Sermon: Big Answers are Found in Small Questions

Our gospel reading this day comes from the sixteenth chapter of Matthew, starting in verse 13.

I invite you to hear these words.

Now, when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, Who do people say that the Son of Man is?

And they said, Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah, or one of the prophets.

He said to them, But who do you say that I am?

Simon Peter answered, You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.

And Jesus answered him, Blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah, for flesh and blood is not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.

And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.

I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.

This is the word of God for us, the people of God.

Thanks be to God.

Let us pray.

O Lord, let the words in my mouth and the thoughts and meditations of all of our hearts be pleasing in your sight.

For you, O Lord, are our rock and our redeemer.

Amen.

Many of you in the workplace know about these.

You may have shuddered for a second when I said the very words.

If you haven't heard of one before, let me tell you about it.

In a 360 feedback analysis, or whatever they want to call it, your superiors and your peers and your reports, fill out an anonymous survey all the way around you about the aspects of your work and your leadership.

When I was in a leadership program seven or eight years ago, we had to fill out a battery of different types of surveys and get people to fill out a 360 survey for us.

And so I went the first day of this program I was in, and I remember receiving the packet.

It came even bound, like there was, you know, it had a binder thing, and in one of those plastic folders that snapped, so you knew that you were getting your money's worth.

And as I prepared to receive that feedback, right?

Of course, I didn't look at the 10 good things that were listed about my leadership and things like that, but I immediately went to the page where I could find the constructive criticism about it, right?

Jesus opens up this passage today and asked the disciples a sense of a 360 feedback question, right?

Who are they saying?

Who are they saying I am?

Right?

Who are all who are all the crowds saying that I am?

Who are the crowd saying the Son of Man is?

I don't think Jesus was quite as concerned about the responses like I was.

His question, though, shows that the general population wasn't quite getting it yet.

They don't grasp who he is.

Even though he's fed the multitudes and has just come off doing that again, even though he's healing the sick, even though he's casting out demons, the Jewish leaders do not fully understand who Jesus is.

The answers they give, right, they say, well, some say John the Baptist, and others say Elijah, and some say Jeremiah or one of the prophets, those answers aren't necessarily wrong.

They're just not full for understanding who Jesus is.

So then he turns the question right to the disciples, right?

And he says, Who do y'all say I am?

He might not have said y'all because he spoke Aramaic.

But essentially he did, right?

Because it is in the plural.

He said, Who do y'all say I am?

And I don't think Jesus is concerned about what the crowd's responses are, but he's definitely concerned with what the disciples are.

And there comes a point in all of our faith journeys where we are forced to reckon with this question: Who do you say that I am?

In this sense, we are all Peter.

We are all Peter in this text.

Because this is not just about that impetuous disciple's response over 2,000 years ago.

The response that earns him the credibility of being called the first rock or leader of the church, who the Roman Catholics will take to be their first pope.

Our response, though, to this question is vital.

It changes the course of our lives.

Who do you say I am?

And Peter says, You are the Messiah, or you are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.

Peter identifies Jesus, right, first as the Messiah, the one who is sent, the one who the Jewish people have been waiting for.

They've been waiting for a one like David to come, a warrior king who is going to come and save their people.

Now, granted, Jesus looks a little different than they expected, right?

He tells them to turn the other cheek and everything like that.

Not quite the warrior they were anticipating, but he says, you are the Messiah.

But then he says this: you are the Son of the living God.

In other words, Peter is saying, Jesus is also divine.

There is God in him.

This is not just another human leader in our midst.

C.S.

Lewis, when he wrote his opus mere Christianity, in the 1940s, in the midst of World War II, he popularized an argument that says that when we encounter Jesus, that we have to reckon with Jesus as either liar or lunatic or lord.

That when we encounter Jesus, we either he's got to be a liar, like he's not who he says he is.

He is just making this up about being God's son and all of this, and so therefore he's a liar.

Or he's a lunatic, like he really believed the stuff.

But we've seen cult leaders who have big followings, or other narcissistic type of leaders who get a big following behind them, but really don't have all that much substance to him.

So or he's a lunatic, or he's the Lord.

And Jesus is who he says he is and who he presented himself to be.

If Jesus is in fact Lord, then you cannot follow him a little bit.

If Jesus is Lord, then we cannot just serve him willy-nilly.

There is no following of the Messiah, the Son of the living God, with just a little bit of devotion.

Our culture wants it to be true.

We want to kind of have our cake and eat it too.

We want to be what I would call a casual Christian in our culture.

We want to have the nice feelings about Christianity without the demands of discipleship.

We want the love and grace parts of Jesus without those parts where he tells us that we're going to have to deny ourselves and take up our cross daily in order to follow him.

We want the promise of heaven without Jesus telling us stuff like we have to turn the other cheek and love our enemies and not go to war.

Jesus is looking us in the eye today and asking us, who do you say I am?

Now we are not going to have this response perfectly cooked up.

Sometimes in the way we think about faith, I feel like we feel like we're supposed to have all of our ducks in a row first or have all of the right answers.

