A sermon from the Rev. Linda Mackie Griggs, on Matthew 16:13-20

 

I first read this question in William Sloane Coffin, Jr’s book, Letters to a Young Doubter, about ten years ago, early in my discernment process. It was one of those instances when you encounter something that hits you at just the right time, with just the right balance of challenge and comfort to be formative. It wasn’t until much later (this past week, actually,) that I discovered that Coffin didn’t just toss that question out one time for his book: It was his signature question.

Coffin, who died in 2006, was a passionate social and political activist, senior minister at Riverside Church in New York City, and Yale University Chaplain. He asked this question in various contexts on a regular basis. Whether he was talking about politics, religion or education, this was invariably the basis of whatever he had to say.

“Who tells you who you are?”

In many ways it’s a rhetorical question, isn’t it? When a person of deep faith and authority looks you in the eye and asks you that question, you know what the answer should be—but the process of answering can be a journey in itself, and it may not be a comfortable one.

How you ponder in the silence after the question mark; the answer you ultimately give can have a profound effect on your life going forward; on your very identity.

“Who tells you who you are?” is another way of asking a bleaker question:

“Who are you—really?”

It’s not a coincidence that Coffin’s words echo Jesus’ questions in today’s gospel. This passage is foundational in many ways.

Both Matthew and Mark record this episode, wherein Jesus asks the disciples about his identity, but Matthew expands on Mark’s original—and earlier–depiction of Simon Peter’s response to Jesus’ pointed question, “Who do YOU say that I am?” In Mark’s Gospel, Simon’s response is simply, “You are the Christ.” But in Matthew’s version, Simon blurts out, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.” This is serious Christology and Matthew needs to spell it out: Jesus is the Anointed One spoken of by the prophets, directly connected to God as God’s son. In other words, Matthew’s project as encapsulated in the words of Simon Peter is to establish Jesus’ identity.

And what happens next?

In Jesus’ response to Simon, Matthew again expands on Mark. Whereas Mark writes only that Jesus says to speak of his identity to no one, Matthew augments this with a statement that is pure ecclesiology—a foundational declaration of both Simon’s and the church’s identity: “You are Peter and upon this rock, I will build my church…” Much of the argument for Apostolic Succession was built on these words; Peter was the first authority of the Church for “binding and loosing”—that is, for the establishing and teaching of doctrine. This passage is of specific interest to the Roman Catholic Church; Peter’s keys to the kingdom are a papal symbol. Of course, there are other households of the Christian faith who have argued since the Protestant Reformation that papal authority is not the only Christian authority. Nevertheless, the point made here about the establishment of the authority and identity of the Body of Christ, even as it ends up being interpreted in different ways, can be traced to this statement in Matthew.

But doctrinal Christology and ecclesiology aside, this passage is rich with still more to ponder about identity. Let’s think a little more about Peter. For all that he is given the keys of the Kingdom, we (as so often happens) find ourselves wondering about God’s choice of a standard bearer for the Church. Peter is extraordinarily prone to stick his size 10 fisherman’s foot in his mouth and will do so again in just two verses when he tries to rebuke Jesus for foretelling his crucifixion. And in response to this rebuke Jesus will call Peter Satan and a hindrance; an inauspicious beginning for the Rock of the Church…

So what are we to think of this? What does Jesus see in this impetuous disciple? Pastor and preacher Jin S. Kim says that what distinguishes Peter in his confession of Jesus as Messiah isn’t so much his righteousness or his rightness but his testimony; his willingness to articulate how he experiences Jesus and God in that moment. “Who do you say that I am?” In other words, Jesus says, “How do you understand and experience me, my teaching and my witness in the world?”

Peter’s response in that moment of clarity, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God,” serves, then, not just to identify Jesus, but it also becomes a statement of Peter’s identity as well.

Testimony

This is the kind of thing that makes many Episcopalians feel a little squirmy. Testimony, for us, is best left in the courtroom. But we are invited here to seriously consider how we experience Jesus and God in our lives. That testimony, even if we don’t stand on the street corner and shout it to the world, and only whisper it to ourselves, reveals a lot about who we are and who we are called to be. Our identity.

“For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.”

