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13 Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, "Who do people say that the Son of Man is?" 14 And they said, "Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets." 15 He said to them, "But who do you say that I am?" 16 Simon Peter answered, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God." 17 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. 18 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. 19 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." 20 Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.

ONE COSTLY FOUNDATION

In the name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Many of us Lutherans are uncomfortable talking about Jesus in the present tense. In our sermons you hear a lot of the historical present as in “Jesus says,” but we’re really talking about what Jesus said in Scripture some 2,000 years ago. And, if the truth is known, we Lutheran preachers are often talking about what a contemporary scholar has to say about what Jesus said. In fact, you can’t tell from a lot of Lutheran sermons that border on lectures, political speeches, or even stand-up comedy whether Jesus is really alive and present in the church right here and right now!

Last week I observed the 30 th anniversary of my father’s death. Like so many of us past 50, I think more these days about loved ones in heaven and of conversations held, and I find myself regretting those conversations silenced by death. These days I think often about worshiping alongside my father in his Baptist church (I went to the Lutheran church at 8 with my mother and the Baptist at 11 with my father).

Daddy loved preachers, both his and Mama’s, and he often lent a sympathetic ear to them. But I remember frequently his remarks as we were headed home for Sunday lunch: “I don’t go to worship to hear about Tillich or Bonhoeffer or Bultmann. I want to see Jesus. And I can tell in five minutes whether a preacher is sold on his product or not!”

Today Matthew poses for us Jesus’ question for both pastors and parishioners. Jesus asks not merely: “Do you think I’m alive?” Jesus wants to know: “Am I the Living Lord of your life?” Could it be that some scholar, some mentor, some friend, or even some loved one has more authority over you than Jesus?

I think it was management guru Stephen Covey that quipped: “Nobody on his or her deathbed wishes that she or he had spent more time at the office.”

On the last day when we face the Living Lord face to face, I doubt that anyone will wish that she or he had spent more time listening to someone other than Jesus. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, it could be that even as we worship today that they are having some fascinating meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature, the American Academy of Religion, the Biblical Archaeology Society, and the Academy of Homileticsin hell.

Last week I said that there are plenty of people that talk about Jesus as if they really know him, but when you compare what they say about Jesus with the Jesus of Scripture, it’s clear that their Jesus is a projection of their feelings and ideas or of someone else’s feelings and ideas. In other words, they really don’t know Jesus!

“Who do you say that I am?” Jesus is still asking the question to you and me. “Am I indeed the Living Lord of your life? Or am I just some ancient dead guy whose body molded away long ago in the sands of Palestine?”

On the last day when you face the Living Lord, you may look off to where the goats are standing and observe some of the cleverest and most acerbic despisers of Jesus. They will be the ones urinating down their legs in terror. They will be about to receive their reward for having done such a magnificent job of shaping hearts and minds for the culture of death while convincing people that Jesus really wasn’t that important.

Perhaps they do have stand-up comedians in hell but nobody laughs. Yes, wouldn’t that be hell?

“Who do you say that I am?” Jesus is present here and now to ask the question.

Years ago many Lutherans, on their Confirmation Day, were seated on folding chairs in the congregation’s chancel while the pastor asked them questions from Luther’s Small Catechism. These days our congregation’s confirmands are required to write a paper that is revised three times before they read it to the congregation at the Confirmation Banquet. Then and now, pastors and congregations were after a Lutheran bar or bas mitzvah to mark the passage of youth into greater participation in the life of the faith community. But as most of us are quick to admit, nurturing youth to confess faith in the Living Lord of the Church requires the living faith of parents or grandparents and of pastors, mentors, and teachers.

Many Lutherans go through the milestones of Holy Baptism, First Communion, and Confirmation as if they were no more significant and less important than athletics, academics, and the arts. What will it matter if your child is an Olympic athlete, a Rhodes Scholar, an Oscar winner, and a billionaire but is headed straight for hell and taking the next generation with her or him? If you don’t really believe in Jesus as your Living Lord, then your kids won’t and your grandkids won’t either!

Now maybe you don’t believe in hell. Maybe you can carefully articulate a history of how Persian dualistic ideas migrated into post-exilic Judaism and how apocalyptic thinking shaped the intertestamental period so that nascent Christianity developed these curious ideas about personified evil and about a place of punishment for the wicked called hell.

