Christ & The Whole Story

September 13, 2026 - Living the Story - 

Jerell Carper asks, "Who do we expect Jesus to be?" In contrast to our modern pop cultural perspectives and even his contemporaries, the whole story of Jesus satisfies the expectations of the biblical authors, subverts the expectations of his first century peers, and surpasses the expectations of many us today. Good news! Jesus is king and a new day has dawned! 

/// Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost ///

Series: Living the Story 

Transcript

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Here we go. We are jumping back into the story of God, and I have uh one sermon to talk about Jesus. So, yeah, good luck. And so I want to just start with just one question to kind of frame up our our time this morning. It's this Who do you expect Jesus to be? Who do you expect Jesus to be? Our our Mark text today is about the beginning of the good news of Jesus, and there's been anticipation about who this Messiah will be and what he will be like. And so I wonder for you in your life, maybe when you were a kid or now, like who do you think Jesus is? How do you picture him? There's been a number of different portrayals of Jesus in our world or pop culture. One I think of that you might resonate with is the 1970 portrayal of Jesus in the rock opera, Jesus Christ, superstar, where Jesus is presented as this countercultural revolutionary. He's a charismatic pop rebel, resonates with the spirit of the 60s and 70s. Is this who we should expect Jesus to be? Superstar. That might be the title of the sermon, if I don't worry about getting zapped. All right. Or maybe, maybe you grew up in the church, you resonate with Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. It's this graphic portrayal of the suffering and the pain of Jesus to die for the forgiveness of sins. Is this who we expect Jesus to be? Or, like Kanye West says, does Jesus walk with us on our difficult journey? Should we expect him to show us the way? Because the devil's trying to break us down. Does he help our feet not fail us now? Or maybe you picture the flannel graph Jesus from Sunday school. He's a fair-skinned, kind of like a first century Noah Khan looking guy. He's got a white robe and a blue sash. He speaks in a soft tone. He loves all the little children of the world. Is this who we should expect Jesus to be? Or maybe you resonate with Jonathan Rooney's portrayal and the chosen. He's this non-anxious presence. He's funny, he's approachable, he's a friend you can sit down and talk to. Is this who we expect Jesus to be? Or maybe, in the words of Scott Hutchinson of the band Frightened Rabbit, Jesus is just a Spanish boy's name. He's pointless to anybody who doesn't have faith. How come one man got so much fame? And I found there's often as many pictures of Jesus as there are people in the room. Is he a countercultural revolutionary? Is he a sacrifice for personal sin? Is he a rescue worker from danger, a gentle teacher, or a cozy friend? Or perhaps is he just pointless in our modern times, a figure from the past with closed-minded ethics, an outdated worldview, and strange rituals. So who is this person of Jesus, and who do we expect him to be? And maybe a better question for today is who did his contemporaries expect him to be? So today I'm gonna talk about everything you could ever we need to know about Jesus. So I can't do that, but I want to just I want to just try three immovable foundations to filter our expectation of Jesus through as we think about how we expect him to show up in our lives in the world. And the first is that Jesus satisfies the expectations of the story of God, he subverts the expectations of many of us, and then he surpasses all of our expectations. So to take a look at uh how Jesus satisfies our expectations, I want to take a look at that first part of Mark 1.15, where Mark simply says, the time has come. The time has come. And to understand how Jesus satisfies the expectations of the story, we need to understand the whole story. So as you know, our kind of church framework is the story of God in the city of Eugene, that the Bible is telling one unified story that culminates in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. So if you look at this kind of, yeah, this sweet thing I made on the computer, um, this is kind of showing us how we live the story, and I want to show that Jesus is the fulfillment of this story. So we are in week seven right now of this series where we finally get to Christ. This story is the true story of the whole world. It's what we currently inhabit. Like we're here in number eight right now. We're part of this story. So a lot of time has passed since in the story so far, and we haven't yet got to Jesus until now. So let's look at where this story is pointing us. I want to look at the first three movements: creation, images, and rebellion. I want to ask, what questions do the biblical authors want us to be asking as we read the story so far? So let me just give you a review of where we're at. You should have listened very well to all of these sermons over the past months, and you should have them memorized. Okay, so in the beginning, we recognize God created a very good world. Okay, first step. He brought order out of chaos, he filled the void, and he created humanity as his reflections and um his representatives of his creativity and his character. We talked about humans having a royal status and a sacred calling. We work as restful residents, and our our vocation was to expand the fruitfulness of the garden out into the world and cultivate God's abundant domain throughout all the earth. Fill the earth, subdue it, rule on my behalf. But in order to do this, humanity