Sermon From March 6

Here is the sermon from March 6.

Jesus and Prayer: The Journey Ahead

As we have ventured through this Lent season, we’ve seen a somewhat interesting connection between Jesus and prayer.  We started off with Jesus performing great healings, and as the people heard about them, great crowds gathered around Him.  But Jesus would often go off to places where He could be all alone, and there He would pray to His Father.  Jesus showed us that He preferred time with His Father where He could focus His prayers as He talked to the Father.

Then, we heard about Jesus spending a whole night awake in prayer, as He prepared to name the 12 apostles.  These men would be entrusted with the life-changing message of His life, death, and resurrection, and because of the impact that this message has on every single person who lives in this world, Jesus spent the whole night in prayer before naming them as His apostles.

As we get to today’s reading, we see yet another interesting connection between Jesus and prayer.  Jesus is off praying alone, and yet, His disciples are nearby.  As He finished up His prayer time, it almost seems that Jesus is suffering from a crisis of identity.  “Who do people say I am?”  It sounds like the kind of question someone asks when they are insecure about themselves.  You don’t typically ask who others think you are when you are well grounded in your identity.  And so, with Jesus asking this question, “Who do others say I am”, and then, “Who do you say I am”, it almost seems like Jesus is having an identity crisis.

Now, since the Bible points out to us that Jesus is not only a human being, but also true and fully God as well, we can pretty much assume that Jesus knows who He is.  So if He’s not having an identity crisis, He must have some other reason for going off to pray, and then asking the disciples what people are saying about who He is. 

We find that reason in the final answer that the disciples arrive at.  Jesus asks them who the crowds are saying that He is, and they give a few scattered answers.  Names like John the Baptist and Elijah are quick to their minds.  But Jesus knows that the crowds don’t know Him as well as these men who are gathered around Him.  If anyone can know the identity that He has claimed by the way He has lived and ministered, it will be these men.

And leave it to Peter to be the one who comes up with the answer.  “The Christ of God!”  Everything that they have seen have led them to this declaration by Peter.  The Christ, the Messiah, as their Hebrew language would have named Him.  The one who is truly the servant of God.  The One who would be anointed by God, and who would have God’s own power and strength behind Him.  The One who could overcome the illnesses and injuries of this sinful world and bring them back to the way that God had originally created everything to be.  And these men had seen Jesus doing these very things.

Jesus had shown Himself to be the Christ, or the Messiah, not by simply saying that He was, but by the things He was doing and the things He was teaching.  Blind people received their sight.  The lame could walk.  Even the dead were being raised, as Luke points out in the previous chapter, with the raising of Jairus’ daughter.  These men had seen Jesus do these things.  Who else could He be, but the One identified by God as His own chosen Servant.  The Christ of God!

A great answer on Peter’s part, and yet, we see that Jesus knows that there is more to this title than the splendor and majesty that everyone seems to think come with the title.  Jesus wants the disciples to know that being the Christ of God is not everything that they may think, and He shows this to them with the next things that He begins to teach them.

“The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.”  When Peter had just said that Jesus’ identity was wrapped up in being the Christ of God, he probably had a much more glamorous picture in mind.   Jesus being a great and wise ruler and leader.  Jesus being a powerful man, who could walk in and take control of the leadership of the nation, and maybe even lead a successful rebellion to kick the Romans out of their country.  Surely the Christ would have power and majesty and honor and glory and might!  After all, that’s His identity!

“The Son of Man must suffer…and be rejected.”  He must be killed and on the third day be raised.  Hardly the glamour that Peter and the disciples thought should belong to the Christ of God.  And so we start to see that Jesus had originally asked the question to open up a teachable moment in the lives of His disciples.

Being the Christ of God involved suffering, rejection, and even death.  And that’s where we find the connection between Jesus and this question of His identity, and the theme of prayer that we’re focusing on this Lent season.  Prayer seems to be less important in our lives when things are going well, when we have the power and the authority, when people honor us and praise our names.  But when things like suffering, and hardship, and trouble, and pain find their way into our lives, prayer suddenly seems to be a lot more important.  Having that connection to the One who can dictate its limits and its severity suddenly seems a lot more important than when things are going easy.

