Scripture: Jeremiah 15:19-21; Matthew 16:21-28; Isaiah 53:4-5 Series: Identity
Concluding a three-week identity series, this sermon asks ‘Who am I in Christ?’ Pairing Jeremiah’s call to turn back with Jesus’s rebuke of Peter and command to take up the cross, Wilson uses physics vectors and Augustine’s curvatus in se to argue that the self-centered life is a lie to be destroyed. To save one’s soul is to lose it for Christ’s sake by standing upright and living for God and neighbor, the deserving and undeserving alike. The church exists so this outward-vectoring service can be done together, culminating in a call to concrete acts of service as a gift of God’s transforming grace.
Illustrations: band-of-brothers-epilogue, animal-house-epilogues, physics-vectors-forces, augustine-curvatus, basketball-lebron, food-pantry-service
September 3, 2023
Who am I in Christ?
Jeremiah 15:19-21
Matthew 16:21-28
Therefore thus says the Lord: If you turn back, I will take you back, and you shall stand before me. If you utter what is precious and not what is worthless, you shall serve as my mouth. It is they who will turn to you, not you who will turn to them. And I will make you to this people a fortified wall of bronze; they will fight against you, but they shall not prevail over you, for I am with you to save you and deliver you, says the Lord. I will deliver you out of the hand of the wicked and redeem you from the grasp of the ruthless. - Jeremiah 15:19-21
From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me, for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life? “For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done. Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom. - Matthew 16:21-28
I am not a big fan of sequels, but I love when movies tell us what happens after the movie. A where are they know clip. The HBO series Band Of Brothers about Easy Company from the 506th regiment of the 101st airborne during the D-Day invasion, shows the real men each of the characters was based on. It is heartwarming to see the men who fought so hard and were able to have their story told.
An earlier movie that does this, in a slightly different genre, is Animal House, from 1978. It shows how all the bad guys have horrible lives and all the good guys succeed, even to the point of John Belushi’s character, Bluto, becoming a Us Senator.
Movies are about conflict and when the conflict is resolved, we want to see the effects. Do they change? Who are they now?
For each of us, when we go through challenging times, it would be great to look forward and see who we will become. When Jesus meets us, he doesn’t leave us in the same place.
Over the past three weeks, each of the sermons has connected to each other in a series about identity. On August 20th, we talked about the question: who am I? How do we know ourselves? We spoke about how we can’t know ourselves just by how we feel or how we look in the mirror by, by what we do. And God gives us grace and strength to do great things and to be more than we think we are capable of. But it’s not just about this feeling. Then last week we talked about the question: who is Christ? In an ideal world, we start with Christ as our source, as the rock from which we are hewn, as the prophet Isaiah says. Christ is the example of humanity at its best, and Christ shows the possibility that each of us can live in this kind of way. Christ does this as well as being our savior, the one who redeems us.
Today, I want to finish this series on identity with this question, who am I in Christ? In some ways, the Christian faith is about getting to know Christ, but also about getting to know ourselves at our fullest. In that quest for knowledge, we see that we are incomplete apart from Jesus. Yet we are also incomplete apart from our neighbor. And this is really what I want to hone in on today.
Jeremiah
In our Old Testament reading, the prophet Jeremiah begins with this great call, therefore, thus says the Lord, if you turn back, I will take you back and you shall stand before me. To turn back, you have to realize that you’ve turned away. This is the first step to ever being found: you have to admit that you are lost. To ever be saved, you have to admit you need help. And yet the story of faith, the story of God, acting on your life does not end in you. It doesn’t. It’s not all about you. We are not the heroes in our own movie, whether it be like Band of Brothers or Animal House, our life is not like that.
What I remember most from High school physics was about vectors in physics and the directionality of forces. How we understand the power of forces in certain directions, centrifugal and centripetal forces, for instance. Also how to actually calculate it and not just throw it out there: how forces come in all sorts of directions. And even at that point, when I was 18 and taking AP physics, I remember thinking about how so much of life consists of these vectors: we’re never stagnant. Even when we feel stagnant, we’re not. We’re constantly moving in one direction or the other. Sometimes vertically. Sometimes horizontally. Always moving. And forces on our lives and on our hearts are rarely ever just straight lines. They come from all directions. They affect us in all directions. This language of physics connected to me to theology and talk about God once I started reading St. Augustine and other fathers of the early church. St. Augustine would talk about our life before Christ as if our heart was curved inward or curvatus. That is, our desires, our thoughts, our will, everything is turned towards itself. It’s this constant centripetal force going in and in and in and in. By this view, we are the center of the story. We are the center of the movie. We are the center of the novel. Everyone around us is a supporting character for our story. When we meet someone, they matter as much as they affect our story. This is life before Christ. What Christ does on our life is to take us from Curvatus to upright orrectitudo. We go from turning inward to standing upright, seeing the world as it is, and we are no longer the center of our story because that centrality was a lite. The idea that the world revolves around us is a lie that deserves to be destroyed. But more than just quashing the lie, God has included us in the greatest of stories. Who are we in Christ? We are a part of the inbreaking new creation of the world. We are a part of the world being made new. In the words of Jeremiah, If we turn back, Christ will take us. We have many reasons to turn back. Matthew gives us a few of them.