needed to trust God. We needed to trust his character and his capacity. So if we're gonna rule as God's representatives, we need his wisdom. We can't do it on our own wisdom. But we know how the story goes, like us today, like the same thing we do over and over. Humanity did not want to trust God on his terms, but took it matters into our own hands. We talked about four relationships that this rebellion fractured our relationship with God, one another, ourselves, and then all of creation. And this rebellion left us outside the garden in the wilderness, in the world that we made. And so the three questions we should be asking, we're only at Genesis 11 right now, that carry us through the rest of the story are one, how will God restore his original blueprint for creation? Like how will we get back to that creation piece? And then the images question how will humanity become faithful partners with God in this creation project? How is it that humankind can actually faithfully image God in the world? When is that gonna happen? And three, how will God reconcile the relational disruption between Himself and humanity? So there is this gap of our sin that draws us from one another and God. We have to ask, what's God gonna, how's God gonna deal with evil and sin in the world? So those are our first three movements of the story. These are the questions the Bible, the biblical authors want us to be asking. So then we move into the second three movements, which are kind of like um carrying on that story further, and we find that Genesis 12, God actually chases after humanity out in the wilderness. He refuses to give up on his original blueprint for the world. So we need to keep in mind like God's space and our space cohabitating on earth is the goal. Um, and so he initiates this loyal family partnership called a covenant with one man named Abram, Abraham, and his extended family. So, in this relationship, God promises to bless Abraham and his family so that they would be a blessing to all nations. They're given this piece of land, and they're supposed to be an oasis of Eden out in the wilderness. And the way they live, their ethic of living together is actually supposed to shine a light out into nations, that nations would be drawn to them because of their economy and the way they treat the outsider and the poor because of God's blessing and abundance that Abraham's family is supposed to be a beacon of light out to nations. But God doesn't just form a partnership with this nation, he actually moves into their camp, he dwells among them. We talked about a temple and a tabernacle. This is God's dwelling place on earth. And it's one of the most important and central themes of the whole Bible is that God actually wants to dwell with people on earth. So clear, and I think maybe maybe we're hearing that for the first time, some of us. And so all this then pointed to the strong, probably the strongest theme in the whole Bible is that of king and kingdom. That God is this generous king who sets up his kingdom, and when he rules, when his ethics, when his way of the world functioning together actually happens, then there is flourishing within the economy, within social systems, within our interpersonal relationships, within our ecology, and we actually live as wise royal representatives of God. And so these inner themes and these inner movements trace themselves through the whole story. But we know that God's people were exiled and then they returned back, and there is this about 400 years of silence from God. And the nation is just not what it used to be. They're looking back at what was and looking forward at what ought to be. And God's people are just not in a great spot for about 400 years. And they're asking this question: how will all nations be blessed through God's covenant partners? When how can God's people actually fulfill that commission given to Abraham if they themselves keep failing? And then how will God's presence actually fill the earth? Like the temple and the tabernacle were kind of smaller versions, but how will God's presence fill the earth? And then ultimately, how will God's rule once again fully reign over the whole world, over our whole cosmos? And these are the questions, these are the questions that the biblical authors want us to be thinking as we kind of crack the page into the New Testament and find Jesus. And what's really cool is that for the New Testament authors, for the gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, they know this. And Jesus doesn't just arrive in a vacuum. We don't skip from Genesis 3 that people sinned the whole way to Jesus' death. We just get forgiveness of sins. There's 85% of your Bible is in between those moments. And so there's this whole story unfolding, and what the what the gospel authors do is they ground Jesus back into that story. He makes sense as part of the flow. He's the answer to those six questions that we proposed. We read Mark's introduction, and Mark places Jesus back among the old covenant prophets who are kind of preparing the way for this Messiah to arrive. When Matthew starts his gospel, you know, with a genealogy, we read this at Christmas time. Um, he goes back to the story of Abraham, that Jesus is here to complete the story of Israel, God's people. Luke goes back even farther, the whole way to Adam. This is the genealogy we read at Christmas time, showing that Jesus has significance for all of humankind. And then if you know how John begins his gospel, he goes back to the pre-created state, um, that Jesus is the eternal, uncreated word. He's been present with God from the beginning. And so when we think about the titles of Christ, Messiah, Son of God, Son of Man, Lord, all of these titles of this first