Sermon Notes — August 30, 2026
“Get Behind Me”
Matthew 16:21-28 (NRSVUE)
Rev. Dr. Mary Beth Bernheisel
August 30, 2026
At a church that I previously served there was conflict – painful conflict – around the future and the direction of the United Methodist Church. And there was lots of anxiety about how the future and the direction of the United Methodist Church would affect that congregation’s ability to be faithful to its mission and ministry in the community. This is the story of a lot of United Methodist churches over the past 10 or so years, so the experience I’m telling you about is not unique. If the United Methodist Church goes this direction, folks wondered, how will the community view us as a United Methodist denomination? And if it goes a different direction, again, how will the community view us in relation to the decision made by the larger denomination. It was a hard place to be for everyone, and in the end we all knew – all of us knew – that some folks were going to have to make a really hard decision about their relationship with that congregation in particular and the larger denomination in general.
Someone put the conflict in terms that really made me think. They said that if the denomination makes X decision then we, the congregation, can’t be winners.
And I know exactly what this person meant. They didn’t mean that we were embroiled in a competition where there would be actual winners and losers. They meant that the congregation might be viewed differently in the community, that the congregation might lose membership, and that it very well could be harder to bring in new members if the denomination made X decision.
But here’s the thing that we know about following Jesus, about being faithful to Jesus, and it’s a thing that today’s text makes really, really clear. We don’t follow Jesus because Jesus promises to make us winners. Jesus doesn’t tell us to follow him because following him will make us successful or give us a good reputation or make people respect us. Jesus tells us to follow him and he will show us how to lose our lives so that we can find them. We don’t follow Jesus because discipleship is a formula for success in the world. Jesus doesn’t call us to be winners. Jesus calls us to obey. Jesus calls us to be faithful. And sometimes, in the economy of the world we live in right now, being faithful can look a lot like losing.
Will you pray with me and for me?
I’m going to quote Terry from last week. This is what’s fun about lectionary preaching – lots of times one week’s text leads directly into the next week’s text and we just get to pick up where the other person left off–and that’s what I’m going to do. Last week Terry preached on Matthew 16: 13-20. Jesus asks the disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of the Man is?” and “Who do you say I am?” And Terry pointed out that this question is the hinge on which the gospel of Matthew rests. The whole book of Matthew until this moment takes place in the region of Galilee. And as soon as this conversation is over – this conversation between Jesus and the disciples – Jesus and the disciples are going to start heading toward Jerusalem. And we know what happens in Jerusalem. Jesus is arrested, tortured, and executed. Terry said to us,
As you study your Bible, you will see that after Jesus confirmed Peter’s declaration that he is the Messiah, he began to teach God’s unexpected plan for the redemption of the world (Rev. Terry Carty)
And that is where we find ourselves today. The text even begins by saying that
From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed and on the third day and be raised. (Matthew 16:21)
Terry taught us last week that the reason Jesus asked the disciples who people say the Son of Man is, was because there were lots of different ideas about who the Messiah was going to be and how the Messiah was going to save the world. Terry reminded us that some people expected a king, some expected a priest, some expected a deliverer directly from heaven, and some expected direct intervention from God.
No one expected a Messiah who suffered and died. That’s not a winning strategy.
It’s no wonder that Peter pulls Jesus aside. Only four verses earlier Jesus blessed Peter for his supernatural understanding of Jesus’s identity and then he told Peter that Peter was the rock on which Jesus’s church – his body – would be built. And then Jesus initiates the Church's first – and worst – PR crisis because Peter knows that not a single person in the world is going to want to follow a “Messiah” whose next move is to give himself up for execution!
Peter is doing the only thing that makes any sense at all. He is warning Jesus of his losing strategy.
God forbid it Lord! This must never happen to you!
And then Jesus, who has just given Peter the keys to the kingdom and proclaimed that the gates of hell would never defeat the kingdom of God, calls Peter, what?
(Wait for it)
Satan. The tempter. Because you know what? Jesus didn’t want to go to Jerusalem and die! On the night of his arrest he sweated blood and begged God to save him from his suffering. He didn’t want to go through what he knew came next. Peter tempted him to turn around and go the other way. To find another way to save the world. A winning way to save the world
And just as Jesus banished Satan who tempted him with a life of fame, success, and unmatched riches; Jesus tells Peter to get behind him. Don’t tempt me with a way out.
What he says next, I can only imagine, made Peter–well, you know that feeling you get when you get the worst news ever? Where your heart starts to race and you get burning hot and everything around you feels wobbly? That’s probably what Peter felt like, because Jesus says to Peter, and to all of the disciples,
If you want to be my disciple then you have to go with me all the way to Jerusalem.
