August 25, 2002 – Matthew 16:13-20
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Confirmation is going to be starting in just about a week.
We’re going to have at least four of our young people in the class, three starting their first year and one who will be completing his confirmation classes and being confirmed next Palm Sunday….we hope.
I bring this up because today’s Gospel lesson deals with one of the six Chief Parts of Christian Doctrine that are taught in Confirmation class and perhaps, the one that is:
· least understood,
· most hurried through, and
· gets shoved into the background.
This Doctrine is The Office of the Keys and Confession.
Martin Luther didn’t try to hide it in his Small Catechism. It’s right there, right between the two Sacraments, Holy Baptism and Holy Communion, or the Sacrament of the Altar.
In fact, some theologians would argue that it is the third Sacrament of the Lutheran Church, that of Absolution.
Now why do you think that for most individuals this is the hardest concept to grasp and sometimes the one that they least want to talk about?
It has to do with two things: responsibility and authority.
In today’s society, what two words are more venomous than responsibility and authority?
I could get on a pretty good rant about school and politics and society as a whole and even the church, but what I would end up doing is having half of you agree with my position and half of you disagree.
Ok, one example. Is it good or bad to have a bumper sticker on the back of your car that says: Question Authority?
First question is, whose Authority? Second question is, who’s doing the questioning? And that’s just the beginning of the debate.
So, for now, let’s avoid getting into a squabble about things in our secular world and concentrate on Church responsibility and Church Authority.
Yeah…now there’s a topic that will avoid debates and disagreements.
DO you see how this one Doctrine can set things off? Do you understand why it’s so much easier to just say, “Oh, yeah, and the 5th Chief Doctrine….for test purposes…is The Office of the Keys and Confessions.”
Very seldom do you get the inquisitive mind shooting a hand up and saying, “But tell us more about it.”
But that’s what were going to do this morning. With the help of the Holy Spirit and the grace of God we will look at what His Word has to say about responsibility and authority and the Office of the Keys and Confession.
First, let’s set this up by reviewing the contents of our Gospel lesson.
Jesus and his disciples are on a what might be described as a little bit of a holiday.
Israel has been described as the land flowing with milk and honey, right? Well, mostly Israel, especially back in Jesus time, was a land flowing with sand and desert. Except for a few places either along the coastal region or in areas surrounding the Sea of Galilee or the Jordan River, the land of Israel was a barren land.
Where Jesus had led his disciples, however, was to an area known as Caesarea Philippi. This was one of my favorite places in all of Israel. The beauty of the place is unforgettable. There are mountains, trees, bushes, lots of shade. It’s a campers paradise. Small streams that flow from the mountains settle into pools that then cascade into one of the three rivers that are tributaries to the Jordan.
At one spot, the water flows right out of the mountain into the pool.
But beauty wasn’t the only thing that surrounded Jesus and his disciples. This area was also one of the most pagan regions of Israel.
Herod the Great, that’s right, the King of the Jews, had built a temple there to honor Caesar Augustus, who was the self-appointed "living" god of the Romans and the Greek god Pan, the god who was half man and half goat, was worshiped there in the shadow of the mountain near the entrance of a huge cave. Niches were built into the rock to hold icons of Pan’s consort and one of his father.
It was in this setting, as Jesus and his followers perhaps walked along the banks of the river, enjoying the shade and cool of the trees, that Jesus asked a question. “Who do the people say the Son of Man is?”
The answers are interesting aren’t they? Everybody thinks he’s a dead guy come back to life or someone from the past. (John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.) No one wants to admit that he might be someone in and of himself. No…he’s got to be someone else.
That’s not unusual back in Jesus’ day. People were seeking. People were expecting the Messiah. They just didn’t anticipate that it would be someone like Jesus, son of a carpenter out of the city of Nazareth.
So he finally looks at them and asks a direct question: “But what about you? Who do you say I am?”
Much emphasis has been put on who answered the question. Peter, which is our English translation of the Greek word Cephas, spoke for the group of disciples.
His response was: “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.”
Jesus’ response is telling. He didn’t do like I sometimes do when I hear a right answer in confirmation class, look up to the sky and say, “Thank God.” No, he said, “Blessed are you.” Blessed are you can be a little misleading unless you take it in context. Jesus wasn’t saying, “Blessed are you for giving the right answer.” He was saying, “Peter you have been given a gift. The truth has been made known to you from my Father in heaven.”
In other words, you didn’t figure this out. It wasn’t revealed to you by man. Not them and not you. It came to you as a gift!
Then Jesus says, “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church.”
This is where it gets a little confusing.
Remember, I told you that Cephas in Greek translates to Peter. Well, Cephas is also a Syriac word. Translated, it means “rock.”
Some have interpreted this phrase from Jesus to mean that Peter is the rock on which He would build His church.
