August 23, 2026 | On This Rock

The holy gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to Matthew.

Glory to you, Lord Christ.

Beginning in verse 13.

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, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah, or one of the prophets.

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

Simon Peter replied, You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.

And Jesus answered him, Blessed are you, Simon Barjonah, flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.

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

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

Then he strictly charged his disciples to tell no one that he was the Christ.

The gospel of the Lord.

Praise to you, Lord Christ.

Please be seated.

Well, it is good as always for Nancy and me to be back with the St.

Paul's family and uh to worship the living God together.

It's always a joy uh to be with you.

Um the last time I was here, you were just a couple weeks on the other side of saying goodbye to your founding longtime rector.

And this time I'm here, and you're just a couple weeks away from saying hello to your new rector and his family.

God is good, and I know and trust, as do you, that he has really good things in store uh for St.

Paul's and to look forward to actually being back in October when I believe we have a date set for the formal institution uh of your new rector.

So we're gonna open God's word together and just please pray with me uh as we do that.

Father God, we do bless you and thank you for this day.

I thank you, Lord, for this people, for St.

Paul's, for the ways that your hand has moved in the midst of this transition.

And we pray, Lord, that we might keep our eyes fixed on you, that we might see and experience uh the grace and the fullness of your spirit.

Uh and we look forward with anticipation, Lord, to this new season and those good things that you desire and are doing in our midst.

And I pray it in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So I would say these moments that I just described are defining moments uh in the life of St.

Paul's, but I'd also say that all of us actually have defining moments in our own stories and in our own lives.

Moments that occurred, moments of experience that really changed the trajectory of our lives.

Perhaps it was when we fell in love for the first time.

Perhaps it was when we made a choice about a certain vocational path or gained some insight into who we are and our identity.

Perhaps it was when we faced some enormous challenge in our life, some difficulty in which God shaped us in a new way.

Well, I want to say in our gospel reading that we just heard from Matthew, Jesus' disciples were experiencing one of these defining moments.

And it was a moment that was initiated by Jesus.

And the way that he initiated it was by asking questions, which Jesus did so often.

He asked first, he said, Who do people say that I am?

And they said, Well, some say you're John the Baptist come back, or Elijah, or Jeremiah, or one of the prophets.

It was easy to talk about what other people say, but then Jesus turned and looked his disciples square in the eye, and he asked them, But whom do you say that I am?

And that became for them a defining moment.

The place that Jesus asked this question is also very interesting.

He didn't ask the question in Jerusalem, where you might think, or Bethlehem or Nazareth, or one of the places that he frequented.

He actually asked it in a place that he rarely went to.

It was a town on the northern edge where Jesus' ministry ever took him, about 25 miles north of the Sea of Galilee.

It was a place called Caesarea Philippi.

And last October, Nancy and I had the privilege of actually taking a group, and there was some really brave souls and dear souls right from St.

Paul's that went with us, and we were able to go to this place, Caesarea Philippi.

And it's an interesting place.

It was renamed by Philip.

It wasn't that nice of him.

He named the place after himself, but he realized he couldn't be too boastful, so he he included Caesar in it because he was under Caesar in Rome, so it became Caesarea Philippi.

But before it was Caesarea Philippi, it was a town called Panaus or Baniaeus with a B, and it was named that because it was the location of the Roman Greco pagan worship of the god Pan.

It was named after a pagan god.

And before it was a place of Roman Greco pagan worship, it was a place where Baal was worshipped way back in the Old Testament story.

The Baals, the other gods.

There was a big rocky cliff which we saw, which had these little kind of windows which represented all these different gods that were being worshipped by this people.

And at the base of this rocky cliff was an abyss of water, which the people believed was the abode of the dead.

That was where people went, and there was some kind of passage between the place where the dead were and the living.

And so it was, listen to this.

This was the place that Jesus took his disciples to ask the defining question.

Whom do you say that I am?

And I want to say that that world is not really very much different than the world that we live in.

We live in a world where there's all kinds of gods that are worshipped.

We live in a world where God's and religion is synchronized and people get to choose what their religion is.

And you can listen to Oprah and get one version.

You can go with New Age spirituality.

You can just take what you like from whatever, put it together, and you can have your own belief system.

And that was the same world that Jesus lived in.

And in the midst of that, he took his disciples to this place and he asked them the question, Who do you say that I am?

And what Jesus is doing is he's really bursting the bubble of synchronism, where people do just kind of do what they want and claim what they want in this marketplace of religion.

And he's introducing with this question an absolute into the face of all the subjectivity of the culture around him.

And it was Simon who answered the question.

He said, You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.

And Jesus responded to him, Blessed are you, Simon Barjona, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my father in heaven.

You see, Simon didn't figure it out.

It was revealed, it was gift, it was grace, it was the movement of the Holy Spirit.

The Father revealed to Simon in that moment that the one standing before them asking this question is none other than the hoped-for Messiah of Israel.

The one that the people of God and the prophets of God for generations had longed would come and redeem his people.

He was none other, Simon says, than the Son of the Living God.

And he made that bold pronouncement, and the Lord affirmed it.

It was for Simon a defining moment.

It was also a name-changing moment because Jesus changed his name at that very moment.

