Sermons

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

As you may remember from last week’s Gospel, blessed Peter—who seemed to have made a career out of getting Jesus’ message wrong—finally got it profoundly right, and was granted authority. He was made the rock upon which the Church would be founded and was given power to bind and loose: that is, to determine the disciplines by which the Church would govern her children.

Well, as it turns out, poor Peter doesn’t get an opportunity to relish in Jesus’ affirmation of him. He doesn’t have time to get chuffed about being made the chief apostle. In this morning’s Gospel reading—which takes place within the same conversation as last week’s—Peter is knocked down a few pegs.

Peter’s response to Jesus’ prediction of his own crucifixion is a natural one: “God forbid, Lord! This shall never happen to you,” he cries out. To all appearances, Peter wants nothing more than for his Lord, whom he loved, to avoid suffering and death. We should feel the same for those whom we love!

This seems to make Jesus’ reply a bit less than sensitive: “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me; for you are not on the side of God, but of men.” The parallel in Mark’s Gospel is even more shocking. Jesus uses precisely the same words, but Mark, usually the most austere of the evangelists, embellishes the story a bit by noting that Jesus words were meant as a “rebuke”. The Greek verb is “epitimao”: the same word used in the New Testament for when Jesus casts out demons. Jesus, here, quite literally demonizes Peter.

The Jesus of scripture and of history is not the “warm, fuzzy” fellow we, who care so much about affirmation and pleasantness, have made him out to be. He’s not “sensitive” in the cheap way we polite, contemporary Westerners use the word. He’s not worried too much about hurting feelings, even the feelings of one extremely close to him, if it means getting the point across. The point is important enough that it had to be grasped. Indeed, it is the most important point of all: namely that the path we Christians tread is the surest way to suffering and sacrifice if we’re really living up to the name “Christian”.

“If any man would come after me,” Jesus says, “let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” We all have a cross to bear, but once again, our polite, comfortable “Christianity”—which, I contend is not the Christianity of Christ—cheapens the sense of Jesus’ words. One’s gouty toe or noisy neighbor or laundry-avoiding spouse is not one’s “cross to bear.” Those are irritations, no doubt, and we can face even greater difficulties than these which, I would humbly submit, are not “crosses to be borne” either. You see, they leave out the operative phrase in Jesus’ explanation of the crosses we bear: whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. There is an element of volition missing from the “gouty toe” or “noisy neighbour” situation. We gain our souls by choosing to lay down that which really burdens us: self-satisfaction and egoism and the need to control others. The crosses we bear—selflessness and loving sacrifice and the call to serve Christ in all persons—turn out not to be very heavy burdens at all. In fact, they are a great deal more like life-preservers, lifting us out of a sea made putrid with the jetsam of human pride that we might be pulled aboard the ark, which is the Church as Christ intends her to be.

In his Epistle to the Romans, Paul reminds us how heavy that Cross may seem, but if we think about it for any length of time, we’ll recognize it’s quite the opposite. Perhaps the hardest-seeming requirement for Christian faithfulness is found in this morning’s epistle:

Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them…  Beloved, never avenge yourselves… Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

It seems like a heavy burden to live this way, but nothing could be further from the truth. How heavy a burden it is to hold on to anger, to live with resentment for our enemies, and how great a relief it is to let that go, to bear the Cross of self-abnegation and forgiveness rather than the yoke of bitterness!

