Sermon — September 14, 2021
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a sixteenth-century Spanish conquistador; an adventurer, a conqueror, a colonizer. You’ve struck out to make your fortune, and you make landfall somewhere in the area that we now call the Yucatán Peninsula, that part of Mexico that juts out into the Caribbean. (Most Americans know it best for places like Cozumel and Cancún.) When you land on the beach, you encounter some of the local folks, and you draw yourself up with your full European dignity and you ask them, in your most imperious tone, “¿Cómo se llama este lugar?” “What is this place called?” And they answer you, and you listen carefully to what they say, and that night, you record in the ship’s log: “Today we arrived in Yucatán.”
There’s just one problem, though. Yucatán was not this place’s name. It’s not what the local Maya people called it, at least. It wasn’t the name they would’ve given you. So for at least four hundred years historians have tried to figure out what exactly the Maya said that the Spaniards wrote down as “Yucatán,” and for four hundred years, one theory has reigned supreme: “Yucatán” was not the name of the place. It was not the name of any place. It was, in fact, the last few syllables of a simple but important phrase in Mayan, the only reasonable response when someone pulled their boat up onto your beach and started interrogating you in a language from across the sea: “I don’t understand you.”
I love this story, not just because I’m a language nerd who loves to see the conquistadores looking ridiculous, but because to me it sums up something that happens all the time in conversation, even when we speak the same language. We listen to each other, and we think we get the point. We become so confident that we know what’s going on in a conversation that we stop listening, stop trying to understand. And then it turns out we’re completely wrong.
Our readings this morning are full of communication breakdowns of various kinds. The Book of Proverbs starts with a vision of a one-sided conversation between Wisdom and the world. The personified Wisdom of God cries out in the street (1:20), and no one listens. She pours out her thoughts (1:23), but the listeners ignore them. (1:25) She has the most important things to say that could be heard, and it’s not that the people passing by aren’t smart enough to understand; it’s that they don’t care enough to stop and listen.
The epistle introduces another problem with our speech. James points out how easily we lose control of the things we say. The tongue’s small size masks its “great exploits.” “The tongue is a fire” that can set a “great forest” ablaze. (James 3:5-6) A careless word can bring our whole world crashing down. So sometimes it’s better just to keep your mouth shut. “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, James says—and here I think he’s mostly talking about preachers, but…welcome back to school—“for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. For all of us make many mistakes.” (James 3:1-2) Amen, says the preacher.
Psalm 19 seems to have a more positive take. It begins with the beautiful image of a celestial conversation between the day and the night, as “one day tells its tale to another.” (Psalm 19:2) The psalm exults in the beauty of the word of God, which is “sweeter far than honey, than honey in the comb.” (19:10) Yet even here, communication is flawed. We can’t fully understand what God is saying. “The law of the Lord” may be “perfect and revive the soul.” (19:7) “The command of the Lord” may be “clear and give light to the eyes.” (19:8) And yet all the divine enlightenment cannot reveal our own flaws to us. So the psalmist asks, “Who can tell how often he offends?” as if even that perfect law weren’t enough to teach us right and wrong. (19:11-12) At least the psalmist recognizes the imperfection, and wards it off with a simple prayer: “Above all, keep your servant from presumptuous sins.” (19:13)
“Keep your servant from presumptuous sins.” Words St. Peter would do well to heed.
I sometimes feel bad for picking on St. Peter, but I don’t feel that bad. Again and again, throughout the gospels, Peter gets so close and then fails, once more. He just can’t stop getting in his own way.
Peter starts off well in our Gospel story today. Jesus asks who the disciples say that he is. “You are the Messiah,” Peter replies. (Mark 8:29) Plain and simple. Some people say that he’s John the Baptist, risen from the dead; or he’s Elijah, returning to herald in the last days; or one of the prophets, sent by God bearing a divine message. But Peter knows better. “You are the Messiah.” You are the anointed one, the king who will deliver us, the one who will finally throw out the Romans and lead the people to glory, or at least to independence. And this moment is huge, It’s the first time the disciples recognize who Jesus is. It’s so important it gets its own feast day. “The Confession of Saint Peter the Apostle,” January 18. The day on which Peter finally gets it right.
