Home  ›  Audio  ›  “Who Do You Say That I Am? (And Why Does It Matter?)” Rev. Mel...

“Who Do You Say That I Am? (And Why Does It Matter?)” Rev. Melissa St. Clair, 8/24/14

“Who Do You Say That I Am? (And Why Does It Matter?)”

A sermon preached at

Heart of the Rockies Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)

Fort Collins, CO

by the Rev. Melissa St. Clair

August 24, 2014

 As a kid, I could tell you the name of just about every student in my entire elementary school.  I would study the yearbook all summer long, memorizing names and faces.  When I went to high school, I joined the girls’ cross-country team along with over 50 other girls.  At the start of two-a-day practices two weeks before school started, we’d go around and say our names as we stretched in a group.  On about the second day, I knew everyone’s name, although I was reserved enough as a freshman that I never volunteered to be the first one to go around the circle and name everyone, which is unfortunate, as there was usually a reward for this feat in the form of ice cream.

While I do work at it, I know that remembering names is something that comes easier to me than it does for many others.  I’m grateful for that gift, because names are important.  We emphasize this with our adults who work with children and youth, asking them to do introductions each time and to learn and use the names of our kids’ early and often.

When I lived and served a church in Kansas City, there was a ministry through one of the downtown Disciples’ churches called Micah Ministry, where over 600 meals would be served to anyone who wanted to eat every Monday night.  Each week, those serving the meals were given the explicit instructions to serve one person at a time, asking him or her for their name and giving them ours, even if we were just grabbing them a refill of lemonade.  It was a way to make sure we saw the humanity in each person we served, a way to honor one measure of personal identity – our name.

In our Old Testament reading from Exodus, Moses gets his name and it’s tied directly to his story:  Pharaoh’s daughter names him Moses because she drew him out of the water (Ex. 2:10).  In our Gospel lesson, both Peter and Jesus have parts of their identity revealed through their names.

READ MATTHEW 16:13-20

There was an article this week making the rounds on Facebook called A Better Way to Introduce Your Friends at Parties.  In it, the author suggests that we set aside the habit of introducing people, especially people we know personally, like our friends, with a characteristic that makes them awesome, rather than by what they do for work.

In other words, “instead of introducing your friend as Jennifer the nurse, you would start introducing her as Jennifer, one of most thoughtful people you know, or Jennifer, the friend who helped you move in when you didn’t know a soul in this city.”

The premise of this is that “introducing your friends for who they are rather than focusing on what they do will remind them they are loved before and beyond their titles. It’s an easy way to remind them that you see them for their hearts instead of their accomplishments.”[1]

Titles and accomplishments mean something, to be sure.  But perhaps they tell us more about how others perceive us than who we actually are.

Jesus flat-out asks those who know him best, his disciples, who others understand to be the Son of Man, a title that Jesus claims for himself.  An assortment of answers come back – John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, one of the prophets.  It sounds like a case of mistaken identity, of misperception, of misunderstanding.

So Jesus pushes a little bit more.  He wants his closest friends own opinions now.  Give it to me straight, he says.  “Who do you say that I am?”

In the aftermath of the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in a northern St. Louis suburb, social media became a primary source of communication and organization; a way to get the word out from people on the ground quickly and from a variety of perspectives, even when the live news feed went down.

On Twitter, the hashtag #Iftheygunnedmedown quickly gained national attention.  It was created in response to public opinion about widely circulated images of Michael Brown released to the public, images that created an idea about who the media were saying Michael Brown was. There was a photo that showed the teen standing on a stoop and holding his hand in a position that has been called a peace sign by some and a gang sign by others. Many in the media chose to publish this photo instead of his graduation photo where he’s pictured in cap and gown.

The Twitter user who started this campaign posted two pictures of himself side-by-side, one of him speaking at his college graduation with former President Bill Clinton laughing hysterically in the background and the other posing in a Kanye West Halloween costume holding a bottle of liquor, which he says was actually filled with soda.  The point he was trying to make is that there is a dangerous narrative used in the media to represent young black men.[2]

The narrative being created about Jesus was a dangerous one too.

Jesus knew, based on his identity and the empire’s perception of it, that the odds were not in his favor.  In fact, after Peter nails Jesus’ identity as the Messiah, the Christ, Son of the Living God, Jesus blesses him and then tells him to hush up.  He “sternly order[s] the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.”

Maybe that’s because he knows that people won’t get it until they know the whole story – the one that includes death and resurrection.  Maybe that’s because, as Jesus goes on to tell his disciples, he knows he’s going to suffer at the hands of those in power and be killed.  He tells them to take up their cross and follow him (Matt. 16:24).  There’s danger in even being associated with Jesus, it seems.

That’s in part because of the negative image of Jesus that’s being portrayed publicly.  His crucifixion is his #iftheygunnedmedown moment.  Not only has his death been justified by virtue of his identity and actions that have been misunderstood, but the image presented at his death is one of disgrace –charged and convicted as a common criminal, with the same sentence: death by crucifixion.  His crime? The sign posted above his head scrawled the charge against him: King of the Jews (Matt. 27:37).

In a world where Christ continues to be crucified again and again with those who are oppressed, even to death, on account of their identities being considered a threat, where do we find hope? [3]

Perhaps we turn back to our Old Testament lesson.  It begins as a story of oppression built brick by brick out of fear of the “other” – a new ruler sees the sheer number of Israelites, and fears the worst for the Egyptian people.  So he calls them to task – after task, after task: “their lives [were made] bitter with hard service in mortar and brick and in every kind of field labor.”  And still, the Israelites multiplied.  So Pharaoh took it a step further: all boys – the future of the Israelites’ strength – were to be killed upon birth.

Does oppression get much more cruel than this?

And yet just when things seemed to be at their worst, someone took a stand.  It wasn’t the loudest or most visible.  But it was defiant.  It combated the rules those with power and authority had breathed into life by allowing life itself to be the final word.

These two Hebrew midwives – who are mentioned by name – chose to live the way God intended, not the way they were commanded by the powers that be.

And so the movement began.

Moses’ life was birthed into the waters of hope: hope on the part of his birth mother that the child growing inside her would be born into a world in which slavery wouldn’t always exist; a world in which her child could have a better life with more opportunities than she had.  Hope that women like Shiphrah and Puah provided that God’s cry for justice would be heard through the stifled wails of the baby boys whose death sentences were commuted by these courageous women.  Hope that the same river that was becoming Ground Zero for baby boys still had the capacity to sustain life.

Hope continued to shine through Moses to his people, even though there were plenty of times when he and his leadership missed the mark.

That’s how hope works.

Anne Lamott says, “Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: You don’t give up.”

In other words, we, like Moses, sometimes miss the mark, misunderstand, misperceive, misdiagnose.  Yet we can still show up and stand up for what is just, what is whole, what is life-giving

Because we know what Jesus’ disciples did, and we probably understand it with about the same measure of clarity they had too – that there are forces in the world, ones we may not always fully understand or recognize, that work to knock us down, box us out, convince us that we are less-than.  We must name those forces, for the sake of identifying where we can, and must, do better.

And then we work.  And we wait.  And we watch.  And we don’t give up.  Because our work isn’t done until the kingdom has come in the name of one we call Messiah.

Read full article here: http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/lifestyle/Iftheygunnedmedown-How-media-the-killed-Michael-Brown.html.