Matthew 16: Church

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0:00 Cool, the rest of us, we're gonna start here several weeks thinking about what the church is. Last week, Brian preached for us. I listened to it. Thanks, Brian, on kindness. On his birthday weekend, did a great job. Thank you, Brian. Last weekend, in Lake Mary, we were installing a new pastor there.

0:32 It was interesting because in the denomination, when we installed a guy, especially out of a place like Lake Mary, we were there. We had a district convention that last weekend as well, which means our district is 54 churches from Racine, Wisconsin, over to Yonkers, New York, and down here to Florida. It spread all throughout. It's the remnants of an old Slovak evangelical Lutheran church that we're in, right? It's 54 churches. 30 of them sent pastors and lay representatives.

1:06 It's interesting. The average size of the 54 churches is about just under 50 in attendance on a Sunday morning. So we're about the average size. The average age, though, is probably pushing up to 100 years old. These churches are old, very traditional Lutheran places. Terry came to the kickoff service. He said, how did you come from these people? Yeah. So out there leading services, so Sunday I was leading a service with our district president,

1:40 30 pastors from the rest of there. And then our district is part of a larger thing called a Synod, S-Y-N-O-D. That's our larger denomination, and our Synodical president was there. And so it was very kind of high church, high liturgy, wearing an AUB, and if our Synodical president came here, I think he would be a little bit uncomfortable. He would have something like Terry. How did you come from us, right? It's because we keep a lot of the theology, but not a lot of the form, because for whatever,

2:16 we can talk about that another time. But what was interesting to me is recognizing, and I've always really liked this since I came out of seminary, trying to find the thread of unity between me and them. And there is a thread of unity, and it gets to what it means to be church. And so I just thought we would spend the next six to eight weeks looking at what the church

2:47 is in the story of scripture. And it starts, well, it's going to start for us in Matthew chapter 16 verse 18, if you want to look there with me. Matthew chapter 16 verse 18, this text that I just read for the kids. So Jesus is, we'll back up here to Matthew chapter 16 verse 13, right at the top of

3:18 the paragraph if you're reading in the paper copy. Matthew says, now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked the disciples who do people say that the Son of Man is. Son of Man is a term that Jesus used that isn't used a lot in the scriptures. Jesus really pulled this out. It occurs almost exclusively before Jesus starts using it in Daniel.

3:50 And remember Daniel is the guy from Daniel and the lion's den. And he spoke a lot prophetically about the world to come and he talks about this one at the end of days who's capable to walk up and approach the throne of the ancient of days and open the book of life and read the names of the book of life. And Daniel refers to this one, Daniel gets a vision of the end times and refers to the one who's able to walk up and open the book of life as the Son of Man.

4:21 It's not really used many other places but Jesus pulls this term out. The Israelites might have been more ready for Son of David or even Son of God. But Daniel has this term Son of Man and Jesus pulls it out and uses it, especially in the book of Matthew, Son of Man. Who do people say that the Son of Man is? And he's talking about himself. And the disciples answered, some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah and others Jeremiah

4:54 or one of the prophets. Remember that before John the Baptist, the Israelites had had stories of prophets. They had writings of prophets. But nobody living had ever seen a prophet before. Remember? In the Old Testament and New Testament, there's 400 years. And in that time period, there are no prophets. So when John the Baptist comes on the scene, people are like, they can tell, they've listened

5:26 to Rabbi's talk, their whole life from when they were little. And when John the Baptist talks, something different happens to them. Something different happens to them. They're like, this guy is living on locusts and honey in the desert. He's wearing camel skin. But Pharisees listen to him. Tax collectors change their way. Soldiers become just soldiers. Tax collectors quit ripping people off.

5:57 John the Baptist is out in the desert and he's speaking effectively and differently. They're like, this has got to be like what it was like to hear Elijah or something. Maybe Elijah's come back. And some of the people, John the Baptist didn't travel. Remember, John the Baptist stayed there by the Jordan River in the desert outside of Jerusalem. And then Jesus is traveling around Galilee. And so some people had heard maybe that there was someone speaking like the prophets of

6:28 Old John the Baptist out in the desert, but they couldn't just leave what they were doing and go find him. And then Jesus shows up and they're like, well, we knew John the Baptist was beheaded. It was about the time that this guy's ministry started. Maybe this is John the Baptist coming to the new person. Maybe this is Elijah because it said Elijah would come before the Messiah comes. Maybe this is the prophets reborn. Maybe Jeremiah's come back. They don't know what to make of it. They know something is different, but it's not what they were looking for or expecting.

