(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “I’m Not Alone
With”, originally shared on August 27, 2026. It was the 428th video
for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my
wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
Do you sometimes feel lonely as a Christian in this world? Today, we
have good news for you!
I saw a video online last weekend that
showed a person type into the Google search bar, “I’m alone with a _________.”
He ended the sentence with the
name of a religion like Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu person, Jewish person, or even
Atheist, Agnostic, or Satanist. The computer’s response called for calm,
tolerance, and understanding for each one.
But when the person typed in
“I’m alone with a Christian”, the Google AI overview response was, “"If
you are feeling unsafe, uncomfortable, or need to leave your current situation
right away, please trust your instincts and move to a safe, public place or
call 911.” It did also note that being a Christian, by itself, does not
constitute a threat and advised them to treat Christians with normal respect if
there was no danger.
No other religious or
anti-religious group received the same safety warning.
None.
I thought that it couldn’t be
true, so I tried it myself.
I got the same result!
Last Monday, however, the
warning was gone.
I found an explanation that the
warning was triggered because of the words “I’m alone with”, but the fact was
that no safety warning was given for any other religion or anti-religious group
other than Christians.
Apparently, Google quietly
adjusted the system’s behavior. But who adjusted the system to warn against
only Christians in the first place?
And, more importantly, what
does it mean?
We get a hint in the Gospel
reading that will be shared in the vast majority of churches in the world this
coming Sunday, Matthew 16:21-28.
The reading is a continuation
of last week’s Gospel reading where Jesus is in Caesarea Philippi, just north
of Judea, with his disciples. He asks them who people say that he is. They tell
him that the people have relatively low expectations.
Jesus asks Peter who he thinks
that Jesus is. Peter answers, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
Jesus affirms Peter. That’s the
good news for Peter.
Then we come to this week’s
reading, and Peter gets some bad news, some very bad news, in Matthew
16:21-23,
21 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 chief
priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. 22 And
Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord!
This must never happen to you.” 23 But he turned
and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for
you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
Well, that escalated quickly! The bad news is that
Jesus is going to be killed (and be raised on the third day). Peter explodes at
what seems to him as impossibly bad news. Peter rebukes Jesus.
And then Peter is rebuked with what must be the most stinging rebuke of all
time: “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are
setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
God reveals to Peter
that Jesus, who is fully God and fully a human being, is “the Messiah,
the Son of the living God,” and Peter was commended for saying it out loud.
Then, Peter went
from having a really good encounter with Jesus, to having about the worst you
can imagine.
At the time that this reading
took place, many people referred to Jesus merely as Jesus of Nazareth, the
place where he grew up. But today, we sometimes refer to Jesus as Jesus Christ,
which is short for “Jesus, the Christ”, because “Christ” comes from the Greek
word Christos, which translates the ancient Hebrew word Mashiach
(Messiah).
Many people in Peter’s day believed that when God sent
a deliverer, the Messiah, an anointed one like the great kings of Israel, like
King David, he would be a great military leader who would deliver them
from the Roman army. That’s one of the reasons Jesus drew such an enthusiastic
crowd as he rode into Jerusalem on the day we call Palm Sunday.
People are people.
We all tend to want Jesus to serve us, and on our own
terms. It’s an expression of our sinfulness.
But when Peter heard that Jesus was going to suffer
and be rejected by the religious authorities, and be killed and then rise
again, this just sounded nuts to him.
He began to rebuke Jesus! His
reaction was over the top!
Jesus looks at his disciples and in turn rebukes Peter
saying, “Get behind me, Satan!” Why? Because Peter was thinking only of human
things, not on the things of God. Jesus, who was at the same time fully human
and fully God, came to die.
We all know people like Peter.
Peter was the impulsive one.
We see it when Roman soldiers and police from the
chief priests and Pharisees came to arrest Jesus the night that he was
betrayed, in John 18:10-11,
10 Then Simon Peter, who had a sword, drew it, struck the high priest’s
slave, and cut off his right ear. The slave’s name was Malchus. 11 Jesus
said to Peter, “Put your sword back into its sheath. Am I not to drink the cup
that the Father has given me?” (BTW, Jesus heals the ear.) 😊
Peter acts in a way that he thought was good
behavior, a courageous defense of Jesus.
Jesus said he didn’t need
defending and Peter was again rebuked because before people can know the Good
News, they first have to know the bad news.
One of my favorite Christmas stories happened when I
was serving at Faith Lutheran Church in San Dimas.
