August 24, 2008 + Elizabeth Gibbs Zehnder

Matthew 16:13-20



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Since the third grade I have wrestled with allergies. Every time the Santa Ana winds blow my eyes turn red and swell, my throat itches and my chest tightens. I feel like my symptoms have been well documented and I know most of what triggers my allergies, but my search for relief has taken me into uncharted territory.

I’ve taken all kinds of medication – Allerest, Sudafed, Claritin. I’ve swallowed handsfull of horsepills at prescribed intervals, eaten raw horseradish with lemon, drank evil smelling juices. I’ve done yoga, acupressure, sputtered through endless attempts at neti pot washes. Each potential cure has its own point of view on the root of my symptoms and the treatment I need.
I find myself guarded when people ask me about them. I feel vulnerable wrapping words around my search for a healing that has proved to be so elusive. I’d rather not stumble through explaining myself why I think Claritin has failed me and why I’m exploring my blocked energy channels. I’d rather wait until its over, until I can assess privately my success or failure.

I think the disciples were in a similar position. They were living out a hope by following Jesus that had never been successfully done before. Sure there had been other itinerant teachers and prophets anointed by God with sizeable followings, but there had also been hustlers and frauds and who was to say which group Jesus belonged to. Every time it seemed clear that Jesus was sent from God, he would break outside the bounds of religious decorum and his identity was again questionable.

The disciples struggled to keep up with Jesus – to understand what was really going on. Of course they are not going to understand everything the first time around. The Bible gives us many instances of the disciples asking for clarification, in private, for what exactly Jesus meant by a particular parable. Sometimes it seems ridiculous, like in the verses before today’s reading in Matthew, Jesus gives an extended discourse on warning the disciples to beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and they walk away thinking that Jesus was frustrated because someone forgot to bring the bread.

So I imagine that the disciples were relieved in this particular Q & A time with Jesus that he is just requesting the latest results from the polls – Who do people say that I am?

You can hear the collective sigh of relief, this is easy. The disciples were eager and perky, glad to contribute what they had heard – the answers came like popcorn popping - some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, one of the prophets….the disciples didn’t have to analyze what was being said, they only were being called upon to report it. This is a good thing, because, as I read it, I don’t think that the disciples really knew who Jesus was – of course they were committed to Jesus, they had left home, work, families to follow him. And I imagine what had transpired during the course of their three years together was the closest thing to God that they had ever experienced – and yet, Jesus was so outside any categories that had ever been created – how can you put words to that? It was too soon for a systematic messianic Christology.

Just about every culture yearns for a Messiah. We long for someone to rescue us from the human condition. We pin our hopes on so many disappointing characters. There isn’t much reliable information about how exactly to identify a true Messiah. There is no bank of Messiah fingerprints to match, no DNA samples to compare.

In his book the Yiddish Policemans Union, Michael Chabon plays with a Jewish concept of messiah –the tzaddik Ha-Dor. The idea is that in each generation God sends a potential messiah – a righteous one, but it is a function of the fullness of time, whether or not that person is called out to fulfill the job description. Mendel, the alleged messiah character leads a life of contradiction – intellectually brilliant, addicted to heroin, able to heal others, but not himself. The other characters in the book see in Mendel what they are looking for – the sick see a healer, politicians see a leader the people will embrace. People project onto the messiah the ability to save them from what they fear the most. Messiah is an illusive category, easily hijacked by those with misdirected agendas.

So the disciples are all about giving the latest poll results and Jesus turns the tables on them – and in verse 15 asks - “so who do you say that I am?”

– Now there is a small space before verse 16 starts with Simon Peter’s answer, but in the actual moment, I feel certain that there was a long, tension filled silence. Eyes scanned the floor for lost paper clips, shoes are inspected for scuffs and signs of wear.

Who do you say that I am?

Jesus always set the bar high for the disciples, and with all of his being, Simon Peter wanted to meet Jesus’ expectations. He knew that there were many wrong answers to Jesus’ question and very few correct ones. He desperately wanted to say the right thing and yet he didn’t know how to put words around what he knew to be true.

