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The Redeeming Keys
April 14, 2024 3rd Sunday of Easter w/ Communion
1 Peter 1:18-21 Matthew 16: 13-20
This is one of the scriptures that is usually read during the Easter season because it’s the passage where Jesus assigns to Simon Peter the authority to be the head of the new church after Jesus is gone. What this passage does is set Peter up for his take-charge moment on Pentecost, when he explains to the crowd what the Holy Spirit is giving to all the people.
This position is given to Peter in two sentences. First, Jesus says: I will call you Peter, and on this rock I will build my church. Second, he says: I will give you the keys to 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.
Now what jumped out at me was the image of keys. Why keys? What’s so important about the key image, and how do they relate to the kingdom of heaven? The authors of the Bible were very specific about the images they used, so, I decided to take a look at them.
In general, the idea of giving a key to someone means that you’re giving them one or more of three things: Accessibility, knowledge, and authority.
Let's look at accessibility. One of the oldest ideas of accessibility is giving someone a key to a city. It represents opening the gate in the wall that surrounds the city. When you give someone the key to a city, you’re saying: You are welcome here; please come and enjoy yourself and we accept you as one of our own. We also use the image emotionally; That we give someone the key to our heart, or someone has the key to our heart. The other person has proved that they understand us, and we now emotionally let them in.
Knowledge is the second idea of the key. Something gives us the means to unlock knowledge. For instance, the discovery that we have genes, unlocked our ability to know where our blue eyes and brown hair comes from, or to analyze diseases and figure out how to cure them. Einstein's E=MC2 unlocked our understanding of how atoms, electrons, ions, and protons work.
And knowledge and accessibility work very much together.
For Christians, the knowledge and understanding of the gospel message is how we unlock our accessibility to God. Peter says to Jesus: You are the Messiah. When we understand all the implications of what Jesus being our Messiah does for us, we end up being saved and redeemed. We are saved because we understand that our sins and our fear of death no longer have control over our thoughts and actions. And we are redeemed because that salvation puts us back onto the right path of goodness. We’re no longer condemned to walk on a wrong path of sin for the rest of our lives and we can switch to a good path because of God's grace.
The third key is authority, specifically the authority of the steward. In ancient cultures, when we moved from a hunter-gatherer society into the agrarian-communal society, it was recognized that someone had to be the manager of the food and the supplies for the community. This appointed person is the steward. In the family unit it was usually given to a senior woman of the household who was in fact often called “the keeper of the keys.” And when a woman got to be older and she could no longer manage the household, she would often publicly pass on the keys to her daughter or daughter-in-law, signifying to everyone that this person now had the responsibility to manage all the supplies of the household.
In Jesus’ time the steward was given to a man with the authority to manage an estate or business. He was expected to manage the work, collect rent, manage the buildings, and pay people their wages. He was responsible for bringing in, or binding, resources that were needed, and letting loose things that needed to be distributed, or were no longer needed. Of course he wasn’t the final authority – that was the landowner, and the tenants or employees could always appeal to the landlord. But usually, it was the Steward who would mediate between the landlord and the tenants, and who received his instructions from the landlord and saw that things that needed to get done were done.
Because Peter has said: You are the Messiah, Jesus knows that Peter understands the core message of the Gospel. Plus, Jesus must have really trusted Peter, and seen him as someone who, in spite of his occasional impulsiveness, would uphold the message, and was someone who would work with others for the good of the movement that Jesus had started.
Jesus publicly appoints him the steward of the future church through two actions. First, by giving him the new name of Peter. It’s a very old tradition that if you give someone a high-ranking job that you grant them a new name to signify that their life has changed with greater responsibility. Second, even though Jesus might not have physical keys on him he is telling Peter in front of everyone that he is being given those keys to the Kingdom of heaven. The disciples would have understood that Peter now has the access, knowledge, and authority of a steward.
Now that's a very nice little summary of what's going on in the story. Peter might have started the church in Rome but how many offshoots of the church are there now? The church from the time of Jesus and Peter has evolved and what do those keys mean for us? Well, I like to think that Jesus not only conferred the keys of the Kingdom on Peter, but also on all of his disciples, leading down to us.
