For a long time, I would have been one of the biggest wigglers and squirmers of all. I’m a cradle Christian, raised in church and Sunday School in the mainline Presbyterian Church. As a young person, I had certainly been taught all the “right” words, all that stuff that we say in the Creeds. The trouble was that I didn’t believe it. I never had any problem believing in God, but Jesus, this man who was supposed to be God, this man who rose from the dead … I just didn’t know what to make of him. When I was confirmed in seventh grade, I remember slyly crossing my fingers behind my back when it came time to profess in front of the congregation that I believed in Jesus. I figured that God’s disappointment over my dishonesty was less immediate and threatening than my parent’s disappointment, should I choose not to be confirmed.
Later on, as I studied Christianity as an academic discipline in college and graduate school, I struggled to make myself believe. I loved God; I had a deep prayer life; I was a faithful church-goer; I even felt a call to ordained ministry …. but I could not for the life of me answer Jesus’ question, “Who do you say that I am?” I thought that it was an intellectual question, a problem that I could figure out if I just studied it hard enough. I took refuge in abstract, philosophical descriptions. I was ashamed to bring up my lack of faith at church, and, to cover my tracks, I became very good at the disciples’ “some say” response: “Some say Jesus is the Word.” “Some say Jesus is the Good Shepherd.” “Some say Jesus is the Liberator.” “Some even say Jesus is their friend!” After a while, I got so used to quoting others that their answers became the crutch that I leaned on to navigate the language of faith—but at the center, the language was empty. There was no risen Lord inside.
So what happened, you’re perhaps wondering? How did I get to the place where I can stand up here in the pulpit week after week and honestly proclaim the risen Christ? Thinking back, I think that it was deeply studying the Bible that began to change me. I had to break open the too-familiar, yet vague, language of the Bible, to find the strange, unsettling Jesus within. My Jesus is a Lord of paradox, a Lord who can’t be pinned down, a Lord who turns things topsy-turvy. But there was more. I had to learn that knowing Jesus doesn’t center around some kind of intellectual assent to a bunch of doctrines. I'll never forget reading that the Old English word, “believe” comes from the root, “be-love.” To believe literally means to “give my heart.” To answer the Jesus question, I had to let life and the Holy Spirit knock me around enough to open me up to love.
To believe in Jesus, to know Jesus, I had to be willing to follow Jesus, you see. I had wanted a safe, comfortable life, a life lived on my terms. I didn’t want to follow a Lord who might ask me to change or to give up things. But when I grew up enough to see all the pain and trouble we have in our world, it became clear to me that changing is exactly what God calls all of us to do, including me: to hand over all of the things that keep us from following Jesus down that path to the cross—and to the resurrection. For you see, when we confess Jesus as Lord, as the Son of the Living God, we, like Peter, are at the same time giving up being plain fishermen on the cozy Sea of Galilee. Instead, we agreeing to be sent out into the world to proclaim—and to live—the Good News. When we define who Jesus is, Jesus simultaneously redefines who we are. With Jesus, it’s not just a matter of words, it’s a matter of transformation.
Paul understands. In today’s lesson from Romans, Paul explains that to proclaim who Jesus is, and to mean it, is to present our very bodies to God as a living sacrifice: “I appeal to you therefore, my siblings, through the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” Did you know that verse is also one of the phrases in the Prayer Book that we could say before the Offering? I don’t use it much, because it sounds kind of off-putting, doesn’t it? When I hear it, I vacillate between picturing my body drooping from the Cross and picturing us sitting piously in the pews, eyebrows scrunched and heads bowed in vague “spiritual worship.” Our “spiritual worship” isn’t pious prayer, though. It’s to act like Jesus, to follow Jesus, and to risk everything, as Jesus did.
The “sacrifice” that Paul is asking of us is indeed the gift of our whole selves. Paul makes clear that in baptism, we die with Christ. We’re swept under the deep waters, our sins and our self-centered hearts alive no more. When we rise from those baptismal waters, we are alive in Christ. We live no longer for ourselves but for God. We live a new life “in Christ.” This new life isn’t some disembodied hovering on earth, however, or some pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by life that we’ll reach someday in heaven. The new life that we’re given is a fully embodied life on earth—a life full of grace, a life lived with Christ’s love flowing through us and from us. It’s a life lived in community. It’s lived out in the giving of ourselves through our actions in the church and in our daily lives. It involves taking on the “mind of Christ,” letting Jesus’ image shape how we see the world. And it involves discernment, testing our ethical choices using this “new mind” that Christ has given us.[1]
The question, “Who do you say that I am?” is hard, I think, because it it’s a question answered with our lives, not our words. Perhaps you know the famous lines from German poet Rainer Maria Rilke? Rilke writes: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”[2] Live into the answer. That’s how the “Jesus Question” works, I think. Who Jesus is, isn’t something that we figure out on our own. Who Jesus is, is something that we live, something that we practice, something that we become—together.
[1] Luke Timothy Johnson, Reading Romans (Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 2001), 190-191.
[2] Rainer Maria Rilke, “Letters to a Young Poet,” quoted in Debie Thomas, “Who Do You Say That I Am?,” in Journey with Jesus, August 16, 2020. Found at https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/2724-but-what-do-you-think
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