Four Truths from Christ

[Below, you'll find the message shared during worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. You'll also find live stream videos of both our 8:45 AM traditional and 11:00 AM modern worship services.]

Matthew 16:13-20

Today’s Gospel lesson finds Jesus leading the twelve disciples into the town of Caesarea-Philippi.

Caesarea-Philippi was a bad place. It’s where Herod Philip, son of Herod the Great, the puppet king of Rome, lived. 

Idolatry was rampant there. The town had one temple devoted to the Roman god Pan, the god of unbridled sex--sex without meaning or love, and another temple devoted to the worship of Caesar.

It’s here though that Jesus starts an important conversation. There are four truths that Jesus reveals in this conversation that I want to hold up to you this morning.

Truth #1: Jesus is higher and greater than the world, by its own knowledge or wisdom, could ever know.

Jesus started this conversation by asking the Twelve, referring to Himself, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” (Matthew 16:13)  

The disciples tell Jesus what they’ve heard people calling Jesus: “John the Baptist…Elijah…Jeremiah…or one of the prophets.” (Matthew 16:14)

All of these are high titles to apply to Jesus. But they’re not nearly high enough! 

After hearing what titles the people of the world are giving Him, Jesus asks the Twelve: “Who do you say I am?” (Matthew 16:15)

Simon’s answer is breathtaking: “You are the Messiah [that is, the Christ, the anointed King and Savior promised by God for centuries], [and, if that wasn’t enough,] the Son of the living God. [God the Son, God in the flesh.]” [Matthew 16:16]

Now, if Jesus was anything less than all that Simon claimed Jesus to be, Jesus’ response to Simon’s confession would be monstrous. Jesus could then be dismissed as a madman or a liar.

But Jesus tells Simon: “Blessed are you [Justified are you, made righteous are you, by this confession you’ve just made], Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven.” (Matthew 16:17) “You’re right, Simon,” Jesus is saying, “You’re blessed with saving faith in Me as God and Christ, as God and Messiah.”

But how did Simon, of all people, know this about Jesus? 

It wasn't because he was smart, wise, perceptive, or insightful.

It was God Himself Who revealed Jesus’ identity as Christ and God to Simon.

In our own power, by our own intellects, no human being could ever figure that out about Jesus. God Himself must show us Who Jesus is. The Bible says, “No one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit.” (1 Corinthians 12:3)

One of the reasons regular worship attendance is essential to Christians is that the Holy Spirit uses the Word and the Sacraments, which we know are God’s Word made visible, to lead us to the same confession about Jesus made by Peter, that Jesus is our King and our God.

As the Holy Spirit uses these means--Word and Sacrament--to give us faith and build our faith, we’re able to confess that Jesus is “...the [very] image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created…” (Colossians 1:15-16)

Truth #2: Being led by God the Father to confess Jesus as our God and our King changes us forever.

After Simon makes his confession, Jesus says to him, “I tell you that you are Peter…” (Matthew 16:18) He gives Simon a new name. In Jesus, our old sinful selves are killed and our new selves rise to new life with Him. The confession that God empowered Simon to make changed his identity.

My identity was changed when I was baptized as an infant, when God’s Word and promise and water met and through the Name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, I was claimed by God. The pastor said: “Mark James, child of God [not Mark James Daniels, the name my parents used for me when I was in trouble], you are marked with the cross of Christ and sealed by the Holy Spirit forever.”

Of course, those whom God has claimed and those who have confessed Jesus as God and King can walk away from God. They can shut down their relationship with God by turning away from Jesus and His people. I did that for ten years of my life.

Sadly, people walk away from Jesus. 

But Jesus never gives up on His lost sheep and like the prodigal son’s father, will run to us when we turn to Him. The God Who woos us to faith works to “seek and to save the lost.” (Luke 19:10)

Truth #3: Jesus will build His Church through those who receive the gift of faith in Him.

Jesus tells Simon Peter: “on this rock I will build my church…” (Matthew 16:18) The word Jesus uses for rock here is slightly different from the name He’s just given to Peter. So, it isn’t Peter the man on whom Jesus builds His Church. He builds His Church through all the people God has led to faith in Him.

And the Church remains on a strong foundation not because of programs or the charisma of its pastors and teachers, not because of its buildings or membership rolls, but because of Jesus Christ alone.

Wherever the God we know in Christ is faithfully proclaimed and the Sacraments are rightly shared, Jesus Christ is building His Church. Just as our salvation is His work alone, the life of His Church is His work alone; our call is to attend to His Word and His Sacraments, to gather with His people to receive His gifts. This is how Christ builds His Church, no matter the size of its denominations or congregations.

Truth #4: Satan will assault God’s people, the Church, but nothing, nothing, will defeat the Church.

Jesus says, “...the gates of Hades will not overcome it.” (Matthew 16:18)

We can expect Satan to hate it when we as congregations and individual Christians confess faith in Jesus.

In the last parish I served, I made known my belief that the denomination of which we were then a part was departing from the authority of God and of His Word over His Church. In the course of a few months, our house was broken into and robbed, the church building was broken into and robbed six times, a drunken man slammed into and totaled both Ann’s and my cars and proceeded to bring a handgun onto our front porch as we waited for the police, and, despite having none of the expected underlying conditions, I had a major heart attack. A Christian woman with whom Ann worked observed, “Someone doesn’t want you two around here.” But we prayed and continued; today, that congregation is part of the North American Lutheran Church. 

Jesus says elsewhere: “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33) Whether in this life or on the Day of His return when He calls we believers from our graves, we can trust His promise: “...the one who stands firm to the end will be saved.” (Matthew 24:13)

Satan cannot defeat, destroy, or rob us of saving faith in Christ and everlasting life with God. We know that Christ and His Church will prevail!

At the end of today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus tells the Twelve not to tell anyone that He was the Messiah.

The reason for this is that He still hadn’t gone to the cross, where He bore the punishment for sin that we deserve and He still hadn’t been raised to life so that all who turn to Him in repentance and faith will have everlasting life with God.

Many people in Jesus’ day believed that the Messiah would be a magical military or political leader who would wave his scepter and make the country’s borders secure, give everybody wealth, and keep foreigners out, none of which had they taken place, could overcome human sin or the condemnation and death our sin brings.