We had an excellent pre-school and one day one of the
pre-school moms stopped by my office to ask if I had a minute to hear a story.
She said that a friend of hers had invited her family
to attend the Christmas-eve midnight mass at a Roman Catholic church and school
in a nearby town. The church was full and there were a lot of children.
Just before the sermon the affable local priest
invited the children to come forward for the children’s sermon and her son, a
student in our pre-school, went forward.
The priest gathered the 20 or so small children around
him and asked if they knew what they were celebrating. “Christmas!” they all
said,
“And who can tell me what happened at Christmas?”
About half of the children volunteered, “Jesus was born!”
“That’s right”, the priest said. “And who can tell me
where Jesus was before he was born?” Some fewer children said, “In heaven.”
“That’s right,” said the priest. “But heaven must be a
terrible place for Jesus to want to come here to be born in a barn.” “No,” even
fewer children said. “Heaven is a wonderful place.”
“Well, why would Jesus leave a wonderful place like
heaven to be born here on earth?”, the priest asked. No hand went up except for
that one visiting child’s.
The child said, “So he could
die for us.”
The priest was very pleased, and he asked, proudly,
“And where did you learn that?”
The little boy leaned into the priest’s microphone and
said loudly, “Faith Lutheran Church.”
The mother said that the priest laughed. A lot.
Jesus gave his life for us on the cross. That’s the
main event of the Christian faith, validated by taking his life back again in
the Resurrection. And sacrifice for others is central to the Christian life
that is produced by that faith.
Jesus spoke to the crowd about sacrifice, in Matthew
16:24-26,
24 Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let
them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 25 For
those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life
for my sake will find it. 26 For what will it profit them if
they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in
return for their life?
Leo Tolstoy, the Russian author of War and
Peace and other classics, wrote a short story with that message
called, “How Much Land Does a Man Need?”
A man who is greedy for more land hears about a group
of simple farmers with a lot of land. He offers to buy their land for a low
price. They counter by saying that, for 1,000 rubles, he can have as much land
as he can walk around from sunrise to sunset in a single day. But, if he
doesn’t get back by sunset, he loses his money and gets no land.
The man is ecstatic thinking that he has gotten the
bargain of a lifetime from these simple farmers. He starts walking, but every
time he thinks about circling back, he thinks that if he walks a little
farther, he can get more land. He keeps walking. Then when he is far, far away,
he makes his loop and starts walking back. But now he realizes that he is way
far out, and he starts running to get back in time. He runs faster, and faster.
Faster, and faster. He makes it back to the starting point just as the sun
sets, but he is fully exhausted, and he dies right there on the spot.
He is buried in a hole 6 feet long and three feet
wide. All the land that a man needs.
Jesus knows that his teachings are going to be
difficult and unpopular with some, but that one day there will be a reconning
for how we respond to the gift of faith.
He addresses this in the concluding verses of this
week’s Gospel reading, in Matthew 16:27-28,
27 “For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his
Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done. 28 Truly
I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they
see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”
We live after those events,
too, with the emphasis on the “not yet perfected Kingdom of God” part.
Sometimes I consider the state of the world and the
condition of the Church, and I think that maybe we just need to acknowledge
that we also live in what Jesus called an “adulterous and sinful
generation” and withdraw from it.
Christians brought into this
world the first public hospitals, the first orphanages, the foundation for a
scientific worldview, the first public education, the first universities, and
more. We ended slavery and the abandonment of unwanted babies in the Western
world. We still oversee the largest non-profit, non-governmental social service
organizations in the world. We bring the best Good News to the world that it
has ever heard, and yet we see our natural empathy weaponized against us.
Sometimes I think that when the
world sees Christians as the worst, that we are almost universally portrayed in
popular media as uptight hypocrites, psychotic killers, pearl-clutching,
anti-science, fascist hate mongers from whom the world needs to be protected, I
think that maybe it’s time to wait it out until the end time when Jesus comes
again to judge the living and the dead.
Sometimes I think that we need to build small, local,
self-sufficient schools that teach farming and the trades in addition to the
great ideas, moral education, critical thinking, and higher learning, and just
be like salt, and light, and leaven in the world.
Maybe we need to establish Christian communities that
are both defended against and serve the local communities.
And maybe not.
Jesus says, “For the Son of
Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will
repay everyone for what has been done.
I’m content to let God be the
judge and, meanwhile, to try to bring as many people to Christ’s salvation as
possible.