But when we look at the other words that Jesus said, why would he built his church on Peter, when Peter didn’t even really understand what he had just said. Peter and all of the other disciples were still in the dark and they remained so until the Holy Spirit was poured out to them following the resurrection of Christ.
The “rock” that Jesus was building on was not the individual, but what was said. God, using Peter as a mouthpiece, had just told the disciples that Jesus, this man standing in front of them was the Messiah, the very living Son of the very Living God!
Peter’s confession is what the entire Church is built on.
That Jesus is unique from everyone else.
Unique. That’s an interesting word.
What makes you unique? Do you think you are unique? One of a kind? Special?
Just recently, there was a young lady down in Sanger, CA, that had four identical little girls. They had them on TV the other day with the mother and she had different colored yarn tied around their feet. They were color coded so she could tell them apart.
But, as they grow up, even though they may look the same and dress the same, they will have things about them that makes them unique.
Just like all of us, their fingerprints will all differ even if just a little. Their eyes will be different. Modern technology allows that they can look at our eyes and identify us, just like fingerprints. DNA separates us from the billions of other people in the world.
To say nothing of our personalities. Each of us is distinct, unique in our own way.
Jesus was unique in a very special way. It was this distinction that God was pointing out through Peter.
Jesus was God. He was born of the Blessed Virgin Mary. He committed no sins during His earthly life. He was arrested and humiliated. He suffered and died. Some would say that those last traits make him just like everyone else. To a certain extent, he was.
Jesus was human. He did hurt physically as they beat and tortured him. He did feel the abandonment of his followers, his disciples and friends. He felt the nails as they were pounded through his feet and wrists and he felt the thrust of the spear as it sliced through his side. He knew that his death was near when he cried from his cross, “It is finished!”
That was Jesus human side.
But Jesus was also unique in that on the third day, He rose from the dead. He rose victorious over sin, death and the devil.
And what made him truly unique, one of a kind, glorious and praiseworthy is that he did it, not for himself, but he did it for you. Each of you and me.
Jesus wasn’t some famous person come back from the dead as some of the people thought back then. Jesus wasn’t some little man-made icon to be mounted in a niche. Jesus wasn’t half animal and half man.
Jesus was all man …. and all God!
So what does this have to do with the Office of Keys and Confession?
Everything!
God has given to His church here on earth the ability to bind and loose sins.
Think of sins as being a prison…cause that’s what they really are. As long as we are slaves to sin, we are imprisoned.
Do we have the ability to come and go and run and play and do good things and bad things? Sure. Do we have the ability to do enough good things to earn our way into heaven? NO! Do we have the ability to do enough bad things to earn our way into hell? Yes…with a caveat.
You see. God has given us a free will. He’s told us what is right and what is wrong. He’s given us the Ten Commandments. He’s given us parents and teachers to guide us.
In other words, we have the ability to get up in the morning and go to school or work and do what we are supposed to do, or we can decide to deny what we have been told and go our own way. Do our own thing. Each of us is free to choose.
But God has given us an even greater free will. We can receive or reject the greatest gift of all. The forgiveness of sins.
When Jesus suffered and died, he did that for everyone. From the time of Adam and Eve to now and as far into the future as this world continues to exist peoples sins have been forgiven through that one act, through that one sacrifice.
Nothing more has to be done. It is there. Ours to receive. As it is stated in Ephesians 2:8-9, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith--and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God-- not by works, so that no one can boast.”
God has given to the Church on this earth the mission to tell everyone the Good News of salvation through Christ Jesus.
That’s where responsibility comes in. We get hung up sometimes telling people what to do and what not to do … pray this way … don’t pray that way … that we don’t follow through with our responsibility to tell the Good News of forgiveness and salvation through Christ Jesus.
What about the authority?
This, my friends in Christ, is perhaps the part that is the hardest to understand.
All authority comes from God and lies in God.
There are far too many places where people go to worship and they hear all of the “thou shalls and the thou shalt nots”, but they don’t hear the forgiveness granted by God to His people through faith in Christ Jesus.
They walk out wondering, “Have I done enough?” Or, “What if I do it again?”
That’s why this text is so important. Here and in other passages from scripture, God gives to The Church the authority to say, “Your sins are forgiven.” The Church vests that authority in the person of their called representative, the pastor.
Just as the words of the confession made by Peter did not come from him, but from God, the words of absolution, come not from the pastor, but from God. The pastor is the called individual that God is using to pronounce the forgiveness of sins for the sake of Christ Jesus.
In Romans, St. Paul explained it like this: “But what does it say? "The word is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart," that is, the word of faith we are proclaiming: That if you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.”
We join together in confessing our sins and receiving that gift of forgiveness from God our Father through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
And in case you didn’t heard the Gospel clear enough . . . whatever sins you have committed this last week, months, years . . . whatever harm you have done your neighbor, yourself, your family, and even your God . . . at His command I forgive you, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Now, live dear friends! Live in that forgiveness! Share in that freedom! AMEN