century guy named Jesus only make sense if you are reading the story as it unfolds and placing Jesus in the middle of that story. So the Bible isn't primarily asking, like, how does my private faith get my personal sins to be forgiven? The story so far isn't asking, how do we go to heaven when we die? This is not the question the Bible is asking us to answer. Instead, they're asking, how is God going to reunite heaven and earth? How will humanity become faithful representatives? How will God's rule saturate the whole cosmos? How will we return to God's original blueprint for the world? So, who do we expect Jesus to be? When we read the whole story of the Bible, we should expect Him to fulfill and satisfy these deep questions, these expectations that the biblical authors want us to ask. And so whether you see Jesus as a social revolutionary, like Jesus Christ superstar, or flannel graph Jesus, or the Passion of the Christ Jesus, or the chosen Jesus, we need to filter our picture of Jesus through the image of the Messiah that the story is asking us to have. Point number one. We tracking? Okay. This is a lot for the first 10 a.m. service. So you could say a lot about Jesus. Okay. So Jesus fulfills the story so far. Point number two, um, Jesus subverts our expectations with his whole career, his life and death and resurrection and more. Um, the kingdom of God is at hand. Mark 15, 115b. So there's a big problem is that even though we should be expecting Jesus to fulfill that story, we ourselves and Jesus' contemporaries didn't always have the right picture and framework for anticipating Jesus. There was about 400 years of God being silent, and so different factions and postures formed within God's people about how they're supposed to participate in the arrival of God's kingdom. We come across these characters when we flip the page into the New Testament, groups of people who we never heard about before suddenly are on the scene and players in shaping the thought of God's people. Probably the most prominent groups that we know about or that we know are called the Pharisees. You guys have heard of these guys before. You know how I'm kind of advocates. I'm an advocate for the Pharisees. Make Pharisees cool again, I guess. Okay. Um they don't do it, yeah. It's true. It's we gotta get our clicks, you know. Um, okay, so the Pharisees emphasize purity, that God's kingdom will arrive when our whole community lives in radical obedience to God. That's what they're trying to do. We're trying to separate ourselves from our neighbors. God's kingdom will come through our purity. That's the expectation. The Sadducees say privilege. Um, these are the people that are in cahoots with Rome. They're wealthy, upper class. If we keep the status quo and kind of keep our foot in the door with Rome, then God's kingdom will come. The zealots are a culture of people that rely on power. God's kingdom will come if we actively resist Rome with guerrilla violence and take out corrupt leaders and weapons. And then the Essenes, uh, they believe in passivity, and so they are they're like the monks out in the out in the desert. We believe we'll experience God's kingdom if we retreat away from public life and devote ourselves to the writing and preservation of scripture. And so, despite what they should have known about the story so far, they they weren't all on the right page with their expectations of how God's kingdom is gonna arrive. Jesus actually kind of disrupts all four of these paradigms with some critique as well. I think what can happen for us today and for them is that we kind of take an a la carte version of Jesus. It's like a buffet style. So growing up, here's a story. Growing up, um, part of the culture that the Christian world that I lived in was to try to practice the Sabbath in a sense. And one of that, one of those ways was to not cook a meal, or maybe it was just an excuse to go out to eat after church, I guess. But we would often go out to eat after church instead of going home and having my mom cook amazing soup or something. Um we would go to Pizza Hut a lot, which is one of my faves. Anyone, Pizza Hut? You can still see them around, they exist as skeletons with their roof line. Yeah, okay. Charlotte does not like Pizza Hut. Well, you can't output that. One of the best things about Pizza Hut in the 90s was the buffet. Anyone? Yes. You would go there and your, you know, your dad would swipe the credit card, and then you just eat as much pizza as you want. And um, I would, you know, I would go savory first, get the get the pizza. But the best part of the Pizza Hut uh buffet was the dessert pizza. And there was like a wild berry with frosting, and then there was apple frosting. You're basically basically an apple pie, except look like a pizza. Um, and the cool thing about a buffet is that you can just take whatever you want, right? You can fill your plate. You could go all pepperoni, you go all Hawaiian, you go all cheese, you could just go straight to the dessert pizza. You could get salad and like, you know, act like you're healthy. And so the thing that we do with buffets or a la carte is we just kind of select the flavors that we most enjoy or most go with where we're already at. I think sometimes we kind of Pizza Hut buffet Jesus, we kind of a la carte his life and ministry, and we read through the gospels and we pick particular things about his existence or work, and we really highlight those, and we get this kind of picture of how to participate in God's kingdom that doesn't look wholly like the life of Jesus, he has something to say and push back on. So some of us, in our we're back in modern days, some of us fill our kind of Jesus buffet plate primarily with his healings and his miracles.