When I first started serving
the church I served in San Dimas we were still in the smaller old church and we
did not have air-conditioning.
My hero in church development, Lyle Schaller, said that if
a church has no air-conditioning, its members should be polled to see how many
of them have air-conditioning in their homes. If the answer is 60% or more,
air-conditioning isn’t a luxury. It’s a necessity.
So, we raised the money and installed air-conditioning, and
the next Saturday we had a huge wedding.
It had been over 90 degrees most of the week, and the day
of the wedding it was over 100, like it’s been here this week. 😊 The church was packed, and I went out to talk with the congregation
before the service started. I said that we had just installed air-conditioning,
and weren’t they glad that they were there that Saturday instead of the
Saturday before?
One guest shook my hand and said (I think a least half
seriously), “I don’t think that churches should have air-conditioning.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because I think that people should have to sit there and
contemplate the alternative,” he answered. 😊
Jesus did not abandon the world in its sinfulness. He
came to serve, and he died for us. And he calls us to serve sacrificially with
the same spirit.
Richard Halverson, former Chaplain of the United
States Senate, once said,
“In the beginning the church was a fellowship of men and women centering
on the living Christ. Then the church moved to Greece, where it became a
philosophy. Then it moved to Rome, where it became an institution. Next, it
moved to Europe, where it became a culture. And, finally, it moved to America,
where it became an enterprise.”
Would it be better for the Church today to re-focus,
to be “a fellowship of men and women centering on the living Christ”?
I think so.
I read an article a while ago on why Finland is
sometimes rated the happiest country in the world. It pointed to the research
that identifies these three characteristics:
1.) a strong sense of community and relatedness
2.) doing good deeds for other people
3.) finding a clear purpose for oneself
Strong community. Good deeds. A
clear purpose.
Are not all of these at the heart of what is means to
be a Christian? And yet they are not, by themselves, enough to make people
happy.
I read another article, by a Finnish psychologist, who
pointed to the high rates of depression among Finnish people.
Can both be true? It certainly is true among
Christians.
Part of our worldview, our understanding of reality,
is that people were created for a living relationship with the one true living
God.
We rejected it.
Jesus died to restore it. That relationship of faith
is free to all who turn away from their rejection of God and open their hearts
to see the face of Jesus.
No one knows what Jesus looks
like literally, but every culture’s art shows Jesus looking like them. That’s
the Jesus of faith. The One who loves me and who also is one of us.
But the Jesus of history is
more specific. He is a person from a certain place and in a certain time.
A 2011 BBC documentary “Son of
God” showed a skull from 1st century Israel, found by archeologists, that was
reconstructed, CSI style, with flesh and tendons, etc. to give a picture of
what Jesus might have looked like. The author pointed out that the olive skin
tone, and black, shortish hair and beard were correct, but everything else was
just a guess. Jesus’ hair in the picture was kind of scruffy because, in Jesus’
time, men cut their hair with a knife.
That Jesus, the Jesus of
history, challenges us.
Are we living from faith? Are our minds not on human
things but on divine things? Are we grateful for the cross? Do we have what we
need to know God?
We still live in a fallen world where sin continues to
separate the world from God, and we experience the negative aspects of life as
a result. We are saints and sinners.
We can’t always expect to be
happy here. Are you happy? In these times?
We can’t promise that
Christians will have a happy life. But we can promise joy!
We may sometimes be depressed, or angry, or
discouraged. But beneath those things lies an indestructible joy that is at the
core of holy living. It comes with the recovery of our true selves, a gift that
can only come from the cross, the gift that means that though we are sinners,
we can be reconciled to God through faith alone as a gift. That is the joy that
comes even and especially when the world gives us none.
St. Paul reminds us of this in his letter to the church at
Rome, in Romans 1:16-17,
What does this mean? It means
that we are never truly alone when the abiding, indestructible presence of God
is within us. We may be lonely sometimes, but we are never alone when we are
alone with Jesus. We need not be anxious about what the world thinks of
us,
Jesus said, in John 16:33,
33 I
have said this to you, so that in me you may have peace. In the world you face
persecution. But take courage; I have conquered the world!”
God loves every person in this world and wants no one to be lost.
But being opposed by the world is not unusual for Christians. In fact, it’s
normal.
Let
us be the means by which God puts all people right before it is too late.
Be
the one who encourages others to say, “I’m never alone when I’m with Jesus.”