In fact, I think that the worst thing that can happen to us is for us to get our ways because when that happens, it makes us satisfied with the goodies of this life rather than hungering for life with God that never ends!

Jesus is our Messiah, our King, because, on the cross, He destroyed the ability of sin and death to keep us from life with God. Jesus delivers the fruits of His crucifixion and resurrection–the fruits of forgiveness, new life, eternity with God–to those who, empowered by God just like Simon Peter–can daily turn from sin and daily turn to Christ in trust and hope.

Jesus has given these four truths to you to receive and believe today and so that you too might be blessed with faith that, through Him, every one of your sins is forgiven and you have life with God right now and forever. Amen

Am I Saved?

Here's today's online worship from Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. Have a good and blessed week!

"Take up your cross and follow Me"

Matthew 16:21-28
[This message was shared during the worship services of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, on September 3, 2017.]

Our gospel lesson for today, Matthew 16:21-28, begins in this way: “From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.”

We Christians have read and heard those words (or words like them) so many times in our lives that we may hardly notice them. Or give them a second thought. But when Jesus spoke them to His original hearers, the twelve apostles, their effect must have been not just jarring, but volcanic!

A few moments before, we read in Matthew, Peter had confessed his faith in Jesus as God’s anointed King, the Messiah or the Christ, as well as God in the flesh, which is what the phrase "the Son of the Living God" means. Peter was saying that Jesus was the Son of God, the very reflection and embodiment of God Himself!

Jesus had commended Peter’s confession, which He said, had come to Peter not from human beings, but from God Himself, the way our faith always does (1 Corinthians 12:3).

And Jesus said that it was on this strong confession made by Peter that “I will build my church, and the gates of Hades [or hell] will not overcome it” (Matthew 16:18).

Peter’s confession of Jesus and Jesus’ affirmation of it must have been an incredible moment for the twelve. For centuries, their people, the people of God, had been waiting for the Messiah promised by God. And here was Jesus confirming what Peter (and probably many of the other disciples) had come to believe. The wait was over. The Messiah, Who would make all things right, had arrived.

The problem was that in the four-hundred-some years since God had given the last book of the Old Testament to His people and the moment of Peter’s confession, an enormous gap between what God means by making all things right for us and what God’s people meant by making all things right had developed.

This gap was caused by the failure to understand on the part of God’s peoplewhat their real problem was.

God’s people had come to see their problem as the Romans. And before that, the Assyrians and the Babylonians. Each had been foreign conquerors. The problem, as God’s people had come to see it then, was these foreigners who had come and taken over their country.

God said that His people’s basic problem wasn’t the people who had conquered them through the centuries. It was that they had forgotten Who their God was.

They worshiped idols.

They worshiped the things of this world.

And because they did, they perpetrated grave injustices against each other and the strangers that were among them, violations of God’s holiness that God had adamantly and repeatedly forbade many times in His Word. It was because of all of this sin that God had allowed His people to be conquered.

To God’s people, including the disciples, the biggest problem they had was all of those other people who made their lives miserable. But God knew that the real problem wasn’t with all those other people.

And the only way that God could make all things right for His people and the whole world was not to give them a strongman king, the people’s version of a Messiah, the Messiah they wanted, who would boot out the foreign conquerors. Why? Because even if the strongman king was successful in routing the Romans and filling the people’s fevered desire for fat pocketbooks, the success of such a king would still only leave God’s people dead in their sin.

The only way that God could make all things right for His people and the world was to send a Messiah Who would deal with the sin into which every one of us--Jew and Gentile--is born.

Our greatest enemy in the world isn’t someone else: It’s not our spouse, our family, our boss, our government, or any of those “other people.” It’s not even the devil, although he hates us and wants us eternally separated from God.

Our greatest enemy is us. It’s us--you and me--who need to be dealt with. We and our sin must be conquered before they kill us off for all eternity.

But this isn’t something we like to hear or wrestle with. Who wants to be forced into saying, “It’s my fault”? Most of the time, those words stick in our throats.

Peter was just like us in that way. Verse 22 tells us that Peter is horrified at the idea of the One he had just confessed as Messiah going to Jerusalem, to be rejected and crucified. Matthew says that Peter rebuked Jesus. “That will never happen to You, Lord,” Peter says to Jesus, telling Jesus, the One he had just confessed to be God that Jesus was wrong. Peter was telling Jesus how to be the Messiah. He was giving Jesus "God lessons"!

In fact, as my son Philip pointed out to me last night, the word used to describe Peter's words to Jesus--rebuked--was in the Greek Septuagint translation of the Old Testament with which Jesus would have been familiar only used of superiors upbraiding or chastising people beneath them in class or authority. Peter is treating the One he has confessed as God and Messiah like an underling!

Look what happens next, starting at Matthew 16:23. “Jesus turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.’”

Jesus calls Peter, Satan! The very name means enemy or adversary. At this moment, Jesus is calling Peter an enemy of God! This is a serious matter.

To try to stand in the way of God and the will and purpose of God makes a person an enemy of God. So, when Jesus uttered this condemnation of Peter, you can imagine how mystified Peter must have felt.

Do we stand in the way of God and His will for our lives?

Are there times when we try to turn Jesus into the king of our dreams, the king who will even go along with us when we’re being selfish or hurtful?

Are there times when we expect Jesus to overlook our sins while we stand in judgment over others for theirs?

Are there times when we insist that the problems in our marriages, our families, or our lives are exclusively the fault of others and not us?

Absent repentance and trust in Christ, if our answer to any of those questions is yes, then Jesus’ words of rebuke and their intrinsic call to repentance and renewed trust in Him, first leveled at Peter apply to you and me too. I know that Jesus' call applies to me many times, too.

But there is good news! King Jesus has come to set us free and make us right. 

Look at what He says, starting at verse 24: “Then Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what they have done.’”

Jesus could have been the king that Peter, the other disciples, and God’s people in Judea wanted. He had the power to do it.

When Jesus was later arrested in the garden of Gethsemane, He said that He had at His disposal “twelve legions of angels,” 60,000 angelic soldiers ready at the direction of Jesus. He could have been a warrior king.

