Remembering Jesus
Sermon
Sermons On The Second Reading
Series I, Cycle A
Christians share a memory - and a belief - that gives us a place to stand, a way of getting things into perspective, and an ability to cope no matter what is going on in the world around us.
We share the memory that once, a long time ago, there was a young teacher who was totally committed to the loving purpose of God for the world. He came healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and making other loving responses to human need. He came announcing a new possibility that God offers to the whole creation and teaching people how to live in that new possibility. He came calling others to join him in a life that is open to the saving work of God and committed to the loving purpose of God. When the powerful people of his day tried to turn him aside from his purpose, he chose to endure a cruel death on a cross rather than to abandon God's loving work. But God would not let it end that way. God raised Jesus up out of death and caused him to be with God and to share with God in everything that God does. We do remember Jesus, don't we? In spite of all of the difficulties related to passing the memory down through the generations for 2,000 years, we have a pretty good idea of what his life was like. We share that memory.
We also share a belief that makes that memory meaningful and important. It is the belief that the great eternal God, who made the heavens and the earth, was purposefully doing something very special through the life of Jesus, something to help us know God, something to help us and all people to enter into the new possibility that God opens to us.
We share that memory and that belief, don't we? That is what it means to be a Christian.
Late in the first century, or early in the second, the early church went through a time when some things were happening that threatened the church's integrity and its future. The apostles, who had held the church together, had all died. The Bible had not yet been put together in the form in which we now have it. Things were happening that put stress upon the life of the church, and lots of people were falling into confusion.
At that time, an unknown church leader undertook to call the church back to the faith that was taught by Peter and Paul and the other apostles. He wrote a letter to the churches in the name of Peter to say to the churches the things that he knew Peter would want them to hear. That was a widely used and perfectly accepted thing to do in those days. The book from which we read our scripture lesson was the result.
The writer of 2 Peter was going to have some important things to say to everyone and some harsh things to say to a few. But first, he called them to remember Jesus. He focused their attention on one particular event in the life of Jesus that gave a basis for the Christian belief about Jesus. It was an event that Peter had shared. Do you remember the story of the transfiguration?
One day, Jesus took Peter and James and John with him up onto a high mountain to pray. While they were praying, the disciples saw Jesus change. His face and his garments glowed. And they saw Moses and Elijah, two of the great leaders of God's chosen people from the past, talking with Jesus. Then, while Peter was stammering and trying to think of the right thing to say, a bright cloud enveloped them and they heard the voice of God saying to them, "This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!" (Matthew 17:1--8). If the disciples still had any notion that Jesus was just another teacher or just another revolutionary leader, like others only better, the vision changed all of that. Because of the vision, the disciples knew that, in Jesus, something entirely new and different was happening - and that it was the doing of God.
The writer of 2 Peter reminded the early church of that memory because things were going on that made them need that recollection. Sometimes things go on in our world and in our lives that make us need that memory, too.
Sometimes things don't work out like we expect them to. Through most of the early years of the life of the church, the Christians had expected Jesus to come again soon, on a day of judgment and salvation, to bring his work to completion. They had organized a lot of their thinking and actions around that expectation. But years after the apostles had all died, Jesus had still not come back. Things were not working out as they had expected.
We have some similar experiences, don't we? Things don't always work out as we had expected. No one ever told us that, if we believe the gospel and live Christian lives, everything will work out well for us. But sometimes we let ourselves believe that. It seems to us that, if God is a loving God, good things ought to happen in our world. Good things do happen, but bad things happen, too, things like natural disasters, and acts of terrorism, and wars that cause enormous amounts of suffering. It seems to us that, if God is a loving God, he ought to be able to keep things like that from happening. Things don't always work out like we had expected them to.
And it seems to us that, if we do our best to live Christian lives and to treat others fairly and to raise our children in Christian homes, things ought to go well for us. And many things do go better for us than they might have if we had lived otherwise. But we soon find that a fickle economy can take away the job and the savings from a Christian as easily as they can from other people - perhaps more easily. Even though we do our best to bring our children up in the Christian faith, sometimes during adolescence they can still get into the wrong crowds and start using drugs and get swept away into a life that we don't want for them. Yes, and some of us have found that good Christians can get cancer or Alzheimer's disease just as other people can. Things don't always work out like we expect them to. Sometimes experiences like those can shake the foundations of our lives and make us ask questions about our faith.
In those times, we need to remember Jesus. We need to remember how he sought out the people who were distressed and hurting and how he reached out to them in love. And, we need to remember that it was God who was at work in the things that Jesus did and that God is still reaching out to those who are hurting.
