Daily Archives: September 24, 2026

Vineyards of Generosity: A Sermon for Proper 20A, September 20, 2026

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I want you to picture in your mind a vineyard. Do you evoke memories of visits to vineyards in France or Italy, or maybe Napa Valley? Can you see the rolling hills, the vines, the ripe grapes, perhaps even workers harvesting. Perhaps it’s a memory of one of those movies that have been popular in recent years, appealing to nostalgia, or authenticity—the scene of an extended family sitting at a table groaning with food; and bottles of wine. Corrie and I recently watched Eva Longoria’s series on French cuisine that featured many such scenes in Burgundy, Alsace, and elsewhere.

In the biblical tradition, the vineyard is a symbol of God’s bounty and goodness. The bounty of the vineyard becomes wine that gladdens the heart. And God is the one who tends the vines and presides over the bountiful feast.

But such images of joyous celebration and bucolic relaxation belie the backbreaking labor that is required to tend the vines and harvest the grapes and the narrow margins with which most vineyards operate. Earlier this summer, I read a story in the New York Times about Napa Valley vineyard owners who are burning their vines because of the glut on the market, caused in some part by our current trade wars.

In the Palestine of Jesus’ day, there was also an economic transformation taking place, as small landholders were losing their land to the consolidation of agricultural production of vineyards, wheat, and olive groves. It’s likely that among the day laborers mentioned in today’s parable were just such people who had lost their land and livelihood and were forced to seek work everyday.

The parable we just heard is often interpreted allegorically—with the landowner standing in for God. On this view, the laborers who were hired at the beginning of the day are usually understood to be Jews, and those who come into the vineyard in the course of the day are the Gentiles who receive the gift of God’s grace. That the earliest workers grumble when they find out they are paid the same amount as those who worked only an hour, feeds into traditional anti-semitic tropes. 

As I’ve often said, parables are meant to unsettle us, to challenge us to see the world in a new way, from a new perspective. This one is no different. In these little stories, we should look for strange behavior, for actions that don’t make sense and explore how those actions and behaviors might challenge our assumptions about the world and God.

There’s plenty of strange behavior in this story. The landowner, for example. He begins the day just the way that landowners and farmers have begun the day for thousands of years, contracting with workers to see that the harvest is brought in. We might assume that he hired all the help he needed the first time he went into the market square. And when he hired them, he and the workers bargained on the pay they would receive. Presumably all were satisfied.

It’s now the landowner begins to act strangely. He comes back into the marketplace throughout the day (One might think that he would want to stay back and oversee the harvest). And throughout the day, he continues to hire workers. What’s his motive for this? Does he really need the additional help or is this his way of helping men who lost out on the opportunity for a full day’s wage? But as the story progresses, something else rather interesting happens. While he clearly stated to the first groups that he would pay them a day’s wage, when it came to the last ones, the ones who worked for just an hour, there was no mention of the pay they would receive. It’s almost as if he ordered them to go, and that they had no idea, no reason to know what pay they might expect. In this situation they lacked power and rights.

The odd behavior continues at the end of the day when the landowner passes out the laborers’ pay. Instead of settling up with those who had been working all day, he starts with the ones who came last. And he pays them a full day’s wage! We can all imagine the surprise and joy we would feel if we were treated that way. We can also imagine the anger and frustration we would feel if we were the ones who worked all day and received the agreed-upon wage, rather than much more. If they received a day’s wage for one hour’s work, it’s only fair that we receive nine times that amount for our nine hours of work.

There’s another way the landowner’s behavior is strange and inexplicable. This is no rational way for an employer to operate. He had better hope they finished the harvest that day, because if he goes out the next morning to hire workers to finish up, do you think anyone would agree to work for him? No, they would all wait, hang out all day, then show up in the market place at the last minute, in hopes of getting a day’s wage for an hour’s work. And all of the other landowners would be angry as well, because they could expect similar behavior from the pool of day laborers.

So, lots of questions… But the fundamental one is this: how does this parable explain or shed light on the reign of God? Matthew introduces this story with Jesus saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like …” That intro prompts us to allegorize it as a story about God offering grace and salvation. But how might have Jesus’ listeners heard this story? We can assume that many of them knew all too well the rigors and challenges of life as a day laborer? How would they have judged the landowner’s behavior? Would they have commiserated with those who were jealous at the latecomers? Would they remember days they had spent in the hot sun, working themselves to the bone, all for a meager sum that was enough for one person to live on, but not enough to provide for a whole family? 

