Isaiah 51:1-6 • Psalm 138 • Romans 12:1-8 • Matthew 16:13-20
Preached at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Oak Park, IL as part of a “Pulpit Swap” Sunday with their Pastor, Rev. Kathy Nolte, who preached today at United Lutheran Church in Oak Park, IL.
Thank you so much for the honor of being with you in worship this morning. It is good to be with you as an ELCA partner congregation in this community. My wife Stacey, who is also here this morning, is expecting our child in October, and one of the many things we have been doing to get ready is cleaning out clutter, which means...lots of empty boxes. I've been thinking a lot about boxes the last few days. I've been thinking about those times in our life or someone else's life that feel like this... [put box over head]. Have you ever been put in a box? No, I’m not talking about when you were five and your older brother played with you by putting you in a box. I’m talking about being labeled something that did not truly identify by who you really are. Maybe it is assuming that just because you are at a White Sox or Cubs game doesn’t necessarily mean you are a fan of the home team. Maybe it is the bully at school who called you weak. Maybe it was the boss who called your work style uncooperative. Maybe it is the extended family member who assumes a political label of liberal or conservative for you on every possible social issue. Maybe it is the doctor who gave a diagnosis that now will labels you, or at least your medical chart, for the rest of your life: depressed, disabled, high-risk...
Boxes and labels, we have been taught, are unhelpful. But it seems in our culture these days that labeling others, putting them in boxes and drawing lines in the sand are becoming more a sign of courage than of weakness. The labels that are being thrown around so casually today are coming out of our preoccupation with economic indicators and political in- fighting and seem to be a way for us to try and hold on to something secure amidst all the change and conflict happening around us.
Once I was at a seminary--that shall remain nameless--and saw the student newspaper sitting outside of the bookstore, and the main headline article was something like “What About Thinking Inside of the Box for Once”. With all the forces trying to change the church this student was trying to advocate closing the church off from the world, in order to preserve the “purity” of the church—trying to keep it in a “box.”
The disciples of Jesus were confronted with this very challenge we face—of labeling, categorizing, and making idols--as Jesus began to turn his ministry towards Jerusalem, and towards the cross. As Jesus asked them “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” he asks them to give him the labels--the boxes--that others would give to him. And they name them: John the Baptist, Elijah, a prophet. But then Jesus asks them the tough question: “But who do you say that I am?” The disciples could pick one of the boxes they had just said and put Jesus in it. They could borrow someone else’s testimony about how Jesus had impacted their lives.
But Peter realizes quickly that Jesus does not fit into a box. He defies categorization. There is only one name that he could be given that comes close to describing who this healing, teaching, preaching, friend of sinners, anti- imperial man was: Messiah. Jesus transcended any human category, because in Jesus, Peter experienced and touched God’s very presence among us. “You are the Messiah, Jesus, the Son of the living God.”
When Jesus comes to us, God’s promise of mercy is made real in flesh and in blood. Jesus defies the category of any other relationship we have ever known or will have in our lives. In him, the living breathing flesh of God comes to us, and it’s personal, it’s real, it’s life-giving, it draws us into an all-encompassing relationship with every single aspect of our lives...that there is no other name we can give him, than Savior and Messiah. When Jesus comes to us, we find we can’t put that experience into a box...it cannot be contained...it cannot be bottled up...it cannot fit into a tidy compartment of our lives...but Jesus envelops and transforms every part of us into something we could not be, apart from Jesus. In him we are given a gift that is bigger than any box, label or name: the gift of being made a new creation, a whole human being, a beloved child of God.
We are posed this question today by Jesus: who do we say that he is? What is the gift that he is to us? Will we box this gift of Jesus into a corner of our lives--to a tidy hour on Sunday? Or can we open ourselves to him walking with us every single hour and day of our lives? Will we draw on another’s testimony, borrowing a box of someone else’s words about how Jesus changed their life, or use those “buzz” words we Lutherans so often like to say—grace, justification, gospel--but maybe don’t know how they actually touch our own lives? Or can we tell our truth, beyond the boxes, of how Jesus love has worked through our weakness to reveal God to us? Who do we say Jesus is?
ELCA Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson challenged the ELCA in his report at this week’s churchwide assembly in Orlando, to look to Jesus as our reconciling Lord who brings us into relationship with each other, not inside any boxes, but beyond them, across our differences. Our Messiah, our Lord, reigns from a cross, transforming our whole lives, and also transforming our relationships with those who differ from us. This Messiah chisels and chips away at us with divine love, love that shape us together into a people who care for each other and for God’s whole world. That love that unites us stands bigger and more powerful than any box, than any difference or than any ideology that may try to divide us.
Eboo Patel, one of my most inspiring seminary professors, is a Muslim. He started an interfaith youth organization in Chicago that equips youth from different religions to do joint service projects, and then reflect on what is it about their faith tradition that inspires them to take action for a better world. Eboo sees that the boxes of religious identity cannot separate us from working together on matters that concern us all. He used to say, look at an average daily newspaper, and cut out all the articles that have the perspective of two different religions or ideologies clashing, fighting or causing violence. See how little of that newspaper is left. The Messiah that Peter and that we testify to today transforms us to into people who work together out of a different story line, across the lines and boxes that the world would put us in, to discover that God is present there, in those relationships we had not even imagined possible.
And so the church is built on this Messiah, not on any strength or coercion or manipulation on our part, but on the box-transcending Jesus. Jesus unites us even beyond the twenty Oak Park blocks that separate United Lutheran Church and Good Shepherd Lutheran Church. The church, just like Christ, cannot be contained with the box of a building, and so it is for us to celebrate our unity, especially the unity of our two ELCA congregations in this community. Pastor Kathy and I are deeply committed to seeing our congregations work together, outside of our respective boxes, to collaborate as church partners--to whatever extent God may be calling us to do so, from sharing educational and youth ministries, to joint worship services...the possibilities are endless. We can together proclaim the Messiah who lifts the world out of the boxes of fear and isolation and bullying and poverty...and who places us into the arms of his own gracious, freeing and merciful embrace.
There are many whom we will encounter in our daily life who live with this as how they view the world--trapped in a box-- whether it’s the literal box of sleeping in one on the street, or what can feel like one when there seems like no place to belong. Jesus breaks these boxes down so we can proclaim to all that are trapped by them, that what traps us no longer has power. Jesus gives Peter and us that power and authority to loose those living bound to the boxes placed on them, and that is the power Jesus can make possible through we as the church. We have been given his power, as Theresa of Avila once said:
“Christ has no body now on earth but yours no hands but yours, no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes through which to look out Christ’s compassion to the world. Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good. Yours are the hands through which he is to bless.”
Who do we say Jesus is? Go into the world, brothers and sisters, as proclaimers of our Messiah, as ones set free to share the transforming gift that does not come in a box: he has named us all as his beloved.
Amen.
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