Sermon – Cross Training Rev. Sandy Lacey September 15, 2024
Have you heard of the power of positive thinking? Sports psychologists use its application to encourage players who are in a “slump.” I am over-simplifying here, but the idea is something similar to: “if you will learn to visualize what you hope to accomplish, pretty soon your body will follow suit, and what you have visualized will actually happen.” Visualize the ball going into the basket and then make it happen. Akin to this idea of positive thinking is positive talk. Called an affirmation statement, it can be used to boost self-esteem, reduce stress, and manifest the life of our dreams by retraining our subconscious mind. Positive thought and talk leads to positive energy. We have all experienced a variation of this when we complain about being part of a gathering that was pleasant until someone arrived who had nothing but negative things to say – then the whole atmosphere changed. The theory says, saying affirmations will create positive energy, which will result in speaking positive experiences into existence. So, saying positive thoughts will lead to believing positive thoughts, which eventually will lead to positive outcomes. Some of you may be skeptical or consider it hocus pocus, pop psychology. And perhaps some of it is. But it seems to help cancer patients visualize the medicine they are taking as “good” cells gobbling up bad cancer cells. And I know some therapists who have counseled their clients to silence the negative voices they may have heard in their childhood and replace them with positive voices – i.e., replace the voice in your head that says, “you are no good and you will never amount to anything,” with the affirmation, “I am a child of God, loved, respected, and designed for a purpose.” I wonder as we listen to today’s Scripture passage from Mark if Peter is heavily influenced by this same theory that we can speak our beliefs into being.
A pivotal point in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus asks his disciples an important question. Prior to the question, we have about 8 chapters of Jesus amazing his followers with healings, with miraculous feedings, with powers over the physical world, with stories about God’s Kingdom, with arguments with the religious leaders. Prior to today’s passage in Mark’s story of Jesus, we see him “setting up the punch line” of the Gospel. And after today’s text, we’ll see a movement, a shift, as Jesus looks toward Jerusalem and what awaits him there. To make the important point that will shift everything, Jesus takes his disciples to an interesting place – Caesarea Philippi – to ask them an important question. Why did he do this? Why does he take them to this pagan area, full of statues and monuments to other gods and people in power, just to ask them a loaded question. Taking in the context, he asked the question, “who do people say that I am?” In other words, what have you heard? And then after the set-up question, he follows it with, “who do you say that I am?” Knowing all that you know so far and taking in all that is around us, all these monuments to power, and what others think; who do you say I am? What a loaded question! It was just one chapter earlier that he chastised them for failing to comprehend what he was about. The disciples probably still had that rebuke reverberating around in their minds, but Peter has been paying attention. And he is perceptive. He is quick to blurt out the right answer, “You are the Messiah.” Saying is believing – it will come true. Peter is “all-in” for this kind of positive talk. Peter may have given the right answer to Jesus’ question, but the problem is that Peter did not know what he was talking about. His idea of a Messiah was different than Jesus’ idea of a Messiah. His idea is that Messiahs, like the monument testimony around him in Caesarea Philippi, seize power and force their influence upon others. Jesus’ idea of Messiah, however, came from God and was expressed by the Prophet Isaiah in his Suffering Servant passage. Peter missed the ironic point of contrast that Jesus was making. Jesus was contrasting the testimonies of power around them with his kind of power. When Jesus shifts the conversation to what awaits him in Jerusalem, Peter will not hear of what he perceives as negative talk from Jesus. It does not make any sense for Jesus to suffer and die; therefore, he chastises Jesus. It is as if he said, “don’t even think that way, Jesus, and certainly don’t speak that way.” He was all about the power of positive thinking as he encouraged Jesus to use his power to change the world. “Surely you are mistaken, Jesus”, you can almost hear him say. Being called “Satan” so soon after being praised for his insight, must have been both humbling and humiliating for Peter. It is a big teachable moment for Peter and the other disciples – a moment with big impact – a moment I suspect they would recall later as one of the seminal events in their