The Divine Shelf - August 23rd, 2020 - Rev. K.C. Van Atta-Casebier

The Divine Shelf - Matthew 16:13-20 

Rev. K.C. Van Atta-Casebier

A Sermon for Foundry UMC

8.23.20

 

Let’s Pray. God, for Your wisdom and revelation and hope, we pray now. Amen. 

 

In our text for this morning and the surrounding texts, there is this symphonic interplay of Christ’s divinity and humanity that prepares us for this critical question...Who do you say that I am? And honestly to us it could seem like an invitation to pick one. Is what we’ve heard about you true? Are you the child of God? Or are you the human that was birthed and given life by Mary, a perpetual-includer, a hope-giver, a challenger (I’ll admit a little angry for my taste sometimes), a guide for the way of peace and liberation? Divinity or humanity: how should we identify you here, Jesus? And in the text as an answer to this question Who do you say that I am?, Peter responds YOU ARE THE MESSIAH, perhaps unaware that he is unlocking a significant piece of the gospel story. And Jesus’ response is YES, I am that. And oh by the way also, I want you, Peter, to be the foundation for the space the Messiah inhabits in the world. Someone will need the keys to open the doors to my people at all hours of the night, to fire up the ovens in the kitchen for bread-baking, to collect alms and distribute them. Be careful with these keys, though Peter, because they also lock doors and can bar them shut and can be used for defensive posturing at best and ethnic cleansing at worst. These keys also lock chains, Peter, and whatever is bound on earth, will be bound in Heaven. This word for bound is used in every other place by the author of Matthew as a synonym for what happens just before death. Bind it and then we will burn it. Bind him, and throw him into the darkness. Bind him and deliver him to Pilate. And in many ways it's worse than the death it foreshadows. It’s an agent of humiliation, a tool of torture, a sure-fire way to exclude (or at the very least place out of sight) people from the family. It’s a big job, Peter. Just as we don’t get Jesus’ divinity without Jesus’ humanity, we also don’t get to claim a divine promise of Messianic fruition and salvation as ours without being handed the keys to the whole dang thing. Peter’s ability to move forward in this calling as the rock and foundation for the ekklesia (the church) is shaped by his understanding of who Jesus is. A gift, the author says, given to Peter from Heaven. 

 

This question for the disciples is one we should be reckoning with every day. Who will we say Jesus is? The struggle of recognizing who Jesus is in the world is an ongoing, ever-present, deeply theological question which considers the collision of Jesus’ divinity and humanity, and it directly affects our relationship to the ekklesia, to divine work, and to the Kindom origin of the Messiah. 

I have this theory that claiming Jesus’ divinity and salvific power without accountability to the work of figuring out what that actually means is the equivalent of holding up a divine shelf to ensure that the Kindom doesn’t crash down and leak all over the systems and institutions that we’ve crafted around our apologetics and often poorly examined portraits of Jesus…and what we’re supposed to do (or perhaps, more prevalently, not do) about it. Institutions and systems that are built with gatekeepers (and their protection at all costs) in mind. But the incarnation cuts out the middle person…on…purpose. If it was up to Peter to conjure the Messianic idea or have it told to him through someone else, this text might have gone in a different direction. But because of impediment-free revelation, it’s an opportunity to lean into what is to come and from that moment, the author says, Jesus began to tell the disciples about the great suffering that lay ahead. Which may not feel like good news. The leak from Heaven, though, is a consequential next step in the harrowing journey to the Golgotha and the life that lies beyond it. 

 

And I want to challenge us to not continue to put all of our effort into holding up the divine shelf. Especially if it is just for the sake of continuing a fruitless dichotomy, to appeal to our binary mindsets or our separatist ideals. If we’re just doing it because we need here and there, we need us and them, we need now and later…we might be calling the Messiah by the wrong name or giving the Messiah the wrong title. 

 

Here’s what I want us to hear, it is an enterprise to keep the Kindom of heaven where it is, to prevent a more close encounter...to keep Jesus’ Messianic revelation up on the divine shelf as a separate characteristic and to claim it without accountability to it, to use it as proof rhetoric for our own Christological convictions that tell us we’re home team, and that we are fine to keep on pretending that somehow not interacting with the world is what will save us and that there will be hell to pay for the ones who dare to try. People make millions of dollars and “save millions of souls” by holding up the divine shelf and keeping it as a distant ideal. It can be sold, because it promises that full investments in capitalist theocracies are rewarded with impunity. And it is controlled by those in power, who sit on thrones of supremacy and bathe under faucets of privilege, who collect rugs to sweep things under and co-sign unwritten rules, and who benefit most from its right-side up, uninterrogated narrative that holiness or salvation was bought by the shedding blood of a brown-skinned immigrant in chains with no realization that the whip is an extension of their very own hand. … Keep it out, keep Jesus’ melanin Messiahship and our role as “bringers-about” of an upside-down Kindom out. Hold up that shelf, hire people to help us if we have to. Repackage it. Commodify it. Keep ourselves clean and white and unaccountable. Let the Messiah sort it out. We’ll wait.  

