Is There a Word from the Lord?

Anne Snyder: From Comment Magazine, welcome to The Understory, where the future quietly takes root. I’m Anne Snyder.

On our final morning, we came to a question that felt both ancient and immediate: is there a word from the Lord for us today? Years ago, in a COVID-era Comment project called Breaking Ground, a theologian and now president of Fuller Theological Seminary, Dr. David Goatley, wrote that Black preaching is ultimately obligated to answer that question — is there a word from the Lord for us today? — not with personal opinion or cultural fashion, but with a word capable of holding together critique and construction, inspiration and instruction, lament and hope, crucifixion and resurrection.

I don’t know about you, but I find myself starved these days for that kind of word. So I asked Dr. Charlie Dates to come and bring one. Charlie is a son of Chicago, a scholar and a shepherd, senior pastor of two of the most storied Black churches in the nation. I asked him because of who he is, the local he has chosen and stayed committed to, and because of how he hears and listens. There is something in him that I uniquely trust in discerning the question — also Bonhoeffer’s question — that we had been circling throughout the three-day festival: who is Christ for us today?

Recorded live at the Understory Festival, here is Rev. Dr. Charlie Dates.

Rev. Dr. Charlie Dates: Well, this is the day that the Lord has made. We ought to rejoice and be glad in it. I was glad when they said unto me, come let us go to Washington, D.C. — to the Understory, where we get to celebrate the wonder of Christ and who he is.

Let me rush to say thank you to the brave soul that is Anne Snyder for envisioning and then giving birth to this august gathering. We honour God today for you. I must say that from your hand comes the most beautifully written emails in the world. I printed off your email and posted it on the wall by my desk. I don’t think anybody has ever composed such a glorious composition of words in email. We thank God for you. Your words have given me life and inspiration, and it’s my honour today to accept this invitation.

My bride of almost 20 years and a few weeks is here with me today — if you wondered what an angel who tripped off the balcony of heaven looks like, you’re in the company of one. She is the sugar in my Kool-Aid, the fire in my fireplace, and the activator in my Jheri curl. Y’all don’t know what that is. And our two lovely children, Charlie and Claire, with us today.

I’ve been given a topic: who is Christ for us today? And I’ve been given 20 minutes. These are going to be 20 Baptist minutes. However, I want to give you fair warning — I came all the way from Chicago. I’m going to give you all of this from my heart.

I want to lift a question that God himself asks about himself. In Matthew chapter 22, verse 42 — I grew up in a church that read the King James Version, the King’s language — one question: Jesus asks the Pharisees, the Herodians, and the Sadducees in Matthew 22, verse 42:

What think ye of Christ? Whose son is he?

I want to talk from that thought. What think ye of Christ? Whose son is he?

Will you breathe a word of prayer with me, please?

Gracious God in heaven, we do thank and praise you for Jesus Christ, our Saviour — for the help and the hope that is ours in his name. I beg of you now for preaching power, clarity of mind, concision of speech, and conviction of heart, that I may tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, for your glory and for our good. Grant me now, I pray, physical strength and spiritual energy to proclaim the eternal truth of our Saviour, that your people may be helped, encouraged, and edified. And if I’ve asked you for too little, I pray that you do something even bigger than what I just asked you for. In Jesus’ name, amen.

It may be this morning that Jesus Christ is the biggest victim of identity theft in our nation. Those are the words of that pastor-senator from middle Georgia, Raphael Warnock. Those words set my mind swirling until it landed in 1845, when — under the criticism of abolition and in the throes of a church-sanctioned chattel slavery — Frederick Douglass, that public intellectual, formerly enslaved theologian, took pen to paper and said:

For between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference, so wide that to be the friend of one is to be the enemy of the other. To receive one as good, pure, and holy is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ. I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.

It was as if Douglass saw within the thin veneer of civic Christian speech a kind of identity theft of Jesus to serve the evils of this nation.

My mind kept moving until it landed six years later, in 1851, when at the height of the women’s suffrage movement, Sojourner Truth — twice rejected, once as a female, secondly as a Black woman — stood before the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, and asked that perennial question that Black women have been asking ever since: Ain’t I a Woman? Pointing at an attendee, Sojourner Truth looked at a man and said, old man in black right there — he says that a woman can’t have as much rights as men because Christ wasn’t a woman. Then, with audacity, she put her hand on her hips, tilted her head, looked at that man and said: where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman — man had nothing to do with him.

I have often wondered what it must have felt like to be in that audience that day, when her tall, impressive physique and her deep, guttural voice more than implied the significance of women through the supernatural birth of Christ. It was as if Sojourner Truth saw a kind of manipulative hijacking of the person of Jesus to serve the evils of oppression.

And then there is Bonhoeffer, who after a stint at Abyssinian in Harlem, just about a year before his execution, wrestled with this very question: who is Christ for us today? It’s almost as if then, now, and always, circumstances in our world compel us to answer this very question that God himself asks about himself. What think ye of Christ? Whose son is he?