The people who lived in those later days of the early church sometimes had to cope with confusion in their understanding of the Christian faith. By that time, all of the letters of Paul had been written and maybe one of the gospels, but they had not yet been put together in the form of a Bible as we know it and sound Christian doctrine had not yet been well defined. When the writer of 2 Peter spoke of the scriptures, he was talking about what we call the Old Testament. Even the most sincere Christians had differences of opinion. And there were some who were intentionally attacking the Christian faith. Some were misinterpreting Paul's teachings about Christian freedom to say that there is no moral law. Some were saying that, since judgment day had not come, there was no judgment. Some, under the influence of the "Epicurean" philosophers, were attacking the scriptures and calling them mere myths. They were not using the word "myth" like some of our modern theologians do. Some modern theologians use the word to describe a story or a tradition that is the bearer of eternal meaning. Those ancient critics simply meant that the scriptures were a bunch of fairy tales that someone had made up and that they were not true. That was causing a lot of the early Christians to question what they thought.
That happens to us today, too, doesn't it? There are a lot of different and sometimes conflicting opinions about important matters even among sincere Christians - and they are not always respectful of one another as they argue. We have seen theological differences divide families and churches and communities. People from other religions and people with no religion at all sometimes call important Christian beliefs and practices into question. As a defense against the harm that religious conflicts can do, our culture has developed a secular approach to life that virtually forbids any public discussion of religion and that indirectly suggests that there is something wrong with religion as a whole. In that kind of a situation, many people have become very confused about what to believe. Some have been led to give up on religious faith all together.
When we find ourselves in that kind of a situation, we need to remember Jesus again. The story of Jesus puts us in touch with the most profound aspects of the truth about God and puts them before us in a form that we can understand. It puts the truth about God before us in the form of the story of someone like ourselves, a man, Jesus of Nazareth. We believe that it was God who chose to be made known to us in that way.
Another sad thing happened in the early church during the time when 2 Peter was being written. Some who called themselves Christians were not living up to their faith. Some were just being lax in their practice of their religion, demonstrating that it really wasn't very important to them. Others were going along with some of the popular social practices of their day that involved idolatry and immorality. In fact, some of the supposedly sophisticated interpretations of the Christian faith that were emerging were just excuses for moral laxity. Christians need to be able to believe in one another as well as in God. When people saw professing Christians not living up to their faith, they sometimes experienced bitter and destructive disillusionment.
Unfortunately, we have had that experience, too, haven't we? Newspapers seem to take special delight in making headlines of the moral and ethical failures of high profile evangelists and church leaders. Those failures are deeply disappointing to people who need to believe in their church. It is also disappointing to see a church or a church--related institution get so caught up in the pursuit of institutional success that it forgets its primary function. Almost every one of us knows someone who talks loudly about his or her religion and is anxious to push it on you, but who really does not practice what he or she preaches. Disillusioned people are always eager to point their fingers at the hypocrisy of the religious. That is hard for us to deal with. We need something we can believe in, something with integrity that we can trust.
When we need something we can believe in, we need to reclaim our memory of Jesus. There is the story of someone like ourselves who gave up his life rather than give up the integrity of his faith. And God was doing something special through Jesus.
Lots of things can happen in our lives that can confuse us and bewilder us and cause us not to know how to go on. Lots of pressures and forces swirl around us like the currents of a rapid river that threaten to knock us off our feet and to sweep us away. There are no easy answers or simple solutions to all of these things.
But when we find ourselves up against things that confuse and threaten, we will do well to reclaim the memory that all Christians share, the memory that the writer of 2 Peter shared with the bewildered believers in his day, the memory of Jesus. No, this is not an invitation to be irresponsible and to stop thinking about the things that challenge us in life. It is not a promise that "remembering Jesus" will work like a magic word and make all of your problems go away. This is rather an invitation to remember that, at one time in history, God did something very special through a young teacher named Jesus.
It is not enough just to remember that there was a Jesus. We need to remember the story of Jesus, what he did, what he said, what happened concerning him. If, to be honest, you really don't know the story, or if it has been a long time since you read it, you would do well to read it again. Each of the first four books of the New Testament - Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John - tell the story. They are not hard to read or to understand and you can read one of them in just a few hours. Read the story again and remember that God was doing something special through Jesus to help us know God.
No, remembering Jesus won't make all of the problems go away. But it will give you a place to stand while you deal with them. It will help you to get everything into perspective so that you can discover what is true and important and good and what isn't. It will help you to get in touch with God so that there will be a spiritual dimension to your life. It will give you something to believe in. And it will put you in touch with a source of enablement as you cope with the problems that arise in life.
The writer of 2 Peter reminded the people of the early church - and us - of something that must always have been a life--shaping memory for the Apostle Peter himself. He reminded us of Jesus - and of what God said about Jesus, "This is my Son, my Beloved; with whom I am well pleased" (2 Peter 1:17). "Listen to him!"