In negotiating with and paying the first set of laborers a denarius, the landowner was acting justly—he paid the agreed-upon wage. In paying those who came later the same amount, he was acting with generosity. 

I find the different settings of the parable instructive. On the one hand, there’s the marketplace where the landowner conducts his business, hires his workers. On the other hand there is the vineyard, where the abundance of God’s grace is on display. The grapes that are being harvested will be turned into wine, a symbol of God’s love and extravagance. 

In the parable, we see the values of the market place being subverted by the values of God’s vineyard. As the day progresses, best practices in business give way to something else, as the landowner orders the laborers into the vineyard without first establishing their pay. When he does pay, everyone is treated equally, it’s not equal pay for equal work; it’s equal pay for each person.

It’s a bit like the story from the Hebrew Bible we heard—God’s gift of manna in the wilderness. God provided food for the Israelites, just enough for each person per day. There was abundance, but no hoarding because the manna would spoil.

We hear a great deal about economic anxiety today, about people worrying about whether they will have a secure future or whether their children will live as comfortably as they do. Along with that, there is a sense that some people receive benefits they don’t deserve, that they haven’t earned. We’re locked in competition with others, and so often our own status, our own sense of self is tied up in how much we make, what we own. It’s a dog eat dog world, and we want to come out on top. 

This parable points to a very different reality. In the vineyard, it doesn’t matter how hard you worked, when you started, where you came from. There’s enough to go around. It’s a world of abundance and generosity, not a world of scarcity and competition. Can we imagine such a world where greed and competition, and ambition are replaced by generosity? Can we imagine a world where the losers and the outcast, those discarded by society, are of great value to God, worthy to live each day with dignity? Can we imagine a world, can we help to bring into being a world where God’s generosity is greeted with gratitude and not jealousy? 

A Sermon for Proper 19A, September 13, 2026

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The irony struck me as I began work on my sermon for today. As I’ve mentioned before, one of the things I do each week as I began thinking about my sermon is to go back through my files and read other sermons I have preached on these propers. Looming over each of the five sermons I’ve preached on these texts over the years is the memory of September 11, 2001, the twenty-fifth anniversary of which we commemorated two days ago. 

The events of that day and the days, weeks, and months that followed brought out the best and the worst in human nature and American culture. There was solidarity and compassion but there was also anger, hatred, and violent retribution. The war on terror brought with it an erosion of civil liberties, islamophobia, torture, and countless lives lost. Like so many other eras in American history, we have not had an honest reckoning with the past nor are we able, apparently, to learn from those errors. 

To hear Jesus speaking about forgiveness on this occasion is challenging indeed. But before we get to the gospel, the story from Exodus offers another perspective on the response to trauma and violence.

Our reading from Exodus has brought us to the Red Sea. The Israelites are fleeing Egypt and are caught between the army chasing them and the sea in front of them. A miracle brings them across the sea and destroys their enemy. In verses not included in today’s reading, we’re told that as they watch the destruction, the Israelites sing praises to their God:

“Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously, horse and rider has he thrown in to the sea.”

                                                                                                           Sentiment like this may be difficult to express, to rejoice in the destruction of one’s enemies; it is also a natural, human response to such an event. Yet, we sense that responses like this, no matter how natural, do not seem appropriate for Christians. An old rabbinic story, going back nearly two thousand years, offers another perspective on the Israelites’ celebration at the destruction of the Egyptian army. It goes like this:

“Having reached safety on the other side, and seeing the Egyptians perishing in the sea, the Israelites began to sing and dance.

“In heaven, the angels saw the Israelites singing and dancing, and they too began to sing and dance. But God rebuked them: ‘Those Egyptians perishing in the sea are my people also, and you want to sing and dance?'”

To celebrate a victory is one thing, whether that victory is on the battlefield or the playing field; to ask for, or offer forgiveness to someone who has harmed us, or whom we have harmed is quite another.

The parable we read in today’s gospel challenges us to think about forgiveness. It is set in the context of Peter’s question to Jesus, How often should I forgive someone who has wronged me? Jesus’ answer to Peter is over-the-top. Jesus says, “As many as 7  times 70—490 times. 