When Satan met Jesus in the wilderness, it was to be precisely this kind of king that he tried tempting Jesus into being. Satan knew that if Jesus relied on raw power, coercive force, to make Himself king, Jesus would have been as guilty of sin as Adam and Eve had been when, in their desire to “be like God,” they ate the fruit God told them not to eat.

And had Jesus been this kind of king, He wouldn’t have been trustingly relying on His Father and His plan, but on violent force.

Our lives could never have been made eternally right had Jesus gone that route.

We could never have been set eternally free from sin and death. Jesus had to go to the cross to take our punishment for sin so that, in rising, He could set free all who turn from sin, that is repent, and surrender trustingly in Him, that is believe in Him.

In the way Jesus chose, He could be King, not of a worldly nation, all of which eventually fail and fall from the weight of their arrogance, sin, and injustice, but the King of a new creation.

Jesus didn’t enter the world to conquer all the armies of the world while leaving everyone in this world dead and separated from God. Jesus came to conquer us with His love and so, give us life that never ends.

The only way for us to appropriate the victory won for us by Jesus on the cross and from the empty tomb is to first, take up our cross--meaning, to acknowledge, in Pogo’s famous words, “We have seen the enemy and he is us.” We need to own the fact that we need a Savior, Someone Who will save us from our sins and ourselves and to save us to be all that God intended for us to be. 

And we need secondly, to follow Jesus. Even when it’s inconvenient. Even when it’s the last thing we want to do. Even when it’s less than popular. Even when it costs us money, time, or our lives.

Taking up our crosses and following Jesus. We Lutherans have always called this a lifestyle of “daily repentance and renewal.” This is the content of the faith in Jesus that Peter, just a few verses before our gospel lesson, confessed: a faith that believes in Jesus as the King that makes all things right, the God Who opens up infinitely more than “we can ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20) to all who dare to surrender to Him.

And how can we know this is true?

That’s the question from the disciples that Jesus seems to anticipate in the last verse of our lesson.

“Truly I tell you,” He says. “some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”

Is that true?

Did the disciples see the coming of Jesus’ kingdom?

I mean, didn’t Jesus teach us to pray, “Thy kingdom come”?

The first disciples did see the kingdom of God come when Jesus rose from the dead, “the firstborn of the dead” as the New Testament calls Jesus (Colossians 1:18; Revelation 1:5) and the “pioneer and perfecter of faith” as He’s called in Hebrews 12:2. The disciples saw the kingdom of God when they saw the King after He had died and risen.

And we see--we experience--this kingdom when we too, take up our cross and follow Jesus.

May that be how we live.

How we die.

And, by the grace God bears for all who trust in Christ, may it also be how we will all rise again.

Amen

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Using Your Spiritual Gift

[This message was shared during both worship services of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio yesterday.]

Romans 11:33-12:8

What do you think of when you hear the term, spiritual gifts?

As a pastor, I’ve sometimes had conversations like this with Christians. “I wish I knew what my spiritual gift was; I don't think I have one” they say, usually at the door from the sanctuary after I've preached about spiritual gifts.

“You know,” I tell them, “the New Testament says that all baptized believers in Jesus have at least one spiritual gift. You’re a baptized believer in Jesus, right?”

“Yes,” they say, “but I don’t think that I have a spiritual gift. Maybe I’m not a good enough Christian.”

And usually before I can continue the conversation, they’re gone.

Now, I have a sneaking suspicion that at least some of the people with whom I’ve had that conversation over the years were really dodging something.

Most church members in today’s world have little interest in being disciples. In fact, some appear to have a deathly allergy to following Jesus with day-in, day-out devotion.

Discipleship entails something people hate these days: commitment.

The only clubs we’re apt to join are retail warehouses like Sam’s Club or Costco.

We shy away from commitments to employees, employers, marriage partners, family members, friends, neighbors, or the Church.

I suspect then that many Christians who claim not to have a spiritual gift, even though God’s Word insists that they do, are basically saying, “I only want Jesus as heavenly fire insurance; the flames of hell don’t appeal to me. But I don’t want to get involved with the Church or finding my spiritual gifts. If I did that, it might change the way I live my life. And, really, my life is way too busy right now for me to add the complication of discipleship or being accountable to God or the Church for whatever spiritual gift God may or may not have given to me. I don’t have a spiritual gift. Now, I’m off for lunch and the game.”

In today’s Gospel lesson, Peter confessed that Jesus was and is the Son of God--that phrase meaning that Jesus is God--and the long-awaited Messiah, God’s anointed King. In subsequent verses of Matthew and in the other gospels, we see that Simon Peter, whose nickname of Peter, petros, given to him by Jesus, means Rock, was about as dumb as a rock when it came to understanding all that his confession of Jesus meant.

But as clueless as Peter was before Jesus died and rose, do you imagine for one moment that he thought that faith in Jesus didn’t mean changing the way he lived and thought? 

To follow Jesus as a disciple is to submit to a process of continual change. 

And, if we honestly survey our lives, we must readily confess that there are lots of changes to be made! 

Every Christian needs, at some time, to deal with an important question: If Jesus died and rose to give all who turn from sin and believe in Him new life, how do we dare not put our whole lives at His disposal to heed His call as His disciples?

All Christians are called to believe in Jesus, to live in daily repentance and renewal, to seek, in the power of God’s Holy Spirit, to love God and to love neighbor and to make disciples.

But the spiritual gifts our second lesson addresses today are God’s imprint on your life as a disciple. Spiritual gifts are the topic of the middle part of today’s second lesson.

Take a look, please, at Romans 12:3-8.

“For by the grace given me I say to every one of you,” Paul writes in verse 3. “Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you.”

Disciples saved by God’s grace through faith in Christ are enabled to look at themselves with clear-eyed judgment. They don’t affect a false humility. And they don’t see themselves through the prism of self-righteousness, either. God helps us to see ourselves as we are: Sinners saved by grace, loved by God, still evidencing imperfection, but given a particular design for serving in God’s kingdom as saved and confident children of God.

Whatever the maturity of our faith, Paul is saying, God will help us to see exactly what we need to see when it comes to our role in His Church at any given time.

Read on, please: “For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.”

