Who is Jesus to Us?
This is the sermon I preached Sun. 9/13 at St.Timothy Lutheran Church and St. Mark Lutheran Church . The gospel was Mark 8:27-38. Before marrying my husband, Ray, I had a part time job at a call center in Rochester, conducting opinion polls over the phone. Sometimes they were political, oftentimes they were about various products and services. In the first few verses of this gospel reading, doesn't it seem that Jesus is conducting an opinion poll of his own? His question was simply regarding who people thought he was. This brings us to a turning point in Mark's gospel. Just who is Jesus? Who do people say he is? Jesus wasn't taking a survey to see what people thought of him. The answers others gave were all high evaluations of Jesus, but they did not confess Jesus as the definitive revelation of God, The important question is not the identity of Jesus, but the identity of God: Is God the one who is definitively acting in the Christ event or not? The discussio