Remember the Rock from Which You Were Hewn

The Reverend Tommy Thompson
Isaiah 51:1-6; Matthew 16:13-20; Romans 12:1-8
10th Sunday after Pentecost
21 August 2011


Remember your baptism and be thankful. This is the call of the Scripture lessons for today, isn’t it. Remember your baptism and be thankful.

In the OT lesson, the people of God find themselves in Babylonian captivity. The land they once celebrated as flowing with milk and honey and all the goodness of God is now described with words and phrases such as “waste places, wilderness, and desert.” Something has gone horribly wrong...life was not meant to be this way. God promised life and now the stench of death is all around.

Of course we know why Israel is in this situation of exile. The covenant worked two ways didn’t it...God promised to be God...to be the ruler of Israel and Israel covenanted to be God’s people, faithful to her mission in being light to the nations.

But thankfully, God is not the god of “I told you sos.” Even though Israel is reaping what she has sown...getting what she deserved, God still stays with her. Instead of rubbing it in, God issues a call...

“Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you; for he was but one when i called him, but i blessed him and made him many.”

Exile is the place of divine opportunity...it is the place pregnant with hope for the simple fact that it is like being dropped right in the center of a desert with no hope of getting out. Israel’s history has shown her time and time again that these places of human impossibility are places pregnant with divine possibility. Exile, God says, is the place where Israel has hope to be Israel by letting God be God.

So in the midst of the wasteland...of what seems to be an impossible situation, God calls Israel to “Look to the rock from which you were hewn, to the quarry from which you were dug. And that means to look to your Father Abraham and your mother Sarah who bore you. Remember that situation?! The whole story of Abraham is one that is endlessly preoccupied with the promise of a son ... the promise that Abraham’s descendants will one day be innumerable just as the grains of sand on the beach or the stars in the night sky.

It wouldn’t have taken long for Israel to get what God was doing here...they know good and well that the gift of a son, the fulfillment of promise, to Abraham occurred not in his prime but when it was altogether impossible...when we was, like the exiles, “as good as dead.” The exiles are invited to recall the ancestors in order to ponder the memory that God gives miraculous blessing to this people in the most unlikely of circumstances1 By calling Israel to “look to the rock from which you were hewn...to the quarry from which you were dug,” God infers that what he did of old to that hopeless people, God will do again in this present needy generation of exiles.2

Isn’t it amazing how wrong we get the Old Testament at times? We think it is all about law...an angry God always wanting to punish his people...I’ve heard folks talk about the Old Covenant that way so many times. Yet when Israel is in exile God does not say, “If only you would’ve worked harder...if only you would have kept the law perfectly.” No, instead God basically says, “Remember your baptism and be thankful.” Look to the rock from which you were hewn...the quarry from which you were dug. It is a rock made out of grace and faith turned into faithfulness. The people of God were dug out of the quarry of God’s endless ability to bring life out of death. And it is this reality she is to remember--God’s initiative and God’s ability and God’s desire to make her who once was not a people into his people.

And after all these years, God’s call still resounds...look to the rock from which you were hewn...to the quarry from which you were dug. Today the church finds herself in situations of desperateness, anxiety, fear...some of the same words that could be used to describe Israel’s situation of exile. Somewhere along the way we were taught that success was commensurate with many bodies in the pews and money in the bank. We do not necessarily consider the lengths we’ve gone to make those two desires reality...the doctrines which have been distorted...the new theologies that have crept upon us due to our desperate desire to be successful (as we have been taught to define success)...we just remember the “good ole days”...the days when we got em all here, bodies in the pews and dollars in the bank...

Today there are many empty pews and the bank accounts are not what they once were...there is a constant cry for more people...for more people, more diverse people, more young people...yet the reality is we seem to be getting older together...more funerals happening in many American churches than baptisms; a reality that is calling forth all kinds of responses from church including our own denomination across the board.

What are we to do in such a situation? Well, God’s call resounds... “Remember your baptism and be thankful.” “Look to the rock from which you were hewn...the quarry from which you were dug.”

Jesus and his disciples just entered into the district known as Caesarea Philippi. This wasn’t just any old district...it once was the site of a Baal cultic center, then in Hellenistic times it was identified with a certain god who people believed worshipped in the famous spring there...then it was renamed by Herod after he build there a temple to Caesar Augustus. After Herod’s death it was made part of the territory of his son Philip, who enlarged the territory and humbly named it after Tiberius Caesar and himself.

So when the narrator tells us “Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he does so for a reason.” He gives us and the disciples to recall all the religious and political status and significance this place holds. And it is in such a place of religious and political prestige that Jesus asks the disciples the all-too-important question. “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” they respond, “Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” Not bad company to be in...but Jesus wants to know more...but who do you who walk with me say that I am? and Simon answers, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Jesus responds, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood ahas not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.” I tell you, you are Rock and upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.”

Look to the rock from which you were hewn...the quarry from which you were dug. Here Jesus says that rock is Simon, son of Jonah...he is “rock.” He is rock, Simon is...who represents all the apostles when he speaks on their behalf here...and it is upon this rock that Jesus says he is building his church.