Well, sort of. Because Jesus goes on to explain what he is going to do: not to conquer, and be crowned king, and to rule his people in glory; but to suffer, and to be rejected, and to die—and then to rise. “And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.” (8:32) Peter is outraged. He’s scandalized. He’s so convinced that Jesus is wrong about the nature of his own mission that he takes him aside and scolds him. I think of Peter like that Spanish soldier standing on the shore. He’s convinced that he understands what he’s heard. And he’s completely wrong.
And Jesus cuts him off. “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” (Mark 8:33) You’re imagining what it would look like for a human being to come and be made king; not what it looks like when God is becoming king. The wisdom of David and Solomon is the wisdom of the great conqueror, who rules with power and might. But the wisdom of God is foolishness, in human eyes.
Because God is not just the God of glory, but the God of the cross. God is not just the God of victory, but the God of defeat. God is not just God when we look at a beautiful sunset, when we see one day telling tales to another in the sky, when we experience the many things in life that are “sweeter far than honey, than honey in the comb.” (19:10) God is also God in the midst of the wind and the storm, at the very worst moments of our lives. And God does not just cheerlead the way victory and success; God walks with us in suffering and defeat. In fact, God leads the way.
“If any want to become my followers,” Jesus says, “let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” (Mark 8:34) This is some grim advice. Jesus never says it will be easy to be a human in this world, or to be a Christian. In fact, he says it will be hard.
But it will never end there.
The Son of Man must suffer, and be rejected, and die, Jesus tells the disciples; and after three days, rise again. The cross is not the end of the story. It’s the worst chapter by far. It will be painful beyond imagining. But it’s not the end. In fact, in the story of what it really means to say with Peter that “Jesus is the Messiah,” Jesus’ suffering and death and even Jesus’ resurrection are only the beginning.
I will be the first to admit I’ve felt discouraged, these past few weeks. I had so hoped and prayed that this summer we could leave COVID behind. I’d looked forward to relaunching our life as a church this year, a few years older, maybe a little wiser, but safer, without the uncertainty and anxiety that have marked the past few years. And as I came back from vacation to face another year of church with mask mandates coming from the mayor and the bishops, with daily case counts higher in Boston than they were this time last year, I felt some amount of despair.
And yet this is not last year. Our kids are back in school, strange as it is. Our adults have free and easy access to vaccines, that make things much less dangerous than they were. We are not fifteen people gathered in the Garden outside for Morning Prayer, but—well, a few dozen more, back in church to share the Eucharist together, as we’ve done more or less safely for nearly six months now. We have been walking the way of the cross. We have been walking the way of suffering and death, and yet there have been many signs of hope along the way, because the way of the cross is also always the path towards the resurrection.
This is not just a “pie in the sky” promise that things will be better in the afterlife, that we will live in misery and suffer and die and then receive our reward. The resurrection is an eternal truth, which means it exists outside of space and time, which means we can taste it sometimes here and now, wherever heaven breaks through onto the earth. We will feast joyfully with God and one another in heaven; but we get a foretaste of that communion in this little heavenly banquet every Sunday. We will sing with the choirs of angels in glory; but today, we sing together pretty well. We will gaze one day upon the loving face of God, and today we can catch a glimpse of that in prayer. We will live in unity and love with one another, and we do that day after day, at home, and at church, and wherever we go.
We do not need to have Peter’s conquering king. We do not need to reach the perfect end. We simply need to walk together on the earth where Jesus walked, and look for the signs of resurrection along the way. For even a little glimpse of that eternal life is “more to be desired…than gold, more than much fine gold.” Even a little taste of heaven on earth is “sweeter far than honey, than honey in the comb.” (Psalm 19:10)