7:01 Actually to guess that Jesus would have been Elijah would probably have been a pretty good guess actually. You know, it was like it was not a dismissive guess. It was recognizing that something was happening. It was acknowledging the voice of the Lord. It would have been a decent guess to say he's one of the prophets. And so when the disciples, when Jesus says, who do the people say that the Son of Man is and the disciples respond with this, I know it's not what Jesus would have wanted to hear, but I don't think the disciples would be embarrassed to tell Jesus they think you

7:32 might be Elijah come back to life. Right? And so some of them said John the Baptist, others say Elijah and others Jeremiah are one of the prophets verse 15 and he said to them, but who do you say that I am? I read this like just this snippet, not all of it because you know how we do with an of an Atlantic article where they've described this new phobia.

8:05 It's probably not real these phobias, you know, but how there are people who don't want to say the names of people who are most special to them. Like that feels awkward or too vulnerable. It starts with the easy like why do you come up with pet names for people, right? That you love the most. Like it moves to a point where there are people who don't want to actually say the name out loud of the person who they love the most or the people who are closest to

8:35 them. They'll call them by something else other than just their name because there's something too vulnerable, too scary about actually calling them by their name. Right? It's like it's like naming it too clearly. And Jesus looks at the 12 who are closest to him and realizes nobody else is quite getting it. Who do people say that I am? Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, others say one of the prophets. Okay.

9:05 And it's like an interesting kind of moment of truth. Who do you guys say that? He just asked him. Who do you guys say that I am? Those other people know us the clearest, right? There's a guy in town I know when he works with people like usually around midlife when they're trying to reevaluate their career and what they need to spend the next season

9:36 of their life on. I can't remember his name. Well, I could remember his name, but that's not pertinent. But I know enough guys who have worked with them, he mostly works with guys. I've known enough guys who have worked with them that I can tell when they're working with them because I get this email and it's like, hey, I'm like evaluating myself and asking 12 people closest to me what they think about me and blah, blah, blah, blah. And it has all this like systems. And it's like an evaluation that he's walking these guys through to get input on who other

10:08 people see them as. Right? Because sometimes other people can see us more clearly. And Jesus asks his 12 closest friends, who do you say that I am? And we've talked about it before, but Peter answers probably not because Peter's the smartest, probably because Peter is the oldest. And so he's the one who's supposed to answer on behalf of all the rest of the 11. And so, but who do you say that I am?

10:38 16, Simon Peter replied, but you are the Christ, the son of the living God. Or he said, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. Christ obviously is like a not an English word. It's a transliteration of the Greek word Christos, which is a Greek translation of the Hebrew word Messiah, which is like I told the kids, like a liberating king, a delivering king. Someone who's come to free the people.

11:11 Right? And so it's a religious term, only because it's used in the story of Scripture and talked about in terms of the one who will come and deliver the people Israel. And Peter on behalf of the disciples looks at Jesus and says, you are the delivering king, the son of the living God. And Jesus answered him and said, blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah, where flesh

11:42 and blood is not revealed as to you, but the Father who is in heaven. I wanted to pause there for just a minute to emphasize for us what a stinking miracle it is that Peter got it, the disciples got it. Jesus asked this vulnerable question. He says, who do you guys say that I am? And Peter answers for all of them and gives the actual answer. He sees Jesus for who he is.

12:14 Let's go through who doesn't see Jesus for who he is. Right? All the powerful people miss it. Right? All of the Roman authorities, all of the Israelite authorities, nobody with power or agency in the world, most of them don't even know Jesus is walking around. Most of the power brokers completely miss it. Okay? Most of the learned miss it. The Pharisees are against him.

12:47 The Sadducees don't really pay any attention to them. They just run the temple. Right? We don't hear about Jesus interacting with any other rabbis moving around except for John the Baptist. Like nobody else gets it. Even the ones following. It sounds like just before this Jesus is talking about disciples, don't you remember when I fed the 5,000 or the 4,000? Like he's been through this. Even those people, they see Jesus and they receive the blessing and the disciples walking

13:23 around picking up the 12 basketballs, listening to who people say that Jesus is. They pick up that some call him John the Baptist, some call him Elijah, some call him one of the prophets, but they miss it. Everybody misses it except for Peter and John, but John's gone already. They've beheaded him. Everybody misses it, but Peter and the 11. This is a miracle that Peter is able to believe.

13:53 And Jesus says what? You can't manufacture miracles. This is a gift from God that you get to see this. Jesus was not a likely delivering king. Right? Son of a carpenter from Nazareth. Does it seem to be particularly? I mean every time he gets a crowd, he tries to disperse it.

14:29 And Peter sees it. It's a miracle. And then Jesus goes on, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my father is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter and on this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. A lot of people, this is like this little verse right here, you are Peter and on this rock I will build my church.

