Anyone else feel like the text this week is a little bit of scriptural whiplash? Just last week, in the verses immediately preceding these ones, Jesus told Peter, “you are the Rock, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.” And here, Jesus says to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan”? That was a quick transition!
Honestly, quick transitions like this is one of the reasons I love Peter as a model of faith. He’s just so stinking relatable! One minute Peter totally gets it, he’s flying high, he’s got Jesus and faith and being a super guy all figured out, and the next minute he’s wrong-headedly blundering in the wrong direction. Keep your pious, perfect, never-faltering faith heroes for yourself, Peter is a guy I get.
It’s also worth remembering that we have an advantage on Peter, knowing the end of the story. That Jesus suffered, died, and was raised is the central point of our faith. We call it Easter and we celebrate it every year. Stores sell marshmallows shaped like chicks and bunnies to help you remember. But for Peter, this is the first time he’s heard of this whole death and resurrection plan. Put yourself in Peter’s shoes, if someone you loved and respected, someone who you thought was the savior of the world, came up to you and said, I’m going to suffer and be killed, but then I’m going to rise from the dead,” what do you think your initial response would be? Peter’s rebuke is also a prayer, a plea to God on Jesus’ behalf. “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.”
What Peter wanted was for Jesus to be who Jesus had said he was going to be, whom Peter had just confessed Jesus to be, the Messiah, the Son of the living God. Peter and Jesus had the same goal in mind. The problem wasn’t Peter’s intentions; the problem was how that intention played out in the world. Peter and Jesus both wanted Jesus’ mission on earth to succeed, they just had very different understandings of what success look like.
Before we get too far into this, I want to pause for one moment for a brief bit of introduction. Our reading for this morning started “from that time on,” indicating a shift in focus. Up until this point, Jesus’ ministry was a public one, traveling around Galilee and the surround regions preaching, teaching, and healing crowds. With this reading, the ministry takes a radical shift. From here until chapter twenty, so for us the month of September, Jesus is speaking only to the disciples. There are some mentions of crowds but they are only in the periphery, the teachings are for the disciples alone. It is important to make this distinction, because the teachings Jesus gives in the next couple of weeks are going to be tough. Jesus has some hard words for his disciples about how they, how we, are to live in the world. So we need to remember that this is insider knowledge. These are not restrictions Jesus put up for those who want to become his followers; these are the lofty expectations of those who already are his followers.
For Peter, and for most if not all of those who followed Jesus, being the Messiah meant Jesus was preparing to ride into Jerusalem with a conquering army to repel the Roman invaders and restart a new Kingdom of Israel in the model of King David. It was a vision of glory and power, which, if the disciples played their cards right, would also include some of them in positions of power and authority in the newly coming ruling elite. Wealth, power, glory, military might, these are the very human idea of Messiahship that Peter and the others were expecting. But Jesus, the king born of an unwed mother, whose companions were fishermen and tax collectors, who came from the backwaters of Galilee, Jesus knew that Messiahship was a very different endeavor. Being the savior of the world was not about military might or worldly power. The empire that would fall was not Rome, but the reign of death itself. Success, Jesus knew, was to be found in a cross, the paradoxical truth that strength dwells in weakness and something has to die in order for something else to live.
And I relate to Peter because while I know this intellectually, while I know that God’s strength is displayed in Christ’s weakness, and that life is found only through death. While I know intellectually that God’s ways are not our ways, I find that I still struggle to understand what that means. And it takes readings like this, and the conversations and events that happen while I’m dwelling on these readings, to help me reorient my focus again.
For example, this week I was thinking about what success looks like as a church. Last week, I had the bishop over to my home for lunch between our service and the installation. We were sitting on the couch talking, and he remarked again about how excited the synod is about all of the things we are doing as a congregation, the ways we are committed to living out our faith in the world. “I’m glad to hear that,” I remarked, “I just wish we were growing.” He and I talked a little bit about why our outreach efforts haven’t seemed to have much effect on our worshiping community, and he encouraged me that the synod believes that the work we are doing in this place matters. His words were encouraging, but the fact is no small part of my salary comes from the ELCA, and while the ELCA continues to affirm their faith in us, I still struggle with doubt around wondering if I am deserving of their money. If the trendline on our worship attendance tells the story, I wonder if I’m doing enough.