How do you condense this life time of living he had experienced in the short months he had been with Jesus ?– the twisted limbs miraculously straightened, his heart so burning with life in those conversations that trailed late into the night under the canopy of stars, the tense encounters with religious leaders and the way Jesus had of making a way when nothing seemed to be possible, bread multiplied to feed a crowd of hungry people – how do you boil that down into a simple answer – who do you say that I am? Its not like the air conditioned calm of choosing between "a" or "c" on the SAT exam.

Its more like Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade. That scene when he’s in the cave with all of the chalices and the challenge is that he has to choose the true “holy grail”, the cup that Jesus had used in the last supper (go with me, I know that this is fiction –but this really gets at the emotional truth). The stakes are high, If he chooses wrong, he dies, if he chooses right he will live forever. So his eyes are drawn to the bejeweled cups, the elaborate ones fit for a King, God’s anointed one, the messiah …but he’s unsure and a the wrong choice will cost him is life...and then at the last minute he remembers Jesus’ humble roots and he guesses the unlikely common cup and in the same instant he reaches for it and lives.

So that’s where Peter is, in that small space between verse 15 and verse 16. He’s on the edge of the precipice, his sandals scattering small stones tumbling into nothingness. His heart pounding. The vacant wind sweeping across the blank canvass of his mind as he desperately searches for words. And then the response comes to him, the wild hope takes on flesh, dry scattered bones leap from the valley floor alive and well. – Who do you say that I am? you are the Messiah!

In that moment an eternity of joy and understanding opened up between Peter and Jesus and the Kingdom of God broke in and Peter could see the exquisite fullness of God’s love and sorrow.
"Blessed are you Simon Peter! You are Peter and on this rock I will build my church."

We need a little help to get in on the play on words that Matthew renders in the Greek. Barbara Brown Taylor, in her book The Seeds of Heaven, lays it out quite nicely. You are Petros and on this petra I will build my church. It’s the same word that he uses twice, the masculine and then the feminine form of the word for “rock” – but there is a subtle difference in the two – Petros – the name that Jesus gives Peter, means stone or pebble, a small piece of a larger rock, while petra means a boulder, a great big rock. So that makes Peter a chip off the old block, a piece of the rock, against which the powers of death shall not prevail.

What good news! I love that Jesus says that he will build the church on that earnest, big hearted, bumbling, impulsive disciple. Reading snatches of the bible each Sunday its easy to miss out on the character development within the text. Peter is a piece of work – what ever he does he does with gusto, but he gets it right about half the time …

Remember he’s the one that when the disciples were adrift in the stormy sea and Jesus comes walking on the water, Peter’s the one who steps out of the boat to walk toward Jesus – notice he’s the only disciple willing to leave the boat. Then he takes his eyes off of Jesus and then falters and starts to sink.

Peter’s the one who later boasts that he would never deny Jesus and then finds himself by the fire trying to stay close to Jesus (again we need to note that the other disciples are long gone) but there he is saying he doesn’t know the first thing about this man Jesus.

One thing you can say about Peter is that he is in the game; granted his execution of the details is sketchy, but his heart is 100% engaged. That is the person Jesus calls out as the foundation of the church; now if you read ahead to next week's text, you’ll find Peter going off in the wrong direction and Jesus calling him a stumbling block (a nickname can really turn against a person!). But even for his inconsistency, Peter is not discarded. He has pushed past what he knows for sure and is willing to step into the hope that Jesus has ignited in his heart.

We should take note that Jesus celebrates Peter for his response, but Jesus names the fact that it didn’t come out of Peter, but that it was “revealed by God in heaven”. Jesus knows that Peter didn’t give his answer out of what he knew for sure – like me filling out the forms in the doctor's office. Allergies? Well that is easy to answer from my experience, I know that list by heart - cats, dogs, pollen dust mold… Peter didn’t say – “You are the messiah” because that was what he had learned to say in Sunday School. No, when he said “you’re the Messiah", Peter, beyond what he knew for certain, was giving voice to the hope that he held, he gave voice to the truth he had received in his spirit.

As a church, Peter’s response to Jesus is our heritage, its our faith community’s DNA. And yet, sitting in this cathedral dripping of established religion, gathered in this space where the architecture suggested that faith in God is manageable and that the ways to God are well charted and known – look around at the stories of our faith laid out in tidy outlines of colored glass, what could be more predictable and knowable? Here in this place Peter’s legacy strikes a dissonant chord.