In its own way, this saying has also caused harm and trauma. It is one thing to ask forgiveness of someone I’ve wronged; it’s quite another to demand that an injured party forgive the perpetrator when there has been no repentance. I wonder how many times victims of sexual abuse or violence have been expected to forgive their abuser based on these verses. 

And then there’s what used to be the public ritual of the public figure caught in some wrongdoing who makes a grand show of confessing their sin and expecting to be reinstated to the public’s good graces. Today, in our coarsened society, such empty rituals are no longer common. It seems like public figures, be they celebrities, politicians, or athletes, can do what they want with impunity.

Still, we expect or desire offers of forgiveness in our personal relationships, when we have hurt a loved one with our words or actions, or when we have been hurt by someone. So Jesus’ words stand as a challenge to us: how often should we forgive one who’s behavior has harmed us once, or repeatedly? What might Jesus mean by these words?

Perhaps the parable is meant to make Jesus’ meaning clear, I don’t think it does. We are given the story of a rich man who takes pity on someone who owes him 1000 talents. The slave goes off and demands the repayment of 100 talent debt from someone else; when the debt isn’t repaid, he has him thrown in prison. Learning of that action, the king, denounces and imprisons the first slave.

The math: a talent was roughly 130 lb a measure used of gold and silver; one estimate is that it equaled about 15 yrs of wages for the typical worker; so the king, being owed 10000 talents, is owed 150,000 years of wages. A denarius was a coin worth about a day’s wages; the slave is owed 100 denarii, so that’s quite a bit of money as well.

The parable leaves us with questions, even though its meaning is quite clear. We should forgive those who owe us, just as God forgives us. But the questions—why does the king not forgive the slave a second time? After all, Jesus has told Peter to forgive not seven but seventy seven times. The parable invites us to think of forgiveness as a calculus—there exists, somewhere a finite number of times, beyond which it is not necessary to forgive. But that’s precisely the wrong way of thinking about things.

To think about forgiveness as a debt suggests that we understand it in terms we comprehend—mathematics or economics, and given all the talk of debt in our culture, we are sorely tempted to go down that route. That’s overlooking something that is crucial in understanding Peter’s question: “How often should I forgive my brother? For that question implies there is relationship between the one forgiving and the one owed. Including that in the equation changes everything. 

We ask God to forgive us and we experience God’s forgiveness, rich, unbounded, unmerited. It is that relationship and that experience that should shape our own forgiveness. That is the point both of Jesus’ answer to Peter and the parable itself.

I have lived long enough and served as a pastor long enough to know that pain and anger from hurt can last a very long time. We process things quite differently; in different ways and at different speeds. Even the same hurt inflicted on two different people can linger in very different ways in those who have been affected. Forgiving others may be difficult, even, at times, impossible. Yet our God, who has forgiven us so deeply and so completely, invites us, not only to be forgiven, but to forgive in the same way, richly, unboundedly, and totally. Thanks be to God!

Trauma, Memory, and God’s Grace: A Sermon for Proper18A, September 6, 2026

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Christians are a people of memory. We are a community called together by memory; called to remember. Our central act of worship is a memorial and a re-enactment; but more than that we enter into the story itself as we remember God’s saving acts and participate in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

But as we all know, memory is a fickle thing. In our own lives, there are stories we’ve told ourselves, stories about us others have told us that might not bear up to close scrutiny and as we age, some of those stories fade into mist or even oblivion. On a personal level, we may repress memories of embarrassing moments or traumas we’ve experienced, but especially in the case of trauma, it can continue to shape us subconsciously, and even, as we are learning, for generations to come.

We see that same dynamic played out in scripture, as the authors and editors tell the story they want preserved. At the same time, they often reveal alternative or counter-stories that raise questions about their perspective. Nowhere is this more true than in the story from Hebrew Scripture we just heard; God’s instructions to Moses and the Hebrews on how to prepare for Passover. This event may be the key story in all of Hebrew Scripture—It describes God’s nature as the Hebrews and then Jews experienced God. It also defines the Hebrews and then the Jews as God’s people.

The story of Passover describes God’s liberation of the Hebrew people from bondage. It’s the story that Jews continue to tell and re-enact each year both because it celebrates God’s salvation of God’s chosen people and because it identifies contemporaries Jews as part of that larger story, part of God’s salvation history.