So I was feeling that over the weekend. But then this week a couple of things happened that left me realizing that it’s possible that our worship attendance trendline is not the story, and that measure I had placed on success may not be God’s measure of success.
The first thing happened in a conversation with Teresa. I’d agreed to go somewhere with a Co-op member for moral support, and since she was under Teresa’s caseload, as a professional courtesy, I wanted to let Teresa know what I was doing. We were standing in the hallway chatting, and I told her what I was doing. “I don’t need anything from you on this,” I told her. “I just wanted to keep you in the loop, since she’s one of yours.” Teresa stopped me, “she came to you on this one, she’s not just one of mine, she’s also one of yours.”
She’s one of mine. I hadn’t thought of it this way before, but Teresa was right. I am this woman’s pastor, just as much as I am your pastor. She’s probably not ever going to come to church on a Sunday. I’ve invited her, but organ music just isn’t her jam. Which I get, one of the reason I think denominations are helpful and important is because people need different styles of worship to connect with God. There are plenty of congregations I’ve visited who’s mission’s I’ve loved, that I haven’t wanted to attend regularly, because their style of worship didn’t speak to me. That’s not a knock on them or me, it’s just that how I connect with God is different than that. But back to the point, just because she doesn’t come to worship on Sundays, and thus isn’t changing our worship attendance trendline, doesn’t mean that she isn’t a part of our congregation, isn’t encountering the living God through us and through this community. She is a part of the expanding kingdom of God in this place. It isn’t success that shows up in metrics, but it is success, it is a story of outreach that needs to be told. And I’m grateful that Teresa could help me see that.
The other thing happened while Wayne and I were outside with a bunch of kids for Freeze Pop Tuesday, deep in the midst of chaos as usual. I love Freeze Pop Tuesday, but, again, I wonder if it’s really making a difference. Does it matter that once a week I send a bunch of kids home with a high-fructose corn syrup induced sugar high? Sure we gave out fifty freeze pops last week, but what does that matter in the grand scheme of things? I was pondering these things again on Tuesday, while all around me kids were yelling, coloring with chalk, throwing beanbags at each other, and generally having a grand time. When suddenly, a dog showed up at the cooler, as if asking for a freeze pop. This was not, I will add, the dog that came to worship last summer. This was a new dog, a small, short-haired, white thing, very friendly. She came bounding right up in the middle of us, distracting the kids from their chaos as I tried to figure out who’s dog it was and what exactly I was supposed to do with our new four-legged friend, on top of the fifteen or so kids pegging beanbags at each other. After a few minutes, much to my great relief, the neighbor across the street came out to collect his wayward pet. We chatted for a bit, and as he turned to leave he off-handedly mentioned. “By the way, thanks for all you guys have done with the kids this summer. It’s great to see them having somewhere to go.”
These kids have somewhere to go. That’s success. Do I wish they’d not just come and eat pizza, but stayed for family camp. Yes, I wish that, but they came, that’s a start. Do I wish they’d come to worship, bring their parents, and become involved, growing our membership, yeah, I do. But that’s what I want. That’s not necessarily the mark of success. Success, the across-the-street neighbor reminded me, is this group of kids knows that this is a place where they are welcome and accepted. Where we may ask them not to throw tomatoes at each other, but we’ll welcome them back even if they do, and we’ll help them clean them up again, even offer to send them home with fresh tomatoes. These kids may not come through the door of the church yet, but they are still our kids. They are still the expanding kingdom of God in this place. And I’m grateful to the neighbor for reminding me of that.
This October we will celebrate the five-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation. But we also seem to be standing on the edge of a new reformation. The church as we know it is changing, dear people. And much like what happened at the time of Luther, I think there is good reason to believe that the church of twenty or maybe even only ten years from now will look nothing like the church of today. And in this world of shifting priorities, the identifiers of what it meant to be thriving and relevant Christian community may no longer be what they once were. But here’s what this passage, and the life of Peter, promise us. God’s ways are not our ways. God’s vision of success does not match ours. Some things we hold dear may have to die so that other things can live. But in the amazing, inexplicable paradox of faith, it is in losing that we will find ourselves, and in dying that new life takes hold. The experience of Peter shows us that this transition is a painful, frightening, and uncomfortable journey. But it also shows us that the rewards are more than we ever imagined. Dear friends in Christ, it is truly a great time to be the church. Amen.
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