August 31, 2014 – Matthew 16:21-28
Matthew 16:21-28
Falling in Love Again
Lectionary 22 – August 31, 2014
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
Doesn’t this seem like kind of a heavy passage for Labour Day weekend?
It does to me!
It’s the end of holidays for some of us and a return to fall busy-ness for most of us.
For sure, for our congregation, it’s a time to gear up for fall programming.
And here is Jesus – not very sympathetically – telling us we gotta get busy and
take up our crosses and deny ourselves and follow him.
Ha! Welcome to Labour Day worship!
Some of us have had very busy and stressful summers.
Not all of us – but some of us.
Most of us look forward to the long weekend before the fall busy-ness as a time to rest from our
labours and be refreshed for the tasks ahead.
Yes: Jesus calls us to strenuous work and to some serious tasks.
But he also calls us to rest and refreshment.
I don’t know about you, but I need some rest and refreshment!
So: here goes.
Jesus is in the middle of his ministry here.
And the disciples have been wondering who this person is.
As I’ve said before, Jesus must have appeared to be from another planet.
No one had ever encountered anyone like him,
this person who had no trouble flouting convention and
crossing every social boundary ever put in place,
this person who turned conventional wisdom upside down and
challenged the wisdom of the so-called wise.
This person whose life seemed to be lived from a different source than everyone else’s.
In this chapter of Matthew, Peter gets closer than most with his answer to Jesus’s question,
“Who do you say that I am?”
And Peter says, “You are the Messiah! The Son of the Living God!”
Yes! Right, Peter! Correct answer! You win the all-expense paid trip to Tahiti!
And . . . a brand new car!
But then Jesus has to tell him and the other disciples what that really means:
It means he will endure suffering, and be mocked,
and scandalously and shamefully die on a cross.
And when Peter rebukes him and says, “Never!” Jesus has to rebuke him and say,
“Get behind me, Satan,
for you have set your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
Ouch! Poor Peter.
It is then that Jesus has to unpack Christian life for the disciples, and tell them what that means.
And what it looks like.
Those who would be my followers, he says, must deny themselves,
and take up their cross, and follow me.
For those who want to save their life will lose it,
and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.
These are hard words to hear any time, maybe especially on a Labour Day weekend.
And they are hard to understand.
But really: Jesus is simply saying that it’s not all about you.
He’s saying that you and your individual life are not the centre of the universe.
We would very much like a God who grants us what we desire.
We would very much like a God who does our bidding.
We would very much like a God who gives us what we want.
Except Jesus knows who is at the centre of that scenario: we are.
And we know who and what is at the centre of Jesus’s life and work:
a God of unlimited mercy and compassion whose love and concern is
not just for us and our individual selves, but for the whole world!
For the just and the unjust, for the successes and the failures, for the rich and the poor,
for the citizens and the refugees, for the well and the sick.
That God is the source of Jesus’ life.
That’s why he looks so weird.
And he wants us to look weird too.
When the values and concerns of the God of all compassion become our values and concerns,
we will look as strange as Jesus.
And Jesus will smile.
I think in this passage on this Labour Day weekend, I think Jesus is actually inviting us to
fall in love with the God of all compassion again.
I think in this passage Jesus is inviting us to fall in love with
the Triune God whose life consists of a perfectly loving circle of three persons
endlessly giving to and endlessly receiving from one another.
I think in this passage Jesus is inviting us to fall in love with
the God whose generous forgiving loving merciful heart he reveals to us.
Jesus is inviting us to fall in love with God – again.
You know what it’s like to fall in love, right?
When your whole universe seems to tilt strangely?
When you seem completely taken out of yourself?
When your focus in life seems no longer yourself, but the other?
When you seem to lose yourself – and find your life and the meaning for your life in another?
On this Labour Day weekend, Jesus is inviting us to fall in love with God and with
God’s loving mission to love, bless, and heal this whole world and every person in it in
the same way.
In a way that makes us wonder at the extent of divine love.
In a way that tilts the universe and its purpose and our place in it.
In a way that takes us out of ourselves.
In a way that changes the focus of our lives – when we see how much bigger the world
and its concerns are than just us and our individual concerns.
In a way that enables us joyfully to deny ourselves and take up our identities as
followers of Jesus – and follow him.
In a way that allows us to find the source of our lives in another – in one who is
endlessly giving, endlessly healing, endlessly feeding, endlessly inviting –
endlessly loving.
In a way that enables us to willingly lose ourselves in love for a God who is
revealed in Jesus to be the one who seeks to mend what is broken and
healall the world’s ills.
Yes: it is true that in a way Jesus bids us come and die with him.
But this God we worship is a God of resurrection life – who bids us rise to a life
much more expansive, much more meaningful, much more shaped and infused by grace.
So on this Labour Day weekend, let us rest from our labours for a little while longer.
Let us contemplate the goodness of a God who bids us rest.
Let us contemplate the goodness of a God whose concern is as vast as the whole world.
Let us fall in love with this God revealed to us in the strange face of Jesus.
And let us lose ourselves – and find ourselves – in him.
So together, let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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