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Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, "Who do people say that I am?" They responded, "Some say you are John the Baptist, but others say you are Elijah, and still others say Jeremiah or one of the other prophets." Then Jesus said to them, "But who do you say that I am?"
-- Matthew 16:13-15 (paraphrased)

In the past year or so, I have had a number of opportunities to preach on this story that is recorded in Matthew and Mark and Luke -- the story of Jesus' conversation with his disciples as they walked into the region of Caesarea Philippi. The last opportunity I had to preach on this text was just six Sundays ago in Namibia, in southwest Africa. I preached the sermon in a very interesting congregation in the capital city of Windhoek. It is a congregation that is attempting something rather new in Africa. Some would call it radical, maybe dangerous. I would say they are being reformational and faithful to the gospel.

The church was filled the day I preached, maybe 400 worshipers, and certainly not because I was there. Normally the worshipers spill out the door and into the churchyard. The congregation is perhaps 98% black Namibians, which may appear to someone from the outside to be rather homogeneous, but it is not. It is a very diverse group of people representing a variety of Namibian tribal groups: the worshipers represented the Ovambo peoples, the Kavango peoples, the Hereros, the Samara, the Nama and Sans people, young and old. There were also a few white Germans, an Indian from the Punjab, and a black woman from Uganda. There were also a variety of educational backgrounds represented; and worshipers who were financially poor and some who were economically well-off by Namibian standards. There were new Christians in the mix and those who were born into a long tradition of the Christian faith.

The diversity went deeper. The members represented three different church bodies that historically did not relate to each other very well because of the different ways they had responded to apartheid in the past. There was even a bishop of one of the church bodies in attendance the Sunday that I preached. It was a new community of diverse searchers in a new nation-state who shared a profound Christian hope.

In many ways, I found that congregation to be much like this worshiping community in Weaver Chapel at Wittenberg University. Most of you are members of various congregations in your hometowns located across the state and across the globe. You represent a mix of different denominations, certainly a variety of different traditions and worship styles. You are used to your own pastors and choirs and their music preferences. Some of you are not members of any church. There is a good chance you don't, at least this Sunday, know all the names of the people sitting in your own row. This gathering is a bit different from your pre-Wittenberg experience. In many ways we have come together like that Namibian congregation. We have formed a new community in an environment new to many of us. Is there a hope we share?

Jesus and the friends and students who were traveling with him entered into the region of Caesarea Philippi. They, too, were no longer in the familiar landscape of their past. Caesarea Philippi was not a Galilean, Jewish village with barking dogs to greet you, with the morning vegetable and bread stalls, friends gathered by the well for conversation, fishermen and women, farmers and shepherds, all the neighbors sharing the same cultural, tribal, and religious heritage. Caesarea Philippi was something very different. It was a new location and mind-set. Caesarea was named after Tiberius Caesar who claimed to be God; and Philippi after the Tetrarch Phillip, a son of Herod, who some would say sold his religious and spiritual heritage, his soul, for power. The disciples were entering a new world with Jesus.

The nation of Namibia is only six years old, since it gained its independence from South Africa in 1990. It had been through much pain and suffering. For well over a century, racial prejudice resulted in everything from resettlement to "ethic cleansing," including an extermination policy crafted by some of the same German officials who formulated Nazi Germany's policies of extermination. Early in this century, it was the official law of the European colonists to shoot on sight any members of the Herero tribe, for example. One year there were well over 100,000 Hereros living in their traditional tribal lands in central Namibia; three years later, about 80,000 of them were dead. The world did not complain, and a similar policy was enacted thirty years later by some of the same people in Germany -- the holocaust. More recent sorrows in Namibia under apartheid involved a brutal war, families torn asunder, refugees flooding over borders, plus the destruction of land and property. The scars of all this are still very apparent; but it is now a new free, democratic nation. It seems to me that their capacity for forgiveness is enormous; and their unified concern for the vast numbers of poor in their nation is genuine.

The congregation in which I preached six weeks ago held many of the leaders of this new country -- a developing nation entering our world of new technology, new models for economic growth; all the promises of the good life through the accumulation of material goods. But what gives substance to a hopeful future? What is there to strive for that has lasting meaning?

Jesus asked, "Who do the people in this new world of ours say that I am?"

I began my sermon in that Namibian congregation by reading a prayer that we often prayed here in worship at Wittenberg before Namibia's freedom in 1990, a prayer for our brothers and sisters in "occupied" Namibia asking God to protect and strengthen them and their congregations; a prayer that remembered their refugees in Angola and Zambia; and that called for the end of apartheid and all the human suffering that it causes. It was a prayer that we at Wittenberg prayed often, and a prayer that the Namibians, of course, not only prayed but lived.

Then I asked that African congregation, "It is now 1996. What prayer concerns should we offer together now, our worship community at Wittenberg University and you, our brothers and sisters in Namibia?"

I believe that we are facing together, in many ways, the same challenges today. That congregation and this congregation have a lot in common. As sisters and brothers in Christ in Namibia and here at Wittenberg, we need each other's support and prayers and insights as we all face together God's call to be faithful in a new global, pluralistic, postmodern world of opportunity and of great need and suffering.

Caesarea Philippi at the time of Jesus was an exclusive Roman government, a resort town in the mountains on a terrace overlooking the fertile north end of the Jordan River valley. It was a beautiful, water-rich, green, park-like location, like our campus. Passing the disciples and Jesus as they walked on the paved Roman road to Caesarea Philippi would have been the regional leaders of commerce and the military who were summoned to power-lunches along manicured gardens. Pre-dating the Romans, the place was still considered by many at the time of Jesus to be the home of the god Pan, the god of new wine and good times, the party god who calls you to seek your own pleasure, even at the expense of others.

