Confession’s Response

A sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 16
Education Sunday
August 27, 2023

Every Wednesday, one of my duties is to send a sermon title to Sallie Culbreth. If you don’t know Sallie, you should. She’s an angel among us. I send her my sermon title, and she sends it on to the Sentinel Record. She often even makes graphics advertising what to expect, like this week. Well, today I’m going rogue. If you came expecting me to preach on “Presenting our Sacrifice,” I am sorry to disappoint. 

What happened? I had the sermon prepared already. But then we had our Thursday night Bible study. We were looking at this week’s gospel lesson. We sat around a table to learn, to ask questions, to make observations, to wonder. And you know what? The Holy Spirit showed up. By the end of our study, I knew I had to go in a different direction. 

That’s an appropriate experience to reflect on this week. Today is Education Sunday, and education at its best is like that. It’s a collaborative thing, where learning is not so much top-down as it is dynamic. Ask any teacher in the room. I bet they’ll tell you they learn just as much from their students as their students learn from them. Ask the students in the room. I bet they’ll tell you they learn from their classmates, sitting around tables, having discussions–maybe they learn more like that than in lecture halls. 

Today’s gospel is a familiar one for many of us: the confession of St. Peter. Jesus and his disciples are getting away. They are in Caesarea Philippi, Gentile country, perhaps for a break from the crowds. I imagine them sitting around the fire, laughing, joking, eating. Jesus is quiet in the corner. Suddenly he speaks up. “Who do people say that I am?” They reply, John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, one of the prophets. But then Jesus does that thing that good teachers are so good at. He ups the ante and makes it personal. “But who do you say that I am?” Maybe you remember being in a classroom and the teacher asks a question. You think it’s just a rhetorical question. But it’s not. And the teacher is looking at you expecting a response. Peter blurts out: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” 

It’s a divine revelation. “Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you,” Jesus says. You and I, so far removed from that time, can miss how radical Peter’s answer is. Not only is Peter using Messiah language, but he also calls Jesus Son of God. That was a title for the Emperor. Peter is setting Jesus up against the powers of this world. 

Back to our Bible study. Something we have done a couple of times is compare stories in the gospels. Sometimes the same story is recorded more than once, and it can be illuminating to see what is the same and what is different. Compare and contrast. This story is recorded in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. But there’s a key difference. Both Mark and Luke stop right after Peter confesses Jesus is the Messiah. But Matthew has this long section about Peter being named the Rock, about establishing the church, about binding and loosing. Why? My fellow students helped me out. Immediately after Peter confesses, Jesus issues marching orders. They are marching orders that will be reemphasized at the Great Commission: Go into all the world and preach the Gospel.

In Matthew, confession must have a response; confession is paired with marching orders; the theological statement is paired with a job description. In Matthew, after Peter says who Jesus is, Jesus says, “Now let me tell you who you are and what you are to be about in this world.” It’s the same today. 

In a few moments, we will confess the Nicene Creed as Christians have done for centuries. We will take Peter’s confession on our own lips when we say “We believe in one God, the Father; we believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God; we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord the giver of life.” But as today’s gospel shows us, we cannot stop there. Our confession must have a response. 

Like Peter, Jesus is looking at us. “So you believe I’m the Son of God?” he’s asking. Then he says, “Now let me tell you who you are. You’re a child of God and there’s work for you to do.” 

What’s the work to which you are being called? If you’re a student, your job is to be the best student you can be. If you’re a teacher, your job is to be the best teacher you can be. If you’re an education professional, your job is to be the best you can be. No matter where we are in life, our job is to be the best we can be and to offer ourselves, wholly and completely, to God as that living sacrifice Paul talks about today. Our job is to offer all of our life and labor to God as a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. And whether we find ourselves in a school or at work or at the store or at the cooling shelter–wherever we are–we are called to point to the love of God; we are called to live transformed lives; we are called to share the Good News with those around us. 

Our confession that Jesus is Lord makes a claim on our lives. It gives us a responsibility, a duty, a vocation. It calls us to live a different life, one that is transformed by the love and grace of God and then shared with the world. So who do you say Jesus Christ is? Go and live the Good News.