 

But the divine shelf must fall. 

 

  It has to clang in its reentry and crash our parties of complacency. Those words, “You are the Messiah,” need to make an absolute mess of this place. Because divine work doesn’t solely exist in ethereality, divine work happens when the disciples are invited into the sea of doubt and offered a courageous, faithful, and yes, even faltering witness, when Jesus feels compelled to change his mind, to shift away from stereotypes and insults hurled at a woman desperately trying to save her child, and to expand his definition of community, of who is welcome at the table. It happens when we are given permission for imperfection, when our impossible standards for ourselves and others bear no fruit and are yanked out of the ground like the weeds they are. It happens when we find a sacred, stolen moment or breathing space to connect cosmically to the fuel station of the universe. When “this is what it feels like to do the thing” becomes an empowering mantra rather than a crippling cry. Its in whispers, in shouts of protest, in the wails of grief, in the songs of hope and of HOSANNA. AND it happens when we invest in the streets and work for racial and economic justice and access to affordable housing and healthcare. It echoes in the halls of lawmakers as we organize against the crafting of evil and unjust policies. It reverberates in prisons as we visit AND as we work to dismantle the system that unjustly locks folx away in the first place. Jesus is the Messiah, the anointed one, the bringer of divine promise and liberation and resurrection. The personification of the Kindom. And also, the Messiahship is incomplete without the audacity of the flesh. Every instrument in the symphony must be played. We need to float through all of the movements –proclamation and the pain, the rising and the reconciliation.

 

May we get the music stuck in our head, commit its chords to our heart. And even when we feel out of touch or like its meaning is muddied more than ever before or when something is attempting to shout or tweet louder, may we find ourselves humming the melody of the Messiah, reminding ourselves that what we know about the Messiah is true - that the Messiah is BOTH - the circle-expander, the un-binder, the challenger, Mary’s child, AND the long-awaited fulfillment of a divine promise of liberation, that we are also accountable to see carried out in the world. 

 

     The Messiah isn’t a reinforcer of separation, or roll calling on an ‘us and them’ roster. ‘You are the Messiah’ is an indicator that the way we live and go about divine work matters, that the Kindom is leaking, and it’s our job to let it (as painful as it might be for our privilege or assuredness)…so that we might continue the work of living in a community of open doors that breaks bread, collects and distributes alms, AND is mindful of the intersections of oppression and the way that the (Big C) church has co-opted those stories. A community that acknowledges its pools of power and does the work to bring more folx to the table, a home for every person to feel safe to show up and not be loved ‘in spite of who they are,’ but in the FULLNESS of who they are. It’s a big job, and it takes waiting and working and suffering and resting…questioning, regrouping, refueling and carrying on in the long-term work. Because the Messiah is not a trend, it’s a revolution. 

 

And the beauty is that we can’t keep the Kindom out even if we try. We can’t hold up the divine shelf or plug the Messianic leak. No matter how many gatekeepers we hire. No matter how much we insist on investing in our comfort, predictability, and stiltedness. No matter our paralysis in visceral pain, grief, or illness. No matter our perceived failure or hesitation at the starting line. Our shoulders will begin to recognize the weight that we bear. And the divine shelf will fall mightily. 

 

This quote from Meister Eckhart demonstrates why: 

Earth cannot escape heaven, flee it by going up, or flee it by going down.

Heaven still invades the earth, energizes it, makes it sacred…

God is at home (here). It is we who have gone out for a walk.

 

Let’s Pray. 

 

God whatever we’ve unfaithfully bound, may you come and help us loosen it. May we be emboldened to sing loudly the symphony of who you are in the world and know that with each note, we have a responsibility to be agents for your liberation - for others and for ourselves. Give us the strength we need for this thing and the next. Gather us up in community as witnesses and reminders of your holy work in us and in the world. Whisper to us each morning that you have not abandoned us. Breathe life and hope into the ekklesia, Lord. We’ll continue to unlock it. In the name of the Trinitarian God we pray together, Amen. 

 

Benediction:

Who is it that you say that I am? I am the Messiah?

Then Foundry it’s time for the divine shelf to fall 

To remember who we are 

To invite perfection into a nasty fall from grace

To unfold every corner

To relocate our humanity in the divine work

And to take these keys and go on a spree of unbinding. 

Go now and may grace and peace abound with us on the journey, Amen. 

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