14:59 People have parsed out so much, you guys. It's incredible. I like, I don't do this a lot, but I have this ridiculous, like you stack all the books together. It's like this wide. Dictionary of the New Testament where they break down all the etymology and uses of the Greek words. And I pulled out the one, it took me a minute to find it. As I knew the Greek word that is used here is echlesia, right? And so I go to epsilon, it's all alphabetical.

15:32 I go to epsilon and echlesia is not there. And I'm like, why? Certainly this thing has a write up on echlesia. And it took me a minute to remember this, we'll tell you how far I am from seminary. Oh, it's a derivative of Kaleo to call. I've got to look up Kaleo, not echlesia. So I go to the Kappa one and find an excursus this long on echlesia, right? And in when they talk about echlesia, then they're talking about these petros versus pet

16:07 tribes. So then they're trying to, the big distinction is, is he saying he builds the church on Peter or is he saying he builds the church on the confession of faith? How about this? Yes. I mean, arguments can be made both ways and I don't think the point really holds. I think what's more interesting, I don't think Jesus is trying to say, I will build

16:40 all, everybody must come through Peter to be a part of the church. I also don't think he's saying, I don't care about you, Peter, I only care about the words that come out of your mouth. I think he's definitely saying, I want to use you, Peter, to build the church that I care about which will be built on this confession. I think he's definitely saying that. What's compelling to me is that Jesus at this critical point, when he's witnessing this miracle of Peter believing, says that. He wants to build the church.

17:15 And because he's not saying, Peter, great, you've confessed a true faith, you now are saved. Now, go get other people, individuals, to believe, I'm going to save individuals through this word, this confession. Jesus is saying, I want to build a church. This is where that word is kind of interesting, Echlesia.

17:48 It is a form of Kaleo, Kaleo is to call, Ech is out, so it's like the called out group of people. And it was a term that was used in Greek cultures to say the ones that are called out by the herald, they would say the citizens, the three voting citizens that would make up and decide the direction of a town, they would call together in Echlesia to decide where to go next. And Jesus is telling Peter at this critical moment, when miracle of miracles, he gets

18:18 a glimpse of what's true. He'll forget it several times, right? He won't be able, it's like a flickering light. Sometimes he hasn't, sometimes he doesn't. In this moment, when Peter has it, Jesus looks at him and says, great, I want to get a whole group of you, that's my goal here, to call out a whole segment of you together who will be the church. And you'll all have this flickering light. And it's almost like you see, from here he starts, right after this, he starts telling

18:51 them what it means that he's going to have to die. It's almost like Jesus is like walking through Caesarea Philippi and he's reached a point in his ministry where he's like, let me see if God's ready for the next step. Who do you guys say that I am? And when Peter answering for the rest of the 11 gets it, he's like, cool, it's coming through, right? It's coming through, Spirit of God's coming through, they're starting to see what's right, time to transition. Let me get out of here, these guys can take it.

19:23 And you get, you start to get the sense that, for me this is what's important, Jesus came not necessarily to save individuals, but to build the church. In order to build the church, people will come to saving faith in Christ. But he's not an individualistic, he's a group thinker. How do I bring all these people together? How do I call all these people out, right?

19:56 And on this little spark of faith, on this little flickering light, that's all we need. We know Peter only had a flickering light, he denied Jesus three times on the night in which he was betrayed, right? And then he stands up and does the thing, and then he has the trouble, he stands up at Pentecost and preaches, 3000 people are converted, then he has the trouble with the Judah Isers,

20:26 he can't figure out, should he go out to the Gentiles or not, he stays in Jerusalem, kinds of tries to run the church. But in 300 years or so, right, the faith of Christ, the way of Christ becomes a dominant religion in the Roman Empire and on down from there, really on down from there, problems after problems, right? I was like a friend of mine, went to Rome recently and toured St. Peter's Basilica, anybody been

20:58 there? St. Peter's Basilica? I've never been there. It's gorgeous by all accounts, right? You know how he built it. The Catholics around that time had like, had figured out that you had this group of sins that you had piled up in your life and when you did penance, whether in prayers or in supplication, you would make up for the sins that were wrong. The problem is, and so you would go to the priest, confess your sins, be given an appropriate

21:31 penance and then go perform your penance and then you would be completely forgiven and you could move on and build up your righteousness, right? And the goal was to get the problem they started to have was if you hadn't done enough penance for the sins you had committed and you had died like without things evening out, this is a logical problem, not necessarily a scriptural problem, right? And so then they started to have ways where you could perform penance for loved ones of yours who were still waiting, who like had started but hadn't finished their penance

22:06 on earth. You could find little sections in Scripture that maybe mentioned they pulled these out and developed the idea of purgatory, right? And so then if you wanted, you could perform penance for those of yours whom you loved, who were in purgatory to help them get out of purgatory into heaven. And then what they started to do is realize it takes a lot of time to do all those prayers, say all those Hail Marys, say all those our fathers, do the pilgrimages, pilgrimages did a lot of penance but it takes a lot of time.

