“Who Is This Guy?” by Rev. Dr. Jay Marshall Groat, September 15, 2024, at Mount Vernon, Ohio, based on Mark 8:27-38

I’d like to open up myself a bit here at the beginning of my message and let you know where I’m at spiritually, and I need to tell you it’s a good place. I shared with you last Sunday that I was going to officiate at my best friend Dean’s mother’s funeral on Friday, which I did. And all week long I’ve been thinking about – her name is Shirley – I’ve been thinking about Shirley, and I’ve been thinking about a lot of things, not the least of which is death, and life. I’ve been thinking about the fundamentals, and that’s where I want us to go this morning in our fleeting moments together. And you should be very afraid because I brought four books with me. This is going to be a very, very long sermon, so sit back and relax and enjoy the flight. No, I wouldn’t do that to you.

But I’ve been thinking a lot about the fundamentals. My day on Friday was Shirley’s funeral at 11:30 in the morning, and I stood up at the lectern at the funeral home in Marysville, and I looked out at the first pew – my best, longest friend Dean, we met in the third grade; sitting beside him was his brother, Derek, who was one year older than us, we played on sports teams together; and his wife; then there was Wendy, their younger sister; and then there was Dwayne, the third son. I grew up with all these people. And it’s such a cliché, I don’t know how else to say it, it’s such a cliché that it just was yesterday that we were all in high school together. What a cliché, but that’s what it feels like.

So that was Friday morning, and Friday afternoon I officiated at a wedding. It’s been on the books for about six months, and I married Doug and Tracy. Doug and Tracy are young. It was the first marriage for Tracy and the second one for Doug. They’re young. I didn’t ask them how old they were, but I think they’re in their 40s, that’s young. I did the service at Dawes Arboretum outside of Newark, they live in Newark. It was at 3 o’clock on Saturday, it was hot. However, we walked a couple hundred yards into one of their favorite spots, it was a whole bunch of evergreens, and I’ve never walked on such soft ground before. We were in the shade, and when you walked from the sun into that shade, I swear the temperature dropped 25 degrees. I’ve done an average of about 10 weddings a year for 37 years so you can do the math, and this one was special. They wrote their own vows, and they said them to each other, and they were beautiful, and they meant them. They were about the fundamentals.

What we have here in Mark at this point is all the building up, and people keep asking, “Who is this guy? This guy from Nazareth.” It’s all building up, and the disciples have been watching, and now it’s time. Write this down, ready? Timing is everything. And now it’s time, so Jesus turns the table on his disciples, and he says, “Alright, guys” – and they were guys – “it’s time. What are people saying? What are you hearing out there?” And someone said, “Some say that you’re John the Baptist come back from the dead, some say you’re Elijah come back from the dead.” And Peter says, “No, you’re the messiah. You’re the anointed one.” The fundamentals. I’ve been thinking about it all week, and I’m inviting you to think about it.

This is my undergraduate level of degree comparative religion text. I still use it. The introduction is called “Paths of Faith,” by John A. Hutchinson, and it was first published in the early ‘70s. Note the title of the book is “Paths of Faith,” and I’ve been thinking about the fundamentals. I want you to think about them too. Matters of life, matters of death. He writes this in the introduction – “Adequately understood, the title of my book, ‘Paths of Faith,’ expresses the main emphases of my approach to the subject matter. The word ‘path’ or any of its numerous translations is a recurring metaphor in the literature of the world’s religions. China has its tao, and the Japanese have the analogous term michi. Buddhists speak of their faith as the path of the Buddha, and Muslims characterize Islam as the straight path. In both Old Testament and New Testament, the same metaphor is used extensively. Thus men have envisaged” – this was early ‘70s, men and women – “thus people have envisaged their religions as paths through the mortal woods.” OK, one more sentence – “As it is used in my title I have understood path to mean a cluster of life values which provides people with a convincing and illuminating answer to the fundamental human question.”

