Sermon from Sunday, Sep 16 2012
Who do people say that I am? Have you ever wondered what your own response might be to this question? What if Jesus walked in, and for whatever reason, we thought this was normal, and as Jesus stood among us, he asked us, “Who do people say that I am?” What would we say? Would we follow Peter’s path and say that Jesus is the Messiah? Or would we say something else, something more appropriate to our own context?
Who do you say that I am? It seems that Jesus is working on his own self-awareness, his own understanding of who he is in a context that is constantly evolving and coming to fruition. The write of the Gospel of Mark seems also to not want his Jesus to be seen as a, or as the Messiah, so he has Jesus say to his disciples, do not say a word of this to anyone. The Messianic secret of Mark, Mark doesn’t want anyone to know about this Jesus and who exactly Jesus might be.
This story of Mark has always resonated for me, it always seems like the most accessible story of Jesus’ Messianic understanding. More than the other Gospels, there is humility, a working out going on in this story, a sort of exploration. In tying this question to Jesus’ passion story there seems to be not a concrete understanding, but an evolving and growing explanation of what it means to take up ones cross, what it means to know who Jesus is. There is a focus less on declaring who exactly Jesus is, and more understanding of what it means to be a disciple of Christ, and what it means to enter into our own passion.
To take up our own cross means to face our own limitations, our own powerlessness and leave behind our desire to control, our desire to dictate the outcome of our lives as well as other people’s lives. To take up our cross means we hand over our lives to God and we desire the Spirit to fill us and move us in a direction that God is desiring us to go.
Powerlessness is a scary thought for us, I think of the move The Matrix and the conversation that Neo, played by Keanu Reaves, has with Morpheus, played by Laurence Fishburne, about fate or having control over the outcomes of one’s life. Neo says that he wants to control his own life, his own fate. It is a wonderful moment in the film where you can see that the two of them are talking about two very different things. Neo is thinking on a metaphysical philosophical level, and Morpheus is thinking specifically of being controlled by other creatures, by other beings.
By the end of the series, Neo realizes that the only way to control his own fate, his own destiny, is to give up his life, to face the powerlessness in his own life, to face the limitations that keep him from fulfilling his own destiny.
In our own powerlessness we find great power, in our own limitations, we find infinite possibility. Who do people say that I am, what a wise and wonderful question to ask ourselves. I don’t know about you, but this also leads me to ask the question, “Who do people say that we are??
As many of you know, we used to be known as “There’s a church at 9th and 4th?” But this is changing, it is changing because the Spirit is alive and well among us. It is changing because we believe that God is among us, that God is here with us. It is changing because as our ancestors before, we have a mind to work.
I have been thinking about what has happened in the past seven years, and all that we have done. I have been thinking about our Food Shelf, and the clients we serve. I have been thinking of the Garden and how much it has grown. I have been thinking about this community of faith and how when I arrived here in 2005 there was a handful of people working hard to keep the doors open. And now we have almost 300 people, many of whom are working tirelessly to make Gethsemane into a meaningful organization in downtown Minneapolis.
I have been thinking about the partnerships we are developing with organizations all around us. The Normandy Hotel, The House of Charity, MCTC, Elliot Park Neighborhood Inc., Sober Corps. All of these organizations desire to change this neighborhood into something greater than it already is. We have aligned with them in our desire to bring change to this place, our mission field, the place where we live and worship and experience God in a unique and powerful way.
Everything we have, and everything we have done has been accomplished because of the knowledge that God is here, that God is alive and that God wants us to be in partnership with God, working to serve those who are in need, those are hurting and those who are in trouble. God desires us to face our powerlessness, to face our limitations and to understand that those things are where we will be able to discover how it is God is calling us to live.
I love today’s Psalm, particularly its opening verses: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament tells its tale to another and one night imparts knowledge to another. Although they have no words or language, and their voices are not heard, their sound has gone out into all lands, and their message to the ends of the world.”
2012 will be the close of our first year without Diocesan support, without the Gethsemane Plan leading us, and it has been a tough year, financially, and even programmatically. But as we approach the end of this calendar year, and as we begin a new programmatic year, and as we look back at the number of things we have done, we begin to see that God has woven a tapestry of amazement in this past year.
God has put together something that is spectacular and overwhelming. In our hands, in our work God has knit together a community of people who have begun to truly plant roots of change into the very fabric of this community. After over 155 years, we are beginning to see again a Church that will and is making a difference.
We want to control what we have in our midst, and we want to try to manipulate how it will look, but when we do that, when we desire to hold onto what our future will be it is then that we lose track of where it is God is leading us. Ask anyone who was here five years ago if they thought this is where we would stand today, and I bet no one would have ever imagined all that we had accomplished.
