Sermon, August 24, 2008

“Saying and Being” (Matthew 16:13-20)
Rick Olson, August 24, 2008

Today’s passage is one of those “Watershed Passages” that everybody knows about, and everybody thinks they know what it means. What that is, of course, is the naming of Simon Peter . . . Peter, or in Greek petros, which in turn means rock. “I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” And for 1500-some-odd years, the church took this to mean that Peter was the first head of the church . . . and the vast majority of Christians today—Roman Catholics and some of the various flavors of the Eastern Orthodoxy—refer to Peter as their first Pope—pope is a diminutive “papa” from Greek, and they trace the heads of their churches—their Popes—back to Peter and this statement.

We Protestants, understandably, don’t buy into this, and this passage has kind of a diminished stature in our eyes: it takes into account the naming of Peter, true, and it does give some kind of theological hat to hang our foundations on. If Peter is representative of all the disciples, as many scholars understand him to be, if he’s a stand-in for us all, then the church is built upon us all, we are the rock upon which our church is founded. Of course, as the hymn goes, “The Church’s one Foundation is Jesus Christ our Lord,” so we have to be careful to nuance that a bit, but still. It does indeed work, theologically, anyway . . .

But if we look a little bit deeper, maybe we can tease out a little more meat, a little more of interest for us modern day Peters. And the first thing to notice is that for Jesus, it’s a teachable moment. And like any good teacher, he begins with a question, addressed to his followers: “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?" and notice that he’s using a theological title for himself, one that places him into a theological context, and its one that—surprisingly, for how often it’s used in the New Testament—doesn’t seem to have a fixed meaning. In some contexts—as perhaps here—he’s associating himself with the final judge, who’s coming is described in Daniel as “one like the Son of Man.” And he asks his disciples—in that perfect teachable moment—who do people say I am?

And they answer with the popular ideas of the day, the popular conceptions of who this wandering wonderworker is, this pointer to the kingdom of God, and apparently they think that he’s John the Baptist, or Elijah, or Jeremiah or one of the other prophets. And it’s important to nuance this a little bit: it’s more than a case of mistaken identity . . . the people think that he’s of the old order, that he’s another in a long line of prophetic Hebrew voices . . . they do not recognize in him something new, that God is doing a new thing . . . and people continue to do that, don’t they? They continue to interpret Jesus in the categories of the old . . . he’s like this or like that, he’s like a military commander, storming the gates of Hell, he’s like an innocent lamb, helpless, led to the slaughter . . . some people view him as the ultimate therapist, here to help us through the bad times. Others see him as the head of a victorious army, the church, fighting the pagans wherever they may be . . .

We continually interpret Jesus in light of what already is, in terms of what we already know, and perhaps that’s inevitable, really . . . after all, we can’t conceive of . . . what we can’t conceive of, can we? How can we describe it—on paper or in our mind’s eye?—if it’s completely beyond our imagination, our knowledge-base, our ken? It’s why “the streets of heaven are paved with solid gold,” why “there will be no sickness, toil or danger” and “the lion shall lie down no more” . . . these are all attempts to imagine the unimaginable . . .

And it’s understandable, of course, it’s a human thing, a human weakness, our finite minds are incapable of describing something totally new, but it can be a dangerous thing as well, when we confuse the reality of the Christ with that of the world . . . and that’s what’s going on with “the people” that the disciples describe, they think Jesus is just another prophet, another Jeremiah or John . . .

And following his lesson plan, Jesus now turns it onto the disciples: “But who do you say that I am?” And immediately, Simon Peter jumps in: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God!” And Jesus calls Peter blessed because of his confession, and we mustn’t fall into the trap of thinking he’s commending Peter for it . . . the word translated here as “blessed” means fortunate, happy and it has the sense of a being a recipient of God’s favor, and Jesus is stating a fact here: Peter is blessed because flesh and blood did not reveal this to Peter, it wasn’t something he learned from someone else, from the Sadducees or Pharisees that Jesus dissed in the passage right before ours, nor did he come to it on his own: flesh and blood did not reveal this to Peter, but God, whom Jesus called his Father in heaven.

Peter comes to this confession, this belief, not by his own will, on his own recognition, but via a revelation of God. God chooses to reveal Gods-self to Peter, not the other way around . . . Simon Peter is blessed in that God made him a believer . . . happy, fortunate, blessed is Simon Peter in that he didn’t learn this by human means. And next Jesus does a little revealing himself—like parent, like son, I guess—he reveals to Simon the meaning of his name: you’re Peter, in Greek Petros, rock, and you are gonna be the foundation of the ecclesia, the church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against the church.

Let me repeat that: the gates of Hades, the evil that stalks this world, that we can feel will not prevail against the church. And isn’t this is a fabulous claim, isn’t it a powerful declaration: despite all evidence to the contrary, the gates of the evil one will not win out in the end. But it certainly doesn’t seem that way at the moment . . . it seems like evil’s got us on the ropes, the church is shrinking, we’re losing numbers and even whole denominations, and ours seems poised to split in two . . .

Just this past week, Juanita and I were at the quarterly meeting of our regional governing body, the Presbytery of Sheppards and Lapsley, and in a sad bit of business, the church at Opelika left the PCUSA for another denomination, and all over our denomination, churches are leaving for one reason or another, and I firmly believe that this is evidence of evil working in this world, that Jesus pictured as the gates of Hades . . . and notice that I didn’t say our brothers and sisters at Opelika are evil, but that nevertheless it is the work of this ancient evil—that our ancestors personalized “Satan” or “the devil”—it’s the work of this evil that our churches are fighting in and among themselves . . . and this dis-harmony does great harm to the work of God, which is the working toward the coming of God’s just reign. Our presbytery spent over a year and resources it doesn’t have trying to fulfill the biblical mandate for reconciliation. But to no avail . . . First Presbyterian Church of Opelika is no longer part of our fellowship.

But Jesus tells Peter that the gates of Hades, this ancient evil—which C.S. Lewis calls “that hideous strength”—will not prevail in the end . . . and why? Because Peter will be given the keys to the kingdom—thus, we picture him at the pearly gates—he’ll be given the keys to the kingdom and the power to use them: whatever he binds on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever he looses on earth will be loosed in heaven. And over in John, Jesus does this after his resurrection, as he breathes the Holy Spirit into them, and there it’s limited to forgiveness of sins: “if you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” He gives the church—in the person of his gathered disciples—the power to forgive sins, to bind on earth what will be bound in heaven, to loose on earth what will be loosed in heaven . . . he gives the church the power to do God’s work on earth, to work toward the coming kingdom of God . . .

And whether that extends literally to the forgiveness of sins, as the Roman Catholics would have it—and after all, that is the literal sense of it—or a more generalized mandate to do the work of God, it’s clear that it is a formidable ability that Christ has bestowed upon us . . . that’s why John pictures it as coming at the same time as the Holy Spirit, because that’s what it must be, it must be spirit-led, spirit-powered, spirit-fed. The church—and note that I said the church, not we as individuals—the church has been given the ability, and the mandate, of cooperating with God’s creative, ongoing work here on earth. And, as they say, that ain’t chopped liver.

We are partners with God, partakers and purveyors of his grace . . . every time we feed someone, it is God who feeds them . . . every time we baptize someone, it is God who baptizes them through us. Whatever we bind on earth is bound in heaven, whatever we loose on earth is loosed in heaven, that is the church, that is us. Amen.