When Hank Ketchum died at the age of eighty-one on June 1 what was in many ways a sad and troubled life came to a close.  His first wife died from a drug overdose at forty.  His first son, Dennis, suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder after duty in Vietnam and became permanently estranged.  Hank married twice more before he died.  You have to wonder how he didn’t die of a broken heart long before disease stopped it.  Yet, none of what Hank Ketchum publicly produced ever revealed his private torments.  When he was only four Hank’s son, Dennis, was tearing his room apart one day when his grandmother told Hank, “‘your son is a menace.’”  That’s when Hank started drawing cartoons inspired by the antics of his son.  Dennis the Menace, still runs in more than 1,000 newspapers (“Menace Maker,” People, June 18, 2001, p. 129).  How is it that the life in the cartoon always ends on a happy or cheerful note so differently from the life Hank and Dennis really lived?  How could his public life and private life have been so out of sync with each other?  Maybe Hank expressed in public what he only wished were true in private.

Jesus asked his disciples what the public polls were saying.  “‘Who do the crowds say I am?’”  After hearing that some thought he was “‘John the Baptist (or) Elijah (or a resurrected prophet) of long ago,’” Jesus turned to his disciples and asked them to answer the question personally.  “‘But what about you . . . Who do you say I am?’”  What the crowd had to say was one thing.  Jesus wanted to know what the disciples believed as individuals.

Almost twenty years ago, Scott Peck documented how people behave differently in groups than they do as individuals (People of the Lie, Simon and Schuster, 1983).  In groups, for example, they can behave in meaner ways toward others than they ever would one on one.  As part of a rioting mob a person might throw a brick through the plate glass window of a department store or worse when they’d never consider such behavior acceptable as an individual.  That principle can also work in the way church people express their faith. 

A friend of mine was recently terminated from his position on the staff of a church in another state.  In that church’s tradition, business has to be handled on the floor of the church.  So, last Sunday morning just after worship, about the time we were finishing lunch, they had a business meeting to discuss his departure.  His wife and son were with him when some of the people publicly said some very mean and ugly things just after worshipping the God they professed to be so loving only moments before.  They said things as part of the group they’d never have the courage to say to his face.  Our public professions

and private faith aren’t always in sync.  It’s that distance between our public and private faith and our public and private lives that interests Jesus and should interest us.  Sometimes what we say in public, even about God, is only what wish were true in private.  That’s why the answers we give at church to Jesus’ question sometimes just won’t do and he asks us, as individuals, not what the crowd says about him but what we believe about him.

At the same time, it’s impossible to be all that it means to be Christian apart from the body of Christ, the church.  Our corporate faith is an essential part of our private faith.  Being with others who believe encourages us to believe and even behave more courageously than we ever would individually.  Like those guys who go barebellied to football games sporting their favorite team’s colors from nape to navel, boldness comes easier in the big crowd.  Gathering every week and professing our faith together keeps us centered on what is central. 

The Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. is currently debating whether Christ is the only hope of salvation.  Not many in this church would even want to debate that issue.  We are here in part because we do believe, as a gathered community, that Christ is our only hope of salvation.  The real question is what we believe when we’re alone with our most private faith.  There will come a time for all of us when how our church answers the Jesus question just won’t do and we’ll have to answer it for ourselves.  Eventually, we’ll all be alone with the faith that is ours.  Then, what the crowd, even the church crowd, says about Jesus, just won’t do.  Judas’ private faith failed him when he needed it most.  Will ours?  Who is Jesus to you?  In public and in private, who is Jesus to you? 

We were recently with a group of young adults for dinner when one of the men paid me a wonderful compliment.  He said that he had told his mother, “that his preacher was just kind of a normal guy.”  I’m not sure what would have defined me to him as abnormal.  But, I think I knew what he meant.  He was saying that, too often, we preachers are so concerned about proving how spiritual we are that we walk and talk and speak differently than anyone else.  There’s a different tone in our voices.  We use words no one else uses and multi-syllabate single-syllable words.  And, it has nothing to do with Jesus.  It’s just that we’re afraid that if anyone catches us being human they couldn’t believe in God.  Somewhere along the way, I grew frightened of that and decided not to accept that responsibility in my job description.

One reason is because I know how human I am.  An old childhood rhyme says, “Don’t step on a crack or you’ll break your mother’s back.”  Well, if you are afraid of breaking your mother’s back, don’t take a stroll on my sidewalk.  There are too many cracks in my concrete for your mother to survive.  People expect the strangest things of their ministers.  Mostly, they expect them to have a faith in God that is greater than their own.  It’s as if people want their pastors to embrace a more rigid way of thinking about God, a safer and more certain way, than they have found to work in their private lives.  As long as their pastor’s faith is strong, they can endure their inadequate faith.  People tend to live their faith vicariously through their ministers almost like they live out their fantasies about romance and courage through a character in a book or on a movie screen.  As ministers mature and grow toward integrity, they recognize that dynamic in church life and know that the only time it gets dangerous is when they allow it to go unchecked.

