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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed! Alleluia!)
Today, May 17, on some calendars for hundreds of years has been, as we are observing it, the Commemoration of Possidius, Bishop of Calama—a city in the Roman province of Numidia, what is now the city of Guelma in the country of Algeria. Born in the fourth century and living into the fifth century, Possidius was a member of St. Augustine’s first monastic community and Augustine’s friend and colleague for some forty years, who authored a biography of the saint and provided an important list of his works. You may recall that Lutherans honor the saints in three ways: thanking God for them as examples of His mercy, of His will to save people, and of His gifts to the Church; strengthening our faith as we consider God’s forgiving their sins; and imitating their faith and other virtues according to our respective callings (Apology of the Augsburg Confession, XXI:4-6). With that in mind, this morning we reflect on the Gospel Reading, with the theme, “Blessed confessors and key-holders: Peter, Possidius, and you”.
In the Gospel Reading, when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, a city formerly known as “Paneas” and especially known for its pagan worship and practices, Jesus provoked discussion of His identity. When Peter ultimately confessed Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the living God, Jesus proclaimed Peter blessed for God the Father’s having revealed Jesus’s identity to him, and Jesus Himself went on to say to Peter and His other disciples that they would be key‑holders for His Kingdom, the Church, which would withstand all the forces against Her.
Given the conditions of the world and our own country, even of our Synod, District, Circuit, and own congregations, we might easily wonder whether the Church really does withstand all the forces against Her, as the Lord calls faithful members home, disgruntled members vote with their feet but not with their membership, others despise the Means of Grace and those who administer them, and budgets are stretched beyond the point of balance. We might easily wonder whether pastors truly are blessed key‑holders, as salaries freeze and so are effectively reduced, health insurance is cut, and other “perks” are eliminated. We might easily wonder whether God the Father reveals Jesus at all, as people all around us and maybe we ourselves in some ways doubt whether Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, instead confessing—not that He is John the Baptist, Elijah, or Jeremiah, but—maybe that He is just like other prophets, such as Mohammed or Joseph Smith, or maybe some have one of the false understandings of Christ that Possidius helped defend the Church against: the Donatist, Pelagian, or Arian heresies.
If not in these ways, then in other ways, we all sin, for we all are sinful by nature, and, on our own, our sinful flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God (1 Corinthians 15:50). Instead, we deserve to be securely locked behind the gates of hell, which were thought to prevent escape and deny access to invaders. Yet, one thing the false confessions of Jesus that His disciples reported actually got right was that Jesus truly was a prophet—a prophet like those other prophets who called all people to repent. Even now, God calls all of us to repent, that is, to turn in sorrow from our sin, to trust Him to forgive our sin, and to want to do better than to keep on sinning. When we so repent, then God forgives our sin—our sin of doubting the triumph of the Church, our sin of considering material blessings more than spiritual ones, our sin of somehow doubting or denying the revelation of God—whatever our sin might be. The Living God forgives all our sin, for the sake of His Son Jesus, the Christ.
Today’s Gospel Reading is the first time in St. Matthew’s Divinely‑inspired Gospel account that the disciples confess Jesus as the Christ (they had confessed Him as the Son of God after He came to them walking on the sea [Matthew 14:33]). Jesus’s being both the Son of God and the Christ matters: He needed to be both true God and true man, in order to be the Christ, the Messiah, the One anointed as not only the Prophet but also the Priest and the King. The God‑man Jesus died on the cross, and His death there atoned for the sins of the whole world, including your sins and my sins. There, as today’s First Reading put it (Acts 20:28-30), He obtained the Church of God with His own blood. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit reveal Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God (Beckwith, CLD III:175, 183, 228), and either, like Peter, we confess Him and are saved, or, like the high priest at Jesus’s trial, we deny Him and will be condemned eternally on the Day of Judgment (Matthew 26:63-65; confer Daniel 7:13; Scaer, CLD VI:45). When we confess Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God, then God forgives us—God forgives us through the means whereby He has appointed for us to receive that forgiveness.
Given today’s Gospel Reading’s mention of the keys of the Kingdom, we might especially think of the means of individual Holy Absolution, which finds its origin in part in this Gospel Reading (Scaer, CLD VIII:169), and which our Lutheran Confessions understand as “absolution” in the strictest sense. Jesus later said that the scribes and Pharisees were shutting the Kingdom of Heaven in people’s faces, neither entering themselves nor allowing those who would enter to go in (Matthew 23:13), so there is little surprise that Jesus, Who alone truly holds those Keys (Revelation 1:18; 3:7; confer Isaiah 22:20-22), later entrusts the Keys’ use to His apostles and their successors, all for the benefit of the people of the Church (Matthew 18:18; John 20:23). Yet the Keys are used not only in individual Holy Absolution, but the Keys are also used in preaching God’s Word of law and Gospel; in Holy Baptism, through which the Holy Spirit creates the Church; and in the Sacrament of the Altar, where bread that is the Body of Christ and wine that is the Blood of Christ give the repentant forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation—the sacramental Body of Christ’s strengthening the ecclesiological (or “churchly”) Body of Christ.
In today’s First Reading, St. Paul warned the Ephesian “bishops” both that wolves would come in among them and that some of them would speak twisted things to draw away disciples after them. Indeed, as we heard in the Epistle Reading (1 Peter 5:1-11), our adversary the devil always prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. As St. Peter prophesied, Possidius, Bishop of Calama, suffered for faithfully confessing Jesus and exercising His Keys: in one instance Possidius narrowly escaped death when a house he was visiting was set ablaze by a Donatist (on behalf of whose un-acting bishop Possidius later interceded to relieve his fine), and in another instance, Possidius was exiled from Calama when true Christianity was suppressed by the Arians. As St. Peter prophesied, we also may suffer for faithfully confessing Jesus and exercising His Keys, yet, as we remain faithful, we remain blessed. For, Peter’s and our greatest blessings are not salaries, health insurance, or other “perks”, but Peter’s and our greatest blessing is by faith sharing in the salvation of the Kingdom of Heaven (Hauck, TDNT 4:367-369). Diminished membership rolls and budget crises may mean that not every congregation, Circuit, District, or even Synod remains until the end, but, even then, we can be comforted, for the gates of hell still will not have prevailed against Christ’s Church.
Until today’s Commemoration, you and I may never have heard of or remembered Possidius, Bishop of Calama, but, by God’s grace, honoring him today is thanking God, strengthening our faith, and leading to our imitating his faith and other virtues according to our respective callings. Possidius is in the encouraging cloud of witnesses that surround us, whom, by God’s grace, we will meet soon enough, and of whom we will sing in today’s Closing Hymn. That hymn, was authored by Stephen Starke in 19‑97 on the occasion of the New England District’s 25th anniversary, at the request of anniversary committee member Walter Reuning (Hymnal Supplement ’98: Handbook, #840, p.105), and it includes a paraphrase of a much‑loved Collect (for example, Lutheran Worship #176, p.262) in the following stanza that we pray now (Lutheran Service Book 667:5):
Lord, give us faith to walk where You are sending,
On paths unmarked, eyes blind as to their ending;
Not knowing where we go, but that you lead us—
With grace precede us.
Amen.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed! Alleluia!)
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +