The Lord God has given me
the tongue of a teacher,
that I may know how to sustain
the weary with a word.
Morning by morning he wakens–
wakens my ear
to listen as those who are taught.
The Lord God has opened my ear
Perhaps like me, every September your mind travels back to memories of school and of your best teachers.
And as I do that, I am reminded that my best teachers weren’t so much the ones who spouted facts and figures and other forms of knowledge . The best teachers were the ones who asked questions that opened my mind and expanded my heart, and challenged my soul. That led me beyond the obvious and the already known, into the realms of the unknown and the mysterious. Realms where my mind could imagine what I had not imagined before. Those magnificent territories that opened out into the mysteries at the heart of things. That realm that we might call the territory of the divine.
Miss Pieper who taught me to love the mystery of letting surprising new thoughts appear through creative writing. Mrs. Collier who taught me that scientists are not ones who are certain, but rather ones who ask questions that push beyond what is already known into the unknown. Mr. Downs who taught me that one can discover things one didn’t know about oneself by letting the body speak those new things in drama class and on the stage. Mr. Merrill who taught me that some of the deepest truths cannot be put into words, but can only be expressed through unworded music. And Dr. Ulanov, who taught me that the deepest parts of the human are to be found not in or through our conscious mind but by a contemplative listening to the unconscious as it makes itself known in dreams and images.
And in the stories that we have just heard from the gospel of Mark, we encounter a Jesus who is both a teacher, and one taught. The masterful teacher of his disciples, his students. But also one who is humble enough to be a student of his own students,
a disciple who learns from his own disciples.
It is as if Jesus has learned from and decided to incarnate, to embody the voice we hear in this morning’s portion from the book of the Prophet Isaiah. Jesus comes before us as one who has the tongue of a teacher, but also as a student, a willing disciple, one who has allowed his ears to be opened and taught by the Holy One, the God of all Creation: we meet this Jesus, eager to listen and learn in dialogue with his fellow disciples.
And so, using the very question that we just heard from the One that I acknowledge as Lord and Redeemer, I offer you a question this morning. Who do you say that Jesus is?
And as you contemplate that question, I wonder whether you think that Jesus is simply playing a game with his disciples? Does he already know the right answer? Or as a true teacher, whose ear and heart and mind and soul are truly open, and not already completely formed and decided, is he really asking them a question that he is asking himself, and does not yet fully know the answer to? Our tradition teaches us that Jesus is fully human, just as we are. And as a fellow human being, perhaps today’s stories help us to see that Jesus, like us, has to wrestle his way through, by true and earnest questions, that central thing all of us have to figure out for ourselves: just who am I? What sort of human being am I meant to be? What steps should I take to become the me that I am meant to be, the me that God created me to be?
I am imagining that Jesus has been asking himself this question all along and that he’s been asking God this question all along as well. And since he isn’t yet entirely sure how to answer “who am I” and “what sort of human being am I meant to be,” he now turns humbly to his closest circle of friends to ask them to help him figure it out.
We’ve all been there haven’t we? Asking God who we are meant to be, and asking ourselves who we are meant to be and asking our closest friends and relatives “who am I meant to be?” Isn’t it marvelous that we have in Jesus, the one we believe embodies God most clearly and fully for us, isn’t it marvelous, that we have in him a companion in this questioning? A fellow traveler? One who understands from the inside the ongoing human struggle that each of us has: to get as clear as we can who we are meant to be. And then to live that out with as much vigor and joy as we can muster.
Turn your mind and heart now to your own struggles about this, struggles in the past, struggles in the present. I know you must have gone through more than one iteration of trying to get clear about who you are and who you were meant to be. I know I did. Fascinated by the space program in my early childhood, I wondered if I could be called to be an astronomer. And then in middle school, as the conservation movement began to take hold in this country. I wondered if I was called to be a Forest Ranger or some sort of ecologist. In college, enthralled by the complex and fascinating development of western civilization during the middle ages and the early modern period, I wondered if I was called be a history professor. Only slowly, with many questions and no few trepidations, I began to wonder and then come to believe that I might be called to be a priest. And certainly, you have had your own journeys of self discovery through questions and iteration after iteration of answers to that central question who am I and who has God made me to be?
And so in dialogue with his dearest friends, Jesus engages in that same struggle. He asks them questions as he tries to figure out who he is. And their responses to his questions are not random. I’m imagining that Jesus has for some time been testing out in conversation with his disciples these possibilities, the possibilities that he’s been hearing his own heart, but possibilities he’s also been hearing from interactions with those he meets along the road of his life’s mission.