journey with Jesus. To further illustrate the kind of Messiah he means, Jesus goes on to characterize what his kind of Messiah will mean for them. He tells them, “in order to save your life, you must be willing to lose it.” What starts out as a rather innocuous question (“who do people say I am?”), ends up as a radical and challenging description of what will be in the future for Jesus and for those who choose to follow him. Jesus’ version of what it means to be a Messiah did not play well for the Jews under Roman oppression in that day, and I suspect it does not play well in our day either. What was needed then, they thought, was a military leader to bring them out from under Roman oppression. What is needed now, we think, is power and influence, and the opportunity to right the world’s wrongs by imposing our beliefs, our worldview on others. To have the most power, we need the most money, the right people in the right places, freedom from having to benefit the common good so that we can individually prosper. We need like-minded people to band together so we can force our way, our values on others. Might equals right. In a culture that emphasizes that we can have anything we want if we work hard enough for it; what is needed now, we think, is for us to live up to our full potential – individually and corporately, to “be all that we can be” even if that means stepping on a few people to get there. (After all, they have the same chances as we do, we think.) Power, wealth, influence, individual rights, and getting what is mine – that is the Messiah we look for in our day. And when we mess up in our attempt to get ahead or when we attempt to short-circuit the “system” and get caught; we might get locked up and put away, discounted and discredited, forgotten. Think of the many people who try to follow the “rules” and become depressed because they cannot get ahead. They resort to self-medicating and may even attempt to short-circuit “success” by selling drugs to other depressed folks just like them. Friends, where would Jesus take us today to have this discussion about power and who he is? Would it be the Capitol or Wall Street or maybe even a prison? Jesus says that in order to save your life, you must be willing to lose it. I have not seen that on a billboard ever – it does not draw people or win friends in our culture of prosperity and competition. Oh sure, some of us are willing to say we believe in Jesus as long as it does not affect our pocketbooks or our plans for getting ahead. We are happy to talk about Easter glory and God’s power, as long as we can gloss over Good Friday and the cost it requires. Pay attention to the monuments of power all around us and hear Jesus calling us to a different kind of life. Being willing to give yourself away and sacrificing for others is not very popular. Peter gives me great hope – he was willing to say what he thought (and what we think,) and God bless him, he even tried to correct Jesus. “You’ve got it all wrong, Jesus,” he said. And Jesus loved him for it, even as he chastised him. So, are you willing to say what you believe, even though you may not know what you are talking about? Are you, like Peter, willing to risk being called Satan? The truth is that sacrifice and giving ourselves away was demanding and difficult for the disciples to grasp and live then, and it is demanding and difficult for us to grasp and live today. Who do you say Jesus is? The answer will be reflected not only in the things you say but also in how you live. Peter initially said the right thing but got tripped up in what it meant. Peter was a work in progress and would continue to learn what it meant to be a disciple of Jesus. The Apostle Paul reminds us in Philippians that we work out our salvation with fear and trembling, knowing it is Jesus who guides and chastises us when needed. There are many times I am sure that I have gotten it wrong – I am a work in progress just as you are. The good news is, as I heard long ago, that God does not call the people who have it all together; instead, God calls you and me and equips us for the task at hand. I have found a poem by Teilard de Chardin a comfort on those days I have felt chastised and a work in progress. I have it in my desk to remind me that I am a work in progress, and it is God who will see me through. The following is a brief excerpt: Above all, trust in the slow work of God We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. . . Give our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete. Richard Rohr puts it this way in his book, Breathing Underwater: Spiritually and the Twelve Steps: “We suffer to get well. We surrender to win. We die to live. We give it away to keep it.”[1] As followers of Jesus, we must be willing to live into that wild paradox. That is the kind of positive thinking that Jesus instructs. AMEN.
[1] Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps. (Cincinnati, Ohio: Franciscan Media, 2011.) p. xxiv.