Listen: Christianity has nothing to do with the rugged individualism our culture so often celebrates.

It’s not us against the world.

It’s not even God and us against the world.

For the Christian, it’s we believers in Jesus in the world, together, praying for each other, encouraging each other, being accountable to each other, growing together, each of us parts of one single body, the Body of Christ.

The Church is not meant to be an association of individuals who show up for weekly Sunday worship 1.3-times a month (the current average attendance record of North American Christians); the Church is a mosaic God is fashioning into a single, eternal organism with one purpose--to be and make disciples--by reaching up to God, reaching into one another, reaching out to others to make disciples and serve neighbor.

Each of we believers in Christ belong to God and to each other.

When any of us who are part of Christ’s Church neglect the unique role God has given to us in the congregational fellowship, that fellowship is less than what God intends for it to be, for its members and for the world He calls us to reach for Him.

When each of us who are part of the Church fulfill our unique roles as the Body of Christ, the Church is whole, able to be and do all that God has called us to be and do, both as individuals and as the Church.

To put it simply: We need each other. When we hold back from using our gifts for the good of the Church and its witness to the world, the Church itself isn't fully alive to all that God calls it to be.

When we’re all in, we’re all alive.

Verse 6: “We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us.” In other words, every Christian has a spiritual gift.

Paul goes on to talk about seven spiritual gifts, “If your gift is prophesying, then prophesy in accordance with your faith; if it is serving, then serve; if it is teaching, then teach; if it is to encourage, then give encouragement; if it is giving, then give generously; if it is to lead, do it diligently; if it is to show mercy, do it cheerfully.”

Do you know what Paul is saying in a nutshell? You have at least one spiritual gift from God, use it. To paraphrase Nike, “Just do it!”

“But what’s my gift?” you might be wanting to scream right now. Let me give you a few “field-tested” ways of finding your gifts.

First, try to participate in a ministry of the congregation. If it works, it might express some aspect of your spiritual giftedness. If it doesn’t, move on to try something else.

Some of you have heard me tell how at the church I served in Cincinnati, I got behind a local chapter of Habitat for Humanity in a big way. I encouraged our folks to help build a home in New Richmond. I felt that I needed to lead by example. So, I showed up, along with about fifteen of our folks each Saturday morning to help out.

Finally, one Saturday, a member of our congregation, Steve, pulled me aside and said, very lovingly, “Look, Mark, we all have our gifts. This isn’t yours. Please don’t come back or you’re liable to get yourself or someone else killed.” I knew that construction work didn't express any spiritual gift I had.

Second, and this was exemplified in my interaction with Steve, listen to the feedback of other committed Christians.

“Do I have the gift of leadership?” a man asked a pastor. “The easiest way to make a determination on that,” the pastor said, “is to turn around and see if anyone’s following.” The man said that no one seemed to follow him and was a bit disappointed.

That’s understandable; we all like to think of ourselves as the general not the buck private. But our spiritual gifts don’t make us any more or less important to God or the Church; they simply give us the tools to do the specific calls God gives to us within the Church.

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 12:24: “...God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it…”

I think that we’re all going to be surprised when we believers in Jesus arrive at the heavenly banquet after we’ve risen from the dead to see how many unassuming people with gifts like servanthood are sitting at the dais, while the preachers who strove to exercise gifts like teaching, leadership, and shepherding are sitting in the very back, just inside the door.

All who believe in Jesus will be there of course, saved by God’s amazing grace. But, as Jesus says “...the last will be first, and the first will be last.” (Matthew 20:16)

So, to find your gift, first, participate in a ministry and find out if it fits and second, listen to what other Christians tell you. Third, pray and really ponder God’s Word.

I began to suspect I had the gift of teaching when, as I considered the words of Bible, I found myself standing up, pacing around, struggling to find ways to teach others what God was teaching me in His Word.

I never wanted to be a pastor. Never. In fact, when I was growing up, my grandfather, to whom I was close, always warned me to stay away from pastors. "They're all lazy," he told me. "They work one day a week and then want to take your money for it." He told me about pastors he'd known who he said had basically run easy money-making rackets, but really didn't care about God or people.

So, I really didn't want to be a pastor. I had other plans.

But, increasingly, I sensed God telling me--and mature Christians were confirming--“This is My gift to you. This is your calling. This is what I made you for. This is your obligation to Me and to the Church.”

I tried to say, “No.” But God would not let me go.

When I finally bowed to God’s will and recognized the gift that He was giving to me for the good of Christ’s Church, I felt a great burden lifted from me. I told a friend, who was also wrestling with his place in God's kingdom, “It’s like a boulder’s been taken from my shoulder.” I felt that way even though I was working two jobs in order to go to school and support our household. I remember one night being in the stock room of Sears, where I'd taken a part-time job and just praying, "Thank You, God" for finally showing me how He wanted me to use my gifts to His glory!

Look: It isn’t just preachers who are given gifts or calls from God. As a baptized believer in Christ, you’re part of Christ’s body, the Church. You have an indispensable gift and calling from God. God has given you your gifts and your life experiences to be used by God in the ministries of the Church in this time, in this place, in this congregation. Truly, if you don't exercise your spiritual gifts, the special calling God has just for you will not get done. And that would be tragic!

So, please, if you feel that don’t have a gift or have never sought to find it, begin praying today that God will help you find your gift. Risk failure by trying a ministry in which you’ve not been involved before. Listen to the wisdom of fellow Christians. Pray and ponder God’s Word.

Your spiritual gift given to you by God, for the good of the Church and the glory of God, is just waiting to be unwrapped. Amen

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

"Getting" Jesus

Here.

Who is This Jesus?

[This was shared during worship with the people and guests of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio, yesterday.]

Matthew 16:13-20
This morning’s Gospel lesson is so filled with good stuff that we need to dive into it right now, verse-by-verse. So, please turn to page 687 in the sanctuary Bibles and look at Matthew 16:13-20.

In verse 13, Jesus asks the disciples who people were saying He—the Son of Man—was. In the next verse the disciples give their answer: “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”

Apparently, the buzz was that Jesus was the reappearance of one of the prophets.

Elijah and Jeremiah, of course, were Old Testament figures, while John the Baptist, the last of the great prophets, had just died.

