Who Do You Say I Am?

My first real girlfriend Krista Monnie broke up with me, over the phone , because God told her to.

According to her Southern Baptist community, I was a bad influence.

Mischievous… maybe… rebellious, yes. But bad?

Well, I did not grow up in a Christian household. As a family, we only went to church on Christmas and Easter. Perhaps I was a bad influence because I was unchurched?

Or perhaps it was because I was just another ill-adjusted misguided teenager traveling down the broad road to destruction. This was partially true.

Regardless, this was one of the earliest impressions my 16-year old brain formulated of who Christians were, and I was certainly not included.

Fast forward roughly five years later to my senior year of college. I was a budding English major minoring in photography. I was also deeply immersed in the world of cinema. I was taking a class with my favorite professor, Dr. Bluestone, on the works of Martin Scorsese and Stanley Kubrick.

At the time, Dr. Bluestone was strongly advising me to pursue graduate film courses at NYU. However, I was also wrestling with the call to ministry and the possibility of attending seminary.

When I went into his office one afternoon to discuss my future path in further detail, he told me that to peruse a path in ministry was utter foolishness. He said that to him, Jesus was nothing more than a cheap plastic pop icon that belonged more on your cars dashboard than in true religion.

Fast forward roughly another five years later to when I was attending seminary in Virginia. I was interning at an Assemblies of God church that was interested in adopting a ministry philosophy known at the time as the Ministry of the 12. It was basically evangelism through a pyramid scheme.

The idea was that you were part of someone’s small group of 12, and then you picked your own 12 followers to disciple, and then they each picked 12 followers and so forth and so on.

The vision had originated at a massive mega church in Bogota Columbia that boasted up to 500,000 members. So as an intern on staff, I was invited to fly down to Bogota as part of the team assigned to learn directly from their senior pastor’s leadership team on how to implement the vision of the 12.

As it turns out, the pastor of this mega church believed that the Holy Spirit had given him a special insight into the Book of Revelation and the meaning of the number 12, particular in the measurements of the New Jerusalem that comes down from heaven.

That first night we were there in Bogota, we attended a worship service with over 50,000 folks, divided into 12 groups representing the different geographical locations in the city. Each of these 12 groups was made up of thousands of folks, each sitting in their own section, and represented by color coordinated jerseys and large flags.

I say jerseys because the whole thing had the feel of one of those violent soccer games that get out of control and end of injuring people. The service was in Spanish and we were given headsets to hear the translation of the service into English.

At one point the different groups of 12 began shouting their own chants in completion with one another. One of the groups began a massive conga line that weaved dangerously through the crowd to high energy worship music. Other teams had climbed upon platforms to gain height advantage that were dangerously close to teetering on the verge of collapse.

All of this was being coordinated from the pastor who was whipping the different teams into a frenzy using a strange mix of pep rally talk and prophecy. This is who Jesus was to them, and the whole event made me weep with sadness.

Which brings us to our gospel lesson this morning where we have this strange and even troubling interaction between Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor over Judah, and the shamed prisoner, Jesus.

Pilate asks, “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus answered, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?”

At the crux of this dizzying confrontation are two important questions: Who do others say I am? And who do you say I am?

It is not until this moment that Pilate is confronted himself, face to face with Christ the King. Up until now, Pilate only knew about Jesus by who others said he was. Now, the Son of God, the divine LOGOS, the incarnation of the truth, asks Pilate directly, Who do you say I am?

You see there comes a time in all our lives where we will have to know the difference between who others say Jesus is, versus who we know him to be.

This is truly where the life of discipleship to Christ begins.

Are you following Jesus because you have experienced a life changing encounter with him, or are you just listening to what others have to say about him?

I will never forget the day I was confronted with such a life changing encounter with Jesus.

I was working on my senior project for photography, a black and white photo essay that was to tell the story of the forgotten ruins of downtown Macon, Georgia.