Let’s get this straight. Peter is not the rock because of any special status he has...no, just stick around till next week’s Gospel lesson and you’ll figure that out pretty quickly. He is rock...the foundation upon which the church is built because he has responded to the special revelation of God the Father and has accepted that revelation as truth, as his confession of faith. “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus says, “flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.”

I think Caesarea Philippi just took upon itself new significance that cleanses and fulfills all that ever took place in that region before! In a place where gods were understood as powerful, where emperors are understood as divine, God is revealed and confessed. This kind of confession can get a person killed you know...if Jesus is Messiah...Lord of all, including the territory Rome has claimed her own, that means that the Caesar is not...that Baal is not...that Hellenistic gods are not. We could easily gloss over the content of this confession, but we better not...because it is upon the apostles’ confession and subsequent ministry in Acts and beyond that is a living out of this confession that is the rock from which the church is hewn.

To get Jesus right as Peter here does by divine revelation is dangerous business. Sometimes it causes the church to decline in numbers rather than grow...just ask Jesus... But receiving the truth of Jesus by divine revelation is essential. We cannot call him whatever we’d like and still be the church...we might be successful in the world’s eyes, but true success is faithfulness to the confession. If Jesus is Son of the Living God who turns out to be the Messiah, then the church’s life should confess this reality in word and deed above all and anything else--even if it doesn’t make us popular or rich...because it won’t.

And if Jesus is the Messiah, the anticipated King in the line of David who would set up his everlasting throne and rule not only Israel, but the nations--the entire cosmos, then there are some huge ramifications that go with that. It infers that the Christian’s polity is not the American polity or the English one or the Chinese one, etc. ... no the Christian’s polity, nation, and communion is the church that will one day fade into the only kingdom that will last forever--the kingdom of God. Living this politic in the world will make you unpopular around democrats and republicans alike--it is a kingdom that alternative to all the evil power structures of this world. It’s king is Jesus and the church is called to live as if He truly is what Simon, representing the apostles’ has rightly confessed him to be.

Wanna know what it looks like to be truly patriotic, not for Rome or Babylon or the U.S. but the kingdom of God? Read the Acts of the Apostles. These guys entire lives are centered in and upon their Messiah. They have one message to deliver to the world and that is of Jesus Christ and his reign that has been inaugurated through the scandal of the cross and the victory of His resurrection. This way of life causes much pain for the apostles, yet produces so much fruit. It is receptivity and faithfulness in response to divine revelation that becomes the confession of faith that is the church’s lived life in it’s first few centuries. And it is upon this foundation that Jesus is building his church.

What does church look like in 2011 as compared to the church that Jesus started building with Peter and the apostles? Are we grieving the right losses in this time that some has called the church’s exile? The call of the Gospel is to remember the rock from which we were hewn...the quarry from which we were dug. To remember our baptism and be thankfully faithful. We did not pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps and build ourselves. No, we like Simon and all the rest of the apostles, are people in sin, easily influenced by Satan and his evil companions. We had no special status. Yet, Jesus called us forth as a diverse people available for God’s grace to work in and through ... we who ourselves were as good as dead were baptized into his death and we rose from the waters participating in His resurrection to live newness of life in Him, our Messiah, our King, the Son of the living God.

The call of the Gospel is offer ourselves anew to this way of life--our whole selves. The apostle Paul urgently invites us: “I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”

This is the opportunity the Gospel invites you into this day...to remember the rock from which you were hewn, the quarry from which you were dug--the baptismal font from which we who were not a people became the people of God. As the Holy Spirit enables us to center upon this reality, let us respond by presenting our whole selves as a living sacrifice to God...to live this confession of Jesus as Messiah through the diverse gifts that exist among us. If we have no time, no energy, for the work of God in the world, then we have not yet remembered the rock from which we were hewn...we’ve offered ourselves as a sacrifice on the wrong altars. Like the disciples and those first followers of the Messiah, we are called this morning to allow God to re-define the priorities...to use our gifts no longer for the age that is passing away but mightily in the grace of God as citizens of the age to come.

“For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher in teaching; the exhorter, in exhortation, the giver, in generosity, the leader, in diligence, the compassionate, in cheerfulness.”

If many of us are offering ourselves on the wrong altars, then the body of the Messiah is crippled...certain members choosing to be absentee...remember, you are a part of the spiritual house Christ is building...precious stones built upon the strong foundation of the apostles and held together by the cap stone who is Jesus the Messiah. What are the gifts God has equipped you with for the purpose of living out this very particular confession of Christ? Will you remember your baptism and be thankfully faithful this day by repenting from offering yourself on the altars of the world and offer your whole self in unison with Christ’s offering for us?

Who do you say that the Son of Man is? Will you join with the rest of the body of the Messiah, allowing God’s grace to make that apostolic confession the sole mission and purpose of your life and use the gifts God’s given you to do just that as one member of his body working together with the rest for holistic mission?

As a church that lives with much anxiety and and fear, who is desperate for growth, may God center us upon the truth of Jesus’ identity and the purpose of His kingdom as he did with Peter and the disciples so that we might live that confession in God’s world with renewed vigor matching that of the apostles and the early church, so that the world may know the God who makes the wilderness like Eden and deserts like the garden of the Lord...so that joy and gladness might be found in her, thanksgiving and the voice of song! Amen.