We’ve gathered here this morning under the canopy of this nave, under the shadows of the witness of history, because every rising generation — from Douglass to Sojourner Truth to Bonhoeffer to you — must wrestle with two enduring questions. Who is Jesus? And what does his life mean for the way we live our lives today?

Well, we’ve come to ask and answer that question. And when we come to the curtain closing of Matthew chapter 22, we find our Lord at the end of a trilogy of entrapment. The Herodians, the Sadducees, and the Pharisees have come to ask Jesus three successive questions. A question about politics: where should we pay our taxes? It’s a question we’re still asking. A question of theological debate: marriage, and will we be married, and to whom will we be married in eternity? A question of morality: what does the law teach? Who really is my neighbour?

And Jesus steps into that controversy — being able to stand it no longer, questions about political allegiances, debates about theological misinterpretation, questions of a broken moral compass — and pulls up at verse 41 and flips the table on the Herodians, the Sadducees, and the Pharisees. After answering all of their questions, he now asks one of his own. Look at Jesus right when their minds are almost closed, because they reckon that they know who and what kind of descendant the Messiah will be. Jesus says to them: think again. Who is Christ? What think ye of Christ, and whose son is he?

You ever notice that you better slow down when God starts asking questions in the Bible? In Genesis 3, he asks Adam a question: Adam, where are you? A few verses later, he asks Eve a question: Eve, what have you done? In Exodus 4, he asks Moses a question: Moses, what’s in your hand? In 1 Kings 19, an exhausted Elijah is running — and he asks him a question: Elijah, what are you doing here? Perhaps my favourite: that erudite prophet Ezekiel in chapter 37, wrestling with the valley of dry bones — he asks Ezekiel, can these bones live?

See, friends, whenever God asks a question, it is never because God lacks information. His questions are not for his benefit, but for ours. And here now he comes to ask this question that I’ve come to D.C. to ask you: what do you think of Christ? Whose son is he?

This text is tailored to teach us that the identity of Jesus Christ confronts our theological arrogance and silences our moral malice. It commands a new moral imagination: that Christ is someone to be thought about. In one sense, Jesus is the perfect obsession, adored and revered in the beauty of his holiness and in the holiness of his beauty. Jesus is someone to be contemplated. Somewhere I read that he is the same yesterday, today, and forever — to be worshipped in all of his glorious monotony. Christ is someone to be experienced. He will fight your temptations. He will light your path. He will save your soul. He will renew your fatigued spirit. He will give you new strength. Time cannot age him, and ages do not time him. He is the Lamb of God.

This now gifts to us two swift movements — an answer to the question, who is Christ? I don’t know if you came ready with your own answer. So I brought mine.

Christ is the sum total of every cure for what ails the human condition. He is the all-sufficiency and indescribable potency of all of Godness, as seen in his dual paternity. This is how the text says it:

Jesus says, what do you think of Christ? Whose son is he? And they answered: he is the son of David. And Jesus said to them, then how does David in the Spirit call him Lord? Saying, the Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I put your enemies beneath your feet. If David then calls him Lord, how is he his son? No one was able to answer him a word, nor did anyone dare from that day on ask of Jesus another question.

Jesus was smooth. He had the ability to sneak up on and silence his opposition. And he asked the Pharisees, the Herodians, and the Sadducees: what do you think of Christ? And they gave him the right Sunday school, Bible college, seminary, orthodox answer: he is the son of David.

They were right, friends, to say that Jesus is the son of David. Throughout Old Testament history, David is the standard-bearer king. He is the ruler who consolidated the northern kingdom of Israel with the southern tribe of Judah. He was — like Dr. Kevin Bond — a prolific musical composer. Temple choirs everywhere were singing his latest hits. The Lord Is My Shepherd rose to the top of the Grammy charts. The Lord Is My Light and My Salvation went platinum. Whom Shall I Fear? The Lord Is the Strength of My Life accumulated wonderful awards. He wrote music that reflected the heart of God. And Israel came to worship the one true God and stand in grand solidarity. So much so that every king after David became judged by King David. The rabbinic tradition understood that the Messiah was to come from the Davidic line.

Jesus says: you are right to say that he is the son of David. But to stop there — to merely attribute the lordship of the Messiah to a human bloodline — is the grossest libel and infringement on the totality of his person. So Jesus asked a question: how? How, then, does David call him Lord? That’s a question of possibility and plausibility. You see, Jesus is pointing to the dual paternity of the Messiah. The Messiah has two fathers.

If you’re in this room today, I want to tell you: that’s good news, because we need him to have both of those fathers. He was both the Son of Man and the Son of God. He was David’s son as a man, but he was David’s Lord as God. He was Joseph’s son as a man, but he was Joseph’s Saviour as God. He was Mary’s little boy as a man, but he was Mary’s deliverer as God.

