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Matthew 16:13-20
When Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. 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.
REINVENTED BY JESUS
In a quote from his book,Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis provides a synopsis of what Jesus is asking of us throughout his teachings. He says:
Give me all of you!!! I don’t want so much of your time, so much of your talents and money, and so much of your work. I want YOU!!! ALL OF YOU!! No half measures will do. I don’t want to only prune a branch here and a branch there; rather I want the whole tree out! Hand it over to me, the whole outfit, all of your desires, all of your wants and wishes and dreams. Turn them ALL over to me, give yourself to me and I will make of you a new self---in my image. Give me yourself and in exchange I will give you Myself. My will, shall become your will. My heart, shall become your heart.
I believe that, in today’s Gospel, this is the point in his own story where Simon Peter does just that: he gives his entire self over to Jesus. He has been following Jesus for a while now, listening to his parables, experiencing his miracles. He has done so with the specific intention of learning from Jesus, in the hope that he is more than a prophet. He had the intention to walk with Jesus. And because he has done so he has come to this moment in time when he is prepared to give himself wholly to Jesus by declaring whom he knows him to be in his heart.
He is not giving just his body, to move out into the world, walking from town to town, wearing out sandals to proclaim the Good News. He is not giving just his mind, to illuminate that Good News through his own teachings and letters. He is also giving his spirit over to Jesus, as he tells him in his own impetuous way,“You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
Jesus recognizes that Simon Peter has come to this realization through opening himself up to the presence of that very sameliving God. This is not a remote, patriarchal, ancient-of-days God. This is a God who pervades our very being. Flesh and blood, reason and logic, have not revealed this to Peter. His own openness to the spirit of God has brought about this revelation and put him on a new path.
Peter is reinvented by Jesus in this moment. He even takes on a new name. His identity is no longer Simon, son of Jonah. Jesus anoints him as Peter, the rock on which he will build his new church. He gives him the keys to his kingdom. He assures him that not even Hell will prevail against this kingdom. Satan does try to intervene a short time later when Peter protests Jesus’ prophecy that he will suffer and die. (How often do we ourselves protest against a scenario of death and dying?)But Jesus, who knows that it is in the dying that we come to our fullest life, intervenes, telling Satan to get behind him, for it is Satan he is rebuking, and not Peter. Jesus knows that we will never be perfect, and that the devil will get in the way, butJesus, ultimately, just wants us to be his. Because Peter has so fully accepted his Messiah, he is saved, even here, from the devil. This is what Jesus can do for us when we are reinvented through Him.
I can imagine Peter, in his later years, and before he is martyred as a disciple in Rome, looking back at this moment in time and realizing just what an incredible turning point this was for him as a follower of Christ, when Jesus reinvented him. He had been following Jesus with the hope that Jesus was the Messiah, with faith that something good would come from this man. But here something has changed in Peter, in ways that are beyond human description and comprehension. We can only get a taste of it when we read this Gospel today. Undoubtedly, despite future mistakes in denying Jesus after he was arrested, this is the moment when Peter could look back on and know that Jesus saw his potential for good in the world. This moment must have given him confidence to be the early church leader he was, the “apostles’ apostle.”
I don’t believe Peter would have had this flash of insight from God if he had not taken up the journey with Jesus in the first place. By intentionallystarting on the path he had opened himself up to God and to Jesus. He had put himself in the right place at the right time. I think that each of us here in this church today has stepped out on a similar journey with Jesus and has put him or herself in a similar position for Jesus to reinvent us. It’s useful, especially as we get older, to look back on our own intentional steps along the path that led us to this reinvention.
The psychologist, Erik Erikson, proposed that each of us has to pass through certain developmental tasks at various stages in our lives. The task of older adulthood is called “Ego Integrity v Despair.” (Bear with me!) Ego integrity basically means being able to look back over one’s life to see how it fits together as a whole, assessing successes and turning points, taking into consideration mistakes, and realizing how one overcame obstacles to get to the level of maturity that one is at in the present moment. When individuals are unable to do this they may fall into despondency or even depression. This is the manifestation of despair. But if they are able to do this, accepting where they are in this moment in time and realizing that they can’t go back and change the past, however bleak or problematic it may be, but only learn from it, then they are successfully accomplishing this task of later life.
In other words, Ego Integrity is wisdom.
I think it is important for us to look back at our own spiritual lives with this same wisdom. And we have the added advantage, when we have Jesus in our lives, of knowing that we are forgiven for the mistakes and pulled through the difficult times, no matter what.
