St. John Chrysostom Episcopal Church – Delafield, Wisconsin
6th Sunday after Pentecost – July 1, 2018
V. Rev. Steven A Peay, Ph.D.
[2 Corinthians 8:7-15/Mark 5:21-43]
“Lord,” not a word we often use. How many of you have had someone ask you: “Is Jesus Christ your Lord and personal savior?” I know that I have, and not always in the most loving fashion, either. Yet, what that enthusiastic person was asking – at least as far as the part of the question is concerned – is as old as the New Testament. So, I’d like to focus a bit today on what is the oldest profession of faith for the Christian Church: Jesus is Lord.
What I want to do is to look at this very simple statement of faith – Jesus is Lord – and then look at how we see it operationally defined in two of the lessons we read together this morning.
Karl Barth, the great Swiss theologian of the twentieth century said, “A Christian is one who makes confession of Christ. And the Christian confession is confession of Jesus Christ the Lord.” (Dogmatics in Outline, p. 65). Scholars across the board agree “Jesus Christ is Lord” is the first attempt at Christians articulating what they believed. The confession can be found specifically in the writings of Paul; in Romans 10:9, Philippians 2:11 and also in 1 Corinthians 8:6. It is also found in the response of Peter to Jesus’ question in Mark 8:29, “And he asked them, "But who do you say that I am?" Peter answered him, "You are the Christ."
What was being said at that moment? When Peter confesses Jesus to be “the Christ,” he is using the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew word “Messiah.” It literally means “the anointed.” What it implies is the ability to rule. When monarchs were enthroned they were anointed with oil to demonstrate that they were chosen not by just the people, but by God. The anointed one, the messiah, was one who would come with power to return the kingship, the rule promised to David’s line to Israel. In short, it would be one who would restore Israel to its place of dignity as a nation and one whose ruler was chosen, favored by God.
The term, however, takes on a different sense in the life and work of Jesus, because his announcement that the kingdom of God is “at hand,” is unlike any other. For Peter, and others, to come to put faith in him meant a whole new way of understanding what that kingdom is and how it is to be lived out.
I like what Michael Jinkins has written in his delightful book Invitation to Theology:
“The title Lord (Greek, Kyrios) without a doubt was no ordinary title of respect for these Jewish men and women who were the first followers of Christ. Kyrios was the word used in the Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures, the Septuagint, in place of the holy and unspeakable name of the Lord God. YHWH (we’ve filled in the missing vowels to make the name “Jehovah” or “Yahweh,” but in point of fact, because the name is sacred, it cannot be uttered, no one really knows what the vowels were). Kyrios, in other words, stands in for the sacred name of the Lord. A Greek-speaking follower of Jesus, like Paul for example, would not lightly place the title Kyrios on his lips. Even more solemnly would he apply it to the human Jesus who had met his death at the hands of Rome. Yet this title is applied to Jesus by Christians who, like Paul, understood its deepest meaning.” [p. 107-8]
The earliest Christians realized that in Jesus they had come to an encounter with the living God. When they were with Jesus they understood who God was. They understood in that moment how God wanted them to live in a way that they never had before. They understood that this God who had said from the beginning, “I am with you always” now was with them in a special way. This God who had said “I am a God of steadfast love and faithfulness” was steadfastly loving and faithful and loving in a new and different way. And this encounter changed their lives from the inside out. Jesus didn’t call them to assent to a dogmatic formula – this is the attempt of Christians over the centuries to understand and explain what they believe and how it is to be worked out. As the Roman Catholic theologian Hans Kung has said, Jesus calls people to “Follow me,” not “Say after me.” What we see revealed, modeled in Jesus is the unselfish, unself-centered love of God reaching out to us so that we may be drawn into relationship with God.
Presbyterian minister and novelist, the late Frederick Buechner said something powerful that speaks to this point.
After centuries of handling and mishandling, most religious words have become so shopworn nobody’s much interested anymore. Not so with grace, for some reason. Mysteriously, even derivatives like gracious and graceful still have some of the bloom left. Grace is something you can never get [nor earn nor conjure] but only be given... The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are, because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you. Here is the
world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. I am with you.
Nothing can ever separate us. I love you. There’s only one catch. Like any other
gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you’ll reach out and take it.
That is what the woman with the hemorrhages experienced. She knew that the experience of grace and healing were close to her. Her society, even her religion, had pushed her to the margins, had marked her as “unclean” and in what she heard of and from this Jesus she came to a new understanding of who she was. She wasn’t a “case,” she wasn’t “unclean,” she was a child of God who needed to be touched and loved and restored to the wonder of who she was. In a moment of incredible boldness she reached past her disease, her life-situation, her fear and her loneliness to touch one she knew could make a difference – and he did. She discovered what all of us are to discover – to profess Jesus as Lord is to be life-giving. Our faith is not to drain the life out of us, but to put life into us.
The same can be said for Jairus, and especially for his daughter – who, like the woman, goes unnamed, maybe because they have ALL of our names? That little girl is raised, as are all of us, from the deadness of selfishness and isolation that keeps us from loving God, from loving those around us and even from loving ourselves in the manner that we were meant to do.
What we see in Jesus’ action in Mark’s Gospel is what we also hear in Paul’s call to the Church at Corinth – generosity. Paul reminds the people, “For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.” We become rich in the things of God. We become, as we learn elsewhere, the “co-heirs” of the kingdom of God, adopted children of the Father who has loved us into being and loves us into the new life of relationship. In short, because we are the recipients of generosity, we are to live generously. What I’m saying is that our lives are to be LIVED generously in the way we give of ourselves in loving service – as Jesus did.
To confess, to profess that Jesus is Lord is to mark one’s self as a follower of Jesus Christ – one who “goes around after” him. What that means, bottom line, is that our profession of faith is more about the way we live, about the way we speak, about our attitudes, our actions, our choices, our conduct of relationships than it is about assent to dogmatic statements (even though, as a Historical Theologian, I believe those statements to be very important as tools for guiding our thought and actions). Nevertheless, they don’t mean anything if we don’t live them – and that’s the point. To say that Jesus is Lord is to live in the same manner as he taught – loving God with everything we’ve got and our neighbor as ourselves.
So, if someone asks you that question with which we started, “Is Jesus your Lord?” I pray that you can answer with confidence, seeing through the baggage of religious language over the years: Jesus is Lord? Yes. Jesus is Lord of life. I am a follower of Jesus Christ. And then, more importantly, live like it – that makes all the difference.