Happy Father’s Day to all the Dads
here.
I’m thinking
today of my son and son-in-law who are the fathers of my wondrous four
grand-daughters.
And I’ve been
thinking all week about my father, Virgil Hoyt Bradley, who grew up on a turkey
farm in Monroe County, West Virginia.
When he moved
to McDowell County, West Virginia to be a coal miner, he told the cook at the
boarding house for miners that she had given him the best chicken he had ever
eaten, she told him it was turkey. He wouldn’t believe her until she took him
in the kitchen and showed him the carcass.
He had never
tasted turkey—you don’t eat the cash crop.
He had an
eighth-grade education, but was one of wisest men I’ve ever known.
He was a
life-long Republican in what was then a deep Blue state. How things change as
time passes.
He enrolled in
the army and was a corporal in the engineering battalion of General Patten’s
troops. He spent the war building bridges for Patten to drive his tanks across
rivers and then blowing the bridges up.
He once told
me, when I asked why they blew the bridges up: “General Patton told us we
weren’t coming back!”
There’s lots
more I could tell you about him, but we need to get to the Sea of Galilee.
The Sea of
Galilee was not a ‘sea’, it was a lake and not a big one. 46 square miles of
water very susceptible to sudden storms.
Imagine being
on a first century boat on a lake when a tropical storm came up.
Imagine waking
up the only passenger who was asleep and telling him they were all going to
drown.
Imagine that
person calling out to the elements of nature and calming the storm.
Wouldn’t you,
like the disciples, wonder “who that guy was that the forces of nature obey
him”?
Who is this?
Who was Jesus?
That, by the
way, is the name of this sermon—Who Was Jesus?
I typed, “Who
Was Jesus?” into Google and got—are you ready for this?—266 million responses!
I only read
one of them—about eight pages—but it had 566 footnotes!
People have
been wrestling with Who Jesus Was? Since the 2nd century.
Scholars and
theologians have struggled for centuries to distinguish between “the Biblical
Jesus” and the “historic Jesus”, without much success.
The Jesus we
know from the New Testament and from the early Christian writing that are
called ‘the Sacred Gnostic writings” that didn’t make it into the canon of
scripture established by the Council of Nicea in 325 a.d.
I brought a
copy of the Gnostic writings to show you how much we know about the Biblical
Jesus.
The ‘historic
Jesus’—we don’t know much about him.
There’s a joke
about how the archaeologists of Pope John 23rd came to him with bad
news—they had found Jesus’ body.
“This
terrible,” the good Pope said, “we must tell the world, but first I’ll call the
Protestant Theologian, Paul Tillich in Chicago and tell him.”
The Pope and
Paul (who called God ‘the Ground of Being’) were on the phone, “Bad news, my
brother,” the Pope said, “we’ve found Jesus’ body.”
There was a
long pause and then Paul Tillich said, with a sigh of relief, “My God, he
really lived!”
So, “Who Jesus
Is?” cannot be answered with any certainty. It all comes down to ‘belief’.
In Matthew’s
gospel, Jesus asks his disciple ‘Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And
they answer that some people say, John the Baptist, but others say Elijah and
still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.
Then Jesus
says, “But who do you say that I am?” And Peter answers, “You are the Messiah,
the son of the living God”—and Peter becomes the Rock the church is built on.
It all comes
down to ‘believing’.
“Believe”,
literally translated, means “to live as if…”
So,
in the end, “who Jesus is” depends on who we ‘believe’ he is—who we ‘live as
if’ he is.
That
puts a lot of pressure on you and me.
“Who
do WE say that he is?” What do we believe about him? How does he help us to
live our lives?
That
is what we must always be asking ourselves, “Who do I believe Jesus is?”
And
how do I live ‘as if’ he was my brother, my friend, my savior, my Lord and my
God?
That’s
the question we must always be asking.
Always
asking.
Always
believing.
It’s
up to us.