Caesarea Philippi was quite a place, where the powerbrokers of the New Age came together to relax and cool down above the super-heated, summer plains of Palestine to do a little business with the Roman overlords; a location where those with big ideas came to sell their hopes; a place where the highly educated came to learn more; a place where people from all over the Roman world, with various religious and philosophical traditions, came together to strategize. It was a lot like Windhoek, Namibia, and Wittenberg University today.

In Caesarea Philippi there were multiple life philosophies and life expressions, some in harmony with each other, and some in wild disharmony; some worshiping the wealth and power and authority of Caesar, and many following the party-hardy Pan calling to you to forget your worries and your responsibilities to care for others.

It was precisely there in the territory of Caesarea Philippi (or was it Capetown or Columbus or our campus?), a setting perhaps where one is most free to see the clarity of choice. There, before friends and strangers and fellow searchers, in the midst of new possibilities for both blessings and despair, while in the background Pan played his flute of seduction. In this very setting, Jesus asked us to look carefully around us.

"Who do people say that I am?"

"Well," his disciples answered in all honesty, "some say you are John the Baptist," calling them home to past answers and promises.

"And others say you are Elijah or Jeremiah," knife-sharp prophetic voices from the past, and we do seek meaning and direction in these changing times that seem to lack satisfying inspiration, that lack a "moral compass."

Others say that they are rather comfortable with their present definitions of right and wrong; very comfortable; they are certain of their salvation. And you, Jesus, you just complicate things when you welcome the tax collectors, treat women as equals, accept the outcasts, and when you tell us to love our enemies. Some say you are too demanding; we want a religion that is more comfortable than what you offer.

Others listen very selectively to what you say, picking and choosing what best suits them, and what meets their perceived needs and their own prejudices.

You are going to run into students on this campus who will say that you, Jesus, are just one voice among many voices that reveal God; no big deal. One of the many possibilities leading to personal fulfillment -- maybe all right; maybe all wrong.

Others say Jesus, you are well-meaning but naive. I mean, look at the realities of Caesar's money and authority. That's what I want; that's what I am preparing for; that's what I live for. I want to be respected for my accumulations, my good taste.

In Namibia, some say you represent an angry God who seeks blood revenge, death to our enemies.

"Who do they say I am?"

The common learning seminar this semester will be examining expressions of the "creative human spirit." One of the lives that you will examine in detail is that of Sigmund Freud who answered, "Jesus, I hope you are more than God because God is just an internal, psychological crutch formed by the human mind to ease the pain of living before death; nothing more. God is not a reality in the realm of physical existence."

"Who do people say that I am?"

Some say in the comfort of these new times, "It doesn't matter who you are Jesus, and it won't matter until maybe, at some later date, when I want to become serious about such things as commitment, religion, and worship again. In the meantime, Caesar rules the territory during the day and Pan with his cool, sweet wine rules the night."

Then, according to the text, it all became very personal. Jesus looked directly at those following him, those around him in this region of Caesarea Philippi, that congregation in Windhoek, Namibia, to us in the chapel, this morning, and Jesus asked, "But what about you? Who do you say that I am?" No room for hedging now.

This is not only the turning point in the book of Matthew, but for the Christian, it is the center of our life. Simon Peter replied, "You are the Christ." You are the one transparent to the source of a personal love that will never be finished!

"Who do you say that I am?" The Namibian congregation where I preached six weeks ago seemed to me to clearly choose a unity of purpose based on a confession of Christ; they wanted more than just a gathering together of diverse people, but they desired to worship and serve God as revealed by Jesus.

God is present in each new moment willing to make us whole, and desiring our actions to bring harmony and peace to everyone we encounter. Jesus, you are the Christ, the Messiah, God who affirms our call for justice; who infuses grace into worship; God who can offer genuine forgiveness; who enables reconciliation and resurrection; and who bursts through social, racial, tribal, cultural, religious bigotry, and idolatry. It is God who points to the equality of all his daughters and sons, and to the interconnectedness of all existence including the very earth itself. It is God speaking through the lives and actions recorded in holy scripture, and hopefully in our own personal diaries and dorm discussions.

Shouldn't this be the purpose of our gathering together here in Weaver Chapel in this new academic year, the reason why we come together for worship and fellowship?

It is all held nicely in Saint Peter's answer to Jesus. Through you, Jesus, God's unencumbered love flows unrestricted to us; and the unity of that divine love knows no boundaries, not time or space, not cultures or tribes or race or sex or age, not even death.

Jesus asked his followers, "Who do people say that I am?"

In this present new age of ours shaped by instant communication, new freedoms, old fears, HIV/AIDS, the continuing cry for justice, in classes tomorrow morning, they say, believe, and disbelieve all kinds of things about you, Jesus. Some say that you are a myth. Some consider you a principle of values that can be bought and sold. Some say that the God about which you speak is an idealistic wish, not reality. Many just don't know what to answer to such a question; they really haven't thought too much about it.

Then, according to our holy scripture, Jesus looks at each of us, and asks the centering question, "But what about you? Who do you say that I am?"

It is an answer that can shape one's future in ways of unity, blessing, and peace, and an answer to share with others.

Saint Peter responded to Jesus, and in that answer is what unites us with our sisters and brothers in that church in Windhoek and with the body of Christ around the globe, and it holds what should be the center of our ministry together this year at Wittenberg. It is the source of the hope, the peace, the direction, and the growth we seek in this new setting in Weaver Chapel, together in this new academic year.

Peter responded, "You are the Christ, the living God." Amen.

Sermon delivered August 25, 1996
Weaver Chapel
Wittenberg University
Springfield, Ohio