This is the first of 8 sermons on a series Entitled “God Solves our Problems”.
The recent spate in Kentucky has brought to us once again the question of the separation of church and state. Which should reign supreme? The law of the United States, which is that homosexual couples now have the right to marry in all states – or the right of a woman who is dedicated to her God and her understanding that God has decreed marriage to only be between a man and a woman?
And we see that both sides in this issue have used the tools at their disposal. The county clerk’s supporters appeal to religious and moral arguments to persuade people – the state’s judge has used coercive force and tossed the woman into jail.
Regardless of which side you take in this dispute, this debate has gone on a long, long time and this particular round is only the latest in a 3000 year old fight between the powers of the king and the powers of the priesthood.
But even this long running feud between King Saul and Samuel, between King Ahab and Elijah, between Jesus and Pilate, between the Pope and King Henry VIII is just part of an even larger debate. That debate is the debate that each person has between the call of the invisible God upon their life – and the call of the visible world, between material reality and spiritual reality, between the spirit and the flesh. It is the question of the concerns of God – and mere human concerns. Does anything exist beyond what we can see and touch and feel and taste and smell?
Jesus and his disciples had now been together for a couple of years. He had already called the Twelve and they had formed into a group of men who understood each others fairly well. They had walked from Galilee to Jerusalem and back several times, a hundred miles each way. They had recently traveled to Tyre, the ancient capital of the Phoenicians, near where Beirut, Lebanon stands today, a land which in that time had huge cypress trees that were famous around the Eastern Mediterranean. They came back to Galilee and traveled to the towns on the southeastern side, the Decapolis, the Ten Cities. And then they walked almost due north to the town of Caesarea Philippi, which was located in what is today western Syria, North of the Sea of Galilee. And wherever they traveled, Jesus healed people and preached his sermons about all people being valuable, about all people being good enough for God, about all people being loved by His Father God.
And so, in Caesarea Philippi, Jesus stopped with His disciples and asked them a key question: “Who do people say I am?”
28 They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.”
“Some say John the Baptist”, the strange cousin of Jesus who lived in the wilderness, telling people that the Kingdom of God was coming soon, and baptizing people to wash away their sins. John had recently been arrested and beheaded by Herod, the king of Galilee.
“Others say Elijah”. Elijah was one of the greatest of the Old Testament prophets, a man who stood up to Ahab and Jezibel, the rulers of the Northern Kingdom of Israel after the kingdom split soon after Solomon’s death. Elijah had held the great contest of the gods on top of Mt Carmel, and God had sent fire from heaven to light the water-soaked wood of Elijah’s sacrifice, and ignored the priests of Baal, and the people had killed the priests of Baal, Ahab and Jezibel’s minions, in the brook at the bottom of the mountain.
“Still others, one of the prophets”. A prophet was a man or woman who spoke for God, someone who God talked with and gave messages to that they spoke to the people and the rulers of Israel. This was indeed a mighty compliment paid to the young preacher from Nazareth.
And then Jesus asked an even more pointed question: 29 “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”
You can almost imagine the disciples looking around at each other to go first. They had talked among themselves – they had seen the miracles, they had helped the lame leap up, heard the mute speak, watched the blind see the world for the first time. They had seen demon-possessed people become sane and calm, and they had tasted wine that Jesus had made, not over the course of 6 months like normal people, but in fifteen minutes, controlling the processes of nature like a man who could walk on water – and they had seen that also. They had even seen dead people brought back to life. But most of all they had seen the terrible wisdom and knowledge that Jesus had. And so they looked around at each other, urging each other with their eyes to speak first.
Peter answered, “You are the Messiah.”
There – Peter had said it. The Messiah. A title loaded with meaning. Messiah was a Hebrew word which literally meant “the anointed One”. In the speech of the Greeks, the word was Christus, in English “Savior”. The Messiah was to be a high Priest and King, the one who would bring all of Israel back together, the man who would establish the kingdom of God once more, bring global peace and rebuild the Temple of God. The Messiah was to be a descendent of David and Solomon, and would restore the holy line of kings – and be a high priest, joining together church and state once more.
“Don’t tell anyone,” Jesus told His disciples.