Jesus taught us that the Kingdom of God is accessible for all of us. And we can take steps to open up that accessibility. When you're baptized you're opened up to let the Holy Spirit work within you. We go to church we learn about God and are given the knowledge about what it means for each of us to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of God. If we believe and accept the gospel message of Jesus’ gift of salvation and redemption, we then choose to be confirmed in our faith. That opens the door to more accessibility about who God is and what it means to be working our lives with that divine power.
And finally, one of the big things we learn in our life is stewardship. How to manage ourselves and our lives so that we can be children of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit.
When we are kind to ourselves and others, we are being good stewards of our faith. When we take care of our families and those who love us, and also those who don’t love us, we are being good stewards of our faith. When we help our neighbors, we are being good stewards of our faith. When we support the parts that make up our communities, like our church, and schools, and local businesses, we are being good stewards of our faith. When we support charities, like our food bank and Heart of the Catskills, we are being good stewards of our faith. When we protect our environment, we are being good stewards of the wonderful gift of this world that God has given to us. And when we stand up to injustice, even if it's as local as bullying in our school, or as large as supporting equal opportunities for people who have none in the world, we are being good stewards of our faith.
Now, God doesn't ask you to do everything, all at once, all the time. But when we are mindful of what we do in the moment in front of us; when we remember that we can choose not to sin; and we choose to live in God's grace, we put ourselves on a continual path of redemption.
Jesus gave all of us the keys, but we make the decision of how we use them to open the door to God and His kingdom. Today we're going to have communion, so as you come up and have your supper with God, I invite you to open your heart to the accessibility of God's love for you; the knowledge of God's love for you; and the care the God keeps you with his love, and the love that you can give to others. With those keys you are on the direct road to God's Kingdom.
What Are We Saved From?
March 13, 2024 Easter Sunday
Psalm 118:14-24 John 20:1-18
If someone from another planet came to earth, they might think that with all the tinsel, parties, and gift giving, that Christmas is the most important Christian holiday. But since the beginning of Christianity, Easter has always been the main holiday. Before 567 C.E. when the Council of Tours designated the twelve days between December 25 and Epiphany, Christmas was only celebrated sporadically.
But Easter! Easter was our beginning. Easter was the big joyful celebration of Jesus over-coming death and emerging from the tomb triumphant and alive! Easter was the proof-positive of all that Jesus had preached in his Gospel: That Jesus was indeed the son of God; that there was an eternal life that Jesus had opened the door to, which we could be a part of; that the conditions of the world could change; and that God had willing made the sacrifice for the forgiveness of our sins.
Since I was little, every year I heard the same pronouncement: Christ died on the cross for our sins, and he was resurrected, and now we have salvation. You know, sometimes you hear the same words over and over again, and we just assume that they’re valued and truthful. But I bet if you asked someone: what are we saved from? could they really tell you? I know I couldn’t for a long time, and it kept me from being a Christian. Not understanding that phrase kept me from really seeing the Good News.
I started my own personal exploration with the pronouncement: Jesus has saved us from our sins. I’ll preach about sin in detail another time – I mean whole books have been written about that subject. But as an English teacher I always like to start by defining terms and I came up with my definition that sin is an inflection of negativity on another person or myself.
You can have spontaneous inflections, when you hurt people without meaning to; that’s just a mistake. There are systemic inflections, like when a university won't accept students of a different gender or race because we all know those people aren’t as smart as we are. And there is strategic inflection, when you decide and plan to do something that is going to hurt others to benefit yourself; like the landlord in the parable who charged such a high interest rate that people couldn’t work off their debts and were in slavery to him forever.
Judeo-Christianity starts from the premise that humans were created in the image of a loving God and therefore we are meant to be good. But because we’re not perfect, we’re going to make mistakes. And because we live in a world of brokenness and often desperation, we’re sometimes lured off the path of goodness, which involves helping others, into the path of sin, which is using others for our own gain.
