"Peter the Rock, Peter the Stumbling Block"

Sermon preached by John C. Hall on September 14, 2008

Text — Matthew 16:18-23

And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.’ Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.

From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, ‘God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.’ But he turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling-block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’

If you watch the news, you’ve been hearing a lot about things in our society that are broken. The health care system is broken.  Public schools are broken. The home loan system is broken. The earth’s climate systems are broken. Our reputation in the world is broken. Iraq is broken. Washington is broken. I’m not satirizing these harsh diagnoses. There really are a lot of serious problems piling up.

Is the church broken too? Is the church missing an opportunity or a responsibility to be part of the repair of so much breakage?

Jesus calls Peter “the rock.” “On this rock I will build my church.” For Roman Catholics, that verse establishes Peter as the first bishop, or the first Pope.

Protestants generally don’t read it that way. The church is built on a human foundation. Peter is mortal, and fallible. The gospels remind us over and over of that Peter, whose name is very close to the Greek word “rock,” was anything but a solid rock. He was conflicted.  He was afraid. Peter was the disciple who denied he even knew Jesus, after Jesus was arrested. Four verses after calling Peter the rock, Jesus calls him a stumbling block. Now we know what kind of rock Peter will be: Peter, you are the stumbling block on which I will build my church!

I do believe there is something divine about the church. The church is a divinely inspired form of community life. It’s a glorious thing. I love the church. But like any other group of human beings, the church is part of the problem that human beings have living together.

I remember one Good Friday afternoon some years ago. The Middletown clergy and a handful of members from the downtown churches used to have a movable Good Friday service. We carried a wooden cross, and we had various stops along the way.

We stopped at the bank, and someone would offer a little meditation or commentary on banks in general — how they help, how they hurt.  How they help people carry the cross, and how they make the cross heavier for some people. We stopped at the hospital, and someone would offer a similar commentary on the health care system. We stopped at the courthouse, the police station, at a drug store, the Middletown Press, City Hall, and so on. The list changed every year, but every year there was at least one church on the route.

This one year, we stopped outside a Roman Catholic Church, and the speaker for that stop was a Roman Catholic priest.  Some of you remember Bob Washabaugh.  He was the pastor at St. Francis Church. I remember wondering what he was going to say — a Roman Catholic priest in front of a Roman Catholic Church. Would he dare to offer anything critical of the church?

He said, “The church is a whore.”  And then he said, “She is also my mother.”

Those two short sentences are the most poignant commentary I’ve ever heard on what it means for the church to be built on Peter, the rock, the stumbling block.

The church, collectively, is like a public mother. Everyone’s welcome. Anyone can walk through the door. It’s a place to find human warmth and compassion. It’s intimate. It’s supposed to care about how its children are doing, and help when they’re fighting and hurting each other. It’s supposed to be a leader and teacher. 

But it’s good also to remember what Bob Washabaugh said. The church is also part of the problem. The church is tribal.  We act in our self-interest. The church is nationalistic, and political, and commercial. Rather than leading, the church often merely follows the ways of the world. The church has more to give than just to follow.

We’ll never be in charge of the world again, and that’s a blessing for everyone. But surely the church is called to be more visionary, more compassionate, more creative, and more holistic, than the large corporations that really are in charge right now.

If you haven’t seen the documentary “The Corporation” I highly recommend it. Fox News and CNN don’t give us all the truth we need. We’ve given corporations all the legal rights of an individual, but none of the moral accountability or restraints.

We are human beings — supposedly highly intelligent creatures. But we are hurting each other and hurting other forms of life that live with us on this planet.  It takes time, and effort, and it can feel inconvenient, and it can make us uneasy, to see the big picture. I often resist that effort too. But when we struggle to be leaders and go a different way than the ways of the world, that’s when the blessing of being the church really comes.

The church is really supposed to be more like a visionary mother. A mother is someone who lives for others. A mother is a compassionate caretaker and advocate. Not a pit-bull with lipstick.

I have my own strong opinion about the Presidential candidates. But here’s just one example of what worries me — and it’s a bipartisan criticism.  Both major political parties—  when you read their policies, what they propose for tax cuts and programs, when you do the math —  both parties are actually proposing to go deeper into debt and pass these costs on to future generations.

The world is at “peak oil.”  That doesn’t mean that the oil will be gone soon, but it means that, from here on, oil and gas prices will go much higher. It’s not that we’ll run out, but less is being produced than all the nations want to buy. Politicians still talk as if they can give us lower gas prices — as if that were even desirable. President Bush actually said that we need an energy policy that encourages consumption! 

In the Connecticut legislature last year, there was a bill to prevent unnecessary vehicle idling that would improve air quality and avoid hundreds of millions of dollars in fuel.  It never made it to the floor because of a powerful committee member whose business, when he’s not being a state senator, is to sell and install remote-control car starters. How do we get the Hartford Courant or the local TV news to report that?  

I don’t like to get political, but this is a spiritual problem. It’s a public spiritual problem when honesty can’t be spoken on the public stage. 

For our 2^nd hour program today, Karl Scheibe will talk to us about people’s tendency or desire to believe “fantastic things.”  It’s a subject relevant to our political discourse.

I’ll close with 3 quotes on truth and believing. One comes from a song by Sheryl Crow.  The 2nd comes from William James. The 3^rd comes from Jesus.

Sheryl Crow: “Lie to me.  I promise to believe.”

William James: “People believe as much as they can.  They’d believe everything, if only they could.”