Have you heard of the power of positive thinking? Sports psychologists use its application to encourage players who are in a “slump.” I am over-simplifying here, but the idea is something similar to: “if you will learn to visualize what you hope to accomplish, pretty soon your body will follow suit, and what you have visualized will actually happen.” Visualize the ball going into the basket and then make it happen. Akin to this idea of positive thinking is positive talk. Called an affirmation statement, it can be used to boost self-esteem, reduce stress, and manifest the life of our dreams by retraining our subconscious mind. Positive thought and talk leads to positive energy. We have all experienced a variation of this when we complain about being part of a gathering that was pleasant until someone arrived who had nothing but negative things to say – then the whole atmosphere changed. The theory says, saying affirmations will create positive energy, which will result in speaking positive experiences into existence. So, saying positive thoughts will lead to believing positive thoughts, which eventually will lead to positive outcomes. Some of you may be skeptical or consider it hocus pocus, pop psychology. And perhaps some of it is. But it seems to help cancer patients visualize the medicine they are taking as “good” cells gobbling up bad cancer cells. And I know some therapists who have counseled their clients to silence the negative voices they may have heard in their childhood and replace them with positive voices – i.e., replace the voice in your head that says, “you are no good and you will never amount to anything,” with the affirmation, “I am a child of God, loved, respected, and designed for a purpose.” I wonder as we listen to today’s Scripture passage from Mark if Peter is heavily influenced by this same theory that we can speak our beliefs into being.
A pivotal point in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus asks his disciples an important question. Prior to the question, we have about 8 chapters of Jesus amazing his followers with healings, with miraculous feedings, with powers over the physical world, with stories about God’s Kingdom, with arguments with the religious leaders. Prior to today’s passage in Mark’s story of Jesus, we see him “setting up the punch line” of the Gospel. And after today’s text, we’ll see a movement, a shift, as Jesus looks toward Jerusalem and what awaits him there. To make the important point that will shift everything, Jesus takes his disciples to an interesting place – Caesarea Philippi – to ask them an important question. Why did he do this? Why does he take them to this pagan area, full of statues and monuments to other gods and people in power, just to ask them a loaded question. Taking in the context, he asked the question, “who do people say that I am?” In other words, what have you heard? And then after the set-up question, he follows it with, “who do you say that I am?” Knowing all that you know so far and taking in all that is around us, all these monuments to power, and what others think; who do you say I am? What a loaded question! It was just one chapter earlier that he chastised them for failing to comprehend what he was about. The disciples probably still had that rebuke reverberating around in their minds, but Peter has been paying attention. And he is perceptive. He is quick to blurt out the right answer, “You are the Messiah.” Saying is believing – it will come true. Peter is “all-in” for this kind of positive talk. Peter may have given the right answer to Jesus’ question, but the problem is that Peter did not know what he was talking about. His idea of a Messiah was different than Jesus’ idea of a Messiah. His idea is that Messiahs, like the monument testimony around him in Caesarea Philippi, seize power and force their influence upon others. Jesus’ idea of Messiah, however, came from God and was expressed by the Prophet Isaiah in his Suffering Servant passage. Peter missed the ironic point of contrast that Jesus was making. Jesus was contrasting the testimonies of power around them with his kind of power. When Jesus shifts the conversation to what awaits him in Jerusalem, Peter will not hear of what he perceives as negative talk from Jesus. It does not make any sense for Jesus to suffer and die; therefore, he chastises Jesus. It is as if he said, “don’t even think that way, Jesus, and certainly don’t speak that way.” He was all about the power of positive thinking as he encouraged Jesus to use his power to change the world. “Surely you are mistaken, Jesus”, you can almost hear him say. Being called “Satan” so soon after being praised for his insight, must have been both humbling and humiliating for Peter. It is a big teachable moment for Peter and the other disciples – a moment with big impact – a moment I suspect they would recall later as one of the seminal events in their journey with Jesus. To further illustrate the kind of Messiah he means, Jesus goes on to