Passover is a celebration of Israel’s liberation by God; but it is set in the context of a larger story. We’ve heard parts of that story over the last few weeks—of Moses’ birth and rescue by Pharaoh’s daughter, the burning bush and God’s call to him. Between that event and today’s readings unfold the familiar story of the plagues. The instructions for the Passover come in the midst of the tenth plague—Yahweh’s killing of the first-born of Egypt, horrendous suffering. 

One might expect that the mood of Passover is joyous, but in the verses that were read, there is a stress on Yahweh’s judgment as well as on liberation. The joy of liberation is tempered by the reality that liberation came at a horrific price. We haven’t heard these weeks the stories of all the other plagues. But this last one, the killing of the firstborn of all Egyptian families, and their livestock, was the culmination of unimaginable violence and suffering. That violence would continue throughout the story—the destruction of the Egyptian army at the Red Sea, and later during the conquest of Canaan, as God demanded that the Hebrews kill everyone whom they encountered. But that will come later.

Back to the story of the Passover. There’s another important element, here. Liberation too is not self-evident. The command to eat while dressed for a journey and to eat hurriedly gives yet another note of urgency. The Hebrews may be free, but their enemies were pursuing them. 

The raw emotion and violence of the Passover narrative might tempt us to try to smooth its rough edges, to re-interpret it so as to better fit our world view. That would be a mistake. The Passover is the central ritual event in Judaism; its message and its re-enactment have played the leading role in how Jews understand themselves. The instructions to eat hurriedly, dressed as for a journey, put contemporary Jews back into the story of the flight from Egypt. Today’s Jews become Hebrews fleeing Pharaoh as they eat their lamb, bitter herbs, and unleavened bread.

Indeed, Passover is so important in the life of Judaism that early Christians had to reinterpret Passover as they developed their own rituals and theology. Thus, in the Gospel of John, Jesus is crucified as the Passover lamb; in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the last supper Jesus shared with his disciples was the Passover meal, and thus our own Eucharist and our Christology borrow heavily from Passover imagery.

But there is a deep problem here. One the one hand, we have the image of a God, who hears the suffering of God’s people, and intervenes on their behalf. God frees them from their slavery in Egypt and promises that they will possess a fertile land. On the other hand, in the course of gaining their freedom, God wreaks vengeance on the Egyptians. 

The story of the plagues, read carefully raises profound questions about the nature of God and God’s willingness to destroy human and animal life. Indeed, it is not at clear in the story that either Pharaoh or the Egyptians have any power to avoid the horrible fates that awaited them. They certainly were not given a choice to avoid the final plague. At one point, God told Moses that he was bringing this last plague, the killing of the first-born on Egypt so that “my wonders may be multiplied.” 

There’s even today’s psalm which praises God’s vengeance against Israel’s enemies and concludes that all of it is “glory for God’s chosen people.”

It is an image of God with which we should be uncomfortable—hearing this lesson with its promise of the destruction of all the first-born of Egypt, not just humans mind you, but even cattle, that language should make us squirm in our pews. 

We might be tempted, many of us have been, to put that language and imagery down to the Angry God of the Old Testament, and contrast it with the loving God of the new. That is one of the oldest heresies on the books, and it’s flat out misinterpreting both the Old Testament and the New. There’s plenty of wrath and judgment in the New Testament’s depiction of God, and plenty of love and mercy in the Old Testament’s—we see that in today’s reading from Romans, in which Paul says twice that “love is the fulfilling of the law.” 

We look at such events and seek explanations. The size of the hurricanes and fires may in part be attributed to climate change, but the reality of natural disasters, earthquakes, hurricanes, and wildfires cause great damage and cost lives. We want to know why. And sometimes, we want to attribute such events to divine agency; that they are God’s judgment on us, or on the inhabitants of those places where they are occurring. But such attempts are misguided—as Jesus says in Matthew, “the rain falls on the just and the unjust.” 

Instead, we should remember another important lesson from our reading of Exodus—God hears and responds to the cries of those who suffer. In the Christian tradition, we see God in Jesus Christ, walking with us, suffering, and dying on the cross. It’s a symbol of God’s presence in the midst of all of the evil and suffering in the world. We should look for signs of God’s presence, God’s love and grace, wherever people suffer, in floods and hurricanes, in the rubble of bombed cities.