In seeing Jesus as a prophet, the people were onto something. A prophet, as the Bible understands it, isn’t primarily someone who foretells the future. Rather, a prophet is one who speaks the true word of God to a world that doesn’t want to hear it, calling people to repent (turn from sin), and trust in God alone.

Like all true prophets, Jesus calls us to live for God alone. Not for our own interests. Not for our own desires. Not for the validity of our own emotions or intellectual analyses. Not for our country or preferred political ideology. But for God alone.

Eventually, Christians would see Jesus as THE prophet, THE priest, and THE king, among other things. But Jesus is much more than is encompassed by any of these titles. That’s why He asks the disciples in verse 15, “But what about you?...Who do you say I am?”

As we said last Sunday, this is the most important question any of us will ever answer. And, at least according to the witness of the Bible and of Jesus Himself, there is really only one right answer.

Jesus is the Word, the very living power of God, made flesh.

He is the only way by which sinful human beings like you and me can be saved.

He is the embodiment of God’s love, given to be the perfect sacrificial lamb for our sin so that all who repent and trust in Him as God’s definitive self-disclosure, as our only hope and Savior and God, will have their sins forgiven and have life with God, beginning in this imperfect world and brought to incredible perfection when we see God face to face in eternity.

These truths, God’s truths, have no expiration dates. You can bank your life, your eternal life on them and on nothing else.

In verse 16, Peter answers Jesus' question to perfection: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

The first thing to be said about Peter’s confession is that, given how Peter wanted Jesus to avoid the cross and be an earthly conqueror of the Romans, given how he denied knowing Jesus on the night of Jesus’ arrest, and given how hopeless Peter was after Jesus died on a cross, Peter probably had little idea of what he was saying at this moment.

We all know how that goes. Two people say, “I do,” with no idea of what the future holds in store. Husbands and wives agree to start a family without knowing what that decision will bring. Peter didn’t fully understand his own confession. But his answer was authentic and true, more than mere words.

The first title Peter uses for Jesus in his confession is Messiah. This is the English transliteration of the Hebrew word, mashiah. It means anointed one. It was a title given to all of Israel’s kings. The anointing of Israel’s kings was a sign of their selection by God. But the title came to be used of the special king God had promised through His prophets. THE Messiah would come set the world right with God and fully establish God’s justice. The New Testament Greek word for Messiah is Christos, or, as we know it in English, Christ. Peter confesses Jesus as the king of the world and the king of his life. So must we.

The second title Peter uses of Jesus is the Son of the living God. Israel’s kings were referred to as God’s sons. But here, Peter is saying more than he himself realizes.

Turn to page 821 of the sanctuary Bible and look at Colossians 1:15-16, please. The passage tells us what it means to call Jesus, “the Son of God.” (We looked at this passage this past week, Tuesday group.) It says of Jesus: “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him.”

That’s what it means to call Jesus the Son of the living God.

It would be awhile before Peter’s faith caught up with his confession. But he had it right: Jesus is God.

If we see Jesus as anything less than the one true God and King of the universe, we have no part in Him, whatever words we may say.

Please go back to our Gospel lesson, verse 17: “Jesus replied, ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven...’”

Peter’s confession about Jesus was pure miracle. His fledgling faith didn’t come from flesh and blood—not from a collection of human thought or the confluence of human emotions or human experiences. God Himself had revealed the truth about Who Jesus was to Peter.

The same is true for us whenever we confess faith in Jesus.

First Corinthians 12:3 tells us: “...no one who is speaking by the Spirit of God says, ‘Jesus be cursed,’ and no one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit.”

My inborn sinful nature dictates that I trust no one but me, that I look out for me and my interests, and that I not believe in a God Who is greater or more important than myself.

Yet, by God’s power, it’s possible for a self-centered, self-driven, skeptical, untrusting person to trust the God revealed to us in Jesus of Nazareth. Only God can give me (and you) the ability to believe in Christ.

In verse 18, Jesus continues by explaining to Peter the meaning of the new name He had already given to him, Peter, Petros in the Greek of the New Testament. It means rock and never in history before this time had it been given to someone as a name. Jesus then says, “on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades [the gates of hell, the gates of death] will not overcome it.”

Jesus builds His Church on the faith confessed by Peter.

The Church isn’t made up of bricks, mortar, carpeting, or sound systems, but of flesh and blood people who believe in Jesus. Without a faith in Jesus as God and the only Way to eternity with God, the Church doesn’t exist even if people sing hymns, light candles, recite creeds and prayers, play guitars, sing praise song, hold meetings, and listen to preachers.

Article 7 of The Augsburg Confession, one of the key confessional documents of Lutheranism, says that the Church exists wherever the Word of God is preached in its purity and the Sacraments of Holy Baptism and Holy Communion are administered rightly…in other words, wherever people meet Christ in faith.

In verse 19, Jesus says that to this flesh and blood people who believe in Him, He will give “the keys of the Kingdom.”

Filled with the Holy Spirit and taught by God’s Book, the Bible, you and I are given the responsibility to tell others about the will of God in His Law—the Ten Commandments—and the will of God in His promise that all who turn from sin and believe in Jesus will be saved.

We are to declare God’s condemnation for unrepentant sinners and to declare God’s forgiveness to repentant sinners.

The Office of the Keys is a scary responsibility for which none of us would be qualified were it not for the fact that, by grace through faith, Jesus lives in us.

Faith in Christ qualifies us for graces and responsibilities for which we, on our own merit, have no qualifications.

And using the keys of the kingdom can open up an eternity of hope and peace to the world.

Berhanu Ofga’a is a pastor of the Lutheran body, the Mekane Yesus Church, in Ethiopia. Once, during Ethiopia’s long civil war from 1974 to 1991, he was imprisoned. One night during his incarceration, he heard a man weeping and begging, “Does anyone here know Jesus Christ? Does anyone here believe in Jesus Christ?” Because Pastor Ofga’a was imprisoned for his confession of faith in Jesus, he was at first afraid to say anything. But finally he declared that he was a Christian. The voice then asked, “Please, how can I know Jesus?” From his prison cell, Ofga’a helped that man confess his sins and confess his faith in Jesus. And his own faith in Christ was deepened in that experience, sustaining him through a hellish time.

