The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
August 24, 2008
Matthew 16:13-20

During my vacation in Maine I spent a great deal of time with my friend’s nine-year-old niece. Jossy is British—she’s spent her entire life in London, and she sees the world with British eyes, and hears it with British ears. This led to some rather interesting discussions about language, because even though she and I both speak “English” we speak vastly different versions. Many of our discussions involved pronunciation, and much hilarity ensued as Jossy tried to coach me in “Brit speak” or in her terms, the “proper” way to say things—tomahto instead of tomayto, grahss instead of grass and so forth. But we also found places where our terminology varied even more than our accents—for example, what many of us would call a shopping cart (although I use the southern term “buggy”) she calls a trolley; her biscuit is my cookie and my biscuit is her scone; chips are crisps and French fries are chips, and after dinner, instead of asking for dessert, she’d say, “What’s for pudding?”

We often take it for granted that those of us who speak the same language share a common vocabulary, that when we use particular words, their meaning will be clear to those who hear them. Those of us who write—whether it’s sermons or newsletter articles or speeches or novels—choose our words carefully, relying on this common vocabulary to help us achieve our goals. But as my conversations with Jossy revealed, even when we speak the same language we may not always have a common understanding of the words we use.

Today’s gospel recounts a critical exchange between Jesus and his disciples, an exchange whose meaning hinges on the understanding of two such words—messiah and church. For modern Christians the meaning of these words seems obvious—so obvious, in fact, that they risk losing their impact. But for the disciples and for those who first heard Matthew’s gospel, these two words had very different connotations. Examining these words more closely and thinking about what they meant in their original context, might also bring us to a fresh understanding of what it means for us to call Jesus “Messiah” and to be part of this thing we call church.

When our gospel begins, Jesus and his disciples have been on the road; they’ve traveled north into the region of Caesarea Philippi, an essentially pagan region, after having spent time in Galilee teaching and preaching and healing and performing miracles. Now Jesus pauses to take stock, asking his disciples, “Who do the crowds say that I am?” and then, “But who do YOU say that I am?” Simon answers by saying, “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God,” and Jesus responds approvingly, blessing Simon and calling him Peter, a word that means “rock,” adding that, “on this rock I will build my church.”

From our perspective, this passage might seem perfectly clear. We understand the messiah to be the Son of God, the one sent for our salvation, the one who died on the cross for us and who was raised from the dead. And we are intimately acquainted with the institution that the church has become, and with the role that Simon Peter played in its formation in the months and years following the resurrection, a role chronicled in the book of Acts. But for the disciples, all this was yet to be worked out.

For the disciples, the word “messiah” –“christos” in the Greek – literally meant “anointed one.” Religious figures were anointed, but so were kings; being anointed was a mark of status. For a first century audience, the word messiah was a word of hope, a word denoting the human deliverer promised by God, the one who would restore the nation of Israel to the glory and independence it had enjoyed under the reign of David. Messiah was thus a word with political as well as religious overtones for a people subject to the rule of Rome. Peter identifies Jesus as the messiah and as the son of the living God, the God of Israel, but as we will hear in next week’s gospel, he will continue to struggle with what that really means as Jesus persists in telling the disciples about what is to come and what it means to be a disciple. And after Jesus’ death and resurrection, the early Christ-followers had to come to grips with the notion of a salvation that didn’t include the restoration of Israel’s power and status. Only over time did our understanding of what it meant for Jesus to be the messiah, the Christ, the anointed one, come into being.

And what did the disciples hear when Jesus said that “on this rock I will build my church”? While we think of church as a building or an institution, the word we translate as church – ekklesia – referred to neither. Instead ekklesia connoted a gathering of people or a community—social or political as well as religious. As Jews, the disciples would have heard ekklesia as a reference to the gathering of the people of God, the national community of Israel, because the word is used that way in the LXX, the Greek translation of Hebrew scripture, the version that they were most likely familiar with. They would’ve been more likely to envision an emerging community than an institution.

Of course we can’t know precisely how this conversation between Jesus and Simon Peter was heard and understood by the disciples and by the early readers of Matthew’s gospel. And it would be unrealistic perhaps to expect our interpretation to match theirs. After all, they were hearing this “fresh” as it were, and we are hearing it through the filter of years of pondering and interpretation. They heard these words as they struggled to do a new thing, and we hear them as we struggle to maintain an old thing.

And therein lies the other challenge for us: Just as our understanding of these words is very different from that of those who heard them 2000 years ago, so too may the connotation these words carry in this post-Christian world vary across individual and groups.. We are here, in part at least, because we have some understanding, however inarticulate, of what it means to have Jesus as our messiah, because we have felt on some level the power of Jesus in our lives. We are here because we have experienced the church as community instead of an institution, as a place of solace and comfort. But even for us these terms can sometimes feel stilted and distant, and we can no longer assume that those outside the church share our understanding of what they mean.

And so, we must ask ourselves this: Can we break out of our old and perhaps staid ways of understanding these words, messiah and church? Can we breathe new life into them, reinvigorate them as concepts that are life giving and personal and real, not only for ourselves, but also for the larger world? Can we think afresh about what it means for us to say that Jesus is the messiah, our messiah, the son of the living God? Can we consider again what it means for us to be the church? Can we shape these words and live them out as something personal and real and life giving rather than something abstract and distant and perhaps even irrelevant?

This year has become at some level the year of evangelism at Saint Mary’s. Even as we treasure our history, our traditions, and our community, we seek to reach out invite and others to join us. But invitations alone are not enough. We must witness with our words and with our lives to what makes what we do here compelling. We must witness with words and with our lives what it means for us to call Jesus messiah. We must witness with our words and with our lives what it means for us to be church. And we must invite and welcome others to join us, to share our meaning, and even to expand it with us and for us.

AMEN