As God’s people, we are also called to hear the cries of those who suffer—from hurricanes and earthquakes, yes, but also the cries of the hungry and homeless, the fearful and the hurting. More than that, we are called to respond to those cries, to work to end their pain, to bring justice and liberation to the oppressed, the enslaved, the incarcerated. 

And to bring us full circle, we are called by God, as a people and community of memory, to tell honest stories, about ourselves and about God. Yes, we should celebrate the liberation we have experienced; we should remember and give thanks for the blessings God has given us, but we should also remember and mourn the price that was paid for that liberation and those blessings—the people who suffered because of them, the people who still suffer, and we should, when necessary, repent.

Wildflowers and Burning Bushes: A Sermon for Proper 17A, August 30, 2026/

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A few weeks ago, I was out on a bike ride on the Capital City Trail, between Dunn’s Marsh and Lake Farm Park. It’s a beautiful stretch of the trail, rolling terrain, some wooded areas and a lot of prairie. I love riding through the prairies in the summer—the scenery is a riot of color with purple coneflower, wild sunflowers, and rudbechia dominating the landscape. As I was riding along, I saw from the corner of my eye a flower I didn’t recognize, but it took me a second to process it and by then I was a few yards further down the trail and reluctant to turn back. 

Later, as I made my way back home the same way, I kept my eyes peeled for the same flower and when I saw it, I stopped took a photo, and identified it with my camera. It was prairie blazing star, a purple-spiked flower. There was just a small cluster of them in one spot just a few feet from the trail. I have biked the same trail several times since then, and I haven’t seen that flower again. Perhaps I haven’t looked for it, or I was too focused on other things, deep in thought, to notice it. 

The story of Moses’ encounter with God at the burning bush is one of the foundational stories of biblical tradition—the story of God’s self-revelation to Moses and God’s call to Moses. But it starts in such an ordinary, mundane way. Moses was going about his business, tending his father-in-law’s sheep.

A lot has happened since we encountered Moses as a little baby, rescued by Pharaoh’s daughter. He grew up at court, with all the privileges entailed, and when he was a young man out and about, he encountered a slave driver whipping a Hebrew worker, got angry and killed him. So he had to flee, and ended up here, in Midian, where he encountered Jethro and married his daughter.

I can imagine him there with a flock of sheep, no one to talk to, lost in his thoughts. He might have been wondering how he had gotten here, after living at Pharaoh’s court; he might have been wondering how his life might have turned out if he hadn’t done that one bad thing. He might have been wondering how his life would turn out now. He might have been feeling just a little bit sorry for himself. One boring day after another, watching a flock of sheep as they grazed.

And as he’s going about his business, on a day like any other day, he has an encounter with God. He sees a burning bush; it’s strange because the fire doesn’t seem to destroy the bush but it keeps burning. So he goes to investigate. On one level, this encounter with the divine is a straightforward theophany, the scholarly term used for such experiences of the holy. There’s a strange event—the burning bush; the divine address to a human, and the human’s response of fear and humility. Moses took off his sandals and hid his face. There’s also the divine self-revelation. I am the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In Hebrew scripture, such theophanies often include a call or commission, as this one does: God tells Moses to go back to Egypt and lead God’s people out, to this place, to worship God.

But Moses isn’t having it. As I’ve said before, these stories from Genesis and Exodus depict many of the leading characters in complex ways. They aren’t all good. That’s certainly the case with Moses, even from what little we know so far. After all, he did kill that Egyptian, so at the very least, he’s probably hotheaded, rash. But now we see another side of him. He’s not going to accept the task God has set out for him without some discussion or debate. He pushes back, saying to God, “That’s all well and good, God, but who should I tell them has sent me?”

Now, in Hebrew scripture, names are incredibly important. They aren’t random but reveal something essential about the person’s identity. Jacob, which was said to mean “heel” for example, was called that because he was grasping the heel of his brother when they came out of the womb. Later, he would be renamed Israel after wrestling with the angel, which was said to mean “he strives with God.” 

