“Who do people say that I am?” “But who do you say that I am?”

Jesus asked two separate and important questions that day on the road, two questions that proved his ability as a teacher, two questions that allow us to understand what our relationship with Christ and his Church is meant to be.

And just as with the summary of the law, with its duel injunctions to Love God as fully as we can and Love our neighbors as much as we love ourselves, these two questions should never be disconnected from each other.

The first was the one that we understand best: “Who do people say that I am?” We’re familiar and comfortable with that one, we like it, it fits our culture of popular opinion defining truth.

Our leaders do it. Each fall we watch as Politicians trim their messages to fit the latest polls, and what people say becomes the reality of the campaigns and candidates are carefully trained to not contradict what people say. And this year we have the added spectacle of Healthcare legislation being crafted by a committee of 300,000,000. As one who has been cursed to live with committees throughout my life, I can’t wait to see how that turns out.

We, especially as Americans, are so enamored with Majority Rule that forget that the majority is often wrong and popular doesn’t equal right and so I listen as we try to turn God’s Church into a democracy and I’ve learned to smile at the futility of that. And the second question we really like: “Who do you say that I am?” and we like it because it’s all about us! We like stuff about us. We can’t wait to show off all that we know and how bright we are, so let’s present our opinions. And again, I’ve learned to smile, at myself and others, when confronted with an established truth of scripture and theology, and we say “Well, I don’t believe that” as if the act of our believing is what makes something true!

God’s truth is like gravity, you can disbelieve it all you want but if you jump off a building you’re going to find out what that what is true doesn’t depend upon you.

So why did Jesus ask the questions?

Because he had what the prophet called “the tongue of a teacher”, more than his healing and miracles and long before his sacrificial redemption of our lives, Christ was and remains our teacher.

His first question forced the disciples to try to place Jesus in a universe that was bigger than just popular opinion polls and yet provided the true value of such polls, for them and for us. It forced them to listen to what people had to say, to think about different perspectives, to understand the richness and fullness and diversity of our faith: John the Baptist and Elijah were very different people and then they lump in the rest of the Prophets and you’re talking about Grumpy Jeremiah and hope-filled Isaiah and patient Habakkuk and the always entertaining weirdness of Ezekiel and you begin to realize that people saw, in Jesus, a broad spectrum of personalities and styles and isn’t it essential to our faith to realize that even today?

The Jesus that I know and love and need at this stage of my life is far different than the one I knew and loved and needed 30 years ago.

Or to put it better: The places and ways in which I experience Jesus at the stage of my life are far different than the places and ways I experienced Jesus 30 years ago, and far different that any of your experiences of Jesus.

And I’ll bet that is true for all of us.

How we hear the stories of scripture, how we discern and follow God in our day-to-day is directly dependent upon what we are going through in our lives, directly related to the blessings and stresses of our day-to-day lives.

So I have learned to listen to who people say that Jesus is. I don’t always agree with them, and I’m guessing that there may be a few things that I’ve said that, maybe, some of you don’t agree with, but that’s the point. We grow by storing away other people’s faith perspectives so that when the day comes that our children are born or they go to kindergarten or they graduate from HS and leave for college or they marry and have perfect children of their own, despite their many imperfections, or when the day comes when the economy delivers a body blow or when the day comes when we mourn the death of one we love, we have these models of what to do and how to act and where to find God through our tears.

We can’t talk about God until we have listened to others talk about God.

That’s why this Anniversary Year is so important, as we listen to the ways in which others served and loved Christ here we add, to our collection of sacred and faithful ways to be Christians.

And it isn’t only the lessons from the past, the perspectives of others in the present expands and nourishes our souls.

That’s why it is important to learn what others think and believe about God, whether they are others in our congregation or others in different Christian traditions or others who worship in Mosques and Synagogues or others who worship radically different gods or others who don’t worship at all. They each have an understanding about life and faith that can help us to know Christ better.

We can’t know what we believe if we don’t understand what others believe and why they believe it. That’s why Tuesday night’s gathering to better understand the Sacrament of Communion is not just for those who have young children, it is for all who want to know what it is that we as a Church believe we are doing when we break the bread and pour the wine.

But it can’t stop there.

It can’t stop with opinion polls.

It can’t stop with mere education.

Sooner or late we need to confront the deeper question that Jesus asked, the one that drove to the center of their souls: “But who do you say that I am?”

They were ready for that second question because they had dealt with the first one.

And it is Peter, my guy Peter, who replies, “You are the Christ”.

Great answer.

“You are the Christ”. And Peter didn’t have a clue as to what it meant.

So Jesus started to explain.

And he doesn’t mince words, he speaks of suffering, rejection, and death.

And Mark tells us, “He said all this quite openly”.

The disciples didn’t like it.

I don’t blame them.

I don’t like it when God speaks so openly about loving enemies on the 11th of September each year or forgiving people who have hurt the people I love. I don’t like it a bit.

I don’t like it when God speaks so openly about personal sacrifice and how much I give or don’t give to the work of the Church, I have as do most, if not all of you, tremendous financial pressures and God says, “give more”. I don’t like it a bit.

So I don’t blame Peter and the others, I would have been giving the same cautious advice. “Don’t be so blunt, let’s see if we can soften this a bit, after all we don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, do we?” Those of you who have served on Consistory, you know that’s what I would be doing and you would be doing it right along with me.

And Jesus said to Peter, at that moment, as well as to me when I have watered down the gospel so as not to offend anyone, as well as to each of us who have found ways to rationalize failing to worship weekly, failing to place the first 10% of our earnings in the offering plate, failing to pray for the Muslim and the Jew, and the atheist, and the terrorist, to us all he says – at those moments when we betray our faith – “get behind me Satan!”

He said all this quite openly.

And all we can do is learn from our teacher, absorb it, acknowledge the truth and search on for answers that can stand up to God’s questions and God’s challenges. Teach us how we should live in the world, that becomes our daily prayer as we scan the newspapers, as we pay our bills, as we spend the time with the people God has given us in our homes, jobs and neighborhoods.

And then we become the teachers.

When Isaiah spoke of the tongue of a teacher, he was not just speaking of the Messiah who would come, he was speaking of the task given to all of God’s people.

He spoke of the ability to sustain each other when we are weary with just the right word, he spoke of listening expectantly for what God has to say each new day and in each new circumstance, he spoke of living with the knowledge that God will help us and so nothing and no one can stop us.

The faith of Isaiah, the life of Jesus each call us to refuse to settle for easy answers, to continue to search for the right words and to believe them when we hear them and then to live as if we really believe them.

You see, that is the beauty of Christianity.

We may not understand all the mysteries of our faith, communion, baptism, the trinity, the incarnation, the resurrection, the will of God for our lives, the failure of the Mets, we may not – we do not, we cannot – fully understand any of these things.

But we can live with the mystery, we can grow in our understanding, we can offer answers and question those answers and offer new answers, but we must not avoid the open and clear call to do two things: to love God and to love our neighbor and to do those two things with all of the passion and enthusiasm and intelligence and humor and piety and humility that we can muster.

And as we do that, as we build our lives upon who we have been, as we build our Church upon the foundations that were laid in 1834, as we build our tomorrows upon yesterday we will continually find answers to the questions that Christ asks of each one of us:

“Who do people say that I am?” “But who do you say that I am?”