"The Confession of St. Peter," a sermon by the Rev. Kathleen Russell, assistant professor of contextual theology for ministry, given on April 26, 2007, in Christ Chapel

The small figure sits calmly, fixed in a glass case in an art gallery in Chicago.

His body seems relaxed, seated in a lotus position—his gaze focused out yet inward;

His face is serene, the image of holiness. He invites the hope of those who pray.

He is one of several statues of bodisattva or bosatsu, the lesser members of the Buddhist hierarchy of deities. These are they who have foresworn full enlightenment—which in Buddhism is freedom from suffering—so that they can act as compassionate intermediaries for the suffering beings of other realms. That would be us.

They bear a striking resemblance to Christian saints, our icons of holiness. Those who have come closer to God and like the bodhisattva are go betweens. We see their faces in medieval paintings; their idealized likenesses embodied in statues, the very image of faith.

For the Hollywood bible epics of the 1950s and 60s, the character of Peter was a favorite icon of holiness. This was usually the older, post-resurrection Peter, moving about the countryside, as Christ’s emissary and intermediary. This Peter was always portrayed by an actor with what they call gravitas. His authority was visible and tangible; he didn’t just walk, he strode. You have to take him seriously because everything about him said:

trust me.

This is the Peter of the today’s Gospel too, boldly declaring to Jesus: You are the messiah, the son of the living God. Yet it is a long road from the Peter of today’s Gospel to the Peter who as an elder writes to the far-away Christians of Asia Minor. But it so much more tempting to stay in the moment of his confession, fixed on this image of Peter, than it is to get on that road with him.

I recently came across the phrase: “the reductive nature of imagery.” A drama critic used it to get at the power of images and how one image of a person or a thing can get fixed in our mind and then that becomes the thing and we can only see one image.

We fail to see more; the reality is subsumed into the image. Yet the image is the same thing as the reality. Jesus knows this as he asks: who do people say that I am?

Now we know what happens when any American politician asks that question. Polls are commissioned, focus groups are convened and minions are dispatched to monitor the blogosphere, all so that appropriate adjustments might be made to the politician’s image.

But Jesus is not seeking data for image adjustment. His identity is fixed, as solid as rock and not dependent on any one’s image or perception of him. And being able to say: You are the Messiah, the son of the living God, is not the same as knowing, really knowing, what that means either.

Peter is the picture of certainty and faith in this scene, but In the very pericope he is pulling Jesus aside and reproving him for talking about the suffering that lies ahead, the road to the cross. Peter in the role of Carville or Rove. Peter literally tells Jesus, don’t go down that road, don’t even think of it. What he is saying is: Don’t mess with my image of the messiah, let alone that of the people. Yes--- it is a long road from Peter’s confession to Peter’s tending of the flock.

This moment of Peter’s enlightenment, so to speak, cannot save him from the fear and cowardice that leads to his abandonment of Jesus in his hour of suffering. Because you see, unlike the bosatsu, human beings cannot forswear full enlightenment. It eludes us by our very being human. Remember those 6 th grade math problems where you are trying to get from point A to point B, but because you are the closing the distance by only a fraction or a percentage point, you can get close but never quite reach your destination.

For human beings, for Christians, the only way we get there is through grace, as Jesus is quick to point out to Peter: you know who I am because God has shared it with you.

The Grace of revelation….the mystery of grace.

The morning after the shootings at Va Tech, I overheard a conversation among some students at the seminary where I was staying. One was commenting on a piece in the paper that quoted a young student who described her friend’s escape from the shooter as being by God’s grace….by God’s grace. The seminarian commented on what bad theology that was— because if by God’s grace one survives, one receives a benefit or a good, then does it mean that the others who died were somehow denied that very grace?

Well, it is bad theology if our God is the God of the European Enlightenment,

a puppeteer in the sky, and grace is a commodity doled out unevenly and arbitrarily:: then yes it is bad theology.

But if God is a living God, then grace for the survivor is not the obvious blessing of still being alive-- which is we hope a blessing--but of having been brought to a new place, a place from which things can be seen differently, just as those who died now see God face to face. Is it scandalous to think that grace has something to do with the difficult and inevitably human initiation into suffering, that glimpse of hell not heaven, like John Newton looking into the literal hell hole of a slave ship, or Peter looking into his own soul as Jesus is dragged off to Calvary. “You are the messiah, the son of the living God” ---Peter barely knows what he is saying.

