Jesus and his disciples went into the villages near Caesarea Philippi. On the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?”

They told him, “Some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, and still others one of the prophets.”

He asked them, “And what about you? Who do you say that I am?”

Peter answered, “You are the Christ.” Jesus ordered them not to tell anyone about him.

Then Jesus began to teach his disciples: “The Human One must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and the legal experts, and be killed, and then, after three days, rise from the dead. ”He said this plainly. But Peter took hold of Jesus and, scolding him, began to correct him. Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, then sternly corrected Peter: “Get behind me, Satan. You are not thinking God’s thoughts but human thoughts.”

I have to confess that this past year has been an unusual one, not only because of the sabbatical, but also because of a wave of deaths of people I’ve known and pastored and worked closely with. It all seem to begin with my friend Michael Swift, the former choir director, who was roughly my age, who passed away from a cancer in Hawaii, after a wonderful career as a nurse.  He was fun to be around, a lovely man, and so smart, and the kind of nurse who you simply trusted within seconds of meeting him. And then recently Joyce from my former congregation in Michigan died of cancer, only a month or so ago – again, a kind and gentle woman whose smile could light up a room. I have two German/English language prayer books from her childhood she gave me before I left the church to pastor here in Chicago – they are on a shelf in my office right now. Amazingly, she and her twin sister died within 2 weeks of each other. Douglas and I lit a candle for her at the Protestant Cathedral in Berlin. Karen, another member of my former congregation in Michigan, died a few weeks – again, a backbone of the church, always handing out the bulletins on Sunday, and sending out her homemade cards she made on her computer, for every occasion, including get well cards for a simple cold.  And then there is Laverne, the church secretary for many years at First Congregational in Houston, who was charter member of that church, and who could tell stories of growing up in Houston before air conditioning become affordable for the masses – Houston without air conditioning is my idea of hell! And Sylvia, who reinvented herself as a mental health counselor after her marriage fell apart and spent decades providing psychological services in an office tucked away in the tower of the Houston church. Both Sylvia and Laverne also passed away within a few weeks of each other. The passing of every one of those souls was a shock to me and it’s not as if they were all unexpected deaths – but when I got the news about each of them, a flood of memories about them would overwhelm my soul, and then the grief and sadness came, even as I have hope and believe to the core of who I am that they are with their Creator, who is love itself, according to Jesus.    

Almost all of us in this room have experienced grief at the death of a beloved, human and sometimes not human, and sometimes the force of it can be overwhelming, almost a surprise in its intensity, even if we’ve had a sometimes ambiguous relationship with them. The experts often try to mark out the stages of grief, or they hand us a model for what to expect – but grief is so particular to each person, and ultimately there are no right ways to express grief or even not express it. I watch too much of the television show Dateline, where true-life murders are unraveled, and there is always that detective who states that so-and-so is just not grieving in the right way for the victim, which was their first clue that this person may be guilty of the murder. As someone who has walked beside a lot people in their grief, and have known my own so acutely, I just roll my eyes when officers say stuff like that – there are no ordinary and right ways to grieve – there is just grief, and it comes out in sometimes surprising ways. We can’t judge people’s ways of getting through grief, not really, though certainly there are healthy and unhealthy ways to deal with loss, sorrow and anguish. We can’t know another’s experiences, the complexity of their experience, the ways they’ve been taught and not taught about how to deal with loss.  