What Peter forgot is that the twin idols of “comfortable living”—security and enlightened self-interest—are a great deal heavier than we can handle; that even what seems at first blush to be genuine concern can be a mask worn by those idols. Naming the idols which we clutch more closely than the Cross of Christ can be more than a little uncomfortable. We may feel the Eye of God, which alone can pierce our souls, can cut rather than comfort. In the end, though, permitting God to root out of our hearts that which really weighs us down, will sting only for a little while. We will then find that Christ’s yoke is easy and His burden is light, that the Cross, borne with confidence and humility, becomes a part of us, an essential appendage, whose weight is so close to us that we cease to notice it and which grants us a life more abundant than we ever believed possible.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I’ve been thinking this week about the nature of ecumenism, the movement toward understanding and rapprochement between Christian churches, and specifically the issue of the papacy in Western Christendom, for a couple of reasons. First, I had to take a rather long car trip to attend a funeral and (as is usually the case with such trips) made the best of it by listening to audiobooks. One of the books I listened to was, The Golden Compass, the first volume in Philip Pullman’s controversial fantasy series, His Dark Materials. It’s controversial because it takes a rather dim view of the church, but it has its religious proponents, including former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. I knew I’d enjoy getting to learn about the alternate universe in which Pullman set the novel when it mentions, almost in passing, that Pope John Calvin had moved the Vatican to Geneva. It was not only a funny, unexpected detail, but a reminder that sometimes our disagreements and divisions within Christianity have as much to do with politics and issues of authority as it does with theology proper.

The second reminder of this came yesterday, when I read the pretty good piece in the Courier about Catholic-Lutheran joint recognition of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. I was pleased to read that at least one of the Lutheran pastors interviewed recognized that the division of the church was not an altogether happy thing- that it was an injury done the Body of Christ, albeit over genuine disagreements. I was, however, surprised that the nature of the issues precluding reunion were not highlighted. It’s all well and good to recognize that the ultimate goal is one church, both spiritually and institutionally, which happens to be my view. It’s quite another to speak honestly and charitably about what real disagreements keep that goal from becoming a reality. Being pretty “small c” catholic in my own theology, the primary issue seems to me to have less to do with soteriology (the doctrine of salvation) or sacramental theology but about authority and church order, specifically the nature of the authority wielded by the Bishop of Rome. Of course, those with a more Protestant theology than mine would disagree, but that’s where I tend to come down on it in case you were wondering.

All this put me in mind of an experience I had over a decade ago, when I was a student at the University of Saint Andrews, an unapologetically reformed, Scottish Presbyterian institution. St. Andrews was a place where religion was taken very seriously. Now, while the students and faculty of my college there took religion very seriously, none of us took himself very seriously, and this deadly combination led one Friday evening to a biblically-themed costume party. It had not occurred to the organizers of this fete that there weren’t that many biblical characters whose identity would be immediately obvious by means of a costume, so there were no less than 3 Satans, 4 Jesuses, and a half-dozen Virgin Marys. Thus, I was proud of my ingenuity in choosing to go as the only St. Peter that evening. The costume consisted of a hastily constructed cope and miter, a set of keys, and a scroll which read “tu es petrus, et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam,” Latin for “you are Peter, and upon this rock I shall build my Church.” I should have known that my Church of Scotland classmates would find this image a bit disconcerting. After a few nervous jokes about what they construed as popery, I was (perhaps insincerely) congratulated for being clever, and we got on with the games planned for the evening. To my disappointment, one of the Virgin Marys won the costume prize.

I tell this story not to brag about clever costume construction or to criticize my fellows for lacking a sense of humor. Rather, I mean to point out how contentious the interpretation of Jesus’ statement in today’s Gospel reading still is. What precisely Jesus means by “you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church” is important, but the answer Christians give still differs, and that disagreement is central to both major rifts in Church history- the 11th Century schism between East and West and the 16th Century schism within Western Christendom.

But, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s begin by looking closely at the passage in question, and particularly at Peter. Up to this point, Peter seems to specialize in getting things wrong. Now, to be fair, Peter’s first appearance in the Gospel shows him getting things profoundly right. He shows up first in the fourth chapter of Matthew, when Jesus, as yet a stranger, calls out to Peter on his fishing boat and bids him “follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Peter’s response is that of faith. He throws down his net, and obeys the call.

