15 PENTECOST, PROPER 16, YEAR A

SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, NORWAY, MAINE

THE REV. ANNE G. STANLEY

24 AUGUST 2008

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Exodus 1:8-2:10; Psalm 24; Romans 12:1-8; Matthew 16:13-20

In today’s gospel we hear yet another account of Jesus finding out more about who he is. Another layer of his identity revealed—to himself. Bit by bit, more and more, layer by layer, as he goes through his life, Jesus keeps learning about himself. Don’t we all, as we go along? In Jesus’ day, not quite so much in our own time, what other people said about you, what people thought about you, was critical for your own self-identity. What people in your community thought about you determined your standing in the community.

Last week, it was the foreign woman who made Jesus suddenly realize that his mission had to extend far beyond the own narrow confines of his own country and people. “Even the dogs eat the crumbs from under the master’s table,’ she said. Being told you are wrong is tough, and especially for Jesus, by an alien woman. But Jesus sucked it up and learned from the experience.

Today Jesus asks his disciples what people are saying about him, and then, who they, the disciples, think he really is. “You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God,” said Peter. “That’s what I think!”

Several thousand years earlier, nearly two thousand, Joseph, great-grandson of Abraham, was sold by his brothers to the Egyptians, who carted him off to their country. Last week we heard about Joseph’s reunion with his brothers and how later on his family fled their land and headed to Egypt, too, to escape a famine. The family multiplied and grew and the Egyptians became uneasy at the growing Hebrew community, a threat, they thought, to their own sovereignty. So they enslaved the Israelites and then tried to kill their boy babies---not too sensible, when you come to think of it, if you also want the boys to grow up to be your slaves. But then, as many have pointed out, tyrants are not known for being sensible.

Enter the women. Women who, like Jesus I think, come to know who they are and what God intends their mission to be (even though “God” is never mentioned in this story). Some women!!  In spite of the Egyptian Pharaoh’s orders, the Egyptian midwives save the lives of the Hebrew boy babies they are meant to kill. Baby Moses included. His mother raises him and when he gets too big to hide, she puts him into a waterproof basket and he is saved by none other than the Pharaoh’s daughter. It seems that Baby Moses’ fate is doomed, but the Pharaoh’s daughter’s better instincts take hold. She knows what she needs to do. She can’t nurse him herself, of course, so when Moses’ sisters just happen to show up and offer to find a Hebrew nurse for the baby and they bring Moses’ very own mother herself, the Egyptian princess thinks this is a fine idea.  Moses and his mother are reunited for now. Eventually Moses is turned over to the house of the Pharaoh and the rest of his long life continues.

Moses’ role in creating the nation of Israel is guaranteed by four brave, smart women who knew what they had to do, and did it.

In Jesus’ time, Simon Peter bumbled along, following Jesus, sometimes putting his foot into his mouth, but always following along. When Jesus inquired what Peter thought about him, Peter blurted out his answer, “You are the Son of God.”  And Peter got an answer from Jesus, right back. “You’ve told me who I am, now I’ll tell you who YOU are,” Jesus told Simon Peter. “You are Peter, petros, rock, “Rocky,” and on this rock, petra, I will build my church….”

…and because of that, I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, so that whatever you bind or loose on earth will be bound or loosed in heaven.” Jesus’ power and Jesus’ authority was established from that moment on, to be passed down to Peter and to others in what we in the church know as the “apostolic succession,” through the ordination of bishops and priests and the baptism of all Christians.

All of which means that we are intimately bound to God, the way the women in the Moses story were intimately bound to God, the way Peter and then others have been bound to God through Jesus. So that we, like those courageous forebears can know and do the will of God as we move our way through our lives. So that we can know, if we are open to knowing, what it is that we need to do.

It took Peter awhile, of course, to know what he was to do. In spite of the gift of the keys to the kingdom, it wasn’t until after Jesus’ death that Peter really came into his own. The women didn’t take quite so long. Faced with a decision they really needed to make quickly, what to do with the growing baby, they figured out a clever scheme and, lo, history was made and with it came God’s blessing on the Hebrew people and ultimately upon us.

And we ourselves? We are part of this story, too. God doesn’t seem to want to operate in a vacuum. God needs us. God wants us to accompany God in bringing the kingdom of God more and more into being. God wants our help doing that. God wants us to be co-creators with God. Sometimes we goof. But when we are aware just how closely we are linked with God, when our lives are grounded in the gospel, the gospel inherited from the ancestors of ancient Hebrew scripture, we have a pretty good chance of helping God get things right, or nearly so. God’s purposes fulfilled, us and God working together.

The Episcopal priest and former monk, Martin Smith, tells the story* about a little boy in church one Sunday. He kept shouting, “I’m in!!” at various points of the service. “I’m in!” As if he wanted God to know that he was “in.” His mother was flustered and tried to get him to be quiet. Especially when he also gave her high-fives along with “I’m in!”

She finally whispered to him, “What IS this? What are you doing? You need to be quiet.”

The little boy was puzzled by his mother’s reaction. “You keep saying the same thing,” he said, “why can’t I?”

“I finally got it,” the mother told a friend later. He kept hearing “Amen” as “I’m in.”

Well, if we know how intimately bound up in God we really are, if we know how linked we are to Jesus, if we are so in touch that we can co-create side by side with God, like the Hebrew women and the Egyptian princess and like Peter, then maybe we can know how “in” we are, too. So be it. Amen. “I’m in.”

*re-told in a sermon by Lorraine Ljunggren, 4 May 2008 which I have paraphrased