And yet, it’s not healthy when we decide not to sit with our grief, or when we try to run away from our own sorrow, or even the grief of others, the deep suffering within and without. It’s the very challenge that the disciples in our story are surely struggling with in today’s text, in their denials of the reality that Jesus has set before them – that difficult things, heart rending things will greet them in the coming weeks and they will know grief in ways they have never known before. But first, he asks them a question, a pivotal question, in a pivotal place like Caesarea Philippi, and in a pivotal moment in the story that writer of the Gospel of Mark is telling. Jesus asks them who the people say he is, who do they think he is?  They reply that some think of Jesus as being the resurrection of dead prophets, ones who have died recently, like John the Baptist, and others who have long since gone, Elijah and the prophets of old. “Fine,” he seems to say, “but who do you say that I am” – and the disciples, well, they say he is the Messiah, God’s promised Savior to the people of Israel. When they say Messiah, they imagine with so many of their fellow countrymen that this Messiah would defeat God’s enemies and bring with him a new golden era of Israel, one not even matched by Kings David and Solomon. “Quiet, then, don’t tell a soul what you believe about me,” he tells them. But then Jesus immediately begins to challenge the ideas they have about what a Messiah should be – he tells them that instead of winning he will lose, that instead of defeating his enemies and the enemies of Israel, they will defeat him – they will kill him, though he will rise, he will rise again only three days later. What’s interesting about this moment is two things: first, you should know that Mark says that this took place in Caesarea Philippi, while Matthew and Luke have the story taking place in another town.  Why? Well, scholars think that Mark wants to make some connections to the time Mark and his listeners were living through, years after Jesus’ life and resurrection, but during the Jewish Civil War fought against the Romans some forty years later. At the time this Gospel was likely written, Caesar Philippi had being used by the Romans as Prisoner of War camp, holding the Jewish revolutionaries who had rebelled against Rome – and in Caesarea Philippi they tortured and killed them in a public manner, as a signal to the population that if you do what these men did, this will be your fate as well– the Romans were always about public displays of state cruelty so as to send a message to the conquered populace. With this horrific scene in our mind, the writer of Mark, in words following today’s verses, but not printed in your bulletin, the writer has Jesus telling his disciples that they must deny themselves, take up their cross, and possibly lose their life for the sake of the Gospel. All of this is said in a city whose streets have only recently run crimson with the blood of Jewish martyrs, men who had laid down their lives in an effort to throw off the shackles of Rome.  

But only moments before this call to follow after Jesus, to take up a cross and follow him, we see Peter literally taking hold of Jesus, grabbing him, so distraught was he about Jesus’ words about dying and rising, that Peter tries to correct him – “don’t be a fool, Jesus, Messiahs don’t die, they live, they win, they defeat the enemies of God.” But Jesus won’t be dismissed, won’t be corrected by someone who doesn’t know what he is talking about – and he literally calls Peter Satan, and says that he is thinking human thoughts rather than divine thoughts – thinking like people who crave revenge and victory rather this new thing he is doing that will defeat the sting of death in the act of resurrection, for all of humankind. What’s interesting here is that Peter, and certainly some of the other disciples, is that they don’t want Jesus to be like them, they don’t want him to be human, to live and die as humans must, and always will – to them, a Messiah who can die is a pretty useless Messiah. Jesus shouldn’t be like us, hostage to the sting and the horror of death, the fear that knocks at the door of even the bravest and most faithful of us. Messiah’s don’t know death – and there shouldn’t be any need for a Messiah to rise after three days because he shouldn’t be dead in the first place! But it’s the beautiful taut tension that runs throughout the Jesus story, this belief that Jesus was as a human as we are, that he felt love and knew joy, felt desire, and knew grief, knew it as deeply as we did. And yet, Jesus was somehow also something altogether different than human – not a different creature, but somehow, mysteriously was divinity itself walking through the streets of Caesarea Philippi, healing the sick, stilling the storms and simply showing us the face of God in ways we had humans had never seen it before. Jesus was not simply God disguised as one of us, but God was actually one of us, one of us humans.

But to be human, to do what God has done in Christ means that God now knows not only the joy and love and laughter and family and friendship that comes with being human.  It also means God knows pain, knows loneliness, knows despair, and knows human grief, knows that it means to lose a beloved to death, to life on the other side of life. We Christians call this idea of God being both fully human and fully God the doctrine of the incarnation, this crazy idea that God came to humankind thousands of years ago in the form of a peasant from a backwater town, and was immersed in the world as deeply as we are, completely awash in the human experience as we all are here in this room. Since the very beginning we Christians have tried to make sense of the meaning of Jesus’ death and resurrection – the debate is all over our New Testament and continues even today. One of the ways some Christians have explained what God did in Christ, what God brought to humankind in the Christ, the possibility of wholeness, salvation, is that God entered into the human experience through this Jesus and that has made all the different – it changed God and it changed us. Gregory of Naznanius, one of the great theologians of the 4th century, said this: “that which he has not assumed he has not healed.”  “That which God has not assumed, that God has not entered into, God has not healed, maybe cannot heal.”  God cannot heal us or the world if God has not entered into the world. Listen to the story of the shaman we heard in our modern lesson, the one that heals through the experience of “feeling with” the patient: “I feel for the sores, the aches and the pains. When I put my hand over the body I can feel every little muscle and every little vein. I can feel the soreness. It hurts me. If they have heart trouble, my heart just beats. Any place they are hurting, I hurt. I become a part of their body.  There is something about entering into the human experience that changes the healer and healed, the Creator and the creation, and many Christians, including myself, believe that God’s choice to do such a thing, to enter into the joy and into the hurt of the world, it somehow gave us the possibility of wholeness. The God who created us, the God who walks beside us in the Christ, and the God who is within us through the Spirit, this God knows our pain, our joy, our grief, our love, our hurt, our fear, our strength and now even our death, and somehow this choice by God to do so has changed God, and can change us, if we will only allow it to. Wholeness is possible, perhaps not completely on this side of the veil, but wholeness in particular moments, that wholeness really is possible because of what God has done in Christ.  