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We expect Jesus to help us prosper financially or receive healings from our ailments or fill our lives with supernatural signs and wonders. We say things like, God's kingdom will arrive if we have enough faith to pray bold prayers for supernatural wonders. Kind of fill our plates with just the supernatural miracles of Jesus, and then take that as our kind of Christian ethic diet. Or maybe some of us we fill our plates primarily with the death of Jesus. We expect him mostly, almost primarily to simply just forgive our personal sins because he died in our place. He satisfies God rat's wrath in the legal courtroom, and God's kingdom will arrive if we rigidly proclaim the forgiveness of the sins and not works-based salvation. This is how God's kingdom arrives. Primarily filling our plates talking about the death of Jesus and the atonement. Maybe we fill our plates primarily with Jesus' liberation and love, right? This sounds nice. We expect Jesus to mostly create uh social renewal efforts of justice. Um, he's here to uproot oppressive systems, to flip tables, care for the poor, care for the sick, create a table for everyone. And God's kingdom will arrive if we live as social reformers and activists concerned with justice and systemic change. You can kind of see where I'm going with this, right? Depending on which part of Jesus' career we emphasize, we're gonna result in a way of following him where he actually needs to kind of flip us around and subvert our expectations of him. These kind of plates are, in my mind, the three most prominent plates that I see within church communities in Eugene. Um, our Pentecostal brothers and sisters, our Reformed or Baptist brothers and sisters, and then our mainline liberal churches. We look at our plates and we really want a particular type of pizza and we kind of claim that as our primary diet. But Jesus wants to confront our imbalances. When we talk about the whole career of Christ, we're emphasizing the Who he is from his birth the whole way through his ongoing rule and reign. So in his birth, Jesus is ontologically, he's the incarnation of God into human history. In his life, just the way he lived, Jesus is and does what humans were meant to be. He is the perfect image of God. He trusts God fully. He surrenders his own life for the sake of others. He teaches this way of life through parables and apprenticeship with his closest followers. And he does die. And a victory of God's, and this is the victory of the kingdom of God. Somehow, God's rule comes through Jesus' death. And he overcame evil. It's sickness, it's suffering, it's death, and it was dealt with on the cross as Jesus bore the guilt and sin of the world. But the story doesn't stop there. Please don't let us stop there. Jesus rises from the dead, he returns, and this resurrection isn't just proving that God accepts Jesus as a sacrifice, making it okay somehow. It is the dawn of a new era. It's a cosmic resurrection. Jesus is the first fruits of this. This is what it looks like when something dead comes alive again, whether it's the earth or you or our relationships. This is the foretaste of a resurrected life. It's the beginning of God's in-breaking kingdom on earth. But the story also doesn't stop there. Jesus ascends and currently is on the throne with a human resurrected body. He's ensuring that his kingdom does come and his will is done on earth. And so when we think about how we expect Jesus to show up, we need to run our expectations through this filter of his whole career, his life, his death, and his resurrection, and his ongoing rule and reign. This, as Mark says, is the gospel. This is the good news. And the gospel is not about you, it is about Jesus. It's not about how to get to heaven when you die. It's about the birth, life, death, resurrection, and ongoing rule of Jesus that is restoring all of creation, including you. When Jesus enters into his current, his context, he subverts his contemporaries, I think, in two main ways. Here's the first expectation that he flips on its head. The first is the question: who qualifies to enter into a loving relational partnership with God? Who can be part of this covenant, God's covenant people? The answer that Jesus clearly shows, we talked about this and we went through the Gospel of Mark, his answer is all nations. Every people group and ethnicity and culture are welcome to enter into this partnership with God because it is not based on Jewish ritual, it is based on faith and trust in God. This is Paul's argument in Romans and Galatians. Jesus breaks down social and ethnic divides. After Jesus, those all those can in common be in covenant partnership with God through faith. They do not have to go through the nation of Israel anymore. This was like paradigm shaking shifting for Jesus, for God, for Jesus' contemporaries. And the second is how God's rule actually enters the world. The subversive answer is that it's through sacrifice and it's through the humble. This is Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, most of his parables, most of his social interactions, that God's rule actually breaks into our space not through the high but the low, not through the proud, but through the poor in spirit, not through power in the sword, but through sacrificial living. This is the inverted kingdom. And so for all of us, whatever you're, again, however you're expecting Jesus, you've been taught probably a particular emphasis on who Jesus is. Is he a social justice reformer? Is he simply the Lamb who sacrificed for your sin? Is he here to give you life and prosperity? Filter that through the whole career of Christ. Don't worry, we're almost done. Point number three is much shorter. I know you're doing the math. And finally, we need the whole gospel, or we need the whole, the