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The Second Sunday After The Epiphany
God, whose Son our Savior Jesus Christ is the light of the world: Grant that thy people, illumined by thy Word and Sacraments, may shine with the radiance of Christ’s glory, that he may be known, worshiped, and obeyed to the ends of the earth; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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The Second Sunday After The Epiphany
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Scripture citation(s): Matthew 16:13-19; I Peter 5:1-4
A Sermon by
The Rev. Canon Carl Turner
on
Matthew 16:13-19; I Peter 5:1-4
✛
Who do You Say that I Am?
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A few months ago before I moved to New York I was in Rome and I bumped into not one but several friends including a group of Anglican Army and Navy chaplains newly returned from a tour of Afghanistan and on a de-brief at the Anglican Center. The contrasts between the tents they had been inhabiting in Helmand Province and the Palazzo Doria Pamphili could not be greater. The Palace, where the Anglican Centre is based, is filled with beautiful works of art from the time of Pope Innocent X who died in 1655. Innocent is probably the most mis-named Pope as he spent most of his papacy looking after his grasping family and amassing beautiful works of art or creating them, such as the famous Piazza Novona – however, he was true to his name in one area though, Innocent was the Pope that covered the private parts of all the nude statues in Rome with fig leaves!
Mind you, there is a whole list of historical Pope’s competing for the title of the most sleezy – and there are some characters far worse than the Borgia’s that you may remember from your history lessons at school – such as Benedict IX who died in 1048 and who put the papacy up for auction in order to marry his sweetheart. But the meanest Pope must surely be Stephen VII from the 9th century who was so rotten he exhumed the corpse of his predecessor Pope Formosus and put it on trial – an interesting slant on the ‘right to silence’.
We live in an age of huge contrasts and those who have power are not necessarily the ones to look up to. The abuse of power in the world is one of the most debilitating sins which can have a de-humanizing influence on whole groups of people. And if we ever doubt this we only have to say the word Auschwitz to bring us back to our senses.
Jesus says to his disciples ‘who do people say that the Son of Man is?’ and he gets the stock answers – John the Baptist, Jeremiah – one of the prophets… But Jesus wants to know the kind of relationship that they have with him and not what they think he wants to hear; “Who do you say that I am” and Simon answers immediately, “Thou art the Christ” that is, ‘You are the Messiah – the Son of the Living God”.
Simon is now given his nickname – Peter – from the Greek word for Rock. And here comes our problem; for so many feel that Peter is the rock on which the church is built, that somehow it is on his person that the Church is built. But we forget that this title is given because of Simon’s confession of Jesus as Messiah and Son of God. Could it be that his confession of faith is the rock – not himself. As the collect put it, ‘keep thy Church steadfast upon the rock of this faith.’ Had it been himself then Jesus might have used a very different nickname; for Simon Peter showed very un-rock-liketendencies – clumsily saying the wrong things, abandoning Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, denying him three times at his trial, refusing to believe Mary Magdalene and the women at the tomb, going back to his fishing after the crucifixion and even in the early church, when he had received the gift of the Holy Spirit and became the chief apostle, being swayed by strong opinions, changing his mind and struggling to lead the church so that St Paul reserves one of his most cutting insults to hurl at him. No – if the name was only about the person then Jesus might as well have renamed him more appropriately Sandy – since his faith and his practice was often shifting and all over the place.
My friends, I think this is why Peter is so important and why we can ask for his prayers because his faith was built on his confession of Jesus as Lord and Saviour and not on his own self-importance. Jesus chooses Peter precisely because he is not powerful and his exercise of power will be liberating because it comes from his relationship with the Lord who humbled himself and set Peter an example. As we heard in the epistle today, “taking the oversight thereof, not by constraint, but willingly; not for filthy lucre, but of a ready mind; Neither as being lords over God’s heritage, but being ensamples to the flock”. Peter could only discover the real Jesus after he had discovered his truest self.
The late spiritual giant, Henry Nouwen, spent nine months in a Trappist Monastery searching for something…searching for a deeper understanding of who he was and who he might become.
His spiritual director gave him some important words; he said… “The question is not so much “How to live for the glory of God?” but “How to live who we are, how to make true our deepest self?”
How to make true our deepest self…
or, as his Spiritual director went on to say:
“If the glory of God is not there where I am, where else can it be?”
Finding the glory through our own human frailty.
St Paul writes in his second letter to the Corinthians “But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.” (2 Cor. 7:7)
A few months ago Archbishop Justin visited Pope Francis. In his address to the Holy Father he said “I marvel at the way God guides frail human vessels to be bearers of the message of salvation, leaving us a legacy across hundreds of years, to which we in our time are called to be faithful.”
This clay that is the stuff of our human nature – once taken by God and formed into his likeness can once again be a sign of his glory through our relationship with Jesus Christ who transfigures and transforms. That discovery transformed Peter so much that eventually people even laid the sick in the street in the hope that Peter’s shadow might touch them. But that power came from God and not from Peter’s self-worth and this community of faith here in Fifth Avenue can also be a sign of glory and a place where transformation happens…but only when we confess Jesus as the Christ and Son of God and let go of our own inadequacies.