But because we are made to be good, when we hurt people, we feel guilty about our actions, and we want to make amends and fix things. But all of us carry the part of us that doesn't want to admit we're wrong, because when we admit we're wrong we feel terrible. We feel like failures, that we’re not good, and will never get anything right. We feel unworthy of friendship and love, and we fear that even an apology or an attempt to make things right, will not make things right. Sometimes we mess up so badly that it seems that the apology and the repentance would even cause more damage to ourselves and others. We start to believe we can never be forgiven for what we've done and get ourselves back to goodness.
The ancient Hebrews had a system to get over this unworthiness, shame, and guilt that we can carry around inside. They made sacrifices at the temple. Depending on what you did wrong and how wealthy you were, the sacrifice could be anything from a handful of flour to a large bull. The sacrifice to God was supposed to be something that costs you to prove to God that you really wanted to be forgiven. But that’s only the beginning of process. Once you got right with God you were supposed to repent – go in another direction – and fix the problem, knowing that God is on your side and is going to help you fix the problem.
That system worked for quite a long time. The problem was it became more exacting and more difficult for the average person to do. So, God sent us Jesus who says over and over to people: You are forgiven. And then he said at the Last Supper: I am the sacrifice for all of it, all you have to do is believe that I sacrificed myself for you. Yes, there is still a system. When we do something wrong, we go to Jesus, and we say: Jesus I messed up I and I'm really sorry about it. Please forgive me and give me the strength to help make some of it right again.
The great glory of Jesus’ death is that we don’t need a priest or an elaborate ritual to stand between ourselves and God, we just need humble and willing hearts, and we are assured that Jesus will listen to us, forgive us, and show us a way to become God’s children of goodness again.
You see Jesus gives us the way out of the spiraling-down trap of believing that we are unworthy of living and that we are unworthy of love. And when we believe that we are unworthy of love, where do we end up? Despair is at the bottom of that horrible pit. I really believe that despair is the blackest emotion there is, because it destroys hope and doesn’t allow hope to live within us.
Think about the disciples on the day after Jesus's crucifixion. They were absolutely shattered. Jesus gave them so many promises. He told them that he was the Messiah. Wasn’t the Messiah the person who was supposed to free them from the tyranny of the Romans and a corrupt temple that only seemed to take from the poor and never give anything back? Wasn’t he supposed to become the king who would straighten out the social injustices of a corrupt system that oppressed 80 percent of the population?
Now he’s dead and every hope has been shattered, and they are fearing for their lives. Are they going to be next? Have the last three years been for nothing? They were in the depths of despair; right down in the place where there is no hope.
And then the women come back from the tomb with this incredible message. The door is open, the body is gone, but it hasn’t been stolen or confiscated – Jesus is alive! And everything that they thought was wrong is now right. They not only have hope again, they are now living with sure and certain hope. Jesus is the son of God; there is an eternal life that Jesus has opened the door to, and we can be a part of it. Because of that sure and certain hope the conditions of the world can be changed; and we no longer have to live with the despair that our sins create for us. Despair is no longer the tyrant over who and what we are.
With his resurrection we are given proof-positive that God forgives us and loves us. Our sins no longer have to drive us into despair, because if Jesus and God love us, we can love ourselves. And with that love we are given the strength to go out into the world and fix the problems of our own making and of other people. We are saved from despair.
The world of the devil doesn’t want to hear that! Advertisers want you to despair that you don’t have enough, and therefore you are not worthy, so you need to buy what they offer. Politicians want you to despair that the world is so messed up that it can’t be fixed so that they can stay in power. And that you have no power to cause positive change. Bullies don’t want you to believe that you are as strong or as worthy as they are. They want you in despair so that they can continue to oppress.
Don’t you believe it! You never have to live in despair. Jesus has proved to you that his message was real by his resurrection. So now we can live in hope. The great gift of the resurrection is that we can always walk with the love, hope, and the eternal strength of the renewing energy of God. We might stumble, we might fall, but we can always get back up with God. As Christians we always live in a state of resurrection and every morning for us is Easter. So today open your hearts and live in the eternal power and glory of Jesus’ love for you.