You Are the Christ | The Rev. Dr. R. Leigh Spruill

Well, we've... just heard one of the more dramatic moments in the gospel story.

Peter puts the name on the divine mystery who is nevertheless fully human, Jesus.

To him, he says, you are the Christ, the son of the living God.

Jesus has taken his disciples about right smack in the middle of the gospel, according to Matthew, to the far north of Galilee, to Caesarea Philippi.

Some of you have been there if you've been on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

Caesarea Philippi is named for first Augustus Caesar and also Herod Philip, who is the son of Herod the Great, by the way, who was given charge by the Romans over this part of northern Galilee at the time of Jesus' adult ministry.

And it is a kind of a retreat setting.

It's absolutely beautiful there, by the way, up near the Lebanese and Syrian border.

I It is here where Jesus, alone with his disciples, and he's going to pivot back as we get past this story, oriented south to Jerusalem for the climax of the gospel, of course, where we have the crucifixion.

But while he is here alone with his disciples, he asks them the question, who do people say that I am? What's being said out there? So Jesus is not trying to get a pulse on popular opinion about himself.

He's not like an anxious or ambitious politician who's trying to get a reading on the latest polling data.

I think what he's doing here is trying to illustrate the importance of making the distinction, of understanding the difference between what the world says about who he is and what we who follow him say about who he is.

Who do people say the Son of Man is? And they answer, well, some say you're like John the Baptist.

Some say you're like Elijah or Jeremiah or one of the prophets.

You're like them, kind of a once every hundred years or more, very charismatic, godly figure that the people of Israel have come to know as an agent of God's will.

Maybe the world says something like this today.

Yes, Jesus was all of that, a godly man, a man whose religious teachings are universal, need to be taken deeply seriously, an influential religious founder, not unlike Buddha or Muhammad.

Maybe the world says something like this, Jesus is a path, one path up the mountain.

And all religions, all the world religions are different paths, but we all get to the same peak on the same mountain.

Is that what Christians say? That we get to the top of the mountain and we're looking at the same God? I don't think so.

What do we think that our Jewish friends, for example, say about who the Christ is? Do we know? What about Islam? And that question will press upon us, the church, and the West more and more as we go deeper into the 21st century.

What do people, and there's more and more survey data out there saying that there are all kinds of folks all around us who actually are spiritually curious and open to the gospel, but they're very skeptical of institutional religion.

What do they say about who Jesus is? And what do many people in the church herself say about who Jesus is who have drifted away? I was reading just yesterday about a new book by a scholar and a pastor named Ryan Burge.

The name of his new book is called The Vanishing Church.

I haven't read the book.