We share the memory that once, a long time ago, there was a young teacher who was totally committed to the loving purpose of God for the world. He came healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and making other loving responses to human need. He came announcing a new possibility that God offers to the whole creation and teaching people how to live in that new possibility. He came calling others to join him in a life that is open to the saving work of God and committed to the loving purpose of God. When the powerful people of his day tried to turn him aside from his purpose, he chose to endure a cruel death on a cross rather than to abandon God's loving work. But God would not let it end that way. God raised Jesus up out of death and caused him to be with God and to share with God in everything that God does. We do remember Jesus, don't we? In spite of all of the difficulties related to passing the memory down through the generations for 2,000 years, we have a pretty good idea of what his life was like. We share that memory.
We also share a belief that makes that memory meaningful and important. It is the belief that the great eternal God, who made the heavens and the earth, was purposefully doing something very special through the life of Jesus, something to help us know God, something to help us and all people to enter into the new possibility that God opens to us.
We share that memory and that belief, don't we? That is what it means to be a Christian.
Late in the first century, or early in the second, the early church went through a time when some things were happening that threatened the church's integrity and its future. The apostles, who had held the church together, had all died. The Bible had not yet been put together in the form in which we now have it. Things were happening that put stress upon the life of the church, and lots of people were falling into confusion.
At that time, an unknown church leader undertook to call the church back to the faith that was taught by Peter and Paul and the other apostles. He wrote a letter to the churches in the name of Peter to say to the churches the things that he knew Peter would want them to hear. That was a widely used and perfectly accepted thing to do in those days. The book from which we read our scripture lesson was the result.
The writer of 2 Peter was going to have some important things to say to everyone and some harsh things to say to a few. But first, he called them to remember Jesus. He focused their attention on one particular event in the life of Jesus that gave a basis for the Christian belief about Jesus. It was an event that Peter had shared. Do you remember the story of the transfiguration?
One day, Jesus took Peter and James and John with him up onto a high mountain to pray. While they were praying, the disciples saw Jesus change. His face and his garments glowed. And they saw Moses and Elijah, two of the great leaders of God's chosen people from the past, talking with Jesus. Then, while Peter was stammering and trying to think of the right thing to say, a bright cloud enveloped them and they heard the voice of God saying to them, "This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!" (Matthew 17:1--8). If the disciples still had any notion that Jesus was just another teacher or just another revolutionary leader, like others only better, the vision changed all of that. Because of the vision, the disciples knew that, in Jesus, something entirely new and different was happening - and that it was the doing of God.
The writer of 2 Peter reminded the early church of that memory because things were going on that made them need that recollection. Sometimes things go on in our world and in our lives that make us need that memory, too.
Sometimes things don't work out like we expect them to. Through most of the early years of the life of the church, the Christians had expected Jesus to come again soon, on a day of judgment and salvation, to bring his work to completion. They had organized a lot of their thinking and actions around that expectation. But years after the apostles had all died, Jesus had still not come back. Things were not working out as they had expected.
We have some similar experiences, don't we? Things don't always work out as we had expected. No one ever told us that, if we believe the gospel and live Christian lives, everything will work out well for us. But sometimes we let ourselves believe that. It seems to us that, if God is a loving God, good things ought to happen in our world. Good things do happen, but bad things happen, too, things like natural disasters, and acts of terrorism, and wars that cause enormous amounts of suffering. It seems to us that, if God is a loving God, he ought to be able to keep things like that from happening. Things don't always work out like we had expected them to.
And it seems to us that, if we do our best to live Christian lives and to treat others fairly and to raise our children in Christian homes, things ought to go well for us. And many things do go better for us than they might have if we had lived otherwise. But we soon find that a fickle economy can take away the job and the savings from a Christian as easily as they can from other people - perhaps more easily. Even though we do our best to bring our children up in the Christian faith, sometimes during adolescence they can still get into the wrong crowds and start using drugs and get swept away into a life that we don't want for them. Yes, and some of us have found that good Christians can get cancer or Alzheimer's disease just as other people can. Things don't always work out like we expect them to. Sometimes experiences like those can shake the foundations of our lives and make us ask questions about our faith.
In those times, we need to remember Jesus. We need to remember how he sought out the people who were distressed and hurting and how he reached out to them in love. And, we need to remember that it was God who was at work in the things that Jesus did and that God is still reaching out to those who are hurting.