We hear some of what he must have been hearing others say about him, possible life shapes that Jesus himself must’ve been wondering: am I to embody the spirit of the prophet Elijah? After all, our scriptures, and our people all believe that Elijah has to return before the Messiah can come. Or, since I’ve been so deeply shaped by my cousin John the Baptist and his call to turn around and help reshape the life of our crazy world, maybe my call is to carry on his mission now that he’s gone, now that Herod has executed John. Or maybe I’m supposed to be like one of the prophets. Maybe like the prophet Isaiah, one whose ear is open to be taught by God, and to be the teacher of others after I’ve listened as closely as I can to what the Holy One is saying. Am I to be like that one Isaiah spoke about over and over again? One who is to be God’s servant, a servant willing to travel a hard road that will include much suffering, but still trusting that God is present as a close companion, loving and supporting one who travels that hard road of truth, never wavering from the loving pursuit of the good no matter how much pain is part of that mission.
So on the heels of these trial balloon answers in dialogue with his disciples, Jesus’ closest friend, Peter, the one who is at the center of the circle of disciples, has the courage to risk a new possibility. Not old answers. Not images from the past. Not safe re-embodiments of the past. Not Elijah. Not John the Baptist not Isaiah or one of the other prophets. No, Peter risks saying: Jesus is not to be one of these. That is not who God has made Jesus to be.
No, Peter says to Jesus: You are the Messiah. The Christ. Jesus is God’s anointed one.
What? This is a crazy answer. A crazy, off the wall possibility. The kind of answer other students would scoff at, and think: that is so far beyond the realm of possibility, that can’t be the answer. That can’t be who Jesus is!
The Messiah was supposed to be a royal figure. Heir of David. A warrior. General and King. Able to rout the Romans and re-establish Israel as independent, strong, God’s land and people, not a vassal state to a pagan Empire. Jesus: Messiah?! No way!
And who knows how long of a gap there was between Peter having named Jesus as Messiah and Jesus taking up the next part of the story. Scripture as we have it is highly compressed and so it may have been hours or days or even weeks later, that Jesus begins – in response to Peter naming him Messiah -Jesus begins to speak about the suffering of the son of man. I wonder what Jesus was thinking in the time between Peter‘s naming him Messiah and Jesus own words about the son of man. Perhaps Jesus himself had to think about what it would mean to be Messiah. But at least as our gospel has it constructed, whether it was hours or days or weeks later, Jesus puts Peter‘s confession of him as Messiah in a startlingly new context. It would appear that Jesus actually Won’t accept Peter‘s definition of him as Messiah. Instead, Jesus name himself son of man not Messiah. Or perhaps, he is saying you all have the wrong idea about the Messiah. The Messiah is not a warrior. He is not a general who will overcome the Roman occupying forces. He is not David’s heir. He will not be a king, he will not rule through Military might. If I am going to be a Messiah, this is the kind of Messiah, I am going to be. This is the sort of Messiah God has in mind, and has anointed me to be. I will be a son of man. I will be one of you. I will be a descendent of Adam, not a descendant of David, and like you, if you are willing, I will accept the suffering that comes my way, as suffering comes to every human being, every child of Adam and Eve. I will accept everything that comes my way. The good and the bad the triumphant and what feels defeating, the betrayal of the ones we all wish we could trust, our closest friends, our religious leaders. And part of what I will accept is that the One who made me to be like you and to be your leader, and to be the son of man, the son of Adam, that One will also overcome the betrayal and the suffering and will raise me up on a third day. So if you want to follow me. If you want me to be your teacher, if you want to be a true student of mine, then come: walk the path that I walk. And trust the One that I trust and if you do, then you will find, as I have found, my true self embedded in that God, and emerging from that God, and that no matter what happens – the good and the bad, the triumph and the deep suffering – all will be held by the God who made you and me, the God who will hold you and will raise you up out of life’s inevitable difficulties, and who will shape and re-shape you into a new being, a new human, a life unfolding into a self that you can barely imagine.
So never stop listening to the God who is continuing to shape and reshape you. Don’t hold on to who you think you are, and don’t try to save yourself by having it your own way. Let it go. And let the God who called me and who calls you give you the good news that is better than the news you have chosen about yourself. Don’t try to hold onto the good news you’ve created for yourself. Don’t try to save that life. Let God save you from the too small life you have imagined. And let the Holy One bring you through all the letting go, and the pain of letting go what you thought you wanted and what you thought you were made for, and let there be even better news about who you are and what you were made for. For if you do, then you will find that God has prepared for you a glory beyond your imagining. Beyond the answers that you have given to the questions of your life. A life of destiny that is literally ex-quisite (for ex-quisite means “beyond the questions”) a life that is beyond the questions and the answers that you have given. Let God bring you, beyond your questions, into the good news that keeps unfolding, now and into the life of the world to come. Amen.