So when Moses asks for God’s name, he is asking to know who God is, but knowing names also gave one some power over the one named. But God’s answer eludes Moses’ trap, and eludes our efforts to understand and control God as well. On one level, God’s response, “I am who I am” is the perfect comeback. It could mean, “Moses, don’t try to control me.” But the Hebrew could be translated in other ways, most significantly, in the future tense—“I will be who I will be.” 

It doesn’t just prevent Moses from defining or confining God into categories he’s comfortable with. It’s declaring to Moses that if he wants to know who God is, he will have to spend time with God; he will have to experience God, walk with God. And over the course of his long life, Moses would do just that. 

But it wasn’t just Moses. The same was true of other biblical figures—Abraham who God called out from his home. It was true of Jacob, who after wrestling with God was renamed Israel. 

And it is true of people in the New Testament, not least the disciples, who Jesus called to follow him. We see that with Peter, who made his great confession of faith, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” And yet a few verses later, when he hears Jesus speaking about what will happen to him in Jerusalem, Peter rebukes him, refuses to believe that Jesus might suffer and die—and in response, Jesus calls him Satan. He, and the other disciples would learn what Jesus meant by his prediction only by following him. They would learn, only by following him, who Jesus was and what it meant to follow him, to take up their crosses.

We often think we need to figure everything out, to know what we believe, know who God is. But as I’ve said before, sometimes, the questions we ask are more important, more revealing of ourselves and of God. Scholars have pondered for centuries just what God’s answer to Moses means. Those few words have opened up infinite speculation and questions that would have remained unspoken if Moses hadn’t asked his question.

Moses asked God a question. Do you have questions about God? Any questions about or for God that you dare to ask? 

Asking these questions, actually saying them out loud, opens us up to the possibility of deeper relationship with God. The God we encounter as we ask the questions is a more expansive, more exciting, more challenging God.

In addition to God’s answer to Moses, we learn something else about God in this reading. It’s something very important but often overlooked. God hears the cries of those who suffer. God responds to the oppressed. 

In addition to Moses’ question, there’s another question that emerges from today’s readings. God called Moses to lead God’s people out of bondage. Jesus called his disciples to take up their crosses and follow him. Relationship with God, relationship with Jesus Christ is not just about being or knowing, it is also about being called. And so the second question we are posed today is, “Where is God calling us?” Our inclination may be, given what Moses did next, given what the disciples ended up doing, that being called by God means big things—becoming a prophet, a saint, a hero of the faith. But close reading of scripture reveals something else, that God uses ordinary people, like you and me, and that God often calls us in very small, ordinary ways. So where is God calling you? Sometimes, that call from God may come in a spectacular event, like a burning bush; but sometimes it may be so small and quiet that we might be prone to miss it if we aren’t paying attention—like not seeing a prairie blazing star as we’re riding by.

Finally, remember that “God will be who God will be.” Among all the other things this means is that our deeper knowing of God, our deeper relationship with God, lies in the future, with all of its possibility and uncertainty. God is calling us all to new things, new adventures, and as we go, we will learn more deeply who God is and experience more deeply God’s love and grace. 

Who do you say that he is? A Sermon for Proper 16A, August 23, 2026

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August 23, 2026

When I read today’s first lesson earlier this week, I couldn’t help but think how my reading of it was affected by our current context. A capricious, ruthless, fearful ruler commanding the separation of families. The suffering it must have caused, not just the slave labor, but then the demand that male children be killed. And the resistance. The different ways in which powerless women refused to submit to the yoke of oppression—with lies and obfuscation, by hiding and concealing. Another interesting fact, the only characters named in the story were the midwives: Shiphrah and Puah; and then, at the end of the story, Moses. No one else is given a name, not his mother or sister; not Pharaoh or Pharaoh’s daughter, but only the two midwives and the baby saved from murder. 

Empire looms over the gospel story as it does over the Exodus story. I’ve mentioned before that geography is important to the gospel writers. Each of them use geographical details in slightly different ways, but paying attention to where events are said to take place, paying attention to Jesus’ itinerary, helps elucidate larger themes in the gospels’ portrayal of Jesus.

In today’s gospel reading we are in the region of Caesarea Philippi. He’s been traveling a great deal in these chapters. A couple of weeks ago, he was in Galilee, and as we saw, he and his disciples crossed over the Sea of Galilee. Then, last week, in the reading from chapter 15, Jesus went from there far to the northwest, to the region of Tyre and Sidon, along the Mediterranean coast. After that, Matthew tells us, he returned to the shore of the Sea of Galilee. 