I remember when I first turned toward Jesus with specific intention to follow him. In my early thirtiesafter graduating from college, I was in a state of flux. I felt I had made many mistakes, and I was too focused on personal self-gratification. I was beginning to sense that the sales work I’d settled for at this point in my life was an ill fit for how I saw myself working in the world, given that I had been brought up in church.I experienced a sense of incongruence between my personal self and my spiritual self. I felt a strong desire to bring my spiritual beliefs into congruence with my work in the world, and have these two threads be interwoven and less separate. I wanted to live out more of my life with God andI wanted a less materialistic path. My dream was to channel myself outward somehow, and not to be so inwardly focused. It all came back to Jesus.
From earliest childhood I had heard and cherished Jesus words, expressed here in the language of Rite One of the Holy Eucharist:
Thou shalt love your God with all your heart and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the Prophets.
These oft repeated words were, I believe, the inception of my intention to follow Jesus Christ. Nothing equals them in my life. They are hung in the deepest recesses of my heart. They pervade my soul. They guide my daily activities. They are the touchstone of my faith.And I decided that, to follow Jesus, I had to make my life about these words.
In school I had majored in theatre and minored in sociology. Through my faith, I believe the seeds sewn by my studies in sociology took root and led me to want to do something more to ease the suffering of others in the world. But my theatre training also contributed.
On the heels of my drama studies I directed community theatre in the town we lived in then, Pacifica, south of San Francisco. One of the plays I directed, “The Shadowbox”, by Michael Cristofer, told the stories of three people who were dying, and of their loved ones.
The themes of death and dying in this work really spoke to me. I feel like I did not choose to direct this play, it chose me. God works that way sometimes. One of the quotes from the play comes from Brian, an older homosexual man who is dying from cancer. This play was written just prior to the AIDS epidemic, and in some ways it seems prophetic. At one point Brian says:
They think it's a mistake, they think it's supposed to last forever. I’ll never understand that. My God, it's the one thing in this world you can be sure of! No matter who you are, no matter what you do, no matter anything—sooner or later—it’s going to happen. You’re going to die.... Well, the trouble is that most of us spend our entire lives trying to forget that we’re going to die. And some of us even succeed.”
Through directing this play, by listening to its heart, through living so intimately with it’s characters and themes, I believe I was transformed. I realized that I did not want to just direct plays about helping the dying, I wanted to actually be present with those who were really dying, or those closer to death. And I came to accept that it is by understanding that we are all dying that we truly allow God into our lives.
At the end of the play I made the directorial choice to have each of the dying characters lit by spotlights while the rest of the cast were shadowed in the background. And something about Brian’s fatalistic words tickled the recesses of my brain, something told me that it wasn’t a mistake, life is supposed to last forever. Just not in the way that we mere mortals expect it to. We will come back to that later.
This play started me on a new career path. I went back to school to get my Master’s in Social Work.I had an internship with Sutter Hospice. I found working with hospice to be more about living than any work I had ever done. Being a social worker with hospice, and later in my career with older adults, meant I was privileged to hear many spiritual stories, and they enriched my life in many ways. And I found more congruence throughout my life, as it was more fully inhabited by God, than I had ever found before. This was how I followed Jesus with intention. I can’t, like Peter, tell you the exact moment when I accepted Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of the Living God, but somewhere in the course of the intentional journey it happened. And I know that in that moment… I was reinvented by Jesus.
When I look back over my work, I know I made mistakes, that I stumbled at times along the path, usually when I tried to take too much control for myself and didn’t remember that Jesus was by my side. And it took me a long time to realize that I was, ultimately, forgiven for these mistakes, and that I would not be abandoned or punished.Because I’d been reinvented by Jesus. It is a forever thing. Peter was forgiven his betrayal because he had been reinvented by Jesus. Peter wasn’t tossed aside. His reinvention could not be undone. It was a forever thing. That was what Jesus was sent to earth to do. We are forgiven. We are saved.It is a forever thing for each of us.
I encourage you to look back at the ways that you invited Jesus into the various nooks and crannies of your own lives; how Jesus used you as one of the building blocks of God’s church in the world. Perhaps you may choose to share it through music or art or a memoir, or through a sincere conversation with a friend or a grandchild. Or you may simply choose to savor you own story, knowing that it reflects the fullness of Jesus’ presence in your own journey. And I encourage you to listen to other’s stories. Sometimes these stories emerge at difficulttimes that are totally unexpected and less comfortable, like the death of a loved one, or a personal experience of illness. ButI know this: Jesus is there to let us know when God is speaking to us and through us, just as he was with Simon Peter.And we don’t lose ourselves in Jesus, we find ourselves. Through him we are reinvented as our forever selves.
We all have reason for hope. We know that the reinvention of ourselves through Jesus Christ, the ultimate end to the story of each of our lives, is new and eternal life in Him. This eternal life eludes our own present understanding, but we have had glimmers of it in our own personal stories, and those of others, here on earth. It is a forever thing. Alleluia!
AMEN