“And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.”

People have plenty of things to say about the church these days:

• The church has become too much like the world out there. It has lost any sense of responsibility to hold forth biblical standards for morality and personal integrity.
  
• The church is too old fashioned. It doesn’t realize that people’s lives don’t fit in the lines. Its ideas about how people ought to behave are puritanical and irrelevant.
  
• The preacher’s sermons proclaim vague, unrealistic generalities that give me no help in living day to day. There is too much theological mumbo-jumbo.
  
• The preacher meddles too much in my day-to-day life. There are too many shallow and helpful hints for living and not enough thoughtful theological reflection.
  
• The church is full of people who have their acts together. There is no room there for someone who might be depressed or traumatized.
  
• The church is just plain pathological. They refuse to confront the passive aggressive people who back stab and try to get thinks they don’t like to fail. In fact, those are the people who end up on committees and the whole place ends up a dysfunctional mess.
  
• All the church does is serve itself. It ignores the terrible suffering in the world and spends all its time bickering about what color to paint the sanctuary or whether or not to get new choir robes.
  
• The church is too much of a social welfare organization. It has forgotten that its true task is to preach the gospel and evangelize the unchurched; it sends too much time talking about “social justice” and supporting the latest liberal programs for improving the world.
  
• The church is too inclusive. It’s too exclusive. It’s too liberal. It’s too conservative. It’s too chummy. It’s too cold. It’s too intellectual. It’s too superficial …
  