Matthew
This is just a continuation of the reading from last week where, where Peter said to Jesus, you are the Messiah. And, Jesus said, “Peter, you are the rock upon which I will build my church, my ecclesia, my assembly of people, the body of Christ.” And yet right after Jesus starts preaching about the suffering that’s going to come and how he’s going to Jerusalem, Peter doesn’t like it. Peter sees him as the Messiah, but he doesn’t want the Messiah to suffer. That’s when Jesus says, Get behind me Satan. Satan is the accuser; the one contrary to the will of God. Jesus isn’t calling Peter Satan or Satanic. Jesus is saying that Peter is currently acting contrary to the will of God if he is not able to conceive of the Messiah suffering. Isaiah speaks often of what will happen to the Messiah
Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases, yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.
Peter is setting his mind on human things and not divine things. He is limited in how he sees. He is not standing upright in that moment. A few moments ago, he was standing upright. He could see Jesus for who he was. And then he lost it. I think that happens to a lot of us. Sometimes, we’re standing upright and we see Jesus for who he really is, and we are thankful and we are grateful, and we praise God. And then life happens. It can be easy to fall into the rut of thinking that the avoidance of suffering is the most important goal in life. This is what Peter was going for when he told Jesus, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” Jesus has harsh words about this. Peter was missing the point and we miss the point when we act in this way, too. The good news of Jesus Christ is not just on the surface, but goes all the way down. Jesus says, if any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves, take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it. And those who lose their life, for my sake, will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?
The word translated here as life, psyche, is often translated as Soul. It is the root of the word psychology. Often life and soul are interchangeable. It’s not a bad translation. The stakes of the line deal with our essence, our very being.
For those who want to save their soul will lose it. And those who lose their soul, from my sake, will find it. This seems like a contradiction. What do you mean if I want to save it, I should lose it? What Jesus is talking about is two ways of living: there’s living in Christ and living for ourselves. If we want to live, we want to live in Christ. And that means standing upright, which means letting go of pride of place of ourselves in our stories. Because what will it profit if you gain the whole world, but lose your soul, is it worth it? Even if it’s what everyone around you tells you to do. When we encounter the risen Lord, we hear the call to return, to turn back our lives, to turn our lives around, to stand upright, and then to live in a different way. In that different way, we live not for ourselves, but for God and our neighbor.
It is a both/and. There is no living for God in which you don’t live for your neighbor. And you can’t pick and choose which neighbor to love. This is why the way of Jesus is narrow. The world tells us to love the likable people, the deserving people. Jesus calls us to love our neighbor, the deserving and the undeserving.
It may seem hard or even impossible. You think about all the unlikable people Jesus wants you to love. Surely not that person, Jesus?
We can do it, but we’ve gotta start right where we are.
It’s like you don’t wake up one day, decide you’re gonna be good at basketball, and then become disappointed when you can’t play like LeBron James. You start where you are, but you gotta keep moving. The vector has gotta keep going outward. We need to go from Centripetal force to centrifugal force. And in that, we see who we are in Christ when the vector keeps moving outward, when our life and our soul is not for ourselves, but for others. And as we do that, we encounter God again and again. We encounter God as love, and we are healed and redeemed and forgiven and strengthened, and we are offered this honor of doing it together. And that’s why the church exists, so that we can do these things together, so that we can receive the grace of mercy and forgiveness and salvation, and then act together to be who we were created to be in Christ and serve our neighbors, to bear our cross together, to stand upright together, to see as God sees, to have our heart cry as God’s heart cries, let us do these things together.
Our days our full and our evenings are short. Few of us are over flowing with free time. We have teams for volunteers around the church starting up. We have continual volunteer opportunities of service with the food pantry, including at 5:30pm for clean up.
I am looking to have other chances during the week and weekend for us to serve our neighbors. We go from the biblical to the theological to the practical. It was one thing to nod and say, yes preacher. It is another thing to sign up and show up and receive the grace God offers us in participating in God’s kingdom building here. Service is not a chore but a gift. Service is not a burden but an opportunity. It is not about making ourselves feel good but being continually made new through God’s transformative Grace as we vector ourselves outwards. This is who we are in Christ.
My brothers and sisters, let us be confident in the grace God has given us. Let us turn back, remembering that Christ will receive us and will stand with us. Let us stand upright, offer ourselves to God, and offer ourselves to our neighbors.
Let us pray,
Heavenly Father, thank you for the blessings of grace which saves us. Thank you for life of Jesus which shows us how to live. And thank you for your presence with us that stands us upright and reveals the reality of the world and your love for the world, even in brokenness. Inspire us to move beyond what is comfortable into a life of love.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.