Despite this initial demonstration of faith and understanding, Peter (like the rest of the disciples) cannot help but to be lacking in both through much of the rest of the Gospel. You will remember from a couple of weeks ago, Peter’s mostly failed attempt to walk on water, and Jesus’ subsequent assessment that Peter was “of little faith.”

The gospels are full of instances of Peter misunderstanding Jesus’ identity and mission, but in today’s reading, Peter finally gets it right. “Who do you say that I am?” Jesus asks his disciples, and Peter answers “you are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

It is to this moment of great faith and insight that Jesus responds “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church.” So, what does that mean? We know that Peter was reckoned a leader of the apostles during his life. Perhaps this leadership is all Jesus implied.

Perhaps, on the other hand, the Roman Catholic view is correct. This is the view that my costume led my fellows to assume I affirmed. Perhaps Peter, as first bishop of Rome, and his successors hold a divinely appointed role as the ultimate authority within the Church on earth. There is a coherent, compelling argument for this with a long history and many proponents from the Patristic era up through today. The view and its proponents must be respected. And perhaps they’re right.

There is a third possibility, as well. Maybe, it’s not Peter as an individual or Peter as symbolic of a series of popes on which Christ means to build His Church. Perhaps the rock to which Jesus refers is not Peter at all, but Peter’s confession. Perhaps the rock upon which Christ has built His Church, against which (he says) the gates of Hell cannot prevail, is the declaration itself: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” The ambiguity of the statement in this instance allows for such an interpretation. It is “you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.” It is not “you are Peter, and upon you I will build my Church”. So, there are some who hold this third view, and we might find it compelling.

But this interpretation has its problems. First, Jesus is clearly engaging in a play on words here, because Peter’s name actually means “rock”. This would lend credence to the view that the Church was to be built upon Peter himself, not upon his confession. Secondly, in the next verse Jesus grants the “keys to the kingdom” and the authority to “bind” and “loose” to Peter. It seems that Peter himself is given real, significant authority here.
In the end, the question of precisely what Peter’s authority is and how and to whom to it is passed is a question for theological debate at a higher level than most of us are qualified to engage in. I could opine, but that’s all I’d be able to give, ultimately: an opinion. The real interesting thing for our purposes, though, is that Jesus gives Peter great authority (whatever the specifics of that authority are), and he grants this authority despite the fact that Peter has missed the mark so many times and will miss the mark again. Later in this same chapter in Matthew, in what will be next week’s Gospel reading, Peter doesn’t get it when Jesus explains that he has to die on the cross. Indeed, Peter’s refusal to accept it leads Jesus to rebuke and literally demonize him by saying, “get behind me, Satan!” This is the same Peter who will deny his Lord on the eve of his crucifixion. Yet, he is also the Peter who would preach before the nations in Jerusalem. This is the same Peter who inaugurates the mission to the Gentiles which Paul would take up after him. This is the same Peter who would be bishop of Rome and would himself be crucified upside-down for the faith.

I think the message here for us, is that God can make us saints despite ourselves. He doesn’t give up on us as lost causes because we slip on the path. Peter is, in a sense, a poster boy for the ordinary Christian, the Christian occasionally beset by fears and doubts and sins, but who ultimately succeeds in living a life of heroic faith.

Some of us need to look to Paul, who lived what was in many ways a desolate life before he became a Christian, and then began a righteous life when Jesus met him on the road to Damascus. It’s from this background, that Paul admonishes the Romans in today’s Epistle to present their bodies as a living sacrifice to God. Our translation calls this our “spiritual worship,” but I think a better translation of the Greek λογικήν λατρείαν is “reasonable service.” Giving up our whole selves is the only response that makes sense in light of God’s grace in redeeming us.

