Aren’t we ready already?

Text: Matthew 16:21-28

[Previously on Matthew:

Jesus: “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?”

Disciples: “Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one

of the prophets.”

Jesus: “But who do you say that I am?”

Peter: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

Jesus: “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.”

And now the conclusion:] [1]

Remember last week, we had this thrilling moment where Peter “gets” who Jesus is. He calls him “the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” It is a highpoint of the story so far and serves to mark it off as significant. God, the Great Mystery, has revealed Jesus’s identity to Peter. But don’t think that these words of congratulations serve as a true conclusion. As Stanley Hauerwas puts it: “Simon’s recognition of Jesus changes who Simon is.” [2] It is this reason that Jesus gives Peter a new name, changing it from Simon to Peter, and it is this reason that he gives him a new position: not one of superiority but one of preserving the church’s gifts.

Hauerwas continues:

“By making Peter the rock on which the church will be built, Jesus indicates that the church will need to be so built because hell itself will try to destroy what Jesus has established.

It is not Peter’s task to make the church safe and secure or to try to insure its existence. Rather, it is Peter’s task to keep the church true to its mission, which is to witness to the Messiah.” [3]

Listen again to the opening words of this morning’s gospel: “Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem”. Jesus reveals to his disciples that 1) he must go to Jerusalem, 2) undergo great suffering, 3) be killed, and 4) be raised. The new man named Peter, with his rockish need to protect the mission not only attempts to stop this from happening, but he actually takes Jesus aside and rebukes him. This is the proof I promised last week for how Peter could “get it” without understanding it. Jesus’s response, seconds after commending Peter, after heaping on the praise, is to call Peter “Satan” and “a stumbling block to me”!

We all know that Peter is trying to protect Jesus. We all know that he doesn’t think that Jesus is ready to die. He doesn’t think that the disciples are ready to die. And he knows that he isn’t ready to die.

We have a lot of examples for those times in which we aren’t ready. Those examples are truly everywhere, aren’t they? This time last year the media was discussing whether or not we were “ready” for a woman president or a black president. There are currently 21 female heads of state, including three monarchs (Denmark, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom), eight prime ministers (Germany, Haiti, New Zealand, Moldova, Mozambique, The Netherlands Antilles, Ukraine and The Åland Islands) and seven presidents (Argentina, Chile, Finland, India, Ireland, Liberia and The Philippines). I should hope that we’re ready.

We also worry that we aren’t ready for disasters. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita didn’t paint a picture of readiness. But if we dig a little deeper, we can see that for decades, Louisiana had called for improvements to the levees. Katrina’s effect on New Orleans doesn’t represent a lack of readiness, but of federal short-sightedness and negligence. Better examples are of the way Kansans deal with tornados, Californians deal with earthquakes, and yes, Floridians deal with hurricanes. These people deal with their expectations and display a relative readiness for what they know is coming.

So why is it that we in the church sit in an active state of unreadiness? We evolve at a snail’s pace, dealing with small issues as if they are catastrophic (You picked what color? We sang that hymn?)—leaving us in a catatonic state when big issues arrive. For some, the solution is to stick fingers in the ears and sing “La la la la!” For others, the solution is to collect an unscientific poll with the predictable “We hate change” result. Or we give in rather than rock the boat.

No, for the most part, we aren’t ready to die, either.

But Jesus gives us real hope:

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?”

He’s not mincing his words here. Taken with the new identity of Peter, we can see how Jesus calls not just his disciples, but the church to act. To take up its cross, following Jesus to death in Jerusalem. Because this is a life-and-death issue, there isn’t time to get ready.

Jesus rebukes Peter because Peter is “setting [his] mind not on divine things but on human things”: demonstrating the polar opposite of what got him praise last week. He is worried about preserving the physical life of the Messiah, the son of the Living God so that this earthly king can rule the Kingdom of God on earth. Just like the Pharisees and Sadducees rebuked earlier, Peter is actually trying to preserve the status quo, the very world as he knows it; turning his mind to the revelation of a heavenly king on earth, Peter posits that this new earthly king will soon be ready to wage earthly war. In this way, Peter is obstructing the Kingdom of God from coming. A Kingdom with a spiritual king—not a militaristic one.

Remember the clue from last week? Making reference to the Son of Man, or Son of Humanity, is our cue that Jesus is talking about the Kingdom of God. Jesus brings it up again here to demonstrate that this is his primary interest. It is establishing the church as a means of bringing the Kingdom closer. That Peter couldn’t quite comprehend the Kingdom is no surprise: look at how easily we avoid the Kingdom. For Jesus, the issue has everything to do with death. Everything to do with our fear of death, the violence that can cause death, and how humanity uses the fear of death to manipulate others. By taking up our crosses, not just any crosses, but THE cross, Jesus’s cross, we are freed from death, the fear of death, the violence of death, and the manipulation of death because it is the Kingdom that matters. It is God that matters.