And then, Jesus told them the flip side of being Messiah. He told them that He would have to suffer greatly, be rejected by everybody who was anybody, be killed, and then, that he would rise up again after three days. And Peter did not want to hear all of this. He loved Jesus, he would follow Jesus anywhere, but Jesus was now talking crazy, because everyone knew that the man who became Messiah would lead a victorious people to retake their kingdom and toss out the hated Romans, and everyone would love him! And most especially, he would live to rule – he would not die, for glorious leaders rule for 40 or 80 years – they do not die before they rule and that talk about coming back to life was just crazy!
And so Jesus took his star pupil, the big fishing boat captain who had followed Him from the beginning, the man that Jesus had name “Rock!” because that’s what Peter means, and turned His back on him in front of the other disciples, and said:
“Get behind me, Satan!” he said. “You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”
Jesus called Peter “Satan”, meaning “liar” or “deceiver”. And he drew Peter’s attention to the real issue: “You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”
And this is still the issue today.
When we look at our problems in life, there are two ways we can look at every single problem we ever face. We can look at the problem with the concerns of God - or with mere human concerns.
The normal way, the way of the world, the human way, is to look at our problems in a world which only contains those things we can see and hear and taste and feel and smell. It is a world filled with objects – cars and boats and rocks and trees and people and hot dogs and cats and flies and snakes. This is the material world, a world composed only of those things we can see and hear and taste and feel and smell.
We look at the material world and we soon lose hope. For in the material world, the material world is clearly stacked against most people.
Studies have shown that the best way to predict how much money you will make in your lifetime is to look at how much money your parents made. The most certain way to become wealthy is to choose your parents well because wealthy parents usually mean wealthy children, and poor parents usually mean poor children.
Other studies have shown that educated parents have educated children, uneducated parents have uneducated children. Children of abusive parents become abusers, children of alcoholics become alcoholics. Etc. Etc.
It seems that in a material world of hungry people, the hungriest simply fade away and those who are born fat and happy stay fat and happy. The rich stay rich and the poor stay poor and the middle class fight to pay their taxes and stay where they are.
But there is another way to look at the world. It is to recognize that this Universe has more in it than just those material things. Besides all those cats and hot dogs and rocks and mountains and buildings, there are also ideas.
I’d like you to imagine a perfect triangle.
Now I know that when you went to high school, you had a geometry teacher who told you that a perfect triangle has 180 degrees spread among the three angles. But tell me, can you draw such a triangle? Can you actually draw a triangle that has exactly 180 degrees spread among the three angles. Could you even draw one angle that is exactly 90 degrees? Or would you draw an angle that that is 89 degrees or 91 degrees or 89.999 degrees or 90.0001 degrees?
You can’t draw a perfect triangle. No one can. You can’t even draw a line to be exactly 5 inches long – you can come close, but you’ll be off a thousandth of an inch or a millionth of an inch or the width of an atom.
But still, in our Universe, we have that idea of the perfect triangle, the perfect 5 inch line, the perfect dog, the perfect cake, the perfect steak, the perfect husband or wife, the perfect day, the perfect President.
And those ideas are real, just as real or even more real than that almost perfect material triangle that we tried to draw, that line that is almost 5 inches long, that almost perfect day, because a idea lasts forever, while a material object soon decays, rots, or erodes and is gone. The idea of the perfect day lasts forever, while the almost perfect day lasts no more than 24 hours. Which is more real? I'll take the perfect, eternal idea over the ephemeral, fading material world.
And then, we can imagine the perfect President, the perfect King, the perfect ruler, the God who is powerful, able to bring justice to our world, to defeat any enemy, any evil, never be corrupted, and always do the best for the people, making perfectly wise decisions. And so, in a world of perfect ideas, why do we suddenly say that this perfect God does not exist?
For look around you. The world away from the destructive acts of people is beautiful. The mountains are covered with beautiful forests, filled with wonderful flowers and birds and mountain streams that gurgle and spray, putting the scent of clean water into the air, telling us that there is hope and wonder and beauty in this world.
And there is Beauty itself. I can tell you why a rainbow has color, I can tell you why the colors are in the order they are, but if our world is only made of material things, then there is no reason for Beauty to exist, yet a rainbow is beautiful. A coral reef is dangerous and yet beautiful. A mountain in full fall splendor is fabulously beautiful even though it tells us that a cold, dark winter is on the way. So why does Beauty exist? Because there is something more than the material world – there is something beyond nature, there is something beyond what we can see and taste and touch and smell and hear – there is the supernatural. Ideas are not material – they are not natural – instead they are supernatural.