But, like God, we, you and I have a choice about whether or not to enter into the world of others, of the life of the greater world, to listen to what is difficult to hear, to what is difficult to understand, the choice to listen to the stories of others, to their truths, their sorrows, to their joys. I talked last week about the need for us Christians to listen to others, to each other, and to God – to echo Matt Smucker’s summary of my sermon, “my pastor said we should shut up and listen!” Part of the reason why I think that is good advice is that it’s exactly what God did through Jesus – God listened to us, and though certainly God spoke to us through Jesus, God also listened to us, and I think the listening made all the difference. And because God listened to us, we should listen to each other, and in listening to each other, we’re sometimes going to hear God speaking through others.  But we humans don’t have to, do we, we don’t have to listen to each other, and to listen to the pain and suffering of the world. Some of us spend a lot of time avoiding having to listen to anything that hurts, that feels what the shaman feels, the hurt of the world and others, and we are like Peter, wishing not to look at the reality, the difficult reality of it that is before him. Some of us only want to surround ourselves with joy, laughter, goodness, and I am tempted by impulse, and sometimes seek out only the light – and there is nothing wrong with that, of seeking to laugh sometimes or even most of the time – and sometimes you just need to watch a bunch YouTube videos showcasing puppies to get through the day! But it’s funny, I think, that even then sorrow can creep into our joy, something I was reminded of this summer during my sabbatical. To get away from the heat in Zurich, Douglas and I went to see Mamma Mia 2 in a nice cool theater, and though the films are nothing but cotton candy, they do have Abba songs, which was the music of my childhood – and usually I just find myself smiling throughout the movie, just smiling with quiet joy.  But this particular time, right there, in this joyous, fun movie, I just started crying because memories just flooded into my mind, memories of my deceased mother and I dancing to Abba when I was seven years old in the 1970’s, dancing with the kind of abandon I don’t think I’ve ever replicated as an adult. Joy and sadness, all mixed up, surely, as it with so much of life, so connected to each other and so impossible they are to sometimes disentangle from each other.

But moments like the one I experienced in that theater are what we are asked to experience, to do what God has done, to take a chance on this world, to choose what God has chosen, to not always look away. Look, I know there are times when it is impossible to not listen, to not look – the cross is before you and me and there is no going back – it just must be gotten through, just gotten through so we can get to our third day, the day of our resurrection. But so often we won’t listen and we won’t look because we fear that what awaits us in our personal Jerusalems will somehow consume us, or destroy us. Sometimes we do have to look away, just to survive – emotional denial is a real and sometimes needed human coping mechanism. But, in the end, we can’t change what we can’t look at, what we can’t listen to, within us, or within the world – that truth is what God seemed to have discovered in the Christ, and what Gregory of Nazianus was trying to say when he said “that which he has not assumed, he has not healed.” It seems that God decided to change the world from the inside out, in and through the Christ, and I think that’s the only way, changing ourselves and the world from the inside out, is the only way we’re going to be able to do the same. So, we have a God who knows joy, who knows pain, and, for me, a God who knows grief, my grief, my human grief, our human grief. And for me that is a God worth journeying towards Jerusalem with, a God who we can trust to meet us in our crucifixion and who knows that resurrection can and will meet on the other side, on that great and surprising and amazing third day.  Amen.