One reason that’s dangerous is because, if I play a role instead of living a life of integrity, I’ll have to keep you at a safe distance.  Otherwise, you’ll see how human I am.  It’s only in confessing my humanity that we can know each other.  Otherwise, I’ll cut myself off from the genuine relationships that keep me honest.  That’s one reason ministers often get in moral trouble.  Not just because they are human but also because they have perfected the art of keeping people at a distance so that they end up in this self-imposed loneliness in which no one can survive morally.  My father has a childhood memory of a relative of his, though not a minister, a man of faith himself who kept one of those white sheets on a hook behind his bedroom door.  One of those sheets with two holes for eyes to see through.  No one, not even your preacher, can afford the moral price tag of having too many sheets hidden at home that never see the light of day at church.  It is frightening what can happen to any of us when the faith we claim at church is too distant from what we keep hidden at home.   Did you notice, in the scripture, “Jesus was praying in private and his disciples were with him . . .”?  Even Jesus needed people and close intimate genuine relationships. 

Another reason it is dangerous for ministers to allow people to live their faith vicariously through them is because that’s less risky than asking people to answer Jesus’ question for themselves, “‘Who do you say that I am?’”  How the church answers that question when we are all together is important for our church’s earthly future.  How we each answer that question personally is of eternal significance for us individually.  Faith is the most personal of all experiences.  So is the call toward which that faith ultimately leads us.

After Peter made his personal confession by saying that Jesus was the “‘Christ of God,” Jesus told them about what his faith was going to cost him.  Profound rejection from those who should have trusted him and who would eventually kill him was in his immediate future.  Then, to each disciple as individuals, he said, “‘If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.  For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it.’” 

Jesus was going into very risky places.  Claiming him as Lord meant following him there.  In the Kingdom of God we can’t see things are backwards from the ways of the world we can see.  Jesus said that there is no such thing as safety except in risk and no such thing as living except in dying. 

Too many have been told at church that, if they just believed enough, Jesus would heal their cancers, restore their bank accounts and bring new life to their marriages.  Jesus did some of those kinds of things when he was here and, even now, Jesus still does some of those kinds of things.  But, Jesus never promised us that he would do so just because we asked him.  When the church promises that Jesus will always do whatever we ask if we just believe enough it is putting words in Jesus’ mouth.  When it does, the way the church answers the question of the human dilemma just won’t do.  The only thing Jesus promised was that there was no such thing as eternal safety except in momentary risk and no such thing as living eternally except in dying now.  And, that’s not bad if you can see beyond what is only visible with human eyes and perceptible through human understanding. 

Gerald Mann, the pastor of Riverbend Baptist Church in Austin, was recently interviewed on television by a faith healer.  Mann’s wife died eighteen months ago after a terribly difficult illness.  When she was pregnant with their first child, she contracted German measles and that child was born terribly disabled.  That child grew up to give birth to a child of her own for whom she was unable to care.  So, Gerald, now widowed, is left alone to raise his now fourteen-year-old grandson.  When the faith healer asked him to pray for those in the audience who were suffering in similar ways he said he would pray but not that God would remove their suffering.  He said he would only pray that they would find meaning in it.  That’s what I hear Jesus promising.  Not a life without pain but a life, even a death, that has meaning on the other side of following him even if the crowd doesn’t.  If you could choose, which would you want?  A less complicated life or a more meaningful one?

Bill Kavanaugh and his wife want to adopt the little girl locked in her mother’s closet for four months.  He was trying to make some sense of all she’d been through this past several years when he said, “I know everything happens for a reason.”  My guess is that he got that answer at church where someone tried to explain how life’s most complicated dilemmas, even the most evil ones, are somehow or another the result of divine purpose.

It is amazing what we will say and do when we try to make sense of our complicated lives.  We’ll even go so far as to put words in Jesus’ mouth.  We so desperately want Jesus to say publicly what we only wish were privately true.  But, the truth is, not everything happens for the reasons we like to claim at

church.  Can we honestly assign God with the responsibility for what happened in Hutchins week before last or in that mother’s bathtub in Houston last week?  This is one of those times when the church answer just won’t do for me.  Just like the bumper sticker says, “Stuff happens,” and we don’t always know why.

What Jesus does promise is that he can give a life, any life, meaning.  He promised eternal meaning in our temporary suffering and even in our dying if we were willing to follow him to that place of suffering and dying where there’s nothing left to hide.  It’s a meaning that comes only to those whose private and public faith are becoming one and the same.  When Jesus died on the cross there was, literally, nothing left to hide.  That’s the same cross to which he has called us.  “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus . . . who for the joy set before him endured the cross . . . (Hebrews 12:2).”

I think I’ll follow the joy.  How about you?