And thus, you can give an erudite account of why this first century rabbi Yeshua, also known as Jesus of Nazareth, bears little or no relation to the Christian myth that led the world into a terrible dark age until Greco-Roman ideas resurfaced in the Enlightenment to free humankind from the tyranny of Roman Catholicism and its Protestant successors. (The only thing many Americans seem to know about Eastern Orthodoxy is what they learned from the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding.)

And yes, today perhaps you can celebrate the blossoming of the Enlightenment to include freedom from the patriarchalism, classism, sexism, abject anti-intellectualism, and homophobia of Christianity. For, after all, Jesus, the great poet of love, would certainly eschew what the Church has done with his ideas if only he were alive to see it. But what foolishness to think that Jesus is God in the flesh who could die and rise and still be in charge of the universe!

And Jesus, the Living Lord of the Church, responds, present tense, “But who do you say that I am?”

When Peter, whose name (as we all know) in Greek means rock confesses that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of the Living God, the Lord Jesus promises to build His Church upon this confession of faith. He promises Peter that the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church. But some of us present-day Christians might doubtfully interject that lately it hasn’t been looking so good for the home team.

We forget that the true foundation of the Church is not Peter’s confession but it is the One whom Peter confesses. (Few pious Christians would argue that Peter’s successors John Paul II and Benedict XVI were and are not powerful confessors of the Living Lord of the Church!) There is one costly foundation upon which the Church is built. That foundation is the Crucified Jesus, God’s Son, who has lovingly given His life away that the world might be drawn from the culture of death into the culture of life – eternal life that begins here and goes on forever.

Some years ago Yale Divinity professor Jaroslav Pelikan wrote about apocatastasis, the Greek term for “restoration,” which refers to the hope for universal restoration for a universe fractured by sin. Pelikan wrote: “…many Christians have nourished such a vision. The justice of God demanded that there be a hell, but the mercy of God permitted (or perhaps even required) that we pray for it to be empty” (The Melody of Theology, pp. 4-5).

When Jesus said to Peter that He would give the keys of the kingdom to bind and loose, He was promising that the doors of heaven and hell would open and close to all the future generations through Peter’s preaching and the preaching of all that would come after Peter. Jesus’ question is still present tense: “Who do you say that I am?”

How the preacher answers that question has a lot to do with whether the people who listen will see a dead Jesus or a live Jesus in worship. How everyone answers that question is a matter of death and life. Would that hell would be empty after all!

God sent His Son into the world not to condemn the world but that the world might be saved through Him (John 3:16). Even today the Living Lord Jesus Christ wants the entire world to be drawn from the culture of death into the culture of eternal life. And if you have not been baptized with water into the death and resurrection of God’s Son Jesus then isn’t it high time you were?

Baptism is not magic. It is the way to daily die and rise with Jesus – to put to death the old selfish person in you so that the Living Lord of the Church might have all authority over your thoughts, words, and deeds every day. Oswald Chambers wrote: “To be born again means that I see Jesus” (My Utmost for His Highest, August 15).

Do you see Jesus? Not just the form of His crucified body on the crucifix but the Risen Lord with the marks of the nails in His hands and feet and side standing before you alive today as the Lord of your death and life!

When you see Jesus, when I see Jesus, alive with the marks of death all over Him, He reminds us that the culture of death in which we live is powerful and indeed deadly but it cannot win the day. The gates of hell shall not prevail against the Lord of the Church who has opened the door and who is indeed the gate to everlasting life.

The Church of Jesus Christ is built upon one costly foundation, the Crucified Son of God. When we die to ourselves with Him, we discover the freedom that God has always wanted us to have – the freedom to be of one heart and of one mind with the Lord of heaven and earth.

Do not forget that the cultured despisers of Jesus are the ones that have always peddled death in all its many manifestations. They are still working to destroy life through the academy, in the arts, in politics, in entertainment, and, yes, even in the Church. Theirs is a lost cause, but see to it that you don’t find yourselves lost along with them.

Who do you say Jesus is? Has your sight of Him grown dim? Have your ears been closed to the sweet clear sound of His voice? Come to the altar today with empty hands. Take hold of the foundation, yes, the Author of Life itself as He comes in bread and wine to take away your sins and mine, to fill us with the power of His endless life!

In the name of the Father, and of the +Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

[An MP3 version of this sermon and each week’s sermon is available on Saturdays at 8 p.m. Eastern Time (US) at www.stmatthewsch.org]