Peter’s testimony regarding Jesus’ identity is rooted in his understanding of the God who calls him into relationship and discipleship. In that moment of clarity, he knows who tells him who he is: It is Jesus, Messiah, the son of the Living God who calls him Peter, the rock of the Body of Christ.

That has got to be a humbling realization. To be confronted with the fact of his identity in God—to know that all the other things that he thought defined who he is are peanuts by comparison—nothing. He is not defined by his occupation, his status, his looks, his possessions. Not by his successes, and thank God not by his failures or regrets either.

Who tells you who you are, Peter? Grace. Grace tells me.

That’s the kind of thing that can knock you to your knees.

Peter’s testimony was a moment of connection and realization, and it would define him until his martyrdom years later. But it was only the beginning of a long and bumpy road, much like that of the Church, which has encountered its share of both glory and shame. But God keeps finding ways to bring us back to the signature question of who—and whose—we truly are.

I recently saw a picture on social media. It was a photo of a young man in Charlottesville during the chaos of that Saturday three weeks ago. In the picture, this young white man stood alone and shirtless on a street corner. A documentary filmmaker had observed him crying out for help as he tore off his white polo shirt, which is part of the uniform of one of the White Supremacist groups. He didn’t want anyone to hurt him, he said. He said he hadn’t really meant it—that he was just doing it for fun.

The filmmaker, C.J. Hunt, made an outstanding point about this young man as he walked away and faded into the crowd. He wrote of the privilege of being able to disappear—to be able to shed one’s identity in order to be safe. Hunt noted that people of color don’t share that privilege. I found this argument to be both compelling and convicting.

But I also saw something else as I looked at that picture of that young man, and I have to say it was a challenging realization. Because in that simple image I experienced a different moment of clarity from what Mr. Hunt had so eloquently observed.

I saw in that young man in that instant—if only an instant—the naked vulnerability of each and every human being in the eyes of a God who loves and calls them. I saw the face of a scared young man as though he has just heard someone ask, “Who tells you who you are?” and who has just been confronted with the answer. And it scares the heck out of him.

Because when you realize the identity of who it is who calls you, it can transform you, and that can be scary.

I don’t know if that’s what happened to the young man in the picture. Sadly and realistically I doubt it, because life is complicated and painful, and it doesn’t always provide us with neat little stories packaged with happy endings. But for a second there was a vision—maybe a little like the corona of Monday’s eclipse—a vision of the arc of history bending through these troubled days. Bending us toward discipleship. Bending the Church closer to the Beloved Community. Bending the universe, by grace, toward justice, reconciliation, and hope.

Who tells you who you are? Who tells the Church who we are? And how will we respond?

Musings on the experience of reading the Bible

I find the Bible a tough read, even the good bits. So there I’ve said it. To say this makes me feel bad, especially when I am insisting that my community engages with The Bible Challenge, a 360-day reading program encompassing the entire Bible. But I will get back to why this is also important, later.

The truth is I feel guilty about the Bible and my attitude towards it. How can I feel this way towards something I also believe to be an inspired vehicle for God’s communication? Donald Winnicott is one of my psychoanalytic heroes. He was that rare man, a psychoanalyst and also a pediatrician. This gave him a unique aspect

Donald Winnicott is one of my psychoanalytic heroes. He was that rare man, a psychoanalyst and also a pediatrician. This gave him a unique aspect on early infant development.

Winnicott believed that the emergence of guilt marked an important milestone in human infant development. Guilt, he explained, was the development of the realization of having damaged what is also most loved. Remorse, repentance, sorrow, and a capacity for healing through the process of reparation are all dependent on a capacity for guilt.

For so-called modern Christians, previous generational emphasis on punishment makes a healthy acceptance of guilt more difficult. Thus, mainline Christians like Episcopalians tend nowadays to deemphasize the importance of guilt. According to our therapeutic deism guilt and punishment no longer matter to the God of love, gentle in all his ways.

So much religion equates guilt with the dire fate of Penny Pingleton in John Water’s 1988 musical Hairspray. Penny’s mother Prudence has a real old time religion approach to the raising of her daughter: 

Penny Pingleton, you know you are punished. From now on you’re wearing a giant P on your blouse every day to school so that the whole world knows that Penny Pingleton is permanently, positively, punished.