Because they couldn’t – we can’t – understand what it means for Jesus to be the Messiah, God’s anointed king, until they see him suffer and die.
Don’t you know that Peter wanted a take back? He correctly identified Jesus as the Messiah, the son of the Living God, but when he said it he didn’t know what it really meant. He was thinking king, priest, warrior – you know, winners! Not suffering. Not death.
And yet that’s what Jesus invites Peter to. And that’s what Jesus invites us to. Jesus invites us to receive true life by making Jesus’s ministry our ministry. All the way to the cross.
I love a winner, even when it means getting on a bandwagon. I did not care one iota about the New York Knicks until they got into the championship series. It didn't hurt that my kids live there. And then I was the biggest Knicks fan ever. Did I know who Jalen Brunson was? No. Did I know who Karl-Anthony Townes was? Yes, because only because half of my family bleeds Wildcat blue. Did I stay up and watch every game? Yes. Even the game where they were down by 27 at the half? Yes. I love a winner. I love being on the side of winner.
Friends, Jesus didn’t call us to be winners.
Jesus called us to be willing to lose. To be willing to lose our lives for the sake of loving our neighbor as ourselves. Because that is exactly what happens when we start to follow Jesus. We begin to lose our lives – the me-centeredness of our lives, the concern only for me and mine that so often dominates our lives, the folding in on ourselves to control what we think is ours to do with what we want – we begin to lose that when we start to follow Jesus.
We lose the mindset of scarcity, the lie that in order for me to have enough there has to be less for you. We lose the mindset that says that in order for God to love the world the world has to live like I live and look like I look and think what I think. We lose the mindset that I have what I have because I deserve it and people who don’t have what I have don’t deserve what I have because they didn’t work for it like I did. We lose these false attitudes and beliefs that sometimes just creep into our hearts and our minds and our souls because it’s so easy to listen to stories that aren’t the stories that Jesus tells.
The story that Jesus tells is that we can have all the power in the world – all the fame, all the fortune, all the success, all the reputation – we can have it all. But unless we follow Jesus to the cross and see him lay down his life for our sake – for the love of us – we can’t fully understand what it means for him to be the Son of God. Because this is what the Son of God does. The Son of God holds all the power in the world – the power to be the richest, the most famous, the most respected, the most recognized person in the world–and he lets it go because it’s more important to him to show us how much God loves us than it is to protect his reputation, his honor, or even his own life.
Last week Terry sent us out from this place and asked us a question, “Who do we say that Jesus is?” And he asked us to really ponder it. Who do we say Jesus is? But saying, saying who we think Jesus is doesn’t mean anything. Like it doesn’t mean anything unless we live like Jesus. If we confess with our mouths that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the only one who can save us from ourselves, the only one who can reconcile us to God, the only one who can recreate the world that is so broken, but we don’t learn to live our lives the way he lived his life then we’re just saying words.
But here’s the thing. Back in Matthew 11 Jesus said this to his disciples. He said, Come to me, everyone who is carrying a heavy burden and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me. I’m gentle and I’m humble, and I will give your soul rest. Jesus doesn’t ask us to figure this out by ourselves. Jesus says that if we’ll walk beside him he’ll show us how to do it. He’ll show us how to live like he does, and even better, how to love like he does. He’ll show us how to prioritize God’s will for the world over what we think we might want or even what we think we might need. If we’ll walk beside him he’ll show us how he opened his heart to the people that everyone else ignored, how he kept right on loving the people that no one else loved even when everybody else was gossiping about him or even insulting him right to his face. He’ll show us how he balanced healing everyone who came to him with getting away to be quiet and still in God’s presence. He’ll show us how to walk into the crowds who oppose us and trust that God will never leave us.
Friends, the question isn’t simply for each of us to ask ourselves in the quiet of our own hearts, Who do we say that Jesus is? It’s a question that we have to answer as a church. Who do we say that Jesus is? Is Jesus the Son of God whose life we want to emulate? Is Jesus the Messiah whose life we want to reflect in everything we do and say together? If we follow Jesus, friends, he will show us how to lose. How to lose our lives so that we find real, true, authentic life. Life that shines with the love of Jesus.
Amen and amen.
Friends, at this table we take up our cross. We stand, we kneel, in communion with the one who did not try to take advantage of being equal with God, but instead emptied himself and took the form of a servant, just like a human being, and he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Here we begin our journey. We let this bread and juice become for us Jesus’ body and blood so that by kneeling here with him we become more like him, so that we can be more faithful to him.
Believing that we are already forgiven, we confess our sin before God and each other.