Maybe in your life at some point this stopped you from being connected in a church community because you felt like you had to have your stuff together first before you came here, not realizing that every single person next to you and around you also doesn't have their stuff together, including the people leading you up front, right?

But sometimes we think we're supposed to have it all together and have all the right answers, but that's not what Jesus says happened to Peter.

When we are open to it, God gives us understanding in order to respond.

God gives us the answer to the question that Peter is asked.

And so Jesus tells Peter that he is blessed because his response could not have been any type of human response, but was only given by God.

Have you ever felt compelled by the Holy Spirit to do something?

Maybe that's why you're sitting here at this church today.

At some point, God compelled you to connect to a church.

Or God compelled you to get back into a church community.

Perhaps you've experienced the wooing tug of God.

When I was 13, I experienced this tug on my heart so distinctly.

I could tell you the long story of it another time, but this was a time when I felt a calling into ministry, and it was also a time when God was drawing my heart deeper into God's own heart.

In our Methodist language, we call this movement of God prevenient grace.

If you haven't been in confirmation class for a while, or maybe never took it, I want you to say that word with me.

Prevenient grace.

Prevenient grace.

It means that God is acting in our lives before we even know it.

That God is wooing us and calling us deeper into God's own life before we can conjure it up ourselves.

That's what happened to Peter here.

Peter confessed what was true about Jesus with God's help.

So Jesus gives Peter a new name in this place.

He says, I tell you, you are rock.

Okay?

Peter's name just simply meant rock.

So every time it says Peter in your Bible, it should probably just read rock.

This is the first time that we know of in that culture where someone was given the name Rock.

It wasn't a very common name.

But Jesus indeed gives Peter authority in this moment.

We're not going to get into the finer points of historical church debate here.

For it was at this moment when Jesus says, I tell you, you are Peter, you are rock, and on this rock I will build my church.

This is the moment when Roman Catholics believe that Peter was given the authority as the first Pope.

But what we are going to do is get into what this means for us.

Because just like Peter represents all of us in his direct response to Jesus' question, so Jesus' empowerment of Peter is not just for him.

This empowerment that Jesus gives is for his church.

This is the first time that Jesus uses the word church in any of the Gospels, and he only uses it one other time in Matthew.

And Jesus gives his church great assurance and great responsibility.

He promises that the church will never die.

It will live on past Jesus and past the disciples.

This is what it means when Jesus says the gates of Hades will not prevail against the church.

Jesus is saying that death cannot stop the church and its power.

This was not a statement about the powers of hell and darkness, but was Jesus making a proclamation about how his followers would still be following him and doing what we are doing today.

When I ponder this fact that Jesus knew that his followers would far outlast him and that we would be worshiping in his name to this day, I am quite amazed.

I'm quite humbled that the church carries on this ministry of Jesus.

When Jesus gives Peter the power, he says, to bind and to loose.

It is something that two chapters later he grants to all of his followers.

In Jewish terms, this binding and loosing was Jesus' way of talking about his relationship to the law of Moses.

There were some things that Jesus was loosing.

Remember when the Pharisees and leaders got really mad when the disciples were plucking heads of grain on the Sabbath?

And Jesus says, don't bother with that, right?

Or another time when they got mad at Jesus, when he was healing people on the Sabbath.

And he basically said, What's the point of the law anyway?

to the leaders.

So there's some things he says that could be loosened, that could be let go.

But then he says there are other things that need to be bound.

Things where adherence to the law is super important because they are indeed binding.

Some of these mosaic requirements reflected the very heart of the law.

Jesus is saying that the church has the power to do this work of Jesus, to enact in our day and age the power of Jesus' good news for the world around us, to interpret and to reimagine what it means to follow Jesus in the world that we live in today.

So as followers of Jesus, we are invited to be in constant dialogue with Jesus.

And Jesus is looking at his church in the eye and asking, who do you say I am?

And he is not looking for a repetition or response for you to say, well, we believe in Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord, who is begotten of the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffering under Pontius Pilate, right?

That's not the answer that he is looking for.

He is looking for a life that is open to be drawn into God's very life.

And Jesus doesn't just stop at our right confession.

He gives us, his church, the power and the responsibility to be his body in the world.

Peter and the other disciples would not understand this fully until Jesus rose and ascended.

But, church, we are called to do a 360 view of ourselves.

For when Jesus asks, who do you say I am?

He is asking how the whole of our life together is a picture of God's kingdom.

Not just North Raleigh United Methodist Church, but the Big C church, all kinds of denominations and non-denominations from all around the world.

Our life together is a picture of God's kingdom.

It is hard to overemphasize how important the work of the church is.

And I'm not saying this just because I'm one of its leaders.

I'm not saying this to perpetuate the institution.

At our core, the church, as y'all know, is not about this hour in this building.

The church is all of our life together showing the world what God is like.

The good thing is that we don't have to do this just by trying to be good or by committing ourselves even more.

The good news is that God will draw us deeper into God's life and empower us in this way of Jesus.

Friends, God is not just making you and me into reflections of Him.

God is also binding us together and making us, God's church, an image of God for the world.

So may God, the Holy Spirit, compel us into the pattern of life that comes with being God's agent and God's ambassador in the world.

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

Amen.