I first learned of Berhanu Ofga’a three years ago. At the time, he was the general secretary of his Lutheran body in Ethiopia. And even today, he and his fellow Lutherans are daily at risk of their lives for their faith in Jesus. Radical Jihadists destroyed dozens of their church buildings. Members were persecuted and subjected to violence. Yet, from 2009 to 2010, the Mekane Yesus Church grew from 5.3-million members to 5.6-million, an increase of nearly 1000 members each day.

There may be many different reasons for the explosive growth of the Lutheran church in Ethiopia. But the biggest reason no doubt is that our fellow Lutherans there are bold and unapologetic in confessing the same faith confessed by Peter in our Gospel lesson: Jesus is the Messiah and God!

Nothing—not prison cells, not hell, not death itself—can prevail against Christ’s Church. Those with faith in Christ are set free, today in this imperfect world and one day when we see God face to face, to live and speak for Jesus and to live lives of purpose that glorify Jesus for all eternity! We may as well get in the habit today, confessing and following Jesus, God and King.

Amen

Jesus' Alternative Universe

[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, this morning.]


Matthew 16:21-28
In his book, Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream, Pastor David Platt tells about several people from underground house churches in Asian countries where it’s illegal to worship or witness for Jesus Christ.

• He mentions Jian, a “doctor who has left his successful health clinic and now risks his life and the lives of his wife and two kids in order to provide impoverished villages with medical care while secretly training [a] network of house-church leaders.” 
• There’s Lin, a woman who teaches at a university where it’s illegal to talk about Jesus. She secretly meets with students interested in knowing more about Him though, risking the loss of her job in the process. 

People like these, who embrace living with the risk of suffering or death in order to glorify God and share Christ with others, live in an upside-down world. It’s a world in which living for Jesus, and not for comfort or status or material success, is the highest priority. Death, sacrifice, and risk looms over their lives constantly, yet the people I've met who live like this are more alive and more joyful than 99% of the people you and I know or know about.

Jesus talks about the strange alternative universe—the kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of God—in which people Jian and Lin live in today’s Gospel lesson.

It’s the world in which He calls us all to live, too. If that scares you, it probably should. It scares me. Yet there is no other place where true life can be found than in Jesus’ kingdom. Let’s learn more about it. Please pull out the Celebrate inserts and turn to the lesson, Matthew 16:21-28.

The lesson actually continues an incident we started looking at two weeks ago. Back then, you may recall, Peter confessed his belief that Jesus was “the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

The first verse of today’s lesson follows: “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.”

How did Jesus “show” these things to the disciples, do you suppose? Pull out a pew Bible, please, and turn to page 609, to Luke 24:27. It’s part of Luke’s account of an encounter the risen Jesus had with two disciples on the road to a village called Emmaus on the first Easter Sunday. The disciples, blinded by their inability to believe in Jesus’ resurrection, don’t initially understand that the stranger with whom they’re speaking is Jesus. Then we’re told: “And beginning at Moses [in other words, starting at Genesis, the first of five Old Testament books traditionally attributed to Moses] and the Prophets [people like Isaiah and Jeremiah, whose prophetic ministries are recounted also in the Old Testament], [Jesus] expounded to them in all the Scriptures concerning Himself.”

Jesus always pointed to the God of the Old Testament to explain Who He was and what He was about. Jesus taught that everything that Christians confess about Him—from His virgin birth to His sacrificial death for our sin, from His kingship to His resurrection—was foretold in the Old Testament.

Peter though, wasn’t interested in what Jesus or the Old Testament had to say about the Messiah suffering, dying and rising. Peter wanted Jesus to be an earthly king who could produce results, like freeing him and his countrymen from Roman rule and their oppressive taxes. Peter wanted Jesus to make his life easy.

That’s why, in verse 22, we read: “Peter took [Jesus] aside and began to rebuke Him, saying, ‘God forbid it, Lord! This [suffering and crucifixion] must never happen to you.’”

Peter wanted to whittle the one he had just confessed to be the Messiah and the Son of the living God down to controllable dimensions. He wanted a king who would do things the way he thought that they should be done. He wanted a God who would wink at his favorite sins. Like Adam and Eve, Peter wanted to “be like God.”


You know, sometimes I go to God in prayer and say, "Now, Lord, what you need to do is thus and so. That will cause such and such a person to do what you and I both know they need to do. Then, I can step in and do this." Do you know what God's reaction to a "prayer" like that is? He laughs. We can't tell God how to do His job! If we do, our speech at that moment might be called many things, but it can't be called prayer.

Peter thought he was going to tell Jesus how to be God and King. Boy, was he wrong! Look at verse 23, for Jesus' reaction to Peter: “But [Jesus] turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to Me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

Jesus uses the same word for Peter, the word Satan, which means accuser, that He used for the devil when the devil tempted Him in the wilderness. Back then, Satan tried to tempt Jesus to avoid the cross and take the easy way to becoming a king. No suffering. No cross. All Jesus had to do was worship Satan and Jesus could have the world He had come to reclaim for God. Jesus refused to take the easy way.

Like the devil, Peter wanted Jesus to take the easy way. The easy way, the way of going along to get along, is exactly what Jesus warned anyone who wanted to follow Him to avoid when He said, “The gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life.” What path are you and I following in life: the Jesus way or the easy way?

My mentor, Pastor Bruce Schein, used to tell us about counseling parents whose high school or college-age children were addicted to drugs. He told these parents that if they loved their children, they wouldn’t give the kids the money they knew the kids would just use to buy more drugs. “But we can’t stand the thought of our kids hating us and thinking they can’t turn to us for help,” they would say. “It’s too painful.” “How painful will it be,” he would ask them, “if you give them what they want and you lose them forever?”

Peter, like Satan before him, confronted Jesus with the same sort of choice that confronted those parents Pastor Schein counseled. It would have been far easier for Jesus to give people what they wanted, to be a king who led a revolution and tossed out the Romans, while leaving you and me imprisoned to sin and death. Jesus willingly endured the hatred of the whole human race and the punishment for sin we deserve so that He wouldn’t lose us forever, so that on Easter Sunday, when the Father raised Jesus from the dead, He could give new life to all who repent for sin and believe in Him.

