June 20, 2004
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco’s new 9:30 Worship Service
Before I play tennis, I need to stretch. My leg muscles are normally tightly in their rightful places but if I want them to help me reach for that passing shot or to poach the net for that drop shot, I will need to have those leg muscles flexible and nimble to move my body in order to get to those balls. Stretching is what we need to do to go beyond what our muscles normally would do.
Our normal tendency is to sit and rest those muscles. We rather not stretch and instead sit to watch TV and eat Maui potato chips! Our natural tendency is to not push ourselves beyond what we normally do.
Today, for the first time in the history of our church, we are having a worship service in this recreation center. We didn’t have to do this when we have a sanctuary all wired up and pews all in their right places to hold worship. It would have been the natural tendency to just live within the limitations that we have. But after much prayer and planning, dreaming and organizing, moving equipment and mobilizing people, we have stretched our church over to the recreation center! The sidewalk in front of our church has just been added with 39 more squares. Instead of sweeping only in front of our church on Sunday morning, we now need to sweep more sidewalks. Inasmuch that I stretch to play better tennis, we have stretched our vision of a new worship service in order to give praise to God.
Stretching for Answers
On this first worship service that we hope will be the beginning of a new worshiping congregation at FCBC; we need to begin with why we are here. We are here to know Jesus.
Today’s Gospel lesson from Luke speaks about the real identity of Jesus. The crowds were stretching for answers so they came up with three possibilities. Earlier in this chapter, Herod thought Jesus was John the Baptist raised from the dead. This is not a surprising answer because Jesus had been baptized by John, and both were apocalyptic prophets, who spoke of the coming kingdom of God.
Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great, had John arrested (Lk. 3:18-20) and executed (Mt. 14:1-12, Mk. 6:17-19). Even so, John’s fame did not die out. Years later the apostle Paul encountered Apollos, a disciple of John in Greece (Acts 18:25) and the gospel of John emphasized the superiority of Jesus over John the Baptist (Jn. 1:20, Lk. 3:16), suggesting that as late as the end of the first century, John still had his followers.
The gospels are clear, however, that Jesus was not the resurrected John; rather John was the forerunner, the prophetic messenger that proclaimed the coming of the Lord.
Secondly, the suggestion that Jesus was Elijah is also not surprising. Elijah has been translated into heaven (2 Kings 2:1-12), so the tradition grew up that he would return in the last days, along with Moses. This is where we get the Old Testament background for Jesus’ transfiguration.
The third suggestion for an answer to the question who is Jesus was even more of a stretch. They thought that Jesus was just some prophet that had been raised from the dead. Many first century Jews believed that prophecy had died out with Malachi. For Jesus to be a prophet, therefore, must meant—it seemed to them—that God had raised a prophet from the dead, perhaps some ancient worthy prophet.
So the best the crowd could do was to say that Jesus was a prophet, a great prophet, perhaps, an apocalyptic prophet. They have stretched their imagination to come up with such answers.
When Jesus asked the disciples near him, “Who do the crowds say that I am?” they could only answer, “John the Baptist, Elijah or maybe one of the ancient prophets.” But when Jesus said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” It was at that point that Peter answered, “The Messiah of God.”
No person could have known that with their own human abilities. It would have been a big stretch for Peter to say that. In Matthew 16:17, Jesus praised Peter for his beyond human ability to proclaim that Jesus is the Messiah when he said, “Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my father in heaven.” The idea that Jesus was the Messiah was so novel, so new, so unimaginable, Jesus said, that no one would have reached that conclusion without the aid and help of God in heaven.
This was beyond human reason because Jesus had not done anything particularly messianic. The Messiah was supposed to be the king, but Jesus was a carpenter turned prophet. The Messiah was supposed to defeat Israel’s enemies, but this Messiah was predicting his crucifixion. This definition of a Messiah was so unthinkable that Jesus instructed them to not tell anyone. The disciples and the crowds were stretching to understand how this Messiah would not conquer a mighty military force, but would die on the Cross.
