Matthew 16:13-28 "Towering" Scott Hoezee

"In the cross of Christ I glory, towering o'er the wrecks of time." That is a hymn lyric that many of us know quite well. In fact, it seems like I've known that line my entire life. But the notion of the cross towering over various temporal "wrecks" gained new poignance for me when I saw that iron-girder cross towering over Ground Zero last March. Whether or not you have been to New York in person, probably all of you have seen that cross in that it became one of the most frequently photographed parts of the that grim and terrible place.

For many people in this world, that's the function of a cross: to mark a bad and tragic thing. Although I've never been to Arlington National Cemetery nor to the vast graveyards near Normandy, France, I'm told that it is almost numbing to see such huge fields of white crosses, each marking the grave of a fallen soldier. Again, however, that's what we do: we place the cross at locations of death. We do not generally, however, sink crosses into places of life, liveliness, or anything else that has to do with our everyday business.

Even in lower Manhattan prior to September 11, no one would have thought to place a cross anywhere in the plaza of the World Trade Center. Not only would such a religious symbol have been shunned as a violation of church and state, seeing the symbol of the cross smack in the midst of this country's greatest symbol of economic power would have made no sense to most people. What would a cross have had to do with all that bond trading and all the other high-octane business that people once conducted in the Twin Towers?

Indeed, in the special edition of Time magazine that came out just days after 9-11, editor Nancy Gibbs opened her article this way: "If you want to humble an empire, it makes sense to maim its cathedrals. They are symbols of faith, and when they crumple and burn, it tells us we are not so powerful and we can't be safe. The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center . . . were the sanctuaries of money and power that our enemies may imagine define us." Gibbs then went on to say that those enemies were wrong, that money is not really America's God after all, and in one sense she's right. In another sense, however, our enemies were right, too. Whether it's a skyscraper or a mega-mall, the modern-day cathedrals of America--those places around which life revolves and that anchor people's lives as surely as the village church once did--those cathedrals are economic in nature.

In a recent article, author David Brooks details the sprawl of what he calls "Sprinkler Cities." These are giant suburban metropolises that have sprung up from virtually nowhere in the last two decades. In order to make such Sprinkler Cities attractive to would-be new residents, city planners are very careful to build all the basics. Chief among the absolute necessities to which people insist on having access are, of course, shopping outlets. And so among the first things to spring up from nowhere on once-desolate patches of prairie are giant slabs of asphalt on which are built things like Home Depot, Petco, WalMart, Bed Bath & Beyond, Barnes&Noble, Linens-n-Things, as well as area-code-sized Old Navy stores. Some of these malls, Brooks says, are so big they could almost qualify for membership in the United Nations. Ringing these behemoths of commerce are other vital landmarks of the newly formed Sprinkler City, including theme chain restaurants of the Macaroni Grill Olive Garden Outback Cantina Charlie's Cheesecake Factory Fridays variety.

If you travel through these new suburban meccas, you'll see all the logos, signs, and brand names you would expect to see, but you'll see no cross, and actually precious few churches. It's hard to know what the cross of Jesus would have to do with a Sprinkler City. The cross is not a symbol of strength. Instead it's a somber symbol of weakness, of death, of tragedy. It's also a symbol of hope, and in a sense the cross at Ground Zero was meant to point beyond those horrors toward something better by and by. But short of the need to see some hope beyond a bad moment, the cross is not something to which you turn your eyes--not on good days anyway.

Yet in Matthew 16 Jesus presents the cross as something to which we cling every day. Indeed, if you were paying attention to what we read a few minutes ago, then you can see that images of power and weakness swirl around one another in these verses. There is also an uncanny reversal of expectations, highlighted by a marvelous interplay of related images.

Let me explain what I mean. First of all, we have Jesus asking the most vital of all questions, "Who do you say that I am?" He wanted to know what the disciples thought (and, of course, I would imagine he still wants to know what you and I think today as well). So Jesus poses what may well be the single most important question in the cosmos only to have Simon rush in where angels fear to tread, blurting out the answer, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God!" It was the right answer, as evidenced by Simon's receiving a swift beatitude and a new name. "Blessed are you, Simon! You're so right about that rock-solid confession that from now on I'm going to call you 'Rocky.' If you stick with what you just said, I'll build the whole future on your rock-solid confession. The result will be so strong that not even the forces of hell itself will be able to make a dent!"