Now Dr. Hutchinson offers up what he says is the fundamental human question. What is it? You don’t have to answer that out loud. If somebody came up to you and asked you, “What is the fundamental human question?” I wonder what we’d say. For Dr. Hutchinson, the fundamental human question is, “Why am I alive?” Now it’s not just because your biological parents got together. He’s asking a deeper question than that. “Who do people say that I am? What going on out there? What do you hear? Fundamentally, who am I?” Jesus is asking. Why are we alive? How would you answer that?

I was going to share this later in the service, I’m going to share it now. Many of you have come up to me this morning and I appreciate it, and you’ve informed me that Denny is now in hospice, so we’ll pray for him later in the service, and I’m announcing to you that I’m going to go see him right after this service. I was planning on going to Adult Forum. The hours are ticking and I’m going to go see him after the service. He’s in hospice. It’s interesting timing because I was going to talk about hospice this morning, and I’m going to talk about it now. I looked up that word, the etymology of “hospice.” Let me read this, it goes back to 1818 – “a rest house for travelers.” Paths of faith. Paths through the mortal woods. So, who do people say I am, anyway? “A rest house for travelers, especially the houses of refuge and shelter kept by monks in the passes of the Alps.”

Here’s the point. I have a friend in Akron, Ohio who’s a hospice nurse. I got to know her really well when I was a pastor up there, and she taught me something, and I’ve been thinking about it all week. What she tries to do when she’s dealing with a family who has a loved one in hospice, she tries as best she can in a graceful way to get the family to deal with five fundamental questions. I’m going to share them with you now, and as you hear them, I’m inviting you not just to think about these questions as they relate to somebody in hospice. I’m asking us to relate them to life. They’re fundamental, and we are invited every day to ask them and to live them.

Not in any particular order, but the five questions that my hospice nurse tries to get the family to deal with are – number one, thank you. Say thank you to the person who is lying in the bed in hospice. How can you and I go about living? Thank you. Thank you. The next fundamental question – I forgive you. Forgiveness is fundamental. How can you and I go about living today? I forgive you. And as I often do in sermons because I’m sensing it’s kind of heavy in here right now talking about death and the unknown, let’s lighten it up a little bit. We’re going to do something that I like to do. We’re going to go around the sanctuary. Everybody’s going to say out loud somebody they need to forgive. Ready? Kasie, you go first. Just kidding, just kidding. She was going to answer. I forgive you.

So naturally the next fundamental question, in the midst of hospice, in the midst of life, is? Please forgive me. I can remember years ago during one of the presidential elections, it was probably 2004, it was about a month before the election or six weeks, and I looked out our bedroom window, we were living in Stow, Ohio, I looked into my neighbor’s yard. We had great neighbors, I loved them, and I was stunned because they had the wrong sign in their yard. It really upset me, and I struggled with it. I said, “These are really decent people. How can they be so wrong?” Right? There’s something about three days. Jesus was in the grave three days. Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days. I took about three days. How can I still keep these people as my friends? And I figured out a way. You know what I did? I forgave them. We were such good friends that I eventually told them the story. I said, “I just want you to know I forgive you for voting for the wrong person.” I had to forgive my own father every four years my entire life.

Thank you, I forgive you, please forgive me. The next one – I love you. These are fundamental questions in hospice because they’re fundamental questions for living. What’s the last one? It’s the hardest one, and it’s the one that I never want to say, and I usually run away from it, I’m confessing to you, because it’s too hard. You know what the last one is, right? Goodbye. I don’t like goodbye. I don’t like it. And it’s real, and everything changes, and everything ends, and something new begins. And death does not stop love. “So what are people saying? What do you hear out there, guys?” Jesus asked his disciples, and Peter said, “You’re the messiah, you’re the anointed one.” And it doesn’t matter what he looked like. What matters is what he said, and what matters is what he did. Amen?