On his earthly father’s side, he got hungry — but on his heavenly Father’s side, he was the bread of life. On his earthly father’s side, he got thirsty — but on his heavenly Father’s side, he was living water. He was born contrary to the laws of birth, but he died triumphant over the laws of death. As a baby, he frightened an empire. As a preteen, he perplexed the elders in the temple. As a man, he made the waves to be still upon the bosom of his gentle command. And even David had to premeditatedly call him Lord. He is King of kings and Lord of lords. King over your problems. Lord over your solutions. King over health. Lord over sickness. King over poverty. Lord over wealth. He is King of kings and Lord of lords.

And so David in Psalm 110 pauses to say that Yahweh said to Adonai — the Lord said to my Lord. Oh, here is David, as wonderful and magnificent a leader as he was, standing in the hallways of history, looking through the corridors of time, seeing one greater than he.

And Anne, I want to celebrate you for bringing us here, because every generation sits in the waiting room of the coming glory of Jesus the Christ. We sit looking to the future for one who is greater than every ruler, wiser than every sage, stronger than every dictator.

Oh, let me say it the way the elders used to say it in the church I grew up in. You ain’t never met nobody like Jesus. No king, no president, no potentate, no congressman, no senator, no scholar, no preacher, no teacher. There’s nobody like Jesus. Not Abraham. Not Moses. Not Elijah. Not David. He is incomparable, uncontainable, unbeatable, insurmountable, unchangeable. He walked on water, turned water into wine, healed the sick, raised the dead, opened the eyes of the blind, fed the hungry, liberated the captives. The Pharisees could not confuse him. Herod could not kill him. Sin could not hold him and the grave could not keep him. He is the Son of God.

You say, well, who is Christ to us today? Well, I want to say to you that in your own low moments, when you’ve had to travel through your own wildernesses, when you’ve had to pray in your own Gethsemane and climb your own Calvary, you too have found him to be exceptional and extraordinary. He still is bread for the hungry. He still is the orphan’s adoption. He still is the prisoner’s pardon. He still is the prodigal’s way home. He still is the immigrant’s identity. And he still is the sinner’s perfect plea. He is the sum total of every cure for what ails our human condition. As a man, he knows exactly how we feel — but as God, he can do something about it.

I leave you now with what is a sad conclusion to this text, but I hope not a sad conclusion of my sermon. Verse 46 says that the Pharisees, the Herodians, and the Sadducees were literally incapable of discovering the words to answer Jesus. The Greek text seems to suggest that their boldness left him. He silenced them.

And in the silence of that room that day, when I read this text, one would hope that with all of the brilliance of the religious leaders in that room — with all of the historical reflection of the Pharisees, with all of the staunch boundaries of the Sadducees, and with all of the political volition of the Herodians — one would hope that once, somebody would have stood up in that room and had enough theological imagination and conviction to shout back to Jesus: I know who the Messiah is. You are the Messiah.

I mean, this is Matthew 22, friends. I would have hoped that after Matthew chapter 1, somebody would have said, we ain’t never seen a man born like this. I would have hoped that after Matthew chapter 4, somebody would have said, we’ve never seen a man pray like you. I would have hoped that after Matthew 5, 6, and 7, somebody would have stood up and said, we’ve never heard a man preach like you. Somewhere in that room that day, I would have hoped that after Matthew 8 and 9, someone would have said, we’ve never seen a man heal the sick like you.

But instead, in that room that day, is the same thing that exists in many churches today. Silence. They didn’t answer him a word.

All they had to do is what I’m trying to get some of y’all to do in here today: stand up and be a witness. To tell someone that the lordship of Jesus is not mere proposition. He is the loftiest fulfilment of the longing of the human soul. Tell the woman who just lost her husband that he is the widow’s pension. Tell the teenager sitting at the lunch table by himself, alone and isolated, that he is the friend who sticks closer than a brother. Tell the little girl struggling with body shame and relational sadness that he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. Tell your neighbours and your friends that he never preached a funeral, because the dead always got up after he started talking.

I wish that day that they had stayed around until Matthew 26, 27, and 28. Oh, I’m going to say it the way I feel it. When they put nails in his hands and a spear in his side and a crown of thorns upon his head. And he died. He died, friends. He died till death died. He died till sin apologized. He died till the earth rocked and reeled like a drunken man. But I wish that they had stuck around, because that’s not how this story ends.

He stayed in that grave Friday night. Saturday morning. Saturday night. But early Sunday morning — I’m going to say it for myself — early Sunday morning, he got up with all power in his hands. Life is worth living now because he got up with all power. Life is worth enduring now because the Son of God has gotten up. Hope is worth having now because he’s coming again. And the footfall of history is worth enduring now.

Glory to the Lamb. Glory to the Lamb.

This truth is marching.