He said, No longer are you Simon, but I will call you Peter, which means rock.

And he says, On this rock, I will build my church.

This confession of who Jesus is.

That's how he builds the church.

Not by fancy programs, not by beautiful music, as much as we love that.

He builds it on the confession of who Jesus is and the reality that Jesus is the Son of the Living God.

And he says, On this rock I will build my church.

As a pastor, as a former church planner, as a bishop, I am so comforted by that reality.

We're not the ones that build the church.

It's not your rector, it's not any of us who build the church.

We get to participate, but it's Jesus who builds his church.

And he builds it on this confession of who he is and the reality of what he has accomplished.

He is our rock.

He is the foundation.

And the truth is all of our lives are being built on something.

Every one of us.

The question is: what is our foundation?

What is our rock?

What is the sand?

What is it that we're building on or have under us?

It's interesting too that Caesarea Philippi was carved out of the rocky cliffs at the base of Mount Hermon.

And Jesus chooses this rocky place to introduce Simon's confession that Jesus is the solid rock upon which he builds his people.

And Jesus goes on to say that the mighty forces, the very gates of hell, will not prevail against it.

That watery abyss, that bode of the dead, that fear of death, none of that will prevail against this Jesus.

One thing we do know is we live in a very shaky world.

We live in a shaky world politically, war and unrest.

Financially, it's shaky, markets go up and down, relationally, marriages break down, families break up.

And it all seems pretty fragile, doesn't it?

And so can't we hear the joy and the promise when Jesus says, on this rock, on this confession, on this reality of who I am and what I've come into this world to accomplish, we have a sure foundation.

We have something that is stable and unshakable.

We have the ground upon which to build our lives.

But it's in the person of Jesus.

Isaiah, we had our first reading from the prophet Isaiah, and he said this in that 51st chapter.

He said, Listen to me, talking, the prophet talking to Israel, you who pursue righteousness, you who seek the Lord, look to the rock from which you were hewn, to the quarry from which you were dug.

Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you.

For he was but one when I called him, that I might bless him and multiply him.

The prophet says, look to the rock from which you were hewn, to the quarry from which you were dug.

And he points them back.

He points them back to the father of faith, to Abraham and to Sarah, his wife, who who bore them.

He points them back to the beginning.

And he said, When I called Abram, he was but one, but but I multiplied him into a great nation.

And what the prophet is saying is that we have a track record with God.

And he's calling the people of Israel to realize that the God who called Abram, the God who took him at an old age and made him the father of a great nation, is the same God that we serve.

And he's saying, look at the track record of what God has done.

Look to the rock from which you were hewn, from the quarry from which you were dug.

And when you do so, know that God is faithful and that what he did for Abram, he will do for Zion.

And the Isaiah goes on to say, he will look with compassion on the ruins.

He will turn the wilderness into Eden.

He will bring joy and gladness once again.

Thanksgiving and sounds of singing will be heard in you once again.

And that was to a devastated people at that time in history.

What about us?

Do we need to hear the encouragement of the prophet to look to the rock from which we were hewn, to the quarry from which we were dug?

Do we look at our lives and our circumstances and see the ruins and the wastelands and the deserts?

That's all Israel could see and experience.

Or do we remember who we are and who we're from?

Do we remember the track record of God in our lives?

Are we shaken and filled with anxiety or worry?

Are we tossed to and fro by the currents of culture and the news on our televisions?

Have we forgotten, as Israel had, what the Apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians and says to us?

He says, For no one can lay a foundation other than that which has been laid, which is Jesus Christ.

It's not a concept, it's not an idea, it's a person.

And that's the rock from which, beloved, that's the rock from which we are hewn.

That is God's track record.

And if we look back to the victory of Christ in the resurrection, we begin to understand who we are.

That what God has said and done and accomplished in Jesus Christ are the very things that He is at work today, even in the midst of the shaky world in which we live.

The prophet was right.

We look to the rock from which we're hewn.

And Jesus said, On this rock I'll build my church, and the very gates of hell will not prevail against it.

Beloved, do you need to look to the rock today?

I don't know why it is, and this is me included, why it is that it's too easy for us to forget who we are in Christ.

But we do.

And when we do, we fall into kind of that shakiness of our circumstances, the fears, and the temporal things of this world.

What I want us to be able to do today is to stand squarely on the rock, on the sure foundation, which is Jesus Christ.

I want us to take hold in this worship as we come to this table in a very tangible way of the rock, the solid identity that's ours in Jesus.

He is the Christ, he is the Son of the living God, and He has secured for us on the cross our lives, our very salvation.

He's been vindicated by the Father in the resurrection.

He is the solid ground upon which we stand, upon which we can build our lives, even in a world that is so wobbly and shaky.

Jesus, ask you and me, whom do you say that I am?

Let me pray.

Father, we do thank you that in Jesus Christ you have revealed your salvation, your grace, your forgiveness.

You have given us your spirit, and He is our rock.

He is the only sure foundation for our lives.

And so, Lord, this morning we invite you to build our lives upon this rock.

May we never forget that our lives have been cut and hewn from His life.

And Lord, move us away from any shaky ground that we find ourselves upon.

Forgive us for ways that we've trusted in anything other than you.

And establish us in your Son that we may live for you and for your glory.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.