Year A
Jeremiah 15:15-21
Psalm 26:1-8 
Romans 12:9-21
Matthew 16:21-28

May the words of my mouth… O God… speak your Truth…

Peter was on the right track… last week Peter was a rock star… at Caesarea Philippi he proclaimed Jesus the Messiah… the Son of the living God… he answered Jesus’ question well… so well in fact… that Jesus pronounced him the rock on which the church would be built… and not even the Gates of Hades would be able to prevail against it… he answered Jesus so well… that Jesus was going to give him the keys of the kingdom… and that whatever he bound on earth would be bound in heaven… and whatever he loosened on earth would be loosened in heaven… but first… let me try to explain what this binding and loosing means …

We start by remembering that… as disciples of Jesus… we live in a spiritual realm… and constantly face spiritual battles… as Ephesians 6:12 says… for our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh… but against the cosmic powers and spiritual forces of evil… and in that struggle we continue to be sanctified… but when we bind on earth… the scarcity we believe about our experience… God in effect says… OK… if that’s what you want… and we limit the possibilities that God has made available to us… Heaven on Earth falls far short of its potential…

But when we loose ourselves from those limited notions and beliefs… when we let go of that myopic vision… when we let go of fear… we tap into God’s abundance… and the divine imagination works through us… and we can hold on to the truth embodied in the Shema… that there is One Presence… always seeking ways to find expression in and through us for our highest… greatest good…

But today… Peter is Satan… a stumbling block… in fact… the word Satan means… the adversary… because 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 accuses Jesus… rebukes Jesus… God forbid it… Lord!… he cannot wrap his head around the idea that Jesus must suffer and die… it goes so totally against the ways of the world… Peter wants Jesus to have the grandeur of what he sees around him… the power and prestige of Rome and its leaders…

But Jesus is on another track… he is grounded in another realm… the spiritual one… and he says… those who want to save their life will lose it… and  those who lose their life for my sake will find it… The Rev. Susan Butterworth explains that the IT that Jesus mentions… refers to eternal life… not just the death of the body… and so Jesus exhorts Peter to focus on divine things… which are given expression in the promise of Romans 6:5… for if we have been united with him in a death like his… we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his…

Peter rebuked Jesus… and I’m reminded about one of the times I rebuked Jesus… after I finished my second year of seminary… during that summer… Joel was laid off after sixteen years at the Ohio Historical Society… his was the only income we had for almost two years… and money was tight… and so now I was facing the death of my seminary education… after all the challenges I faced… after a lifetime of discerning this call… I was going to have to drop out… and I thought… I believed… I feared… that once I did I would never be able to pick up where I left off… and I told Jesus that this could not be so… and my lament was like Jeremiah’s… truly God… to me you are like a deceitful brook… like waters that fail…

You see… having an experience of God that is not redeeming… is also part of the spiritual life… because it shakes us out of ourselves… and may open us up to new insights… and Jesus’ Satan language may seem startling… but it can also help shake us out of our rootedness in Empire’s systems… it can bring us face to face with our desire to dismantle the systems which we believe are against God’s will… but you know… which have worked out really well for us… so maybe we won’t dismantle them… just yet…

And after I rebuked Jesus about Joel losing his job… Jesus rebuked me… and said… get behind me… I can see farther than you can… and I will lead you into possibilities you can’t imagine… I will open doors you can’t see… and I will connect dots you can’t perceive… and I will breath new life into a circumstance you can only understand as death…

So after sharing my situation with a few others at my two partner seminaries… Bexley Hall and Trinity Lutheran… different pieces came and fit together like a jigsaw puzzle… and presented a different picture than what I envisioned… but which revealed the outcome for which I prayed… and I was able to finish without interruption…

Jesus’ Satan language may seem startling… but it can bring us face to face with our faltering desire to dismantle the systems which we believe are against God’s will… do you think you know whose shadow that is on the bulletin cover… we might make many guesses… but it’s actually anyone of us… who resists God’s will for us… God’s best for us… any person who sees the better way but chooses to avoid it… because… well… things are working out well for them when it comes to the ways of the world… to the ways of Empire… and why rock the boat…

The man on the bulletin cover is rebuking Jesus… he is acting as an adversary against what God knows is needed… what God knows is just… and so we must ask… whether physically dismantling 671 high-speed mail sorting machines across the country… including one in Grand Rapids… has some kind of parallel to spiritually dismantling voting rights which the law says ought to be available to all those who are eligible… especially when the President Trump acknowledged on August 13… that he wanted to make it harder to process an expected surge of mail-in ballots due to the pandemic… and we must ask how its possible to point fingers at the symptoms of systemic racism without pointing fingers to its causes… and we must ask how Jacob Blake could be shot seven times in the back… while Patricia and Mark McCloskey were praised by some for brandishing guns at protestors… contributing to an atmosphere of fear and individualism… and possibly emboldening seventeen year-old Kyle Rittenhouse to murder Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber… and wound Gaige Grosskreutz…

Bp. Satterlee said that sometimes Jesus rebukes us by making us vulnerable… that Jesus rebukes us… but never abandons us… and so we can take up our cross… and proclaim the burden of our own experience… its lament… the ways we may sometimes experience God like a deceitful brook…

And when we follow Jesus… when we do our best to stand up for Gospel truth… people will rebuke us… and sometimes their rebuke will be about them not wanting to change… so they can get back to their idea of “normal” as quickly as possible… because it’s been working out so well for them… but maybe part of the truth… is that we are all like Peter… both rocks… and stumbling blocks… both saint and sinner… and that may just be the nature of being a disciple… who seeks to loosen ourselves from the values of the world… and bind ourselves to the spiritual and eternal life that Christ offers… as gift…