Discipleship Paradox
As Christians, we are called to go beyond what other people do. We like to just be normal and our natural tendency would be to just do as much as we can to get by or to know only what we need to know. We don’t want to stretch those muscles when we don’t have to! But in this passage from Luke, Jesus is telling us that we must stretch ourselves if we want to be his disciples.
First, Jesus said that “The Son of Man must undergo great suffering and be rejected and be killed.” And when we hear this and I’m sure when the disciples heard this they reacted the same way, we would, “No way! It’s not our natural tendency to suffer. Nobody wants to be rejected. And for sure, we don’t want to die!”
Do you know what a paradox is? A paradox is a statement that seems contradictory, unbelievable or absurd but that may actually be true in fact. It’s inconsistent to common experience and common belief. We have to stretch our thinking to understand what a paradox means.
Suffering is a paradox in our faith in Christ. What links us to Christ and to God is suffering. We don’t like it. We rather not go through with it. But unless we suffer with Christ, we don’t have anything common with him.
The paradox is that God who is transcendent becomes incarnate in humanity to suffer. Christ is both divine and human so that he can suffer. And we who are human beings, despite our natural tendency to want to be pain-free use our freewill to suffer in discipleship. Jesus said, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up the cross and follow me.”
John Wesley said, “A cross is something contrary to our will, it’s displeasing to our nature.” To take up the cross is essentially painful. “Taking up” our cross is a little different from “bearing” a cross. “Bearing” a cross means enduring what is laid upon us without our choice whereas “taking up” a cross means to voluntarily suffer what it is in our power to avoid; when we willingly embrace the will of God, even when it differs from our own will.
Jesus then taught them and teaches us today, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.” (Lk. 9:24) There is truth in this paradox. Our willingness to suffer as disciples speaks about the paradoxical nature of being human who have the gift of freedom. Clearly, our human tendencies are to save ourselves, but we can decide to follow Jesus and in so doing lose our life in Christ to save it in eternal life.
Jesus is asking us to stretch beyond our natural human desire to protect ourselves, to preserve our status quo, to conserve our resources, to become pain-free. When we stretch our faith to new heights, we come to understand this paradox that may be inconsistent with common sense but in the end, holds the ultimate truth for life in God.
Who Am I?
Early in his ministry, Jesus’ identity was a major question for him, his disciples, his enemies and the people who followed after him. And as a new worshiping congregation starting off on a new faith endeavor today, we ask this same question for ourselves. When we can say that Jesus is the “Messiah of God,” we clarify our identities too.
I was given the name, “Donald” by an Irish American woman named, Mrs. Mildred Davis from my home church in Boston. Most of my teachers called me, “Donald.” When I got to college and nicknames became the craze, my friends shortened my name and I became “Don.” When I was ordained in 1975 at my church, I became the “Rev. Don Ng.” And finally when I became your pastor in 1998, you began calling me, “Pastor Don.” My identity was clarified in relationship to others.
If Peter knows Jesus as the Christ then that makes Peter a disciple, a follower of the Lord. Jesus makes it clearer to his disciples that to become a follower of his, one needs to deny himself and take up his cross and be willing to lose his life.
The question, “Who am I?” is one we live with all of our days. In one sense it will never be fully, completely and totally answered. We are still in the process of discovering who we are.
But when we are able to answer Jesus’ question, “But who do you say that I am?” And we say, “Jesus is the Messiah of God,” we also discover who we are. In our relationship with Jesus Christ, we are his followers. We are members of the First Chinese Baptist Church willing to go beyond our natural tendencies to be pain-free and willingly choose to take up our crosses, deny ourselves to follow Jesus.
We are stretching to be more faithful, stretching to understand the paradox of being disciples, and stretching to become Jesus’ disciples in the world.
Let us pray.
Dear God, as disciples we come to you to discover who we are. Teach us to know that you are the Messiah of God who comes to save the world from sin and calls us to everlasting life. Grant us courage and faithfulness to suffer for Christ by taking up our cross to follow him. We pray in the name of our Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen.