Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

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Sermons

September 2002 (click here to return to "September 2002 Sermons" page)

22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time (September 1, 2002)

“Test Your Logic Against God’s” Dr. Julie Adkins

Text: Matthew 16:21-28

SERMON

Oh, look, it’s our friend Peter again.

Last week, we saw him having one of his good days:

where Jesus tells him,

“Peter, I’m going to build my church on you.”

But now, we see one of his not-so-good days,

arguing with Jesus, flat-out contradicting him …

getting himself into trouble.

He doesn’t like what Jesus is teaching them.

He doesn’t even understand it all,

but the part he does understand, he doesn’t like.

So, he rebukes Jesus.

Now think about that for a minute.

Even though Simon Peter has just before this

confessed that Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of God …

Even though he was way ahead of the other disciples

in figuring that out, listen to him now:

“No way, Lord!

Things can’t happen like that!

You must have misunderstood

something that God said to you.

Jesus, you’re just not making sense.”

But then, Jesus rebukes Peter in return,

for his lack of understanding,

and for his attempts to make God

conform to human standards.

“Peter,” he says, “when you say those things,

you are not on the side of God,

but of human beings.”

I wonder if sometimes

he wants to say the same thing to us.

Because I think that most of the time

we find God’s ways to be

just as incomprehensible as Peter did.

We understand the words that Jesus said –

in translation, anyway! –

but somehow, when they all get put together,

we can’t quite grasp the meaning he intends.

To use a perfectly mundane and even silly example:

If I were to say to you,

two plus two equals five …

You know the words in that sentence;

you know what each one of them means,

and yet once you put them all together,

their total meaning doesn’t make sense.

It’s a contradiction.

And Jesus’ words often sound to our ears

like just so many contradictions.

In order to find yourself, you must deny yourself?

In order to save your life, you must lose it?

We’ve all lived on this earth long enough to know

that real life doesn’t work out that way.

If you’re wandering around half blind

because one of the lenses fell out of your glasses,

you don’t find by it having lost it.

If I invest my retirement savings in the stock market

and then lose it,

I haven’t somehow gained it in the process of losing it.

It’s no wonder that Peter had trouble

understanding what Jesus was trying to tell him.

We have trouble with it,

and we’ve had a few thousand years

to get used to the idea!

Our reasoning, and our logic,

can’t quite make sense of God’s way of doing things.

Let me give you a kind of funny example

from my own childhood.

I remember it quite clearly,

though I couldn’t have been more than three or four years old.

My mother was talking to me about

what it means to be a child of God,

and I was having a little difficulty grasping the concept.

I could understand that I was God’s child …

after all, I was a child,

and so that made perfectly good sense.

So when she asked, “Who are you?”

I could happily say, “I’m God’s daughter!”

But I had trouble seeing how my mother fit into the picture.

I knew how human relationships worked, though,

so when she asked, “Then who am I?”

I said triumphantly, “You’re God’s wife!”

“No, honey.”

“Then you’re God’s mother.”

“No, I’m God’s child also.”

“But if you’re God’s child,

doesn’t that make me God’s grandchild?”

We went round and round with that for quite a while,

but I was never entirely convinced.

I decided to believe her,

because she was my mother,

and so she was smarter than I was!

But I didn’t understand it at all.

After all, if my mother were God’s child also,

that meant she was my sister,

and she couldn’t be my sister,

because she was my mother!

Kind of like that classic old song,

“I’m my own grandpa.”

Well, I understand all of that better now,

as I’m sure you do also.

We’re all God’s children,

no matter what our other relationships are.

But if we look at it in purely human terms,

it still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

And that’s where the problem lies

with us and with Peter,

when it comes to understanding Jesus’ words.

We want God’s word to make sense

in terms of our limited understanding.

We are afraid, or unwilling, or something,

to allow our minds to be transformed,

and our faith to mature,

so that we can see things through God’s eyes.

When we hear things like,

“Those who want to save their life will lose it,

and those who lose their life for my sake will find it…”

When we hear things like that,

we are afraid to believe them.

It goes up against everything we’ve been taught up to this point,

at least, everything we’ve learned everywhere but here.

We know that if we want to save our lives,

we’ll look both ways before crossing the street,

and we’ll wear our seat belts,

and practice safe sex,

and have a checkup once a year or so.

The several times that I’ve taken first aid,

I’ve learned about saving lives by artificial respiration, and by CPR,

and by trying to prevent someone from going into shock,

and by properly dragging people out of a burning building,

and all that good stuff.

Nowhere in the book does it ever say

that you save people’s lives by losing them.

It isn’t logical.

In fact, it’s a contradiction!

And as long as we look at it in purely human terms,

it will always be.

And so the question for us is this:

are we going to be bound forever

by the safe and comfortable limits of our own minds,

or are we going to take the plunge

and ask God to come into us, and change us,

and help us to see the world through God’s own eyes?

Or as the apostle Paul might phrase it,

are we going to stay conformed to this world

because it’s familiar and predictable,

or are we willing to be transformed by the renewal of our minds,

so that we may prove what is the will of God?

We have a choice; God isn’t going to transform us against our will.

Are we willing?

Let me stack the deck a little further.

When Jesus rebukes Peter, he says to him,

“Get behind me, Satan!

For you are setting your mind not on divine things

but on human things.”

Those are strong words,

but they were words that Peter needed to hear,

and that we also need to hear.

Please understand, though;

it is not our human reason, or logic, or understanding,

that is somehow satanic.

Our minds are a gift from God.

The problem comes, as it did for Peter,

when we start to think that our reason

is more reasonable than God’s reason.

That does come from Satan, or evil, or the dark side,

or whatever you want to call it.

That kind of human “rationality” that made Peter say,

Lord, it doesn’t make sense that you should die;

surely you’ve got it wrong.

It’s the same kind of thinking that makes us say,

“If God only knew how awful my parents were to me,

God would never have said

we have to forgive seventy times seven.”

Or,

“If God had known how bad Saddam Hussein was going to be,

God would have never said ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”

That’s insanity!

That is the power of evil at work within us,

for us to assume that we know better than God,

that we are smarter than God

when it comes to knowing about the world.

We try to test God’s will by seeing if it conforms to ours,

rather than testing our thoughts and reason and will in comparison to God’s.

We have the whole thing backwards!

What it boils down to, I suppose, is this:

we have to trust that

God knows what God is doing,

because it doesn’t seem logical or sensible to us.

We have to believe that

if we give up our lives

we will save them.

To believe that the more we give away,

the more we will have

-- you will not find that in any computer program!

To believe that if we want to find our true selves,

we must deny ourselves,

and take up our crosses,

and follow Jesus.

To believe that God’s way of doing things,

though it seems strange and contradictory to us,

is infinitely better than our way of doing things.

It does require a leap of faith,

a letting go of some things,

some of which are very comfortable and dependable.

It means a certain degree of what we might call

“blind trust,”

walking by faith and not by sight.

But above all, it means venturing out

and discovering that those things

we thought sounded so crazy,

are in fact the truest things there are.

Test your logic, your reasoning, against God’s.

If they don’t agree …

well, you know where to start working!

Amen.