“Who do you say I am?” It’s a question that takes more than a minute to answer, no matter who asks it. Maybe someone’s asked you before, seeking some sort of direction for her life, a kind of signpost to follow. A child may ask a parent to say what kind of person she will become one day, what career she’ll have, when exactly she’ll meet her spouse, how she’ll deal with conflict, how she’ll face the setbacks that come, how she’ll navigate the world.

A father might ask with terrifying vulnerability, “Who do you say that I am?” addressing his child, wondering if he’s done right by her or left her ill prepared for the world, struggling to cope, failing to love, lost in changing times. What judgment by the child awaits the parent? With how much dread does he ask his daughter, “Who do you say that I am?”

Maybe you’ve asked that of yourself, wondering out loud to an empty room, as if the silence would afford you something that has otherwise eluded you, and you would know the answer to the poet’s question of what it is that you must do with “your one wild and precious life.”

What is your end goal? What are your dreams? What accomplishments remain before you? What is your purpose? What is your identity?  

The question “Who do you say that I am?” cannot be ignored, cannot be hidden from – whether you ask it of yourself or find yourself looking into the eyes of someone who is hoping that you have an answer. Peter does. “You are the Messiah,” he says, the anointed one, the long-awaited king. But Peter has no clear grasp of what it means for Jesus of Nazareth to be Christ for the world. And it comes out in the rest of the Gospel reading, when he decides, in his earthly wisdom, to pull aside his rabbi and tell his Messiah what he is doing is wrong.

So Jesus has to say, as clearly as possible, that the way of God is unlike the ways of God’s creation – that God has much to show us about how to live, that Jesus’ example can show us that another world is possible, if we follow after the footsteps of the One who chose to walk among us and to know the depths of our experience – our pain, our isolation, our grief, our anxiety, our uncertainty, our frailty. Another world is possible, if we listen to the words of Jesus of Nazareth, not some leader of a country but Christ for the world, the One who would offer himself for all, a king on a cross.

I’ve been listening to this congregation, too. The stories you’ve told, the values you’ve shared, the stated and tacit priorities you’ve pursued. I’ve been getting to know you, putting together a collection of observations, a sort of answer to your own, unasked, question: “Who do you say that I am?” Who are the people who gather at Howard Chapel? God speaks to me through you – your hopes, your disappointments, your faithfulness, your caution. And God speaks through the community around this church – through its richness, its gifts, its challenges, its pristine land, its isolation, its room to grow.

Our answer to Christ’s question, “Who do we say He is,” rests in how we treat our neighbors. To be responsive to the needs of the community is to be the kind of church that, in our actions, demonstrates that he is the Messiah, the Christ, given for the world – not just for us, not just for those who are fortunate to seek him today – but for everyone. Consider everyone in need of a sense of forgiveness, everyone in need of assurance that new beginnings are possible, everyone in need of a community of belonging and welcome, everyone in need of a God who calls all of us to live as our whole selves.

God calls us to all live, not just in this world with its striving and struggling, but, crucially, to live as if another world is possible, if we listen to the words of the One who in a word made us and who chose for himself to walk among us.

Jesus invites us to see the world as God would have us see it, and he also silences our indignant protestations. He rebukes foul and unclean spirits. It’s not only the ones we call sinful and see as repugnant. It’s also the attitudes we have come to rely on – that no good can come from certain towns and corners of the country, that no hope of reconciliation remains with people we haven’t seen in ages, that nothing can change or improve, that the eyesores and causes for grief all around us will never fade or ease into something new.

Those attitudes cage us in and make us settle for mediocrity; we tolerate iniquity; we shrink from change and untested endeavors. But Jesus, our Messiah, points us to something new and fresh-fallen from the heavens. God liberates us from the prisons we have fashioned out of weak resignation to the warlords and tyrants over lands around us parched of love, a world we have grown accustomed to.

We do not need to settle for a world ruled by anxious fears. We can listen to the words of Jesus, and we can walk instead in the way of charity and grace, quickly confessing our shortcomings, consistently striving for holiness, and warmly embracing all we meet, whose Maker is the same as ours.

We can live lives worth living, following the word of God in Jesus Christ, listening to the teachings of the One who speaks with authority, because first of all he speaks with love – a love both spacious and unyielding, broader than the sky, with room enough to shelter us all.

Would you follow after him, even if it led you to a cross of your own? Who would you say that he is? And would you call him your Messiah also? Would you? Will you? I pray you will. Amen.