We fear death. This doesn’t surprise any of us. Death is scary. And the disciples surely felt that they didn’t sign up for that. But they followed him all the way to Jerusalem. It is there that they abandoned him. They walked up to the edge, but couldn’t do it. Fear prevented them. Some of the great stories in Acts and in traditions tell of how the disciples, decades later, accepted death, finally getting what Jesus had been saying years earlier. Their example is truly comforting, because this stuff is scary.

But Jesus promises us resurrection after 1) Jerusalem, 2) punishment, and 3) death. Our fear for our lives need not be predicated on our survival. This is Jesus’s great offering. That we can gather up God’s strength and become a people whose ministry is to bring the Kingdom closer is not just an awesome responsibility, but an awesome responsibility. Jesus was putting the church in the hands of fisher-men and -women who showed not just great devotion, but great willingness to give up on the safety and security of the world around them. How could that message not resonate with us? How dare we not hear that message in the midst of our own culture, with our jobs and our childcare and our responsibilities and our families and our sports and music and reading and gardening and on!

We are church not because we are friends or we like to dress up or we like to give to charitable causes: these things are a part of us: but we are church because we have accepted that responsibility. We, like Peter, have answered Jesus’s question by calling him “the Messiah, son of the Living God” and because we believe that Jesus’s challenge for us is worthy. The grace revealed in this gospel is that we can deny ourselves, take up the cross, and follow Jesus. That we have nothing to fear in death. As Jesus often told his disciples, “Do not be afraid.”

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[1] For the 9:30 service only.

[2] Hauerwas, Stanley. Matthew. (Brazos Press: Grand Rapids, 2006) p. 150.

[3] Ibid.

Living in Tyre and Sidon

Text: Matthew 15:10-28

There’s a short gap between last week’s gospel and today’s. In it, Jesus heads for Gennesaret, where tales of Jesus’s miraculous powers of healing spread and “all who were sick” come, touch his cloak, and are healed. Then the Pharisees come all the way from Jerusalem to harass Jesus and his disciples, claiming that they have broken the Law by eating without washing their hands. It is a sure example of Jesus claiming hierarchy and nuance to Law, that purity laws are nothing compared with matters of faith. Then Jesus says to the Pharisees:

You hypocrites! Isaiah prophesied rightly about you when he said:
⁸“This people honors me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me;
⁹in vain do they worship me,
teaching human precepts as doctrines.” ’

It is this that precedes Jesus’s talk of defilement.

Taking today’s gospel out of this context, we might suggest that Jesus is railing against gossip, profanity, or lying. Or we might take it literally—that the talk of going into and coming out of the mouth…well, having seen some of Sophia’s spitups, I would say that is pretty gross. Or in his articulation to Peter, Jesus seems to suggest that our emotional reactions, those things we say when we’re cheesed, those things that we do without thinking, are bad.

But Jesus’s taking on the purity codes, his talk of defilement in Gennesaret, and the movement in the second half of the gospel to Tyre and Sidon should be taken together.

Tyre and Sidon represent, for the Pharisees, places of defilement. These locations would greatly distress the Pharisees. If they thought Jesus’s disciples were bad for not washing their hands before eating, what will they think of going to impure towns, talking with impure people, doing impure things?

This is a common situation in the gospels: Jesus either seems to be doing something he’s “not supposed to do” or he’s being scolded by the “true believers” for what they’ve seen, or more commonly, heard that he’s done.

We all know who is battling for the title of Pharisee today. They go by many names including the self-dubbed “Bible-believers”. They serve as the unelected watchdog of faith and encourage the crowds to not only see things the way they do, but to turn on each other ravenously. Imagine if the Pharisees had the Internet! Or access to journalists eager for a juicy story (about sex)!

We’ve included in this week’s bulletin an insert from the National Church. It highlights the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams’ closing remarks to Lambeth in which he encourages a continued interest in the forming of an Anglican Covenant. What a truly fortunate thing to discuss in the midst of something so contentious as Jesus’s propensity to break the Law and get caught. How freely Jesus disregards the Laws that impede on the primary law, the Greatest Commandment and its partner: Love God and love your neighbor. How easily the Law is lesser to these fundamental principles.

This proclamation, found in the three Synoptics, concludes in Matthew 22:40 by suggesting that “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Covenants are radically inclusive decisions of mutual benefit. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church defines covenant as “A bond entered into voluntarily by two parties by which each pledges himself to do something for the other”. Its use prior to the Old Testament was in civil and governmental matters and implies the relationship of two parties, not the 44 regional and national churches that comprise the Anglican Communion, or a single document to which each church must subscribe; the Augsburg Confession is just such a document for Lutherans. Perhaps there are now too many Pharisees in the church, like cooks in the kitchen.