  Such is only a sampling from the litany of common complaints about the church. Heard at cocktail parties and on little league fields, around a family’s dinner table and as whispers across the pew on a Sunday morning. Such is the litany of common complaints that can be heard, if one really listens, about almost every church.
  It is no surprise that survey after survey reveals that the majority of the people in this country still hold religious beliefs, the church no longer holds the place it once did, shaping, guiding, and directing a people and their values. There are legions of people out there who says “God- yes. Even Jesus- yes. But church-no.” Thousands are simply not interested in the church anymore- many not even interested enough to complain about her problems or debate her proclamation and practice.
  All of which seems like an odd observation to make on this Homecoming Sunday, on this Sunday of celebration in the church. The pews are full, people have returned from far and wide, fifty-year members are recognized and thanked, children are ready to begin another year of church school, the choir has returned to its place and we are back to being the church. But the truth is, that even as we are the church, even as we fill the pews and the choir loft and the church school classrooms and the picnic tables, we are those, if we are honest, who have our concerns and complaints about the church, who question about its relevance and question its necessity, who wonder if there is really any foundation underneath all the layers of what it is we do here. If it is not a silent wondering of your own, be assured that it belongs to another.
  With all that in mind and in heart, then, on this Sunday, we turn to the first mention of the word church in the Bible, to one of the most familiar incidents in the New Testament. It is the first place we find the word “church” and the first place we learn we hear the question that has echoed down for centuries, “Who do you say that I am?”
  Jesus and his disciples are walking along the road one day hear the Roman city of Caesarea Philippi and, seemingly out of nowhere, Jesus asks them, “Who do people say that I am?” They answer, “Some say you are a prophet, Jeremiah or Elijah or even John the Baptist.” “But you, you, who do you say that I am?” Then Peter, ever impetuous, says, “You are the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.” It is the first time anyone had said that. They might have thought it, but no one had been so bold as to speak the words. It was, of course, a defining moment. But then, moving from who he is to who Peter is, Jesus changes the direction of the conversation. “You are the Rock- Peter- and on this rock I will build my church. And the gates of Hades- the gates of hell,” which actually translates better as the gates of death, or the power of death, “will not prevail against it, my church.”
  This is the text that has probably been most argued about by Christians over the centuries. For traditional Roman Catholics, these words were fundamental to the doctrine that successive popes, as Peter’s legitimate successors, constituted the foundation for the church’s authority. The Reformers, though, understood the rock not to be Peter as a person, but to be Peter’s faith, his confession in Jesus as Messiah, a confession shared by all Christians, and that it was only over-translation which gives birth the idea of papal succession. The conversation among scholars goes on even now, and a middle ground where Peter is indeed the rock on which the church is built, but in a unique and unrepeatable way seems to be emerging.
  Interesting and as intense as those questions and thoughts are, they are not my questions and thoughts this morning. Rather, on this Homecoming Sunday when the church has gathered in celebration, with joy and gladness, but also with question and doubt, my questions and thoughts have to do with the church itself, the church Jesus intended to build, the church of which he spoke when pointed to Peter as the rock that day on the road.
  The church, ecclesia, those who are called out, is the people of God. It is the communion of saints, from those created by a breath a creation’s all the way to those sitting by our sides this day, who are claimed and called by God. It is the community for which we were created. Here, as the psalmist’s pen would write, “kindred dwell together in unity… For there the Lord has ordained blessing, life forevermore.” But of the “I believe” said each week here in the Apostles’ Creed, Karl Barth was convinced that what was referenced of the church was not “an invisible structure … but a quite visible coming together, which originates with the twelve apostles. The first congregation was a visible group which cause a visible uproar.” The first church, you see, was a people, a community, drawn together by the same confession that was Peter’s that day. So for our purposes on this day, I bid you your hearts and minds on the church visible, the people and places, the communities and congregations which, following Peter, exist in a particular place and time. Of that church, Barth would further write that it is, by the Holy Spirit, “a provisional representation of the whole world justified in Jesus Christ.” The church Jesus intended to build is a given to exist in a concrete and particular way, provisionally, in the time between the revelation of his resurrection and his anticipated return. In that time between, now, the church represents or communicates or shines forth something of what God has already done for all of humanity. The church is the holy community of the in-between.
  What Barth further suggests is that “it is necessary that this provisional representation take place. It is not merely possible … It is a saving necessity … The true church is no mere form of grace … It is not something which has a mere form we can take into account merely accidentally or relatively or perhaps even optionally. It is not just the means to an end which can be dispensed with, or treated with a certain aloofness… but the true church is savingly necessary.” For Barth, the church is “the saving operation of the Lord Jesus which did not conclude but began in his revelation of Easter Day. It is essential that therefore necessary, to Him,” to Jesus “not to be merely yesterday and forever, but today, in the intervening time which is our time.” In other words, the church is necessary, for us to be the church is necessary, savingly necessary, but it is how and where he can be, how he is with us, in this mean time.
  To be clear here, I would also submit that the church is not the only place where Christ is present in the world here and now. There are those who would suggest with great fervor that one need find the church to find Him, and so truth and hope and life. Even Calvin said, “away from the church’s bosom, one cannot hope for any forgiveness of sins or salvation.” This preacher is not quite so confident as Calvin of that fact. For I believe it is not the church, but the God we come to know in Christ who saves. And although it is true that we, as the church, are bound inextricably to Christ, I do not believe it is necessarily true that Christ is bound inextricably to us alone. Thank God Christ is not trapped in the church.
  The question remains, though, of how it is that Christ is with this church he promised to build. The question remains of how this body, any body of believers united in Peter’s confession, is his “saving operation.” For those of us who sometimes wonder and the relevance of the church to the lives we lead, or the church’s ability to play a significant role or do anything substantive that other organizations cannot, how is it that this happens? How is the church really the representation of what God has done?
  In the first place, Christ is in the church, operates in the church, as it is a community which is composed of those whoa re admittedly broken, as it is provides the only place we can exist and live as our truest selves, as the finite and fearful ones we are. In many ways, the church is the only place where we are freed from life’s demands to be something other than what we really are. I think of the pressure young people face each day to fit into the right crowd, to be friends with the right people, to wear the right clothes, to have the right stuff an to use the right words. I think of the expectations so many have placed upon us to be perfectly competent in the work or perfectly successful in their school or perfectly loving in their home. I think of how so much of life pushes us into being something other than the helpless creatures we are, the broken and even sinful creatures we are. And I think of how the church. In his name, claims us and calls us- as helpless babes in arms who do not know who or what God is, still as helpless adults in the middle of our lives when one finally comes along who can speak the gospel as never before and sends us kneeling to the font or bowing in prayer, as those who come ready to confess their sin rather than claim their perfection. This is how Christ is present in the church.
  And I do believe that is, at least in part, why people walk though these doors- through any church doors- on a Sunday morning. Though on the outside we clean up and don our Sunday best, people come because that is proclaimed in his church, a word which speaks to the wrinkles and warts under our Sunday best, because there is lived here a truth that accepts us, embraces us, in all of our brokenness, because they know that here alone and quite admittedly they are in the company of others who are as tainted by sin and sorrow as any. The church represents what God has done for all humanity as it invites you are you are and me as I am.
  But Christ is present not only as the church welcomes the broken, Christ is present, Christ works through this saving necessity which is his church, as we who are broken hold each other up. Listen to the words from the first letter of Peter, Come to him, a living stone, tough rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house.” In other words, like stones which compose a building, laid upon a strong foundation, let yourselves be put together, side by side, let yourselves be so connected to one another, so fused with each other, so dependent on each other that together you might be, you will be, a dwelling place for the holy.
  The church has a way, like no other institution I know, of upholding and caring for its people. Of course, there are the tangible ways in which the church does so- the flowers delivered, the meals organized on a moments noticed, the rides arranged, the prayer shawls knit and delivered. But more, there is the question of genuine concern asked, the prayer spoken night after night for another’s healing, the thoughtful and quiet visits made by those who simply want to pass on that which they themselves have received. And I promise you that is how Christ is present in his church.
  But there is more, for the church is not only a body which comes together and cares for its own, but also, especially, is the body that reaches out heart and hand into the world around. “Where the life of the church is exhausted in self serving, it smacks of death,” writes Barth in another set of comment about the church, “the church is sent out: ‘Go and preach the gospel!’ It does not say, ‘Go and celebrate services! ‘Go and edify yourselves with the sacraments!’ …’Go and devise a theology which may gloriously unfold that the Summa of St. Thomas! Of course, there is nothing to forbid all this; but nothing, nothing at all for its own sake! In it all the Church runs like a herald to deliver that message. It is not a snail that carries a little house on its back and is so well off in it, that only now and then it sticks out its feelers, and then think that the ‘claim of publicity’ has been satisfied.” No. The church lives only as it exists for others, each moment of every day, only as it speaks the word that it alone has to speak. That word is spoken through sloppy joes scooped out for the hungry, fish ponds constructed for those trying to exist and work independently, and nails hammered into a house for one who needs shelter. That word is spoken is so many ways and this is how the church provisionally represents what God has done for all humanity, that is how Christ makes himself known in the church.
  The church is savingly necessary, my friends. The church, worthy to be commended and to be criticized, is relevant because, and only because, it is the building of Christ. It is where Christ has chosen to dwell in these days. The church has everything to do with us, with the world and with Almighty God. In this community for which we have been created, in this people formed by covenant and grace and confession, among this people fed by worship and service, something of God’s grace is represented. It is only provisional, “in the puzzling form of a reflection,” and so insecure and incomplete. But it is also a place, with the love of Christ knitting together every stone in the building, where divine work is done.
  There are times when the church is too inclusive and too exclusive, too liberal and too conservative, too chummy and too cold, too intellectual and too superficial, but there is no other place which is what the church is and does what the church does. We are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, and God’s own people. We have been called out of darkness into his marvelous light, and we have been given the gift of being his church. What a responsibility. What a privilege. Thanks be to God. Amen.

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