Now in our particular tradition of the wider church, we have tended to key not so much on the person of Simon Peter as on the nature and power of what Peter said. We don't think Peter was promoted to become the first pope but we believe instead that whenever anyone says what Simon Peter said, then right there is the rock-solid faith on which the church is built. It's faith that matters. And that's good because had Jesus been focusing only on the person and character of Peter himself, then things would have soured very quickly. After all, Peter still holds the world record for the fastest change in spiritual status. Within the span of only a few minutes, Peter went from Rocky the Blessed to Satan the Scandal!

Jesus wastes no time after Peter's confession before launching into a lot of doom and gloom stuff about suffering and death. In verse 21, Matthew tells us that Jesus explained to the disciples how all of that must happen to him. It's the tiny Greek verb dei that is used there, and throughout the New Testament this notion of absolute necessity is routinely linked with the sufferings and death of Jesus. This simply had to happen.

Apparently, Peter missed hearing that little word "must" because he seems to have concluded that this suffering and death stuff was just one possibility of what the future held. But since it was only one possibility among many, Peter figured it was best to avoid it. Since he was feeling pretty full of himself following his Lord's personal beatitude, old Rocky takes it on himself to give Jesus a little lesson in theology. So he pulls Jesus aside--after all, why involve those lesser disciples in this? Peter summons Jesus away from the other disciples the way the president might consult with his chief-of-staff on matters that don't concern the "little people" around him. Peter assumes the posture of a superior instructing an inferior.

With his arm draped around Jesus' shoulder, Peter quietly but sternly upbraids Jesus, "God forbid this should ever happen to you, Lord!" That's when Jesus calls Peter a Satan, but not just that: he calls Peter a skandalon, a scandal, which in Greek refers to a rock over which a person stumbles. Simon is still getting depicted in rock-like terms, but this time he's not a foundation stone but a trip-hazard! Then, just to be sure Peter, and now all of us, get the point as to what makes the difference between being a useful building block or a dangerous stumbling block, Jesus launches into his famous words about bearing the cross.

The cross, and our ability to let our everyday life be shaped by that cross, is what creates the difference. But that means that the thing that even hell itself cannot touch is not something powerful the way the world reckons such things but something weak. It's weakness that hell cannot attack. It's vulnerability and the gospel way of suffering servanthood and gentle love that the devil and his hosts cannot exploit.

This was a truth that was not lost on the Christian writer J.R.R. Tolkien. With the recent release of the first Lord of the Rings film, Tolkien's trilogy of books has received renewed attention. As some of you know, the story centers on the accidental discovery of a powerful ring that had once been forged by the evil Lord Sauron. The only way to destroy this ring, and so cut off the wicked strength of Sauron, was to re-melt it in the same fiery volcanic cracks in which the ring had been forged.

Throughout the long tale of this ring's journey back to the place whence it came, Tolkien introduces readers to a number of powerful figures, each of whom would, by all worldly standards, be logical a candidate to take on Sauron. Yet the wise among these powerful ones know that evil will be defeated not by power but by weakness. If Gandalf the wizard or Galedril the beautiful elven queen were even to touch the ring, the ring's evil would corrupt the power these people already possessed and would transform them into something monstrous. The only ones who could safely touch the ring were the weakest and most innocent of creatures: the pint-sized Hobbits like Frodo and his faithful companion Sam. By being weak, they were strong. By having no great powers that the ring could exploit, they could destroy the ring in a way no overtly powerful being ever could.

Tolkien understood the gospel. If there is something that hell itself cannot touch, it's not just faith in Christ as Peter first confessed him--with visions of worldly clout and political power no doubt dancing in Peter's head--but rather faith in the Crucified Christ. We must accept the need of the cross and, what's more, take up that cross ourselves.

It is life in all its goodness, and not only death in all its sadness, that the cross needs to define. It towers over not just the wrecks of time but over glistening shopping malls, urban financial districts, manicured Sprinkler City neighborhoods, golf courses, schools, and everything! Taking up your cross does not mean that you go looking for suffering. And as we have noted before, this kind of cross-bearing should also not be restricted to only certain problems in your life--the kind of difficulty that leads people sometimes to say things like, "Well, my ulcer is just my cross to bear in life, I guess."

