+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Some of you know that I am spending this year reading through the Swiss Reformer Heinrich Bullinger’s magnum opus the Dekaden. It’s worked out pretty well, and not interfered with my other reading too much. It’s exactly fifty sermons, so I can read through one a week and still complete the task and have a Christmas break. That said, the sermons are long—fifty or sixty pages apiece—and one wonders what the good people of Zurich would have thought about a two- or three-hour-long sermon every week. I guess one effect of legally compulsory church attendance is that a preacher could get away with things like that in the Sixteenth Century.
The thing that’s surprised me most is that Bullinger will go on for pages presenting pretty carefully worded, thoughtfully analyzed arguments from a relatively moderate (for the time) Calvinist perspective but then he’ll just posit some crazy proposition as if it were self-evident. Like, of course all the Patriarchs from Adam to Moses knew the full Gospel of Jesus Christ a millennium and more before our Lord came in the flesh, they were just being intentionally ambiguous about it. Or that an ecclesiastical death penalty should be maintained as an option because Peter killed Ananias and Sapphira in Acts (listener, that’s not how I read the story). I came upon another doozy a couple weeks ago. When Jesus said “upon this rock will I build my church” in today’s Gospel he was referring to himself and not to Peter.
Now, I don’t think this is a good reading of the text, but we can understand why Bullinger presented it that way. Christ is the chief cornerstone upon which the church is built as Paul tells us in his Epistle to the Ephesians and as Peter himself affirms in his First Epistle General. Plus, just a generation after the beginning of the Swiss Reformation, it is understandable that Bullinger would want to distance himself from any who would suggest that Peter’s successors as Bishop of Rome had a particular authority given by Christ himself. Even so, I don’t think his is a terribly compelling reading of what Jesus actually says. And can’t poor Peter, who messed up so frequently during Jesus’ earthly ministry at least chalk one up for once? Don’t worry, he’ll get slapped down again in next week’s Gospel, when Jesus literally calls him Satan.
So I think Jesus is saying something particular and positive about Peter, here. Whether the “rock” is apostolic authority of a particular type which may or may not be translated in whole or in part to his successors or if it’s just his role as leader of the twelve during his lifetime or if it’s simply his embodiment of the good confession he makes of Christ as Messiah and Son of God I admit I am not completely certain. I think any of those options are possible as a faithful reading here, and can be justified as potentially valid interpretations.
What’s more interesting to me, and probably more useful for those of us who are not engaged in high level ecumenical dialogue, is what I take to be a possible double-meaning in Simon’s new nickname, Peter, and his status as “the rock”, however we are to interpret it. A rock is solid, steady, a good foundation. A lot better than sand if you’re in the business of building. A rock is also inert, heavy, dumb (in both senses of that word). Might Christ here be saying something like this: “Peter, you’re kind of a numskull, but you’re a good solid guy, and you’re good enough for the Kingdom. There are still some boneheaded things you’re going to say and do before this is all over, but I love and trust you. So just keep at it. You’ll be okay, and you’ll do great things for the sake of the Gospel.”
It may have become a cliché, but it remains true, that God only works with imperfect instruments, because that’s all he’s got. We are each of us flawed and fallen, but we’re enough, and thanks to the fact that we are regenerated in the waters of baptism and adopted as God’s children, God can do infinitely more through us than we of ourselves could manage. All we need to do is to put ourselves genuinely, wholly before him and allow him to consecrate our lives to his purpose.
I think that’s what Paul is getting at in today’s Epistle. You’ll forgive me, I hope, for one of my little Greek lessons, but there is such a confusing and unfortunate choice that all popular, modern English translations make in the first verse of that passage from Romans. Paul instructs us to present our bodies, a living sacrifice to God as our λογικήν λατρείαν. This is translated as “spiritual worship”, which is an interpretive leap. It literally means “reasonable service.” The point, I think, is not that we are making some mystical oblation of our selves, some occult process by which we are made to float above the ground where mere mortals tread. Rather, presenting the whole of ourselves to God is simply the reasonable thing to do, because all that we are and all that we have belong to God, anyway.
None of that is meant to deny the possibility or profitability of mystical experience. I’ve no doubt it happens, by the grace of God, for those heroic saints who through spiritual practice are given that gift. I’m not convinced we are all called to that peculiar vocation, though, and I am personally okay with the prospect that I won’t receive the beatific vision until after I die.
What we can all do, though, is recognize what we owe to God (which is everything), place it humbly before him, and ask him to use us as he will. We will receive in return an illumination of our minds—perhaps less like a thunderbolt from heaven and more like a small but sensible conviction—whereby we can the more easily discern God’s will for us and the gifts he’s given us, and the sober judgment to use them effectively for the sake of the Kingdom.
I think one will discover that the reasonable offering given to God in prayer, in study of his Word, and in service to his people in distress will slowly transform us into the best kind of stone: steady and unshakable and fit for supporting and adorning the house of God, just like Peter finally became. We’ll not be made perfect this side of Paradise, but neither was he. But he was still deemed fit for duty, and so are you.
+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.