2024.03.03 | Praise the Mount
“Praise the Mount”
Rev. Brenda Loreman
Designated Term Associate Minister
Eden United Church of Christ, Hayward, California
Third Sunday of Lent,
March 3, 2024
Matthew 16:13-20
While I was preparing for my sermon this week, a memory floated up from nearly the bottom of my memory pool to the surface about a job that I had in college that I hadn’t thought about in years. Now, I’m not exactly sure why I remembered this college job this week. It might be because I have been pondering the faith journey of Peter this lent, but it’s probably more likely because this week Macy’s announced that they were closing 150 stores across the country, including the iconic anchor location at Union Square in San Francisco. During college, some 40-ish years ago, I worked for one summer as a part-time, floating sales associate at a department store. It wasn’t Macy’s, because we didn’t have Macy’s where I grew up in San Diego. I worked at the Southern California department store chain, called May Company. I was about 20, and I had no real interest in or aptitude for retail sales, but it was a job, and I needed some summer employment in between college semesters.
At some point during the summer I met another young woman about my age, whose name I cannot now remember. One slow afternoon in the junior clothing department, my young work colleague discovered that I was a Christian. Now, knowing who she was, I think she probably asked me if I was a Christian. When I said that I was, she asked me the next question, which was, “are you born again?” You don’t hear this term much today, but in the 80s, it was the way for an Evangelical Christian to find out if they were talking to another Evangelical or if they needed to evangelize the person they were talking to. I admitted that I was not “born again,” which gave her an opportunity to convince me that I needed to be. She insisted that in order to be a real Christian, a true follower of Jesus, I needed to be born again.
The idea of being born again comes from the Gospel according to John, in Chapter 3, where the Pharisee Nicodemus has a conversation with Jesus about how one gains eternal life. Jesus says that no one can have eternal life without being born again or “born from above,” depending on how you translate the phrase. Nicodemus thinks Jesus is being literal and ponders the impossibility of actually coming out of his mother’s womb again, which is of course, absurd. He doesn’t understand that Jesus is being metaphoric and suggesting that one needs a spiritual rebirth in order to have eternal life.
Some Christians interpret this expression of Jesus to mean that having a conversion experience is necessary to be a follower of Jesus, and not just a gradual conversion, but a lightning-bolt striking mountain-top aha moment, which may very well come at an altar call in a church service, where one confesses one’s sinfulness and one’s need for repentance, and makes the confession that Jesus is one's personal Lord and Savior. Because I had not had this particular kind of conversion experience, according to my coworker, I wasn’t truly a Christian yet despite having been baptized and confirmed in my church, and being a faithful Sunday worshiper, and a faithful lay leader in my congregation.
I took my frustration with my coworker to my pastor, the Rev. Joan Pettis, one of the co-pastors at my church at the time, and she suggested that I talk about my experience and my coworker’s experience in light of the two experiences of Peter and Paul. “Some people have conversion experiences like Paul,” she said. Paul, who was originally called Saul, was a persecutor of the early Christians at the beginning, but then he had this lightning-bolt striking mountain-top aha moment conversion experience on the road to Damascus. “Suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’” Saul, a devout Jew, knew the voice of God when he heard it. “Who are you, Lord?” Paul said. “The reply came, ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.’” (1) This powerful experience of Jesus converted Paul nearly on the spot, and he became a fervent follower of the Jesus Way.
The Peter model of conversion is the type of conversion we’re studying throughout this Lent. Peter doesn’t come to an understanding of Jesus and what Jesus means for his life all at once. It happens over time. We’ve already seen this in our scripture passages for the first two weeks of Lent. So far, we have seen Peter being called by Jesus to fish for people. Peter is at first reluctant to hear Jesus’s message. Jesus asks him to let down his nets and Peter says, “Lord we haven’t caught anything all night! It’s not going to work!” But it does. And Peter follows. We saw Jesus walking on water, and Peter, struggling to follow Jesus across the waves. It works for a moment, but then he loses his focus, he loses his trust in what he’s doing, and what Jesus is asking him to do, and he falters. He sinks beneath the waves, and Jesus has to rescue him. In our scripture today, Peter has the realization that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of the living God. But come back next week and the week after that, and especially come on Good Friday, and you will see Peter still fumbling. Still questioning. Still struggling for understanding. Peter doesn’t have the lightning-bolt striking mountain-top aha moment conversion experience. But he still comes to faith. And he does become the rock upon which the church is first built.
So, armed with a biblically-grounded explanation for my lack of a conversion experience, I eagerly looked forward to my next conversation with my coworker. I thought, “This is gonna go great! She won’t be able to argue with my biblical explanation of conversion.” Well, it didn’t work. She thought my explanation was interesting and all, but it didn’t convince her that I was a real Christian. She still believed that I needed that mountaintop altar-call experience, in order to be a real Christian, and a true follower of Jesus.
There is a part of me that wishes I could see my coworker today, and ask her what her understanding of Jesus is now. It could be that she still has that same understanding of what it means to be born again, of what it means to follow Jesus, and who Jesus is. But I am willing to bet that in the intervening 40 some years, her understanding of what it means to follow Jesus has changed. Who I understood Jesus to be in my 20s is not how I see Jesus today. And it’s not because I went to seminary and read some big books and have the letters MDiv after my name. It’s because following Jesus takes a lifetime to figure out. And I know that as I draw my final breath, I still will probably not have it figured out. The question of who Jesus is for us as individuals as a community is a question we can ask for our entire lives and never come up with quite the same answer.
The answer that Peter has in today’s text—that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the living God—is but one understanding of who Jesus is and why we Christians follow him. There is a verse in the Epistle to the Hebrews that says, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” (2) In her excellent book Freeing Jesus, the Christian scholar Diana Butler Bass suggests that, “Sometimes Christians interpret that to mean that Jesus is static, almost like a pillar of stone, ever reliable, never changing. But we, of course do change, and because of that Jesus goes with us as we grow, a surprising companion who never ceases to be who we need at any given time, showing up recognized but ever new.” (3)
The book Freeing Jesus is something of a spiritual memoir for Diana Butler Bass, recalling the understandings of Jesus she’s encountered while growing up Methodist, turning to Evangelicalism as a young adult, and finally finding her spiritual home as a progressive Episcopalian. She explores the more traditional understandings of Jesus as Lord and Savior, but also the more intimate views of Jesus as Friend and Teacher, and the mystical views of Jesus as Way and Presence. These six understandings are the focus of the book, but she also suggests that there are many more understandings of Jesus that have been explored by Christians through the ages. There is the understanding of Jesus as Mother, one that the mystic Julian of Norwich wrote about in the very first book written by a woman in English, in the 14th century. “There is also Jesus as Lover, a rich image from medieval spirituality, [... and …] Jesus as Word (and the corresponding Jesus as Silence); [...] Jesus as Wisdom, [...and …] Jesus as Bread and Wine.” (4)
“We know Jesus through our experience,” Butler Bass notes. “There is no other way to become acquainted with one who lived so long ago and who lives in ways we can barely understand through church, scripture, and good works and the faces of our neighbors.” (5)
Who do you say Jesus is? Whether we meet a new understanding of Jesus in a lightning-bolt striking mountain-top aha moment conversion experience, or in the stumbling, rambling wandering heart experience, Jesus meets us where we are, with just what we need. Amen.
1) Acts 9:3b-6, NRSVue
2) Hebrews 13:8, NRSVue
3) Diana Butler Bass, Freeing Jesus: Rediscovering Jesus as Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way, and Presence (New York: HarperCollins, 2021), XXVI.
4) Ibid., 263-4.
5) Ibid., 264.