Instead, Jesus indicates that just viewing life the way he viewed it will itself lead to a degree of suffering. If we see faithfulness to God as our top priority, then there may inevitably be clashes between us and the "business as usual" practices of the world. However, what we need to see in conclusion this morning is that this difference between the world and us will be less visible if we, like the world, relegate the cross to just the ash heaps of life while keeping it away from life's sunny meadows and good times.

Are we still able to spy the difference the cross makes? Once upon a time in our neck of the Reformed woods, people used to talk about the "antithesis" that exists between the Christian and the world. Sometimes these days, however, it seems like there is more of a convergence between church and society. In some ways this may come into focus between parents and children, which on this morning of infant baptism is a good place for our focus.

Can we parents still make the tough calls, seeing that a cross-shaped life properly steers us away from some cultural facets? Are we able to discern the toxic nature of certain features to the mass media? Oddly, it seems that the more glaring certain negative features to our culture become, the more difficulty some of us have avoiding those same pitfalls.

For instance, ours is such a strange time when it comes to things like movies. This summer alone there have been a couple of movies that were rated PG-13, meaning that in the opinion of certain Hollywood folks, kids under 13 probably shouldn't see these movies (and if that's what even those jaded entertainment folks think, you'd suspect that those of us with even more scruples ought to agree rather heartily). Yet some of those same PG-13 movies have been promoted through the give-away of little movie-related toys that get put into kiddie meals at fast food restaurants--meals that you may not receive unless you are under the age of 12! Not surprisingly, I've heard of parents taking kids as young as 4 years of age to these PG-13 movies because, after all, these kids want to see the source of their free little Happy Meal toy. Maybe as cultural streams of influence go, this seems pretty minor. But the question Christian parents ought properly face is whether or not we can say "No" to this type of influence over us and our children.

Are we willing to cordon off from ourselves and our kids certain music, TV shows, DVD's, video games? Are we willing to tell our children not to work on Sundays, not to attend certain events, see certain websites? An advertisement running on TV now gives what may be the most stringent message people are willing to tolerate today: "Let your kids be themselves but stay in touch." Give them a cell phone, ask that they check in now and again, but other than that . . . All parents say "no" to some things like drugs, but can we target things we reject that go beyond what even non-religious parents also reject these days?

If the cross, and faithfulness to the Jesus who died on that cross, is going to shape our everyday lives, then conflict with the prevailing culture should be expected. There may be certain promotions we shouldn't get or take as Christians, certain business opportunities we should decline, certain things we won't go along with, say, or do. Unhappily, we tend to treat secular success as something about which we need not be too spiritually concerned.

As I said in another sermon a while back, if as pastors Bob or I heard that someone lost a job, most of you would expect that we'd maybe call this person and assure him or her of our prayers. Yet you'd be highly taken aback (though maybe you shouldn't be) if Bob or I heard about someone's promotion but then responded by calling this person and saying, "Floyd, I heard you got promoted but I'm concerned about the new temptations this may introduce into your and your family's life. May I come over and pray with you for strength in the face of this new success?" How could worldly success ever be a cause for Christian concern? But if we ask that question, then that alone may show that also for us many times, the cross has been relegated to only the sad parts of life, not the happy or ordinary times.

Of course, as many of you know, if in our tradition there has been an emphasis on the antithesis between Christ and culture, there has also been an emphasis on discernment to see what parts this world are OK, which parts still reflect God's original goodness in creation. Ours has been a tradition of engaging with culture, not an Amish-like flight away from it. That makes things quite complex, of course, but why would we expect our guiding symbol of the cross to make things easy?

When you see in the cross of Christ not just your fondest hope for life beyond death but your dearest source of daily guidance right now, then life has gotten turned on its head such that there will be some tortuous choices to be made in order to stay on the path this Crucified God has marked out for us to follow. It's finally the difference between being a building block or a stumbling block; a part of God's good foundation or a trip hazard with potentially dire consequences.

A person can gain the whole world, Jesus warns, but still lose his soul. And if in the end, when Christ returns in glory, a person does horrifingly discover that his soul has been forfeited, well then not all the riches of this earth will be enough to buy that soul back. Some things come to us only as a gift of grace. Life with God is just such a gift, and it was purchased for us by Jesus on a cross. Every day and in every place, that cross towers over us, and we should not want it to be any other way. Amen.