characterize what his kind of Messiah will mean for them. He tells them, “in order to save your life, you must be willing to lose it.” What starts out as a rather innocuous question (“who do people say I am?”), ends up as a radical and challenging description of what will be in the future for Jesus and for those who choose to follow him. Jesus’ version of what it means to be a Messiah did not play well for the Jews under Roman oppression in that day, and I suspect it does not play well in our day either. What was needed then, they thought, was a military leader to bring them out from under Roman oppression. What is needed now, we think, is power and influence, and the opportunity to right the world’s wrongs by imposing our beliefs, our worldview on others. To have the most power, we need the most money, the right people in the right places, freedom from having to benefit the common good so that we can individually prosper. We need like-minded people to band together so we can force our way, our values on others. Might equals right. In a culture that emphasizes that we can have anything we want if we work hard enough for it; what is needed now, we think, is for us to live up to our full potential – individually and corporately, to “be all that we can be” even if that means stepping on a few people to get there. (After all, they have the same chances as we do, we think.) Power, wealth, influence, individual rights, and getting what is mine – that is the Messiah we look for in our day. And when we mess up in our attempt to get ahead or when we attempt to short-circuit the “system” and get caught; we might get locked up and put away, discounted and discredited, forgotten. Think of the many people who try to follow the “rules” and become depressed because they cannot get ahead. They resort to self-medicating and may even attempt to short-circuit “success” by selling drugs to other depressed folks just like them. Friends, where would Jesus take us today to have this discussion about power and who he is? Would it be the Capitol or Wall Street or maybe even a prison? Jesus says that in order to save your life, you must be willing to lose it. I have not seen that on a billboard ever – it does not draw people or win friends in our culture of prosperity and competition. Oh sure, some of us are willing to say we believe in Jesus as long as it does not affect our pocketbooks or our plans for getting ahead. We are happy to talk about Easter glory and God’s power, as long as we can gloss over Good Friday and the cost it requires. Pay attention to the monuments of power all around us and hear Jesus calling us to a different kind of life. Being willing to give yourself away and sacrificing for others is not very popular. Peter gives me great hope – he was willing to say what he thought (and what we think,) and God bless him, he even tried to correct Jesus. “You’ve got it all wrong, Jesus,” he said. And Jesus loved him for it, even as he chastised him. So, are you willing to say what you believe, even though you may not know what you are talking about? Are you, like Peter, willing to risk being called Satan? The truth is that sacrifice and giving ourselves away was demanding and difficult for the disciples to grasp and live then, and it is demanding and difficult for us to grasp and live today. Who do you say Jesus is? The answer will be reflected not only in the things you say but also in how you live. Peter initially said the right thing but got tripped up in what it meant. Peter was a work in progress and would continue to learn what it meant to be a disciple of Jesus. The Apostle Paul reminds us in Philippians that we work out our salvation with fear and trembling, knowing it is Jesus who guides and chastises us when needed. There are many times I am sure that I have gotten it wrong – I am a work in progress just as you are. The good news is, as I heard long ago, that God does not call the people who have it all together; instead, God calls you and me and equips us for the task at hand. I have found a poem by Teilard de Chardin a comfort on those days I have felt chastised and a work in progress. I have it in my desk to remind me that I am a work in progress, and it is God who will see me through. The following is a brief excerpt: Above all, trust in the slow work of God We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. . . Give our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete. Richard Rohr puts it this way in his book, Breathing Underwater: Spiritually and the Twelve Steps: “We suffer to get well. We surrender to win. We die to live. We give it away to keep it.”[1] As followers of Jesus, we must be willing to live into that wild paradox. That is the kind of positive thinking that Jesus instructs. AMEN.
[1] Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps. (Cincinnati, Ohio: Franciscan Media, 2011.) p. xxiv.
_____
[1] Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps. (Cincinnati, Ohio: Franciscan Media, 2011.) p. xxiv.