This is more easily seen in Paul’s life, with his profound conversion from enemy of the Gospel to its greatest proponent, but it is no less true for those of us who, like St. Peter, experience less a single, discrete transformation of our lives but a series of course corrections, of getting it right and getting it wrong, but ultimately giving our all through the work of Christ in us, for the sake of the Gospel. Peter teaches us our need for continual conversion. We need to have our hearts open, to follow Christ when he beckons us out of our fishing boats or factories or cubicles and promises to lead us we know not where. We need to have our eyes open to see the risen Lord when he asks us, “who do you say that I am?” and we need the faith to respond “you are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” We need to be ready, like Peter, to welcome Jesus into our lives every day, to acknowledge where we have misunderstood or denied him, and to ask for the strength to follow His will. It’s just that simple, but don’t we have a terribly hard time doing it?

Our failure to understand and follow is not to be excused, it is daily to be corrected. But neither is it to be dwelt upon. God has work for us to do, and He gives us the gifts we need to do that work. Because of Peter’s good confession, Jesus bestowed a gift of great authority on him. In response to our own good confessions, to our own acknowledgement that Jesus is Lord and God, the Spirit will continue to give us the gifts to do His work; as St. Paul writes in today’s epistle: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.
And like Blessed Peter, we must remember that the Spirit’s gifts are not to be horded. Rather, they are to be used in service to the Gospel, for the advancement of God’s purposes and His Kingdom in a world yearning for the Good News. When we succeed in doing that, our petty doubts and fears will (like Peter’s) be dwarfed by the good fruits which Christ’s Spirit bears in and through us.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Due to last Sunday having been a principal celebration of the Church, namely the Feast of the Transfiguration, we missed our weekly dose of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, which is a shame, because one of the central assumptions underlying the universal nature of the Christian mission assumed in this week’s lesson was not reckoned to be a given, but required an argument, at least insofar as Paul understood his audience’s assumptions. So we need to back up a bit and catch up.

Paul admits in what would have been read last week had it not been for the holiday to being in great sorrow and unceasing anguish for his own people. He even goes on to say that he would accept being “accursed and cut off from Christ” for the sake of the Jews, from whom came up the law and the prophets and a man named Jesus of Nazareth. And it seems that “here endeth the lesson”. But, in reality, there’s much more to be said.

Our first response might be that Paul’s sorrow regards the failure of the law to produce righteousness. Paul immediately counters this assumption by insisting that the Word of God (which spoke through the law and the prophets) cannot possibly fail. Rather, he says, the “children of Israel” is not an entirely ethnic or racial reality but a spiritual reality: those Gentiles who accepted the consummation of the Law in Christ are to be reckoned “children of Israel” and those Jews who rejected said consummation were not “children of Isreal” in this most important, spiritual sense.

Paul again anticipates a possible objection to this line of reasoning: namely the suggestion that this would make God out to be unfair. He did, after all, promise Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that their descendants would be God’s chosen people, and this business about spiritual rather than actual descendants being “the children of Israel” seems too clever by half.

Paul gives what might strike us at first as an unsatisfying answer. God, he says, has mercy on those whom he wants to show mercy, and we’re not God. This might strike us as unsatisfying, because it seems to gesture toward a sort of Calvinistic “double predestination” which I mentioned briefly a couple of weeks ago. That is to say that God has chosen those whom he intends to send to hell and we have no part in the matter. But, if one were to read Paul closely here one would find that that’s not what he’s saying at all. That God has decided to be merciful to the Gentiles does not imply that He has chosen to reject the Jews. Rather, God has mercy on the faithful, whether they be faithful in Christ or faithful to the Law. It is simply that those who had pursued the latter seemed by-and-large to have failed in their pursuit. It is in response to this failure that Paul is “in great sorrow and unceasing anguish” for the sake of his kinsmen, and it is why he laments “Brethren, my heart’s desire and prayer to God is that they may be saved.”