It was by the hard way of the cross that Jesus won life for all who trust in Him. God’s saving grace in Christ is free, but we must give up life as it’s usually lived to be free to grab hold of it!

In verse 26, Jesus amplifies this point, when He says in part, “If any want to become My followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

To take up our cross is to acknowledge that our sins put Jesus on the cross. I love what Martin Luther says when, in The Small Catechism, he explains the meaning of Baptism for our daily lives:

[Baptism] signifies that the old Adam in us, together with all sins and evil desires, should be drowned by daily sorrow for sin and repentance and be put to death, and that the new person should come forth every day and rise to live before God in righteousness and purity forever.

Just as Christ’s crucifixion led to His resurrection, daily taking up our crosses, confessing our sins, and submitting to the death of our sinful impulses and orientations brings us fresh new life every moment we walk with Jesus.

When we live in daily repentance and renewal, we can confess with Jeremiah, writing in the Old Testament book of Lamentations: “The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; His mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning…”

But what does it mean to deny ourselves? It means to dare to trust God’s revealed word and will and not in our own reasoning or experiences. Psalm 118 says that “it is better to take refuge in the LORD than to put confidence in mortals [that includes ourselves].”

Denying ourselves means admitting that we need God not as we want Him to be, but God as He is, the God Who can only save us from sin and death when we give Him our unconditional surrender and when we sign over control over our lives to Jesus Christ.

There is a joy and a peace to a life like this which, I confess, I have only tasted at times, but which I want more than anything! In the New Testament book of Philippians, the apostle Paul writes, “To me, living is Christ and dying is gain.” (Talk about upside down!)

Peter rebuked Jesus because he was concerned about living and organizing life as he wanted it to be. He was a slave to his desire for personal freedom and control. He wanted God to bend to His plans rather than submitting to whatever God had in mind for him.

One of the reasons I have such an irrational fear of water and have never learned to swim, I’m sure, is because I’m afraid to let go and just…swim. I like the feeling of control I have on dry land. New Testament scholar N.T. Wright says that following Jesus is like learning to swim. “If you keep your foot on the bottom of the pool,” he says, “you’ll never work out how to do it.” If we are to follow Jesus into eternity, we’ll have to do something similar. Wright continues, “You have to lose your life to find it. What’s the use of keeping your feet on the bottom when the water gets too deep? You have the choice: swim or drown. Apparent safety, walking on the bottom, isn’t an option any longer.”

True living, whether in this life or in eternity, doesn’t belong to those who play it safe. It belongs to people who give control of their lives to Jesus—to people who deny themselves, who take up their crosses, and who follow Him.

This life, no matter how many years we live here, is just a warm-up lap for the one to come.

Let Jesus take control of your life now. Start living in Jesus’ alternative universe—the kingdom of heaven—today. Let Jesus call the shots. Let Jesus set your priorities. Do everything you can to tell the world about the new life that only those with faith in Jesus have.

You may not win any popularity contests for living in Jesus’ kingdom. You may not gain power or wealth or ease. But you will live in the power of the only one who can give you life, the only One Who will be left standing when sin and death have done their worst to us.

And as you live with Jesus each day, you will, as Jesus promises at the end of our Gospel lesson, “not taste death before [you] see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom.” You will see the imprint of Jesus on every moment that you breathe. And you will be alive.

Today, right now, this moment: Follow Jesus!

A Look at The Lessons for This Coming Sunday (August 24, 2008)

[Most weeks, I try to publish at least one post dealing with the appointed Bible lessons for the upcoming Sunday. My hope is that I can at least help the people of the parish I serve as pastor, Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, to prepare for worship. Others may find these explorations helpful because we use the same Bible lessons used by most other North American Christians each Sunday. For information on the Church Year and the plan of lessons called the lectionary, see here.]

The Bible Lessons for This Sunday (The 15th. Sunday after Pentecost):
Isaiah 51:1-6
Psalm 138
Romans 12:1-8
Matthew 16:13-20

The Prayer of the Day:
O God, with all your faithful followers of every age, we praise you, the rock of our life. Be our strong foundation and form us into the body of your Son, that we may gladly minister to all the world, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.

General Comments:
1. All the appointed lessons fit in with an overall theme which I've tried to summarize here:

Confession of faith in Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, is the foundation on which Christ builds God's eternal community, the Church. The Church is essential for Christian faith...no Church, no faith. The Church is composed of those willing to stand under Christ even as we fail to fully understand Christ; we follow by faith. Faith, simply, is trust in God that God creates in those who are willing to believe.

If that's clear as mud, let me offer a few words on the lessons.

2. Isaiah 51:1-6: Most modern scholars believe that Isaiah 40-55 were written by a prophet from the Isaiah school of teaching during the Babylonian exile.

In Old Testament times, the Babylonian Empire swept into ancient Judea, the remnant of even more ancient Israel, and conquered God's people. They were utterly subjugated and many of their leaders were killed or exiled to Babylon, where they served as slaves of their Babylonian masters. The walls of Jerusalem, walls being the marks and the guarantors of safety for ancient cities, were brought down or allowed to crumble. More seriously, the Temple, where it was thought that the presence of God dwelt in the Holy of Holies, was torn up and allowed to deteriorate.

The "Babylonian Captivity," this period of mass exile for many of Israel's people, created a massive crisis of faith:

If Yahweh, their God, was the Lord of all and omnipotent, how could this have happened?

If they were God's chosen people, how could this have befallen them?

Had God allowed them to suffer the consequences of their chronic reliance on themselves or on worldly power, leaving them naked and vulnerable before a superior army, a superior power in the world?

If God was only knowable in a Temple made with hands in Jerusalem, as many had thought, what happened to their God and to their faith when the Temple was no more and they were far from home?

Many Old Testament passages give voice to the anguish felt by God's people. But it was also in this time period that many were inspired by God to hope for the coming of a new anointed king, Messiah, who would put things right. The exile happened in the 6th.-century BC.

3. Read what Lutheran Old Testament scholar Ralph W. Klein has to say about the Isaiah text (note that he mentions the Gospel lesson as well):

The two paragraphs in this pericope, vv. 1-3 and 4-6, both begin with the word "Listen" and are followed by warm promises of God. The faithful audience is characterized as those who pursue righteousness and who seek Yahweh.