Ironically, today’s passage in Matthew is in a similar juxtaposition. Its preceded by Matthew’s account of Jesus railing against the Sadducees and Pharisees, the religious leaders of the day. In Luke, Jesus had said that these religious leaders were actually hindering people who were seeking to enter the Kingdom of God because of the way that they taught God’s laws. Jesus was accusing them of being gatekeepers who were mis-using the law to keep people out.

So after critiquing the religious establishment, Jesus says that Peter is now going to be holding the keys to the kingdom. That’s the kind of gatekeeper that I would hope for. Some one who has tried and gotten it all wrong and tried again would certainly be the one I would want to meet at the pearly gates.

Jesus’ declaration that Peter will be living out heaven’s desire speaks volumes. It underscores that Jesus’s church is built on a foundation of a willingness to push past what is known for certain and reach out to what is hoped for.

Before living in LA, I was working in youth ministry with Young Life. Each summer we would take teens to camp and there would always be a ropes course, (Launa Prince knows all about these). This particular one at a camp called Windy Gap, was set about 30 feet up in the air, a series of platforms attached to the tall trunks of pine trees, connected by a variety of rope webs, tight ropes, rope ladders. The hardest part for me was always the exit – you come to the last platform, 30 feet up and there was no apparent way down. Just a trapeze hanging about 6 feet away from the platform. The idea was to jump, catch the trapeze with your hands and then hanging from the trapeze you’d get lowered to the ground (before anyone calls Young Life to protest, it wasn’t possible to free fall to the ground, there was a safety rope on each person’s harness that would keep them from falling) Somehow that safety line information was not helpful as I would stand, year after year on that platform, terrified. Knowing in my head the way down was to leap out over the emptiness to grab the bar, all the while my feet craving contact with the platform. It was terrifying.

Being a fairly short person, I never was able to reach the trapeze. Year after year, my fingertips would brush the bar and I’d fall a few feet before the safety line jerked me to a stop. I’d bask in the rush of grace of that safety line as they slowly let me down to the forest floor.

Fifteen years later, its not so much the leap that I’ve taken away as my faith lesson, but the safety line. That’s where I know God’s grace with all of my being – and there are plenty of times, aside from the foolish proposition of jumping off of platforms 30 feet up in trees, times when I stumble, or am tackled, or when I try to do too much at once, there are plenty of times when I fall, but that safety line of grace is always there. And just like Peter, who was never rejected for his mis-steps, but always, that line of grace came through for him. Remember, how the Gospel of John tells us about Jesus and Peter, in that morning on the other side of the resurrection, sharing breakfast on the beach, Peter saturated with the shame of his denial and Jesus offering restoration and grace?

That’s the foundation that Jesus declares the church will have.

Not the foundation of the Sadducees and Pharisees, with a multiplicity of rules and laws that keep people out of the kingdom.

Rather a foundation of living out of a center of love, of action, of falling short, of receiving instruction and guidance, of trying again and again and again. A foundation that doesn’t require having all the answers, but does require a willingness to receive an unexpected answer.

So as we take our inheritance and try to live out the fullness of our DNA – as we seek to be the gathered people of God, a chip off the old block – how do we make sure that we have it right? How do we make sure that we aren’t so busy trying to find a messiah that fits our need of the moment that we follow the wrong one? How do leave enough room for God’s spirit to guide us in our uncertainty without opening ourselves up to the possibility that we get it all wrong? How do we keep an open mind without having our brain fall out?

We are right up on that platform, 30 feet up. Six feet of open space and that trapeze bar swinging gently in the breeze. Our body craves the solid platform, we crave the clear delineation of the stained glass – right and wrong, holy and profane, messiah and false prophet. And yet….

Our heart knows what Peter felt that day, we feel the surge of God’s truth, but it's never manageable enough to put in categories, it's never solid enough to grab onto. We know that the only way to keep going is to leap off the platform, to receive the spirit’s prompt, to act on what we hope for. Maybe we’ll miss the bar, well, we’ll probably miss the bar. But hear the Good News, God’s grace abounds, God’s grace will catch us, nourish us, and guide us. Like Peter we need to keep our hearts 100% in the game, guided by the hope and the love that walking with Jesus has kindled in our hearts. Amen.