22:37 So if you want, you can give the Catholic Church some money and then they'll send one of their monks to do the penance for you. And so now if you want just the certain amount of money, more money gets more penance done, that's it. And will someone else will do the penance for you? Now you can do penance, now you can, you know what, this is just easier, you can do it proactively. Just pay us a lot of money, we'll set a monk to work doing penance for you permanently

23:11 and you'll know when you die you skip over purgatory and go right to heaven because we just got it taken care of. And this going around, they call these indulgences, going around and selling these indulgences is how they accumulated the wealth to build St. Peter's Basilica vomit. Right? I mean St. Peter's Basilica is still beautiful, a pinnacle of human creativity and culture but at this expense, right?

23:43 And so that's like when Luther comes on, the indulgences, crazy. What, crazy, what, that the church survived it. Isn't it? I mean blatant exploitation and corruption and the church endures. I was listening to a very compelling interview the other day of this black professor at Wheaton

24:20 who just wrote a book and it was kind of a far reaching conversation but one of the points he was pulling out is like the legitimacy of faith and he was talking about how often he felt like the faith of his forebears, black Americans who came through enslavement was written off as a superstition that helped them get through a hard situation but he's like maybe they actually had faith and that actually held them through the hard situation.

24:59 Maybe it wasn't a fool's hope, maybe it was actual hope and if you think about the black church in general, I was like it got me down the road like they're brought here against their will enslaved by Christians and who are perpetrating chattel slavery in the name of God saying they have the right to do this and in the midst of that a true church emerges, that's some kind of miracle of a salvific king bringing people, liberating

25:34 people back to life, indulgences, enslavement and then like many of us American Protestant Christianity evangelicalism in the United States today is so fraught and broken and enmeshed with culture and everything else and it breeds consumerism and greed and leads

26:05 to moral failures and yet here we are on a Sunday morning in a warehouse without much heat and some kind of miracle. You all are some kind of miracle. We together, the church is some kind of miracle.

26:41 Children and all, some kind of miracle. Paul picks this up, this will close us. Paul picks this up in his letter to the Ephesians, Acts, Romans, 1st Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Ephesians 2. He's talking about God calling the Gentiles in together into a group into the church, calling

27:13 the Gentiles out. Or remember that you at one time were Gentiles in the flesh called, okay we're going to skip forward because he says a lot. We want to get to verse, let's go to verse 18. For through him we have both access in one spirit to the Father, verse 19.

27:44 So then you are no longer strangers and aliens but you are fellow citizens with the saints and the members of the household of God. You are citizens. The church, the miraculous group of people following the way of Jesus amongst corruption and exploitation throughout its history, this miracle that Christ came to establish

28:15 is a citizenship into the reign of God so that your participation in the miracle of the church is of greater significance than almost any other team that you're on. It is a miracle that people like us would get together. And Jesus has in mind together with God the Father a particular role and opportunity. He creates the church not just for ourselves but we'll see over the story of Scripture

28:49 that it's a consistent strategy of the God to create a group of people and place them strategically in the world. That the world would be what it's supposed to be. And that humanity would get to be what it was made to be. He does that through a people called out. And so the fact that you are part of a church is some kind of miracle and worth considering what does it mean that in the world today I'm one of the called out ones.

29:23 What's my role, responsibility and opportunity because I am in this miracle? Paul calls it a citizenship. So then we are no longer strangers and aliens but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone in whom the whole structure being joined together grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.

29:58 This is the last point to draw out for you that more consistently, sometimes we think about that we are the temple of God. More consistently the story of Scripture talks about the people of God come together in a group and when we come together like the Psalm said that we read, there is the Spirit of God. This is what keeps the miracle working from one generation to the next, from one flickering light to the next, from one exploitation and abuse through that to the next.

30:30 It's because still by good grace and power of his will the God shows up when his people called out come together. And so you and I doing this thing here, being this thing for each other, take our spot in the miracle that Peter initiated, Jesus initiated in Peter there in the first century and he initiates in us today.

31:00 So what I'm excited to look out for the next several weeks is what does that mean for us as we look forward to who we want to be together for Orlando, for our families and for the church broadly. Okay, cool, let me pray. Hey Lord, thanks for this group of people and for your miracle of the church. I'll solidify in us hope for the future and faith to endure. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.