Israel's ancestors Abraham and Sarah are compared to a rock or a quarry, something solid in a time of great uncertainty. The gospel for the date, Matt 16:13-20 has the famous saying about Peter, You are the rock and on this rock I will build my church." Though they were originally one (or two if you want to be picky about it), they became under God's blessing a numerous people. Similarly the exiles, few in number, could look forward to a God-blessed population increase.

"Comfort" is a theme word in Second Isaiah, beginning with 40:1. Comfort means much more than sympathy; it means God-worked transformation. Zion's waste places and wilderness will become luxuriant like the Garden of Eden. The transformation will be marked by appropriate human rejoicing: joy, gladness, thanksgiving, and singing (v. 3).

The second paragraph, vv. 4-6, is written in the first person as the words of Yahweh. God's teaching that goes forth and God's justice recall the eschatological promise of Isa 2:2-5.

Verse 5 promises God's speedy intervention as a military liberator. Note the military images in Yahweh's arms/arm. The nations too will rejoice in this deliverance. Heaven and earth as we know them will vanish and wear out, while Yahweh's salvation and deliverance will last forever (cf. Isa 40:8, which states that grass withers and flowers fade, but that Yahweh's word or promise will stand forever).

4. Psalm 138: This hymn of praise, ascribed to David, expresses thanks to the God who preserves His people "against the wrath" of their enemies.

5. Romans 12:1-8: The opening verses of this passage are extraordinary! In it, God tells us to offer Him our bodies, which is acceptable spiritual worship. Once God has access to out bodies and our spirits, God will begin to transform our minds, beginning, as in the case of Peter in this Sunday's Gospel lesson, by creating faith.

The reason I find vv. 1-2 so extraordinary is that they convey a truth: Give your body over to something or someone and your mind and spirit have no choice but to follow. Don't believe me? Consider some examples.

Two people think that they might like to be friends, but are uncertain. Until they take the time to meet and talk--even if that meeting and talking take place in cyberspace, they won't be friends. No commitment will happen.

Or, in a negative vain, consider an addict. The addiction may be alcohol or drugs, whatever. If the person can physically avoid ingesting, inhaling, or exposure to the object of addiction, the mind and the spirit will become habituated away from the addiction.

This applies to faith as well. As this Romans passage reminds us, faith happens and grows in the Christian community of which each member is an irreplaceable part, the Church. We may come to worship feeling skeptical, indifferent, or rebellious, for example. But if we willing submit our bodies to the discipline of regular worship, it's likely that God can work on our spirits and minds to build faith.

We are wholistic beings--bodies, minds, spirits. Wherever we commit to take our bodies, our whole selves will follow. This is why those who stop worshiping regularly are in jeopardy. Just as our whole selves will wither and die if we don't show up for meals, our whole selves will wither and die if we aren't regularly in worship with the Body of Christ, the Church. As Rick Warren noted in his book, The Purpose Driven Life: "The problem with a living sacrifice is that it can crawl off the altar."

Warren also notes that people who tell us that they won't be somewhere--be it a party, concert, family gathering, or worship service--"in spirit," are telling us one simple thing: "I won't be there." But when we show up bodily, we are there. Knock on the door of the house where the party is happening at the designated time and you'll be at the party. Hand over your ticket to the teller and walk into the arena and you'll be at the concert. Put your backside in the pew of a faithful Christian community on a Sunday morning and you're bound to hear the faith-inciting Word of God. Offering our bodies to God can be as simple as showing up to help with a community service project, making it to a Bible study or prayer gathering. Offering our bodies to God means being there where God sends us.

For a brief discussion of Romans 12:1-8, go here.

6. Vv. 3-8 of the Romans passage deals with how believers in Christ are part of a single living organism, the Body of Christ. Each is gifted for service which builds up the whole Church and empowers the Church to fulfill its mission. For a survey of the spiritual gifts, see my series of Advent devotions from several years ago, links to all installments of which can be found here.

7. Matthew 16:13-20: As I've written many times before, context is important to appreciate for understanding a given passage of Scripture. Many scholars think that the Gospel of Matthew's structure is patterned after the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, always deemed by the ancient rabbis as the most important portion of the Scriptures. In this theory, which seems plausible to me the Gospel has five thematic sections, each built around a major speech.

By this reckoning, our lesson for Sunday is the climax of the third book of Matthew's Gospel. Its theme, Brian Stoffregen says, has a a central issue:

Have people been able to discern from Jesus' ministry that he is God's Christ, the one anointed to manifest God's salvation and empire (cf. 11:2-6)?

Discerning Jesus as the Christ had been difficult for the imprisoned John the Baptist to make at the beginning of the third section. But, through the power of God, the willing and finite Peter catches a glimpse of the truth about Jesus at its end. (But only a glimpse.)

8. Consider another context. The first person to fully and freely confess Jesus as the Messiah in this Gospel is a foreign woman, who appeared in last Sunday's Gospel lesson. Note that this woman's discernment of Jesus as God's Christ happens also in the theorized "third book" of Matthew's Gospel.

Within Matthew's narrative, the woman stands out because, by the time she makes her appearance, Jesus' fellow Jews--Pharisees, Saducees, and even disciples--still don't get Jesus. She does. She shows up after a confrontation Jesus has with both Pharisees and Saducees and shortly after the disciples, show, in Jesus' words "little faith" (contrasting with her "great faith") during a storm on the Sea of Galilee.

Our Gospel lesson finds Jesus and the disciples in a city known for its worship of foreign gods. Caesarea Philippi was originally a center of Baal worship, then of Pan worship. In Jesus' day, one of the Herods, Phillip, had named the place for both himself and the Roman emperor, who was also the object of idolatry.

9. Yet another context. Immediately following our Gospel lesson, Jesus has to upbraid Peter, the very one whose faith He applauds in this Sunday's Gospel lesson. Why? Because Peter refuses to accept that Jesus must be crucified. He calls Peter, "Satan," surely an indication that neither Peter or the Church is perfect. The Church is Christ's fellowship of recovering sinners.