That’s a powerful way of understanding it. In fact, it’s interesting. There have been surveys this time of year whether it be for the political conventions or for whatever. We’ll say lots of things. But there was a survey that listed 30 different behaviors and asked people to rank what they thought were the worst ones. Adultery and racism hit the top of the list. Well, the good news is that at least racism is being recognized as something that is wrong. It doesn’t talk about fixing it. But one of the things that they didn’t recognize, sadly enough, is child abuse, battering of a partner, torture of a prisoner. Because we can find reasons for that—cultural dysfunctional, family broken down, whatever. If we could just fix that dysfunction, then we could fix that problem.

But Jesus Christ came, first of all to say we are broken. It is only by God that we can be fixed. Yes, therapy can help. Yes, good counseling is a part of it. But if we don’t as a church hold up that we are all needing a savior to save us from our sin. And sin is defined simply as a broken relationship. And we talked last week, a relationship of God as Father, a broken relationship between God as Savior, a broken relationship between you and me, a broken relationship in my own heart and spirit. That’s what’s a part of sin.

Well, we can stay there and some churches do just like you mentioned. Some don’t mention and talk about Jesus nearly like they should or could. And some churches will go to sin and say “Be saved” and that’s all you need to do. But I think there is a strong part of the gospel that we also need to bring that Jesus comes not just to save the world, but to get us to be something different. Not just saving us from something, but to save us for something.

Do you have any words about that, or what you might be saved for?

Pastor Andy: I’m a preacher. Of course, I have words for that. Saved for—what Bob and I would like to share this morning is yes, we are saved from many things. But one thing we want to tag this morning is this—Yes, we are saved from sin but we are saved for others. We are saved for friendship. Friendship—Jesus Christ saves us from sin, but He saves us for friendship. Here we are back to the relational and the personal. Jesus is our Savior, but Jesus is also our Friend. He is the One who is there for you. He is the One who walks with us. He saves us from sin but he also saves us so that we might be there for others.

What’s the old song we sing? “What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear! What a privilege it is to carry everything to God in prayer.” There’s another old song we sing. “Jesus is all the world to me, my life, my joy, my all; He is my strength from day to day, without him I would fall. When I am sad, to him I go, no other one can cheer me so. When I am sad, he makes me glad, he’s my friend!” Let’s sing a couple of stanzas of that.

He is my friend! What’s the passage in the Gospel of John where Jesus gathers His disciples in the Upper Room and He looks at them and He shares with them “No longer do I call you servants, but I call you friends.” Jesus is communicating to those closest to Him what it means to sacrifice and to be there for others. That’s what the church is all about. At its best the church is a community of friends! Who are your friends? Who’s going to be there when the chips are down? Who’s going to be there when you celebrate those special moments?

Jesus is our Friend! Le me ask you: Do you see Jesus as your Friend? Lamb of God? Yes! Prince of Peace? Yes! God’s Son? Yes! God’s eternal Word? Yes! But Friend? Do you see Jesus as your Friend? To know Jesus as Lord and Savior is also to know him as your Friend! And one of the ways we understand and get to know Jesus as our Friend is through knowing others in the church as friends. When we celebrate the Sacrament of Baptism, we do so yes as God’s family, but we do so as friends, as those committed to one another. When we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, we come forward and we share not simply as believers in Christ, but also as those who confess to one another that we have missed the mark as friends.

As a personal testimony, one of the reasons I understand Jesus as Friend is because of those who’ve taken the time to befriend me, who have been there for me. It’s very difficult to see Jesus as Friend if you don’t have friends. One of those friends who introduced me to Jesus as Friend was my grandmother. She was someone who was my friend. Through her life I came to see that Jesus was not some distant figure in the past but He was the Lord of life! Jesus was my Friend who loved me, who gave His life for me. No longer was I simply a servant, but I was a friend of God. We would sing, my grandma and I, “O how I love Jesus, O how I love Jesus”. Why? “Because he first loved me.” God’s prevenient grace—loving us before we can return the love.

There is a love that loves us before we return the love. That’s how we come to know who Jesus is. God’s love and grace opening up our lives that we may see who Jesus really is. Bob, we believe that Jesus is our Friend, but we also believe He is our Savior; He is the Lamb of God, the Lion of Judah, the bright Morning Star. And so here is the question, Bob, “Who is Jesus Christ?” Let me ask you who you say Jesus is?

Pastor Bob: Jesus today, before I answer it directly, is probably one of the vernaculars that we use; we call him the “people” person because he was a friend of sinners, tax collectors. He befriended the alienated, the morally down, the disrespectful people. Will Rogers, a comedian back in the 30’s, a cowboy comedian he was called, said “I never met a person I didn’t like”. But Jesus says, “I never met a sinner I didn’t want to befriend.”

So I guess for me, to say who Jesus is, is to remember what Peter said in his response when in Matthew, Chapter 16:13 and following Peter confesses to Christ, “When Jesus came to the region in Caesarea Philippi, and he asked his disciples, ‘Who do people say the Son of man is?’ And they replied, ‘Some say John the Baptist: some say Elias; and still others, Jeremiahs or one of the prophets.’ ‘But what about you?’ he asked. ‘Who do you say I am?’ Simon Peter answered, ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.’”

And that’s my confession. If you ask me who He is, I confess that He is the Christ, the Savior, the Friend, the Son of the living God. And, of course, I can ask you the same question. Who do you say He is?

Pastor Andy: He is the Son of the living God. He is the Anointed One of God. He is the Christ, the Holy One. He is Lord. He is Savior. He’s my Friend. I think it was Ellsworth Kalas, an evangelist, who once shared with our church, “You cannot remain neutral when it comes to Jesus. You have to decide—who is he? Dietrich Bonheoffer during the 1930’s eventually was executed by the Nazis said when asked this question, “Who is Jesus Christ for us today?”

Is that an easy question? How you answer that question will determine your life and how you live your life. Some of you next Sunday are going to be given a book; one of the great books of the 20th century written by C.S. Lewis. It is called Mere Christianity. In that book, C.S. Lewis states that when it comes to Jesus you must make a choice because “either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else, he is a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God.” That’s your choice!

You may disagree with C.S. Lewis, but you cannot escape the question: Who do you say He is? The very name calls for a decision! Therefore it is a question we ask you this morning, “Who do you say He is?”

Pastor Bob: Who do you say He is?

Pastor Andy: When you hear that name, what do you hear? Another swear word or God’s holy Word? Another interesting person in history or the Savior of history? Friend or foe? Who is he?

Pastor Bob: That’s the question. Let’s bow our heads for prayer. “When you came as Jesus, gracious God, you came to look at us, to see us as we are, not as we think we are. And you saw brokenness and you brought healing and wholeness. You come to us holding out your hand and the hand of Jesus offering friendship, love, the deepest and personal relationship. You offer salvation from our sin. May we confess that today? May we say that you are the Christ, the Savior, the Son of the living God? For each of us must answer that question for ourselves. Amen”

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