One of the many reasons that prayer was so important to Jesus was because of the difficulty and challenge of the task that was ahead of Him.  Jesus would know suffering, more suffering than we have ever experienced in our lives.  Jesus would know rejection, not just at the hands of human beings, but even from God, as the Father turned His face away from His Son as He hung there on the cross, bearing your sin, and my sin, and the weight of the sin of the whole world.  Jesus would know death, not as death reached up to claim Him, but as He gave up His own life to descend to the depths of the grave.  And that’s when we would come to realize the full identity of the Christ of God.  He would overcome all of this as He would be raised back to life, proving Himself far more powerful than suffering, and rejection, and even death itself.

The saving of the world was not a task that would easily be accomplished.  It would be a difficult, challenging road, and Jesus shows us quite often that the rest stations of prayer along the side of the road are of utmost importance.  Jesus Himself would rest there along the journey, a journey that He undertook for you, and for me, so that we would have the hope of forgiveness and new life with our God.

Prayer is vital when we face suffering, and rejection, and even death.  When the road is bumpy and dark, when we face speed bumps and potholes in the journey, prayer is the rest station on the side of the road.  We may want to think, every once in a while, that the life of one who follows Jesus should be filled with ease, and that the journey shouldn’t be all that challenging.  After all, we belong to God.  God can do anything, and surely He wouldn’t let us encounter difficulty and struggles and suffering and rejection as we walk the path of life, right?

Jesus Himself points out that this isn’t the case.  “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.  For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.”  If the way were easy, and the load light, we might not face the need for prayer very much in our lives.  We might not feel the need to have that intimate connection with our Father.  We might not see why Jesus Himself so often spent precious time in prayer.

Deny yourself.  Take up your cross.  That’s why we need prayer so much in our lives.  We are a people who have received an identity.  In the waters of baptism, something miraculous happened.  We were baptized into the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.  At that moment, as the water touched our bodies and the word touched our ears, we were given an identity in Jesus.  We were connected to the one that Peter rightly called “The Christ of God!”

We are CHRISTians.  And you may notice the prominence of the word CHRIST in that name.  Our identity is found in Jesus, who is the Christ.  Our identity is found so closely to that name that, when God looks at you, He sees Christ Jesus Himself.  St. Paul describes it in one place that you are clothed with Christ, so that when God sees you, He sees the clothing of Christ covering you.  

If you have been that closely aligned with the name of the Christ of God, you are going to need prayer.  We follow the way of Christ, and that way is going to involve denial, and suffering, and rejection as we walk the path.  We daily take up our cross, those things which God puts before us to do as His people in serving Him, and we recognize that doing those things will not always bring joy and happiness from the people around us.  We recognize that being connected to the One who truly served all people humbly means that we suffer by giving up the things that we would claim for ourselves, and instead giving of ourselves to love others.  

And that’s where we find the connection with prayer in our own lives.  Prayer is our opportunity to cry out to God when we find that the journey is not smooth and easy.  Prayer is our opportunity to remember that we are His, and that He has given us our identity in Jesus.  That identity means that God does indeed care for us and has compassion on us, even though we find that the path of life involves carrying crosses, and suffering, and rejection.  Prayer is our opportunity to be reminded that the road may be hard, but we are in His hands.

And if you think that seems like a small amount of comfort in this world of pain and suffering, then think about the last thing that Jesus says about the Christ and His identity.  “On the third day He will be raised.”  There is a new life that the Christ claims.  Jesus claimed that life when He rose from the dead on Easter.  Though the identity of the Christ may be found with suffering and rejection, it also finds part of its identity in resurrection and new life.

And you are also connected to that identity as a CHRISTian!  New life lives inside you!  You have the full and complete forgiveness that Jesus purchased as He went through suffering and rejection and death.  You have the new life that Jesus claimed as He rose from the dead.  Your identity in Christ is an identity of resurrection and new life.  Prayer is also our opportunity to be reminded that the road of life may be challenging and difficult, but that road ends in new life.  That road ends in victory.  That road ends when our identity in Jesus comes into its full existence, as Jesus claims us as His own in raising us from the dead, and introducing us into the new life that is ours because our identity is found in the resurrected Christ of God.  Thanks be to God!  Amen!