God will provide the cliché goes, but, I say God is providing, and that God is present and that we are being made new every day here in the Garden, we are being led by a God who desires nothing but for all of us to serve and know that at our heart we are loved, and we are called to serve the poor and those in need. This is who we are, this is who I am, a child of God, loved and powerless, but filled with infinite possibility.
Who do you say that I am? It seems that Jesus is working on his own self-awareness, his own understanding of who he is in a context that is constantly evolving and coming to fruition. The write of the Gospel of Mark seems also to not want his Jesus to be seen as a, or as the Messiah, so he has Jesus say to his disciples, do not say a word of this to anyone. The Messianic secret of Mark, Mark doesn’t want anyone to know about this Jesus and who exactly Jesus might be.
This story of Mark has always resonated for me, it always seems like the most accessible story of Jesus’ Messianic understanding. More than the other Gospels, there is humility, a working out going on in this story, a sort of exploration. In tying this question to Jesus’ passion story there seems to be not a concrete understanding, but an evolving and growing explanation of what it means to take up ones cross, what it means to know who Jesus is. There is a focus less on declaring who exactly Jesus is, and more understanding of what it means to be a disciple of Christ, and what it means to enter into our own passion.
To take up our own cross means to face our own limitations, our own powerlessness and leave behind our desire to control, our desire to dictate the outcome of our lives as well as other people’s lives. To take up our cross means we hand over our lives to God and we desire the Spirit to fill us and move us in a direction that God is desiring us to go.
Powerlessness is a scary thought for us, I think of the move The Matrix and the conversation that Neo, played by Keanu Reaves, has with Morpheus, played by Laurence Fishburne, about fate or having control over the outcomes of one’s life. Neo says that he wants to control his own life, his own fate. It is a wonderful moment in the film where you can see that the two of them are talking about two very different things. Neo is thinking on a metaphysical philosophical level, and Morpheus is thinking specifically of being controlled by other creatures, by other beings.
By the end of the series, Neo realizes that the only way to control his own fate, his own destiny, is to give up his life, to face the powerlessness in his own life, to face the limitations that keep him from fulfilling his own destiny.
In our own powerlessness we find great power, in our own limitations, we find infinite possibility. Who do people say that I am, what a wise and wonderful question to ask ourselves. I don’t know about you, but this also leads me to ask the question, “Who do people say that we are??
As many of you know, we used to be known as “There’s a church at 9th and 4th?” But this is changing, it is changing because the Spirit is alive and well among us. It is changing because we believe that God is among us, that God is here with us. It is changing because as our ancestors before, we have a mind to work.
I have been thinking about what has happened in the past seven years, and all that we have done. I have been thinking about our Food Shelf, and the clients we serve. I have been thinking of the Garden and how much it has grown. I have been thinking about this community of faith and how when I arrived here in 2005 there was a handful of people working hard to keep the doors open. And now we have almost 300 people, many of whom are working tirelessly to make Gethsemane into a meaningful organization in downtown Minneapolis.
I have been thinking about the partnerships we are developing with organizations all around us. The Normandy Hotel, The House of Charity, MCTC, Elliot Park Neighborhood Inc., Sober Corps. All of these organizations desire to change this neighborhood into something greater than it already is. We have aligned with them in our desire to bring change to this place, our mission field, the place where we live and worship and experience God in a unique and powerful way.
Everything we have, and everything we have done has been accomplished because of the knowledge that God is here, that God is alive and that God wants us to be in partnership with God, working to serve those who are in need, those are hurting and those who are in trouble. God desires us to face our powerlessness, to face our limitations and to understand that those things are where we will be able to discover how it is God is calling us to live.
I love today’s Psalm, particularly its opening verses: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament tells its tale to another and one night imparts knowledge to another. Although they have no words or language, and their voices are not heard, their sound has gone out into all lands, and their message to the ends of the world.”
2012 will be the close of our first year without Diocesan support, without the Gethsemane Plan leading us, and it has been a tough year, financially, and even programmatically. But as we approach the end of this calendar year, and as we begin a new programmatic year, and as we look back at the number of things we have done, we begin to see that God has woven a tapestry of amazement in this past year.
God has put together something that is spectacular and overwhelming. In our hands, in our work God has knit together a community of people who have begun to truly plant roots of change into the very fabric of this community. After over 155 years, we are beginning to see again a Church that will and is making a difference.
We want to control what we have in our midst, and we want to try to manipulate how it will look, but when we do that, when we desire to hold onto what our future will be it is then that we lose track of where it is God is leading us. Ask anyone who was here five years ago if they thought this is where we would stand today, and I bet no one would have ever imagined all that we had accomplished.
God will provide the cliché goes, but, I say God is providing, and that God is present and that we are being made new every day here in the Garden, we are being led by a God who desires nothing but for all of us to serve and know that at our heart we are loved, and we are called to serve the poor and those in need. This is who we are, this is who I am, a child of God, loved and powerless, but filled with infinite possibility.
Comments