If anything supernatural exists at all – then God must exist, for the supernatural can not be created by the natural. A perfect triangle cannot be created by an imperfect protractor, a perfect 5 inch line cannot be created by an imperfect pencil and imperfect ruler, and a perfect God could not be created by imperfect people. Imperfect people create imperfect gods, like the anger-prone gods of the Greeks who were little more than powerful, overgrown twenty-year olds.
But perfection can create imperfection.
And a perfect God can create imperfect people.
And so, the second way of looking at the world is to recognize that more than the natural material world exists, that perfect ideas and a perfect God do exist. And then, it might be time to find out what that perfect God has said to us imperfect people.
Jesus Christ claimed to be the Messiah. But He also claimed many times to be God Himself walking on this earth. “I and the Father are One” Jesus said as reported in the Gospel of John 10:30. And Jesus taught us totally new ways of living our lives, some of which are now accepted by most people, others of which are still not accepted.
Jesus taught us that the poor are just as important to God as the rich. He taught that the rich should be fair and just and show mercy to the poor. He taught that every person is tremendously valuable to God and therefore should be valuable to each of us. He taught us to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves.
And because he claimed to be God, he was killed for blasphemy against God. He was killed for claiming to be God. And the Romans made sure He was dead by beating him with a whip, by putting him on a cross to bleed and suffocate to death, and by stabbing Him in his side to make sure He was dead, dead, dead.
And then, three days later, He came back to life and was seen at least eleven different times in different places by different eyewitnesses, including at least once by over five hundred people, and he ate and drank with them and taught them and scolded them and cooked for them and touched them. And so at least eight of those witnesses put pen to paper and wrote about what had happened – Peter, Paul, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, James, Jude.
And what does the Resurrection of Jesus prove? Only that Jesus was exactly who Jesus said He was – God walking upon this earth – and that everything He said should be trusted as the actual Word of God.
In particular, Jesus said that those who follow Jesus will gain eternal life with God. If you choose to follow Jesus, you will live forever. As the actual Word of the real, eternal, perfect God, this is a promise that will be kept.
And that changes everything. Living forever changes your view of what is important.
You see, if you will live forever, who cares about the merely human concerns of the material world? Does it matter about the fight you’re having with your landlord, with your neighbor, with your ex? Does it matter if you have a long life or a short life when you will live forever?
Many times, I’m sure you’ve thought that children around you were fighting over something trivial. Because of Jesus’ promise, almost everything we argue about as adults becomes trivial. Will it matter in ten thousand years?
And so, the first way that God helps us fight our problems is to put an eternal perspective of the problem, and in my experience, this means that almost all problems disappear because they aren’t important.
The second way that God helps us is God begins to train us. God has a training course ready for you to help you become the wonderful person that God knows you can be. You’ll need to break some bad habits first, but God will be there right beside you, like a drill instructor that will not quit, working to make you into a leader among the people of the world, giving you hope where you had despair, life where you saw death, wonder and joy where you way dullness and sadness.
God is about to break you free from the habits that have been holding you in slavery, your addictions, your stinkin’ thinkin’, your self-caused troubles.
But God is polite. Unlike your mother, God will not peel the bandaid off your knee without your permission. Before God starts to work on you, you have to give God permission.
You have to give God permission to break you of your bad habits. You have to give God permission to lift you from your despair. You have to give God permission to change your heart and change your ways of thinking and you have to give God permission before God will break the chains of addiction to sin that hold you back. It is your choice to follow Jesus ... or not to follow Jesus.
Long ago, I chose to follow Jesus. And that has made all the difference in my life. Is there something in your life you want to get rid of, to break free of, to walk beyond? Is there a problem that is holding you back, tearing you down every time you start to climb, throwing you into a hole of darkness?
Choose to follow Jesus and ask God for help with the difficult things in your life.
And God will step forward and break you free.
For the truth is that most of our problems are caused by our own habits, our fears, and our choices.
- God’s training program – the teachings of Christ - allow us to break our bad habits and develop new ones.
- God’s promises – the promise of eternal life – allow us to remove our fears.
- And God’s guidance – working through the Holy Spirit that we receive at baptism – helps us to make good choices.
And this three-fold path – the Teachings of Christ, the promises of God, and the guidance of the Holy Spirit - are how God helps us fight our problems.
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