picture of God's restoration of the whole world. That Jesus surpasses expectations. He surpasses expectations. For Jesus, the arrival of God's reign on earth is a cosmic event. As Paul says in Colossians, it's through Jesus that God is reconciling all things. All things. I think sometimes we're guilty of making the good news of Jesus just smaller than it really is. But the scope for God's people needs to be about how God is going to restore all things, not just get us to heaven and when we die. And what Mark says is that when we encounter this good news, our posture is to repent and to believe. This repentance means just a total 180 of our actions, of our worldview, of our perspective. Faith is an allegiance, a primary allegiance to Christ, and trusting in his wisdom. It's not access through just assenting to the correct beliefs, but actually an embodied trust, like you're actually laying down your life and trusting in this Jesus, having repented. Following Jesus isn't just the American dream, but you can go to church on Sunday. It's to return fully to Christ and trust and believe in Him. Our lives should look like we are ambassadors of another kingdom. We're an outpost in ungene of light that represents God's rule. It's not just like a couple sprinkles of Jesus onto our life. It's a whole life posture. God is restoring all things, and we get to be part of that part of that mission. There you go. The whole story, the whole career of Christ, and the whole gospel and the whole world. So to conclude, I want to I want to just focus on one image that I think best captures this, and it's the table. There it is. Nice crafted table. So when we, you know, we do the story of God in the city of Eugene, we have nine movements of the story and nine practices, right? So I wrestled with a lot of like, what is your practice for Jesus? You know, how do you practice Jesus? And I thought of using the word gospel initially, like we practice the gospel, but I feel like that word, I feel like it doesn't mean what it you think it means. That's what movie is that? Yeah, okay, Princess Bread. I watch movies. I thought about using witness, kind of like we share this good news, but I actually think, I actually believe that maybe the best picture that that that shows the whole career of Jesus is the table. That's why our practice is hospitality. And uh my friend Nathan Riley's gonna preach that sermon next week. He's a pastor at Red Disney in Portland, they support us, and so I'm excited for you guys to meet him. He helps pay our bills. So show up and clap or look like you're interested. So here's why I want to here's why the table pictures hospitality, which is our practice for Jesus. Hospitality is about welcoming to our table the outsider and the stranger, someone who can give nothing back. And the good news of Jesus is that our credentials are not our qualifiers, and neither are our neighbors. We will make the table big. There is always a seat. You can come to Jesus as you are, you don't have to clean yourself up. There is forgiveness at the table. You don't have to find a way to be forgiven before you get to the table. Jesus was eating with people who his contemporaries thought didn't belong. And we didn't belong at Jesus' table until we sat down either. So the table is about radical hospitality and welcoming of the outsider, especially someone who can give nothing back to us. This is what Jesus did for us. But hospitality is also about food being on the table. There's a bunch of it. We've talked about this through the story of God from the creation to the manna in the wilderness, Jesus multiplying bread. There's plenty of bread. There's plenty. Um, we let the kids come up and just go at it. I still have to think that through. But like there's enough. Like we're not gonna run out. So no matter who sits at the table, there is an abundance. Jesus offers you eternal life as you dwell and abide with him. There's a seat for you, and there's plenty of food, and then there's plenty of seats. It's not there's no scarcity. And then finally, hospitality is about a relationship. As you come to the table and you share the meal, conversation happens and trust is formed, and you are known. You can be known fully, and you can fully know one another and Jesus. It's a picture of abiding in the shared love between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. God with us, dwelling with God at the table. This has always been the goal, not getting to heaven, but being with God, sharing space with Him. The table is a picture of salvation. It's a picture of our union with the Son and the transforming power of the Spirit. This is why every week we conclude our service with an invitation to the table. It's a proclamation of the gospel to ourselves that you are welcome to receive the forgiveness of Christ, that you can belong on your way to belief, and when you do, you can receive the presence and forgiveness of Christ and one another. So, however you showed up today, or maybe were taught, however, you expected Jesus to be a superstar, a sacrifice, a trail guide, an ethical sage, or perhaps pointless, I invite you to encounter him truly once again at the table. Jesus is the fulfillment of the story, he's the one who accomplished it all on your behalf, and he is the one through whom God is already in one day making all things new. This is the good news. Let's pray. Father, we're grateful that you entered into the story and that we can trust and have hope that you will restore all things through the whole career of Christ. It is a lot to take in. We want to faithfully uh follow him. Um and it is hard sometimes. We are just immersed in cultural currents that constantly draw us his way. May we as citizens be a community of people who can faithfully represent what it means to trust and follow you in our world. Amen.