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“Wondrous Strange”: Sermon by Mae Barnes 8/30/2026

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Sermon on August 30, 2026
“Wondrous Strange”
By: Mae Barnes, Guest Preacher

https://churchofstmartin.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/2026_08_30_Pentecost14sermon.mp3

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” I’ve never been entirely certain if starting a sermon with a quote from Shakespeare is cliche or not, but by gum and by golly, I am nothing if not a sucker for the Bard. (And, if I know my audience, a fair amount of you fine folk are just as fond of him as I am.) For those who do not know or cannot remember the context of that line, it is spoken by the Danish prince Hamlet to his friend and fellow scholar, Horatio, immediately after having seen a ghost, and specifically the ghost of Hamlet’s dead father. Horatio is a sober-minded rationalist, and remarks upon seeing the ghost as “wondrous strange”—something I think anyone in his shoes might say. And yet Hamlet takes an opportunity to comment on philosophy, not just Horatio’s but the entire discipline, and how so often, even the most intelligent among us, the most learned, the most credentialed, are

all-too-often unable to account for the strange. “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Truly, it is in Horatio’s exclamation of that which is “wondrous strange” that helps contextualize the Gospel for us, as is Jesus’s rejoinder to encourage us to dream bigger. For the past few weeks, if you have

followed the lectionary, we have seen Jesus do progressively more impressive miracles, including walking on water and healing who Matthew calls a Canaanite woman and Mark calls a Syro-Phoenician woman. These are important stories, wondrous strange, and Jesus appears not only as a master of creation but a compassionate healer with mastery over life and death itself. And it all culminates, of course, when Jesus asks the disciples who they think he is, and Peter proclaims him the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. So moved by this profession of faith, Jesus even declares Peter to be the rock upon which the church is built.

All of that makes today’s passage exceptionally hilarious. You see, sometimes I think whoever makes the selections for the scripture passages in the lectionary is either a complete and utter hack who should have never been given that power… or the greatest comedic mind of their generation. Because what do you mean, you divide the SAME CONVERSATION in which Jesus calls Peter the Rock Upon Which His Church Will Be Built into two different passages? You are waiting a FULL WEEK to give the punchline to a joke nobody knew they were telling! And so it appears as if Jesus has completely flipped on Peter with no run-up or warning, but he was JUST telling him how cool he is! And now he’s calling him Satan!

Then again, it makes sense why he is calling him that. Peter, without really thinking it all the way through, just confessed that he believed that Jesus is the Messiah. This passage is Jesus explaining what that actually means. Because there is a lot that people believe a messiah is supposed to do and be, and none of that includes being called a heretic and then killed by the state.

Being a messiah, an “anointed one,” a chosen one, whatever you want to call it, looks very much the same way in many different stories. Messiahs are great Men, indeed, Great Kings of Men, who command legions, save the people, and overturn the ruling powers of this world, in order to replace them with something better. They are your King Arthur Pendragons, the Once and Future King; they are your Aragorn son of Arathorn, heir to the throne of Gondor; they are your Paul Atreides of Arrakis. Note that all the messiahs I just listed are all fictional. Note that all of them that I just listed, while they fill the boxes of a messiah, they also are subversions of messiahs, in that there are elements to their stories that do not neatly fill the niche of “chosen one of the people.” Arthur was a lost heir, an intellectual uneasy with the kingship that was his birthright, and ultimately a failed king. Aragorn was a lost heir, a son of a line that was severed when his ancestor failed to destroy the one ring, and thus he was

raised in the wilderness, away from the great halls of his forbears. Paul Atreides is a lost heir (see the pattern?), a noble son who had to survive in the wilderness, and who in the end became a messiah based on a lie, a myth that his mother capitalized upon and used to their advantage, who used the faith of the people to become a ruler just as cruel as the one before.

The truth is, we love the stories of our messiahs in concept… but often messiahs do not reflect the myths we build up around them. Instead, they often either fail to live up to the myth, or become a tyrant themselves, the kind of person another messiah would come to supplant. All of these are stories we tell about ourselves, of a hero king, come to save us from oppression. But what these stories reflect is that messiahs are often all too human, and what they face in their struggles are not quite what we imagine should be the reality. In the story of the Gospels, then, Jesus is here today to dispel us of the myths that surround his messianic destiny.