The people who lived in those later days of the early church sometimes had to cope with confusion in their understanding of the Christian faith. By that time, all of the letters of Paul had been written and maybe one of the gospels, but they had not yet been put together in the form of a Bible as we know it and sound Christian doctrine had not yet been well defined. When the writer of 2 Peter spoke of the scriptures, he was talking about what we call the Old Testament. Even the most sincere Christians had differences of opinion. And there were some who were intentionally attacking the Christian faith. Some were misinterpreting Paul's teachings about Christian freedom to say that there is no moral law. Some were saying that, since judgment day had not come, there was no judgment. Some, under the influence of the "Epicurean" philosophers, were attacking the scriptures and calling them mere myths. They were not using the word "myth" like some of our modern theologians do. Some modern theologians use the word to describe a story or a tradition that is the bearer of eternal meaning. Those ancient critics simply meant that the scriptures were a bunch of fairy tales that someone had made up and that they were not true. That was causing a lot of the early Christians to question what they thought.
That happens to us today, too, doesn't it? There are a lot of different and sometimes conflicting opinions about important matters even among sincere Christians - and they are not always respectful of one another as they argue. We have seen theological differences divide families and churches and communities. People from other religions and people with no religion at all sometimes call important Christian beliefs and practices into question. As a defense against the harm that religious conflicts can do, our culture has developed a secular approach to life that virtually forbids any public discussion of religion and that indirectly suggests that there is something wrong with religion as a whole. In that kind of a situation, many people have become very confused about what to believe. Some have been led to give up on religious faith all together.
When we find ourselves in that kind of a situation, we need to remember Jesus again. The story of Jesus puts us in touch with the most profound aspects of the truth about God and puts them before us in a form that we can understand. It puts the truth about God before us in the form of the story of someone like ourselves, a man, Jesus of Nazareth. We believe that it was God who chose to be made known to us in that way.
Another sad thing happened in the early church during the time when 2 Peter was being written. Some who called themselves Christians were not living up to their faith. Some were just being lax in their practice of their religion, demonstrating that it really wasn't very important to them. Others were going along with some of the popular social practices of their day that involved idolatry and immorality. In fact, some of the supposedly sophisticated interpretations of the Christian faith that were emerging were just excuses for moral laxity. Christians need to be able to believe in one another as well as in God. When people saw professing Christians not living up to their faith, they sometimes experienced bitter and destructive disillusionment.
Unfortunately, we have had that experience, too, haven't we? Newspapers seem to take special delight in making headlines of the moral and ethical failures of high profile evangelists and church leaders. Those failures are deeply disappointing to people who need to believe in their church. It is also disappointing to see a church or a church--related institution get so caught up in the pursuit of institutional success that it forgets its primary function. Almost every one of us knows someone who talks loudly about his or her religion and is anxious to push it on you, but who really does not practice what he or she preaches. Disillusioned people are always eager to point their fingers at the hypocrisy of the religious. That is hard for us to deal with. We need something we can believe in, something with integrity that we can trust.
When we need something we can believe in, we need to reclaim our memory of Jesus. There is the story of someone like ourselves who gave up his life rather than give up the integrity of his faith. And God was doing something special through Jesus.
Lots of things can happen in our lives that can confuse us and bewilder us and cause us not to know how to go on. Lots of pressures and forces swirl around us like the currents of a rapid river that threaten to knock us off our feet and to sweep us away. There are no easy answers or simple solutions to all of these things.
But when we find ourselves up against things that confuse and threaten, we will do well to reclaim the memory that all Christians share, the memory that the writer of 2 Peter shared with the bewildered believers in his day, the memory of Jesus. No, this is not an invitation to be irresponsible and to stop thinking about the things that challenge us in life. It is not a promise that "remembering Jesus" will work like a magic word and make all of your problems go away. This is rather an invitation to remember that, at one time in history, God did something very special through a young teacher named Jesus.
It is not enough just to remember that there was a Jesus. We need to remember the story of Jesus, what he did, what he said, what happened concerning him. If, to be honest, you really don't know the story, or if it has been a long time since you read it, you would do well to read it again. Each of the first four books of the New Testament - Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John - tell the story. They are not hard to read or to understand and you can read one of them in just a few hours. Read the story again and remember that God was doing something special through Jesus to help us know God.
No, remembering Jesus won't make all of the problems go away. But it will give you a place to stand while you deal with them. It will help you to get everything into perspective so that you can discover what is true and important and good and what isn't. It will help you to get in touch with God so that there will be a spiritual dimension to your life. It will give you something to believe in. And it will put you in touch with a source of enablement as you cope with the problems that arise in life.
The writer of 2 Peter reminded the people of the early church - and us - of something that must always have been a life--shaping memory for the Apostle Peter himself. He reminded us of Jesus - and of what God said about Jesus, "This is my Son, my Beloved; with whom I am well pleased" (2 Peter 1:17). "Listen to him!"