In this chapter from Matthew, Jesus is highlighting that the notion of defilement, or ritual impurity, is not a matter of what one eats or where one is/lives, but about what one says and does. Like in Jesus’s other demonstrations, such as his parable of the Good Samaritan or his regular meals with tax collectors, Jesus shows priority for love in the midst of ritual impurity over the avoidance of those things that would cause defilement according to the Law. The Samaritan, considered impure by the Pharisees, based solely on where he lives, helps a man made impure by his situation while two observant Jews left the man there to die. This is Jesus’s radical proposition! He demonstrates for all of us that tradition isn’t a problem—traditionalism is. That some traditions need questioning. Some need to be discussed and re-examined. By physically placing himself in a land that represents impurity, conversing with a woman who is impure by the nature of her home, Jesus questions this very tradition, challenging the puritanical around him. It’s as if he is saying to the Pharisees “You don’t like it that we didn’t wash our hands? Wait and see where we’re going to eat!”

Now, Jesus calls the woman’s faith “great”—33 verses after calling Peter’s faith “little”—not because of who she is or where she comes from, but because of what she feels and says. My heart doesn’t always cause me to spew filth (though occasionally when I’m driving it does), but can motivate loving action. Jesus’s interaction with this woman seems to demonstrate that difference in faith between little and great. His disciples are following him, but she is acting like him. Remember last week, when I said Peter “gets it”. He does. But does he do it? For in their time, it was the disciples’ job to live like their rabbi. They followed him wherever he went, they listened to his teaching, they followed his instruction, and lived like him. Think about Jesus with these followers, wandering all over Palestine. They lived together, ate together, always watching their rabbi for instruction. You know they watched him eat, how he walked, how he spoke to strangers, and were trying to learn how to do that too. You know they’re doing that! But sometimes they are so busy watching that they forget to do! They forget to act! Their heads are in the way. But this woman speaks from her heart with her great faith and Jesus commends her on the spot. Unlike Peter, whose faith wavered and needed to be rescued by Jesus, her faith is strong, regardless of her environment and who is watching her.

We are called to that kind of faith and discipleship. Jesus knew his disciples didn’t get it all right. He didn’t expect them to. He didn’t pick the best scholars, he picked fishermen for a reason. But these examples of great faith served them as they serve us today.

And it is hard to live out that kind of faith and discipleship, isn’t it? Sometimes we have great faith—but don’t act upon it. Sometimes we are such great disciples that we forget to have faith. As we guard and protect our faith, out of love and devotion, of course, we no doubt smother it. I can see how easy it is for the Pharisees (then and now) to object. But Jesus was a boundary pusher, living by faith in God, moved by the Holy Spirit. He knew that a Spirit, active and glory-filled should not be confined by rules of adherence.

These rules included the traditional boundaries of right living and behavior, boundaries of preaching and interpretation, boundaries of worship practice and prayer forms, Jesus pushed all of these boundaries.

Jesus calls us to follow him, live like him, act like him. We should love our traditions that form us and feed us. But what of those boundaries that confine us? What of those things that prevent us from loving God and our neighbor? I have faith that an Anglican Covenant, regardless of what has caused its creation, will be Spirit-led. But I’m also incredibly confident that it will be a means of measurement and a further set of boundaries for our faith.

Instead, we are called by Jesus to look for today’s Tyre and Sidon. We are called to minister to those people rejected because of where and how they live. This is living and loving like Jesus.

Standing up to the wind

Text: Matthew 14:22-33

Our story today picks up from last week with cinematic detail. Jesus disperses the crowds that have just been fed (the Five Thousand + women and children), sends the disciples out in a boat, and walks up a mountain to pray. Suddenly, a storm gathers, Jesus walks on water, is mistaken for a ghost, and the terrified disciples cry out.

A few of us will remember this passage from Vacation Bible School in June in which we learned that Jesus gives us the power to be brave (“Aha!”). The participants had the chance to “walk on water” like Peter did. Bravery is one element in this gospel.

But think about where this takes place: it is immediately following the feeding of the Five Thousand. We know from that gospel from last week that Jesus asked four things of the disciples: collect the food, offer it up to God, distribute the food, and collect the remainder. Jesus’s miraculous act was an expression of God’s relationship to humanity, more than it was a showy display or a requirement of belief. Those two fish and five loaves feed thousands of people with twelve full baskets remaining, one for each disciple to take out into the community.

