Mary Vano, Class of 2003 from the Diocese of San Diego

Senior Sermon on September 5, 2002
Proper 17A
Matt. 16: 21-27

Like most of my classmates, I spent this past summer immersed in the work of Clinical Pastoral Education. Although my assignment with Hospice Austin was often difficult, it gave me an opportunity for many new and valuable experiences, providing me with a fertile field for theological reflection.

One patient in particular shared an experience with me that has stuck in my mind. This was a man who chose to live alone, and yet he did not want to die alone. His family and friends were few, and so he milked every minute he could from his Hospice visitors. He demanded very little except for our presence. On one of my visits, after I had gotten to know him for a while, he spoke to me with uncharacteristic fear in his voice, saying, "I think I might be going crazy." I asked him to tell me more, and he explained that he had had several experiences of seeing someone in the room with him out of the corner of his eye, but when he looked, the person was gone. Other than the fear of losing his mind, the experiences themselves were not at all frightening to him. On the contrary, he felt a comfort in their presence, and came to see these little visions as angels of God - a message that he was never alone. This revelation did not fully relieve him of his anxiety about dying alone, but he was able to find some peace and comfort in the assurance that God was with him always.

Like I said, this patient's experience stuck with me, and I've found myself reflecting on it many days since then. There was something curious to me about his story. The fact that this man was able to see something out of the corner of his eye that he could not see directly was intriguing to me. Whatever phenomenon he was experiencing, his direct vision could not help him perceive God's presence with him. It reminded me of an article I read recently about astronomers and their attempts to see stars and galaxies. Astronomers use their peripheral vision, and a technique called averted vision to see objects that cannot be detected with direct vision. It has to do with the distribution of rods and cones in the eye. Peripheral vision is particularly sensitive to movement; and if you use averted vision - looking to the side but still paying attention to the center - you tap into your eyes' extraordinary ability to see dim light.

If we may make use of an astronomer's technique as a spiritual analogy, today's Gospel lesson seems particularly suited to this experiment. In order to make it work, we'll need to expand our pericope to include last week's Gospel, which if you'll remember, begins with Jesus' question to the disciples: "Who do you say that I am?" It was Peter who gave the winning answer, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God." He was right on. In that instance he caught sight of a revelation from God, and gave voice to it. In response to this A+ answer, Jesus blesses Peter, rewarding him for his daring statement of faith. But it is in the very next breath that we get today's Gospel reading. Peter rebukes Jesus for foretelling his own suffering and death, and Jesus' response was both powerful and shocking: "Get behind me Satan, you are a stumbling block to me." Those words must have taken the breath right out of Peter. In seminary life, it would be like getting an Honors paper and a Conditional in the same day. One moment his inspired vision is providing the foundation for the whole church, but quicker than he can eat his own words, he finds himself cast into utter confusion, and sentenced to spend the rest of his life figuring out the puzzle. If we use our astronomer's analogy, we might say that he caught a glimpse of a dim light in one moment, but in the next he couldn't see it clearly.

So what is the difference between these two consecutive moments in Peter's life of faith? It all took place at once - in the same setting, with the same characters, in the same conversation, and yet in one instance he is the rock, and in the next he is the opponent, the stumbling block. The writer of Matthew answers this question clearly: the difference in these two moments for Peter is the difference between the earth and heaven, between death and life, between the human and the divine. In the first instance, Jesus tells Peter that his identification of Jesus as Messiah was revealed to him not in flesh and blood, but by our Father in heaven. But when Peter refuses to believe that the Messiah must suffer and die, Jesus rebukes him, saying that he has set his mind "not on divine things, but on human things." He put himself in the way of God's plan because he could not see what was right in front of him.

Of course, we all know what Peter didn't. We know the rest of the story. We know about the suffering and death of Christ, and we also know about the glorious resurrection. We understand, or at least try to understand, God's plan of salvation. So it's pretty easy for us to say that not only was Peter the rock, but he was pretty dense, too! How silly of him to dispute Jesus! How could he have seen it any other way? But that's from our perspective. It seems to me that from Peter's perspective his answer probably made perfect sense. For what kind of sense does it make for the child of the living God to be crucified like a criminal? It made no sense in the world that Peter could see directly in front of him. The divine plan was already there, right before him, but Peter could not see it in his perspective of the world, because his mind was set on human things.

The Gospel writer makes that distinction clear. There's a world of difference between the human and the divine, between worldly insights, and revelation, between what we see right in front of us, and what we might discover from a different perspective. But to me, these distinctions beg the question - how do we set our minds on divine things? How do we reject worldly intentions in favor of God's revelation? How do we know the difference?

Many Christians over the centuries have answered this question by narrowing the field of vision, taking the road less traveled, shutting out anything and everything that endangers our view of God. This path rests on the notion that worldly beings fall into two categories: the good and the bad. The bad things are, at their best, distractions from the good, and at their worst, they are poison - if allowed they will destroy the good. So this path simply removes the obstacles by narrowing the field of vision until we get a view that may be small, but it is certainly appealing, and then we hope that it is also divine.

Although many saints and martyrs have successfully traveled this ascetic path, I worry that others of us can only be led astray by it - that we will narrow our field of vision so much that we lose sight of anything that is real, including the divine. So the other way to shift our perspective is to take the opposite approach. Rather than narrowing our field of vision, we broaden it, and open ourselves to God's revelation by learning to continually adjust our perspective. Peter was able to reveal Jesus' true identity because in some mysterious way God made him able to receive the revelation. Peter certainly stumbled and fell, but he did not have to shut out the world in order to get a glimpse of the divine Christ right in front of him.

It's funny, I didn't intend to sit down and write a sermon about symposium, but in the end, I think I did. The past two years must have been some kind of success, because it seems to me that broadening our perspective is exactly our purpose in symposium. We are trained here not to narrowly view the world, but to expand our understanding by expanding our vision. We are to try on different lenses, and to get a glimpse of things never before seen by participating in the greater conversation. This year's topic of art is an exercise in learning to perform those tricks of the eye. Through our willingness to learn and explore, we will use our peripheral vision and our averted vision to see things that are much more than visual stimuli. Not every star in the sky is easy to see, but a devoted astronomer will continually strive to detect those dim lights, until we are able to see them not only for their brightness, but also for the truth that they reveal.

This is the process of becoming. As disciples of Christ like Peter, we must answer Jesus' question, " Who do you say that I am." And we must not stop there. For our answer to that question, our faith response, is only the beginning of a disciples' journey of becoming. Like Peter, we may have moments of inspiration, and other moments of failure. We cannot, however, let our fear of failure stall us on the journey. We must get out of our own way and broaden our vision of the world… deny yourself; we must let our statement of faith guide, shape, and challenge our perspective… pick up your cross; and we must allow God to inform us along the journey, through our hearts, through our minds, and through our lives… Jesus said, follow me.

Amen.