Our attempt to get away from the image of ourselves permanently wearing a giant P has led us to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Because the problem is that abolishing guilt is as spiritually damaging as responding to it with threats of punishment. By eradicating guilt we’ve tried to communicate an image of God as never wanting us to feel bad. The God of therapeutic deism – our contemporary heresy, is a God who is all understanding and non-judgmental. No matter how we are attracted to this self-projection onto God, this is not the Christian vision of God.

The crucial role of guilt in spiritual development

As Winnicott explained, feeling guilt arises when the infant reaches the developmental stage of connecting up its damaging, aggressive feelings with its loving, protective feelings. It discovers that the mother who frustrates it and provokes hatred is the same mother it desperately seeks to preserve through its power to love. The growing child thus learns about accountability and the predominance of love over hate.

I feel guilty about finding the Bible a tough read because at the edge of my conscious awareness I fear my attitude damages my relationship with the God I deeply love. I’ve been taught that this makes me bad, and punishment is what awaits bad boys and girls.

I want a nice God, a God who is forgiving but gentle with it. So when I turn to the pages of the Bible I am confronted with a not nice God. I find there a God who does not easily fit with my expectations and this leaves me feeling guilty – after all, it’s not meant to be this way, surely I must have misunderstood.

Maybe this explains my attraction to traditions that sit lightly to Bible reading outside of the weekly liturgy. The fact is that reading the Bible is the fastest way to really challenge one’s own self-projection onto God. Throughout the pages of the Bible God simply refuses to act according to our expectations and play nice.

Those of us at St Martin’s, who have been persevering with The Bible Challenge, will on Monday arrive at day 93. Along the way, we have waded through some pretty tedious and gruesome stuff. Recently in the Bible, the book of Joshua’s depiction of Israel’s genocide of the Canaanites as God’s chosen instrument gives way to the same storylines, now retold through the lens of the book of Judges. If we detect Judges retelling the Joshua story let’s not be too hasty and skip over. If we do we will miss noting that the two books tell two different versions of the same story of the settlement of the Promised Land. Joshua presents it as a blitzkrieg campaign during which no quarter is given to the poor old Canaanites. However, Judges presents it as a long process of gradual infiltration with the Israelites winning some and losing some. The end result is a picture of assimilation, with Canaanites living cheek by jowl with Israelites.

The book of Joshua’s unremitting chronicle of slaughter, worthy of a Viking Saga or from the Game of Thrones gives way to a more complex picture in which the tensions of fidelity to the old ways and assimilation into newfangled ones – an age-old story, forms the central narrative. It’s interesting to note that modern archaeology tends to confirm the Judges version.

Here is an interesting thing about the Bible. When we read through the lens of modern expectations of reading either descriptive truth or even reliable history, we get bogged down at the level of the words on the page. Read as descriptive truth or somewhat vague yet reliable history the words describe events that outrage our modern expectations of a loving God, gentle in all his ways. Yet, if we raise our eyes from the words on the page and pay attention to the directional flow of the narrative, e.g. take-in the story flow from Joshua to Judges, we begin to catch a glimpse of the shape of the forest above the tree line, a forest stretching towards the horizon.

If the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice it’s because the Judeo-Christian epic bends it in that direction.

It’s something of an overstatement, but not much of one to say that the consistent directional narrative of the Bible concerns the keeping of promises. The repeating plot line is one of the covenant -the reciprocity of promise keeping. The ups and downs in the relationship between God and the Chosen People chronicle the repetitive cycles of remembering and forgetting promises. Things go well when the people remember their promise to worship the Lord. Things go badly when they forget God and stray into worshiping other gods. All the while the long epic of the relationship is moving towards greater inclusion under laws of justice and mercy, thus bending the arc of the universe towards justice.

Hypothesis put to the test

The hardening of the Jews against receiving the revelation of Jesus as the Messiah was one of the deep pains of the Apostle Paul’s life. Romans, chapter 11 brings his exploration begun in chapter 9 of the fate of the Jews in a post-Jesus world to a climax.

I ask then, has God rejected his people? Hell no! ….For the promises of God are irrevocable.

Paul arrives at a somewhat unsatisfactory conclusion that: 

God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.