Perhaps grace brings us to new ways of seeing, freeing us from the fragments, the old images, the dead images. Yes it is a long road from Peter’s confession to Peter’s epistle.

By the time Peter writes his epistle he has become the post-crucifixion, post Resurrection, post Ascension, post upper room, post Pentecost, post Council of Jerusalem, post the hardships and dangers of traveling in the service of Jesus Christ, post persecution… post—well, post-a-lot Peter. Now he is very clear —clear about who Jesus was and is—his identity is fixed in Peter’s mind and soul and over and over again he uses the image of the rock and the cornerstone to talk about Jesus, even calling him a “living stone.” And what does this all bring him to say? This is what he tells those far away Christians in formation: “Finally, all of you, have unity of spirit, sympathy, love for one another, a tender heart and a humble mind.” (1 Peter 3.8). Those words aren’t theoretical; they are borne of having been a sinner and having been loved and forgiven and raised to new life in Christ.

Now why, why this narrative of Peter, with its themes of grace, humility and compassion? Why does my mind’s eye go these images just as my eye was drawn to those Buddhist statues? I think because these above all offer they offer the interpretive grid, the context, for what follows Peter’s confession as Jesus promises him the keys to the kingdom of heaven and tells him “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”

These are powerful words, intimidating really because they are about authority. Yes, the A word—a subject about which we are in some confusion. Is it good or bad? Should we resist it, grasp it, contain it, embrace it? Because it is so intimately tied up with power, authority evokes deeply ambivalent feelings.

As Christians we have often lurched between a hierarchical understanding of authority---which naturally works from gravity, that is top down--which can be very tempting—or

or from a leveling paradigm-also tempting--in which we pretend there are no differences among us, and thus no calls to responsibility or accountability. People who are too ready to claim authority make me nervous and the people who disdain it I find irritating.

Likewise we treat the keys of the kingdom either like keys to a warehouse –grace as that obtainable commodity that will fix your life once you say the magic words—or like the keys to a gated community—admittance earned by good works.

Now we are the children of the Reformation and so first we have to take seriously the sense that authority is given to all by virtue of our baptism through which we all participate in the priesthood of Christ. Peter himself says this.

I have wrestled with the question of authority myself, being besieged by its multiple yet fragmentary images in our tradition and our culture, the ones out there and the ones I’ve internalized. And I have come to think that authority is about being given—in and through grace—the means by which the work of the Church may be done through us, through our selves, our souls and bodies. And that authority begins and ends in grace, the alpha and the omega.

Authority does not begin or end in church canons or our self-discipline or will or our skills or force of personality or even our virtue or hard won wisdom or our exegetical facility. All of these things which can work for the good of God’s people mean nothing without the grace of Jesus Christ. All authority in the church is about God’s love, and God’s love is about forgiveness and reconciliation, and reconciliation is about Hope.

In just the last three days, three wonderful Christians who have been dear to me have died. They were all elderly and their lives were marked with love and friends as well as difficulty and struggle. They had distinctly different ministries: one was a bishop who helped form a diocese, one was a vocational deacon who ran an Episcopal social service agency and the third was a great lady who—to my knowledge—ever had a more prestigious position than president of the Altar Guild but who was a stalwart and an anchor for her parish for over 60 years. And what did they have in common—they all had kind and gentle hearts, forgiving and compassionate spirits and deep faithfulness. They carried their authority lightly and lovingly…and invitingly.

Across from the unnamed bodhisattva, is the statue of one who is named, Jizo. Like the others he forswears full enlightenment to help the suffering, taking the form of a gentle monk. The statue is only about 3 feet tall and it shows him walking.

He has a kind face, serene, full of charity. Jizo is the patron of the particularly vulnerable: children, women, and—surprisingly--travelers and warriors, an interesting set. Jizo carries a staff as he walks. From it dangle several small rings that jingle as he makes his journey. The rings—in some depictions they are bells-- are there to warn away any small creatures that might be in this path, so that they will not be trampled as he walks. Now we can respond to this by thinking, oh, isn’t that nice! Or we can take it to mean that we are supposed to tiptoe around fearful and cautious, not trusting our own footfalls. But this image of Jizo’s staff strikes me as really being about making sure that the path is a safe path for all; that it has room for creatures of every size and kind, the strong and the vulnerable, and that we who walk it together have the self-awareness to know that we can do harm and that we can be harmed, and yet the very path we walk is the path of grace. In Jesus’ name, we pray.