Now, he and his disciples are in or near Caesarea Philippi. That’s far to the north on the border of the province of Syria, in a region controlled by Philipp, Herod the Great’s son. Caesarea was a city that Augustus had given to Herod and Herod had rebuilt. Herod had built a marble temple dedicated to Augustus. When Philipp succeeded his father, he continued the building spree and renamed the city Caesarea Philippi, in honor of his imperial patron and himself. Like all such cities in the Roman Empire, it was a projection of Roman power and culture. It was both symbol of that power and a central node of power.

It was here that Jesus asked these two questions—“Who do people say that I am? Who do you say that I am? Those of us who are familiar with the story, familiar with the Christian tradition, know a little bit of how this story has been interpreted in the history of Christianity. It is a founding text for notions of papal supremacy, and the power of the institutional church. “On this rock, I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.” As you probably know, one of the most common symbols of the papacy are the papal tiara above two crossed keys. 

But I’m not interested in that tradition of interpretation. Rather, I want to focus on the power and significance of those two questions, and I want to imagine, if you can, Jesus asking those questions today, on Madison’s Capitol Square, , or in the halls of the US Capitol, or the White House. Jesus asked his questions in the shadow of empire, with the presence of Roman military and cultural power dominating the landscape and no doubt the minds and lives of the residents.

Who do people say that I am? 

That’s the easy question to answer. The disciples had no problem offering answers—John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, one of the prophets. What answers would you give to that question today?

“Who do you say that I am?”

That’s the hard one and I can imagine the disciples looking away, looking down at their sandals, trying to avoid Jesus’ searching gaze. Awkward silence, until Peter blurted his response,, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” And I can see the other disciples rolling their eyes as Peter responded, thinking to themselves, “There he goes again. Why doesn’t he just shut up?”

But Peter’s answer was not because he had studied harder than the other disciples, that he had memorized everything Jesus had said. Peter’s answer came not from himself but from God. And even he didn’t know what his answer meant. A few verses later, after protesting in response to Jesus’ prediction of his arrest, execution, and resurrection, Jesus would call Peter, “Satan.” And as we know, Peter would deny Jesus at the moment it mattered most. 

Still, now, he made the confession, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.”

We live in perilous times for Christianity. It’s not just the rise in the numbers of those who claim no religious affiliation. There’s the close identification of evangelical Christianity with right-wing political views, the conflation of American Christianity with American nationalism and of course, white supremacy and racism. 

We might think that the questions Jesus asks here are primarily doctrinal—about his nature and identity with God. You might have thought, as I gave you silence a few minutes, “Now what does the Nicene Creed say?” 

You might think that Jesus wants an answer full of doctrinal statements. But I don’t think that’s the case. Jesus asked the question of his closest friends and companions, people who had walked with him across Galilee, to the Mediterranean, and now to the far north. They had listened to him, even when they didn’t always understand what he meant; they had seen him heal the sick, cast out demons, feed thousands. They had stuck with him even after they heard of John the Baptist’s death, and begun to imagine that a similar fate might await their leader as well.

They might not have been able to say the words—even Peter needed God’s help to say them, but deep inside, I think they probably were sensing something of who Jesus was, because they were getting to know him. 

I don’t think the point is that we get the answer right. After all, Peter didn’t really understand what the words he was saying meant. I think the point is the conversation—hearing Jesus’ questions, taking them seriously, wrestling with them, and in that response, opening ourselves to him and to his love. 

Our American culture, American Christianity, have named Jesus but I don’t think those of us who experience and know Jesus in ways different than that, who see in him someone who welcomes the stranger, feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, loves his enemy, can simply argue for an alternative definition, blurt out a different response to the question. We have to show in our lives, and in our community who Jesus is.

When Jesus asks us, “Who do you say that I am?” he does not want an answer in word or doctrine. He is asking us to speak from our hearts; he is asking to see us put our answer into action, not words. 

Who do you say that I am? That may be the most urgent question facing us today in the midst of all of our political turmoil. Can we confess, and express a Jesus who offers hope to those in despair, who breaks down the barriers that divide us, who loves everyone, without exception, and whose love casts out our fear?