Paul’s confidence in the mercy and love of God rests on his refusal to accept that God can be unfaithful, for God keeps promises whether or not we keep our end of the covenantal bargain. We may not like the results, and Paul choked on Jewish rejection of Jesus, he could not conceive of God going back on his promise to Israel. Although God desires that we keep our promises also, the point is not so much to be faithful in return but to trust that no matter what we do, God is always trustworthy. Wanting desperately for some clarity on who’s in and who’s out of God’s favor, Paul has to settle for living in the tension of contradiction.

We read in Matthew 15 of Jesus dispute with the Pharisees about ritual practice. The Pharisees seem to be taking the position that performing the purification rituals rendered one spiritually clean. Jesus contends that these are simply external practices that at best confirm the internal state of purity. It’s not what we eat or drink that defiles us, but the words and actions the emanate from an impure heart.

Note that when Jesus is in the Jewish heartland this is the kind of disputation he is confronted by – wrangling over rules. Contrastingly, he then travels among the gentiles and here he encounters another kind of disputation with a woman Matthew archaically refers to as a Canaanite woman.

Now, the Canaanites had long since departed the historical scene by Jesus’ time. From our reading of Joshua and Judges we are immediately alert to the way Matthew wants to project the historical tension between Israelite and Canaanite into the current context of Jew and Gentile with a new twist in mind.

At first, Jesus rejects the woman’s claims on him reciting that God’s promises are exclusive to Israel only. Seemingly for us, he uses the very offensive Jewish metaphors of giving the children’s (read Jews) food to the dogs (read gentiles). It’s her response that startles him and maybe we catch a glimpse of Jesus learning on the job. She takes his line of reasoning and pushes it in a new direction. She boldly asks, do not the dogs eat of the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table? Is this a new insight for Jesus, being confronted by the expansion of God’s promises? Whether or not, we see the application of his earlier teaching to his disciples on the nature of spiritual acceptability. God is not only faithful to his promises but he desires to extend them to new, hitherto unacceptable and excluded groups.

The text is always written by the authors for those of the generation who first read what is written.

Why read the Bible, especially the early books of the Torah? In them, we read page after page of the violent practices of tribal exclusion. We read about an image of God that we vehemently protest is not our image of God. But me think we protesteth too much. As current events swirl around us, the surfacing of tribal memories assail us. Animosities we thought long since transcended raise their ugly heads again. White tribalism, racism, and anti-Semitism dare to speak their names once again upon the civic stage.

The text is always written by the authors for those of the generation who first read what is written. There are three contextual aspects to keep in mind as we read Scripture. The first is the context described in the text itself. The second is the context within which the text is actually written. The third is our contemporary context readers. Scripture is written for the writers and their context. The story’s setting is a fiction constructed to confront the generation who author and first read the text. Whatever mythological events described, and whatever the authors of the text intended to convey, as contemporary readers we have our own context. How does the text inform us about ourselves and our unacknowledged projections into God?

Context 1. The books of Joshua and Judges describe the conquest of the Promised Land, now shrouded in the mists of time. Primitive tribal nomads, as a rule, do not write down their experience. At best, they record their experience in oral stories, repeated by word of mouth. All generations project themselves onto the blank canvas presented by God. So we should not be surprised that Moses and Joshua’s God is remarkably like them.

Context 2. Scholarship now indicates that the books of Joshua and Judges were written down during the period after the fall of Jerusalem in 586 during the prolonged experience of captivity in Babylon and Persia. Joshua and Judges make their appeal to a captive people who are struggling to hold onto their identity after the destruction of nation and Temple. The message is, don’t lose faith, do to not forget their glorious past. God’s faithfulness and Israel’s unfaithfulness are incisions that cut to the heart of the experience of captivity. The books encourage a people at the darkest point to remember how in the past God has blessed them. This is a call to turn away from disobedience and return to God as their ancestors did.

Context 3. As we read the history of the Israelites and their struggles with God, let’s not be too hasty to rush to judgment. Do we not see more of ourselves in these pages than we might care to admit? Are we not a people with genocide in our history? Does not our history of the institution of slavery continue to disturb and disrupt the security of our identity as a people? As the greatest military superpower, is there not a deep contradiction between how we see ourselves and the perception other nations have of us?

The text is often an uncomfortable mirror.

Reading Joshua and Judges provides us with a larger context that aids our introspection so that better prepared and forewarned, our own primitive Israelite likeness, lurking just beyond sight, will not so easily ambush the unwary.