Jesus is the messiah, this is true. He is the heir of David, the Son of God, and the promised Great Man who will indeed save the people and overturn the oppressive powers of the world. And to do that… he will suffer. He will be put to death. He would DEFEAT death and be resurrected three

days later. Peter, bless his heart, stopped listening to Jesus when he said “be killed.”

On the one hand, I think this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do; he was, after all, Jesus’s friend, follower, and saw him perform wonders and miracles. He was as much a true believer as anyone! But he didn’t know what kind of story he was in. Peter thought he was in a much more straightforward story. Peter only considered that Jesus was there to free the Jewish people from the tyrannical Roman rule. He was there to save the land of Israel and Judea from the hands of the invasive colonialist empire.

That story has a much more straightforward narrative, in his mind! Because all it takes to become a messiah in that narrative is to rally the people, storm the castle, and free people from the invading army. You know, not easy, but rational. Reasonable, even! There was precedent there, and that would make sense for a young Jewish man in occupied Judea. So, I can’t really blame him for thinking that, can I?

And yet, he failed to perceive the real story that was going to play out.

Jesus’s main opposition was not the Roman Empire, but the concept of Empire Itself. Jesus’s opponents were not the specific Jewish priests and scribes of Jerusalem, but Religious Corruption Itself. Jesus’s campaign was not merely provincial and concrete, isolated to the land of Israel and Judea,

but instead, one of cosmic importance. He was not simply oppositional to the violence of the empire, but indeed, Jesus’s true enemy was Death Itself. And the only way to undo death was to suffer it. Jesus was going to die, only to reverse the process and make it so that Death no longer has the final word. Jesus would speak Life into the world, and in so doing, bring together the world as we know it and the Reign of God. Wondrous strange, is it not? There are more things in heaven and earth than are even dreamt of in your philosophy.

But of course, that isn’t all. A messiah needs followers, and Jesus tells his friends that if they want to follow him, they too will need to be willing to die, indeed, to take up their own crosses and follow him. A cross is a positively ghastly implement of death. It was a symbol of imperial cruelty and power. And Jesus was telling his friends that they, too, would need to be willing to give up everything if they are to inherit the coming Reign of God. They need to abandon their sense of self-preservation if they are ever to truly follow this messiah into the promised kingdom. And that, my dearest friends, is not an easy thing to convince your friends to do.

Being willing to give up everything, your very life, is a complicated matter, and each of us is charged with working out how that will look with fear and trembling. You will be asked to make difficult decisions if you take

seriously the call of Christ. You must be willing to sacrifice everything that this world will promise you–security, money, certainty, power, fame–you must be willing to sacrifice everything in order to inherit the Reign of God. It is easy to do that if you have nothing else to lose, for sure. Jesus’s followers were not exactly rich, nor rooted in one specific place. They did not have trusts, pensions, 401k’s, or anything like that to consider. But still, most of them abandoned their families and businesses to follow Jesus in his ministry. They saw that there was something to this Jesus that was worth sacrificing, and all Jesus is asking is for them to see that through to the end, to follow that logic all the way down the road. What would be at the end of that road? Jesus warns them that it is cruelty, yes. Struggle, of course. Torture and death, even. But also, if you keep listening, you will find that the end of the road has the end of death itself. That Old King Death will be dethroned, and the Son of God would reverse entropy itself to offer to all of creation new life, a new beginning. If that isn’t a road worth following him down, then I do not know what is.

Hamlet and Horatio saw a ghost and marveled at its wondrous strangeness. But Jesus offers us far more than a spectral undeath. No, Jesus fully will reverse the death that comes for us all, if we would be willing to follow him down the road. Jesus offers us new life… if we are

willing to die. That is the price of life unending, the price of the Reign to come. And I am not going to say it is an easy decision to make.

We most likely have more in common with Peter than we would like to admit. We all too often are convinced we are in one kind of narrative, one kind of story, when in truth, there is far more in heaven and earth that we must factor into our philosophy. And it will seem wondrous strange, impossible even. But Jesus promises the impossible, and we must make space in our faith for impossible demands if we are to inherit an impossible kingdom such as his. If that sounds like something you can believe in, the choice is simple: Take up your cross and follow Jesus to the end. Amen.

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