Think about how that story informs this immediately succeeding gospel. The disciples are sent out into a boat, into the middle of the water. They are separated from both Jesus and their ministry to the people. If they were on an island, that would at least imply stability—they’re in a boat, made vulnerable to the waves, the rain, and the wind. “The wind was against them” it says.

Like the disciples, we often feel like we are out in a boat in the middle of a storm. The very elements seem to be working against us.

Our Western model for dealing with adversity seems to be about overpowering it. Standing firm against it. Daring it to topple us. Standing in the middle of the storm ignoring conditions, yelling at the clouds, daring lightening to strike.

Those elements that make us afraid are everywhere. Many worry about crime, cultural change, numbers, rising costs of upkeep. Many worry about the direction of our local church, diocese, national church, or fear those that sow the seeds of separation. Many worry about budgets, youth, worship style, and music. Many worry about what Mt. Hope or St. Paul’s are doing. Many fear the government, the police, and intelligence agencies. Our environment so readily isolates us, pushing us out to sea—we drift further and further from our ministry partners and God.

Heading into Lambeth this summer, that every-10-years conference in England, attended by all of the bishops of the Anglican Communion, it was expected that this conference would be more wind, more storm. Just as every major meeting was supposed to settle our disagreements for ever, and then failed to do so. And there we were, with the world watching us—all eyes on Canterbury to see how things would fall, cameras poised, mics extended and… we talked. Bishops from all over the communion got together and talked. Even bishops from boycotting provinces were in attendance. Nearly every bishop that was there was giving the conference a shot.

But the issue isn’t really about a conference, communication, or collaboration. It’s about that bravery, isn’t it? Some think that they’re being like Peter when they jump out of the boat. Some think they’re going to walk on water. Or worse, some think the boat’s going in the wrong direction and choose to walk toward Jesus on their own—maybe they join another boat. They believe that they are following the will of God.

It is never that simple.

Jesus appears to the disciples, walking on the water. The very nature of this act is fantastic—but it is God that created the Earth. It is God that formed the rules—gravity, molecular shape, and form—and only God that is beyond those rules. Jesus’s appearance to the disciples is an expression of God. It is an expression of God’s command.

And as he approaches the disciples, Jesus says to them "Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid." That middle phrase, “it is I” is actually two words: I and AM. This, of course, is the divine revelation, the way God, the Great Mystery, was revealed to Moses in the burning bush: I AM. Jesus reveals to the disciples in visual sign (walking on water) and linguistic cue (I AM) that this moment is divine. It reveals Jesus’s relationship to the Great Mystery.

We may be tempted to push Jesus into that great theological shoebox in which most of us keep him most of the time. We might suggest that he is revealing himself as God, as divine. But that’s an argument for another time. Instead, we see that Jesus is revealing God’s work in the world. Like the Feast of the Transfiguration on Wednesday and last week’s gospel, God’s work is revealed to us by Jesus.

But Peter flips the script: he takes initiative. His love for Jesus and his desire to serve God causes him to try this audacious act. To actually walk on water.

He wants to do it, but he knows that he can’t do it on his own. He’s smart enough to know that. So he makes the audacious request: "Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water." He knows he can’t do it alone—he needs God to do it and Jesus has to command him to do it. So Jesus simply says “Come.”

We love courage and audacity and bravery. In Harry Potter, it is the preferred attribute to skill, compassion, and cunning. We expect our leaders to do things we ourselves are reluctant to do. We want other churches to try something out before we invest in it. Bravery is an attribute we seem to reserve for others or for the things we are sure about. The things we are certain about. Maybe that’s why we are so attached to tradition—it was someone else’s bravery.

For the disciples, bravery and faith are the same. To follow Jesus was an expression of valor and courage. For Peter to walk on water, spoke to the way faith in God is formed. So think about what this gospel tells us today about our bravery in faith: Peter’s “little faith” was the most mature of the disciples! Peter got it, but he just got distracted by the wind—the world around him kept his faith in check.

How easy it is for all of us, in our community of little faith, living out our lives of little faith to act like Peter. We’re here aren’t we? We each got up this morning, got ready, and came to church. Like Peter, we are making that request: “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” We are taking that audacious step today.

We are making that first move to be in relationship with the Great Mystery. But we don’t always listen for the response, do we? We don’t always listen for that simple command of “come”. We rather think about bills and count the people around us and dream of big churches filled with perfect people.

But the gospel reveals to us that the Great Mystery doesn’t want that kind of faith—it is security in bravery that God cares about. We can easily see the church in that boat, and like the disciples, we can cry and fret and make a stink. But Jesus shows a different way. A way of patience and love. He tells us to not be afraid because God is with us. Be brave because I AM here. Don’t be afraid.

So what do we do? We listen for God’s call to us and then we stand up and…