Finally, Paul comes to the “twenty-four thousand dollar question”, the question which his argument in the preceding two chapters of Romans makes unavoidable: “I ask, then, has God rejected his people?” He is swift in his response. “By no means!” Paul himself was an Israelite. Jesus himself was a Jew. And what’s more, Paul says, while the majority of his kinsmen had stumbled, they have not yet fallen. “As regards election,” he puts is “they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers.” You will forgive my use of a phrase which some of you might find a bit too evangelical, but it is appropriate and true. Paul’s deepest desire is that his people may come to “accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour.” The joy obtained from such a relationship predicated on God’s Grace is greater than any joy that could be obtained by other means. Even so, Paul is insistent that God is not a liar and he doesn’t take back gifts he’s given. The Jews are saved, but Paul wants his kinsmen to experience Grace as he has come to experience it. This is why, with regard to the missionary impulse we find in this morning’s Epistle, Paul has to remind his audience that it is, indeed a mission to all: “For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek [he writes]; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him.”

So that, in a nutshell, is how Paul’s argument develops in the central chapters of Romans, but one question remains, and it is the answer to this question from which we find something applicable not just for the Christians in ancient Rome, but for us as well. Why did Paul spill so much ink into addressing this question specifically?

To answer that, we need to recognize who Paul’s initial audience was. The church in Rome was a remarkably diverse group. It was situated in the capitol of the most powerful Empire in the world, so this little church would have likely counted among its members people from all over the known world. The most important distinction, however, as you no doubt know, was the distinction between Jews and Gentiles, of which there were many of both in the Roman church.

Paul’s letters were always occasional, which is not to say infrequent, but rather that each was written to respond to a particular issue within the local church. The distinction between Jew and Gentile and how this distinction effected the mission of the church had become controversial. Paul had already had to justify his practice of preaching to Gentiles before the council of the apostles in Jerusalem, and he had convinced the apostles that the Gospel was meant for all, not just for Jews. But just because the apostles had been persuaded by Paul to open up the church to Gentiles, local churches still had that most pernicious of problems which we see still see today: namely, the division of the world into “our kind of people” and “those people”.

It is safe to say that this very issue had caused dysfunction in the church in Rome, just as it had in other churches. Jewish Christians might have seen themselves as elite, being the inheritors of word of God as it had been passed down for centuries. Gentile Christians might have seen themselves as superior, since it was not their forefathers but the forefathers of the Jews who had botched things up by not following the Law. There may have been heated arguments within the church in Rome about who really deserved to be there. Paul’s discussion about Jews and Gentiles, then, would have been an attempt to combat the elitism and sense of superiority each group likely held.

I hate to burst anybody’s bubble, but this still happens today. We still divide ourselves according to race and social class and where one’s “people” are from and all other sorts of distinctions which we spend far too much time thinking about. If you don’t believe me, consider the sad business that happened in Virginia this weekend. It’s a hard thing sometimes to realize that while (I hope) most of us try to behave as if there really is only one race that matters (that is, the human race), we can’t just assume that everybody’s figured that out yet.

Indeed, each of us, no matter how enlightened we think we are, can build these walls between ourselves and others by making even subtle, unconscious assumptions. I know I do. Probably one of the most important experiences in my life, as silly as this might sound, was spending the first several years of my ordained ministry in the rural South, and getting to know people who spoke with rural southern accents who were smarter than I am. I was relying on this sort of easy prejudice that if you sound like Larry the Cable Guy, you’re probably dumb or something. First of all, that’s not that guy’s real accent, but more importantly it’s just not right. I can’t claim that that lesson in humility completely stuck; I know that’s still a prejudice I have deep down that I need to work on and (at least) be aware of. Anyway it’s very easy to make those kinds of assumptions and thereby create barriers between one’s own sort of people and “outsiders.”

The Gospel and the love it is meant to stir up in us for God and each other does not recognize these walls we build between people. The Gospel, Paul reminds us, is for everyone: Jew or Gentile, black or white, prince or pauper, native or newcomer. May we set aside our proclivity to divide the world between “us” and “them” and see each and every human being as somebody whose heart is a proper place for the living Christ to take up residence and to receive the love which God has given us and expects us to share.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.