One crisp sunny autumn day I went to shoot in an old tire factory ruin that was nothing but three crumbling walls, no ceiling, surrounding a concrete foundation that was covered in ruin, and weeds, and garbage.

In the middle of the room, if you could even call it a room, there was a stool where I sat and began to journal on what I was photographing. Somewhere in that entry my words went from describing the actual warehouse ruin to describing the ruin within my own soul.

It was there I came to the realization that I did not believe in any absolute truth, that there was truly no meaning to existence or to my life. And I could cut and paste and shape my own morality into whatever I wanted it to be.

It was all trash, it was all ruin, and it didn’t mean a damn thing. There was no truth and we are all alone.

It was at that moment I looked across the room and saw the sunlight shining through a busted window pane of an old doorway in a wall of the ruin. It was beautiful. A simple beam of light shining through a cracked window of an open door of a forgotten space.

And then there was a presence that I can only describe as eternal joy. The hairs on my arms stood up, and I was filled with the most beautiful, and real, and vulnerable love I’ve ever felt. I knew that I was not alone. That none of us were ever alone and that all things were created, shaped, and interconnected together by this divine presence of love.

I saw that my life, flawed and broken as it was, was lit from within by the divine flame of the eternal one, and that his light shining through all the desolate and cracked places of my life was somehow transforming me into something new, something beautiful, something human and deeply divine at the same time.

For the first time in my life all the shadows and fears and the void in my heart were filled with a light and a truth that gives all things purpose, meaning, and definition. I knew at that moment, sitting among the rubble and the trash and the ruin, that I belong to Jesus.

I took a picture that afternoon over 25 years ago of that beam of light shining through that open door.

Who do you say that I am?

This is who Jesus is to me… the light that shines in the darkness of our hearts and gives light to all people no matter how lost, how broken, how ruined we may appear to be.

Today is Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday on our liturgical calendar, the Sunday we look to the Ancient One, the King Eternal, the Alpha and the Omega as the cosmic king of all creation.

Today is the Sunday that bridges the end of our lectionary to the beginning, where we look toward the first week of Advent to prepare once again to receive the incarnation of the word of God, the Word made flesh.

Jesus is the Cosmic King: the one who created all things, sustains all things, and holds all things together by his death, resurrection and ascension. He has come down into our ruin and destruction to reveal to us the unconditional love God.

And he will come again in glory as the king of kings to make all things new, and to usher in his Father’s eternal kingdom of love.

Therefore, we proclaim the mystery of faith: Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again.

As I was preparing for this sermon and going through my old photographs from my senior photo essay, I came across another old photo I took that I thought might make for a good closing story.

Which brings us to Graceland in Memphis Tennessee, to the house of the King of rock and roll himself, Elvis Presley. Have any of you been on a tour of Graceland?

It’s so amazing! You get to see his living room, his parent’s bedroom, the famous jungle room, his private jet, the Lisa Marie, and all his legendary costumes, artifacts, and 174 gold records hung up around his game room.

But what struck me the most comes at the end of the tour and was quite unexpected. As you end the tour, you are brought out into Elvis’ backyard where you encounter a massive statue of Jesus that marks the very grave where the king himself is buried.

The tour of the king’s mansion ends at the feet of the King of Kings where the resting body of Elvis awaits the second coming of Christ.

As Elvis once said at one his concerts, “I am not the king. Jesus Christ is the king. I’m just an entertainer.”

This certainly sounds like someone who encountered the cosmic Christ, the king of all creation.

So may we, like Elvis, on this day of Christ the King, encounter the true Jesus, not because of what someone else has told us about him, but because we know his rule and reign in our hearts, and because we know that we belong to the Truth.

As we sang this morning in our opening hymn,

Crown him with many crowns, the Lamb upon his throne; Hark!

How the heavenly anthem drowns all music but its own;

Awake my soul and sing of him who died for thee,

And hail him as thy matchless King through all eternity.

Amen.