Sermon: “The Weight of Peter’s Confession”- August 23, 2026

The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Matthew 16:13-20

The Rev'd Ezgi Saribay Perkins, The Rector 

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In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Please be seated. There's an old Turkish proverb, and it goes something like this. A stone has weight in its own place. It means that something carries its deepest meaning when it is seen where it belongs. A stone removed from where it's meant to be may look worthless, but set it into a particular wall, a foundation, a threshold or a grave, it begins to show its true weight. And its weight is not only physical, it carries memory, history and belonging. Caesarea Philippi was one of those places where the stone spoke too. Before Jesus ever arrived there with his disciples, that region had carried the weight of different divine claims. It had been associated with Baal, the ancient Canaanite storm and fertility god, and then with the worship of Pan, the Greek god of the wild and of the shepherds, and then with the name of Caesar. It was a place where religion, empire, fear, and power had all left their mark. And it is there in that place that Jesus asked the question none of us can avoid, who do people say that the Son of Man is? The disciples answered with the rumors of the crowd, John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets? These are not bad answers. They recognize that Jesus is not an ordinary man. They place him among the servants of God. But even the highest human category they can think of does not fully name his identity. So Jesus presses the question closer. But who do you say that I am? What says you? He makes it personal. If you ask this question to an Episcopalian in the checkout lane of TJ Max, you might get a puzzled look. You might even hear the internal scream, we just don't do that. That's just a little too personal now, isn't it? But that's precisely the tension this gospel asks us to enter. Peter answers, You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. In the presence of dead idols, Peter confesses the living God. In the shadow of imperial power, he names the true anointed king. And then Jesus speaks of another stone, another rock, another foundation. You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church. A stone has weight in its own place. And here at Caesarea Philippi, Peter's confession carries that weight we call the church's beginning. Here's what I think the point of the passage is. Jesus asks his disciples who he is, and Peter's confession becomes the place where he begins to reveal the his identity, authority, and promise of the church he himself will build. But first, he asks the question every one of us must answer. And Jesus begins with a public answer of what people think about him. Who do people say that the Son of Man is? And they give him some pretty straightforward answers. They are not bad answers, someone like John the Baptist, Elijah, and Jeremiah. Crowds are not dismissing Jesus. They know something of God is happening in him. But admiration is not the same as confession. The crowd has reached the highest categories it knows, but those categories still fall short. To call Jesus a prophet is to say something true, but not enough. Though he speaks the word of God, he does stand against falsehood and injustice, he bears the marks of divine commission. But he is not the only one more voice in the long line of God's messengers. He is the one to whom prophets pointed. He is not simply another servant of God. He is the Messiah, Son of the Living God. And that Messiah name makes him as God's anointed king. Son of the living God names his unique relationship to the God of Israel, the God who is not a dead idol or an abstract idea, but alive, active, and reigning. And then he presses the question closer. But who do you say that I am? You in the Greek here is equivalent to what southerners call y'all. So who do y'all say that I am? Jesus is asking the disciples as a community, but the question means personally too. It moves from witness, rumor to witness, from inherited language to living faith, from what others said about Jesus to what disciples themselves must name before him. And that's where discipleship becomes unavoidable. We may admire Jesus from a distance, we may respect his teachings, he's a nice enough guy, isn't he? Every once in a while he's a little offensive in my opinion. We may place him among the great moral and spiritual figures of the world. We may even speak warmly about his compassion, courage, his welcome, his nearness to the poor. But eventually Jesus turns to the church and asks, Who do you all say that I am? And that question cannot be answered by what people generally think. Even when people think highly of him. Friends, the question is not whether Jesus is useful, inspiring, comforting, or admirable. The question that we ask in the gospel today is whether he is Lord. At Caesarea Philippi, in the shadow of the rival gods and rival powers, Peter gives the answer on which the church must live. You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. And Peter makes that claim personally. And that's why Jesus calls him blessed. For a moment, Peter sees Jesus as he is. And Peter's confession is true because God has revealed it. Jesus does something very important after Peter speaks. He blesses him, but he doesn't congratulate him. He doesn't say, Well then, Peter, you've reasoned your way to the right conclusion. He says, Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. That's a strange sentence for us modern people to hear. We live in a world that prizes research, analysis, critical thoughts, and those things are not bad. Christian faith does not require us to despise the mind. Matthew does not present Peter as an anti intellectual, and Jesus is not praising ignorance, but Jesus is saying that the deepest truth about him cannot be mastered as an object from a safe distance. It cannot be reduced to a scientific experiment, a gut feeling, an intellectual preference. It must be revealed by God. You and I know that there are truths we observe in the scientific world and still not know. A person can know the chemistry of tear production and not really understand grief. A person can study the theory of music and never be moved by beauty. A person can study the history of Christianity and still not know Christ. There's a kind of knowing that is not less than reason, but more than reason, and emols surrender, trust and a gift. And that's what happens to Peter. He sees the same Jesus others see, he hears the same teaching, he watches the same healings, but somehow, by the grace of the Father, he is able to say what most can't say. You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. But as much as we love him, Peter is not a stable foundation, if we mean by that a flawless human being. In the very next passage passage, he will resist the reveal of the cross. The same Peter who confesses Jesus rightly soon misunderstand him profoundly. And that should make us careful. The church is not built on greatness of humans, cleverness, certainty, or moral perfection, but it begins with a fragile disciple receiving a truth he did not invent and could not control. And his confession invites humility before he creates authority. To confess Jesus is not to stand above others as though we have solved the puzzle of God by our doubt, our inquiry or imagination. To confess Jesus is to live under this revelation. It is to admit that living God has acted before we understood, spoken before we answered, and given before we knew how to ask. And finally, Jesus builds his church on this confession. On this confession he gives them authority and promises that no matter what happens in the world, death will not overcome his church. The sentence you are Peter on this rock, I will build my church, has carried centuries of arguments about who Peter is and who Peter is not, but what we need to hear from it today is to hear the force of what Jesus says in that sentence. Peter has a real place in this moment. He is not incidental. He is the disciple who speaks the confession aloud, and yet he cannot be separated from the confession he has just made, and he cannot be separated from Christ who names his person and his witness as rock. But the most important word I think in that sentence is I. On this rock I will build my church. The church belongs to Jesus. It is built by Jesus, gathered by Jesus, founded upon the confession of him and sustained by Jesus. But the following promise flows out of all the claims Jesus made as Lord. The gates of Hades will not prevail against the church. In Jewish thought, Sheol was the realm of the dead, and the gates of Sheol or the gates of death named the imprisoning power that no human being could finally escape. In the Greek world, Hades carried the same sentence, the shadow realm where death held what it had taken. So Jesus is not giving us a cartoon picture of hell. He is naming the oldest terror beneath every empire, idol and temple, at every human who fears death. And he names this fear at Caesarea Philippi. In a place marked by ancient gods, imperial claims and shrines cut into stone, Jesus announces that he will build a different kind of temple, not made of marble for Caesar or carved into the cave of a pan, but a living community gathered around his identity. The powers around him says this place is where power lives, and Jesus renames it by saying I will build my church here. The power of death says everything comes through our gates. Jesus says, I will not let you have them. What a remarkable promise that is. Then Jesus gives the metaphorical keys of the key in the kingdom. Peter and later the church are entrusted all of us to bind and loose, to teach, to discern, forgive, but also correct, open and guard. And that is a holy responsibility. It's both humbling and powerful, isn't it? Jesus entrusts his work to fragile people, people like Peter, people who can confess rightly and misunderstand unbelievably. But he doesn't hold the promise because of our insufficiency. The church lives because Jesus is who Peter says he is. You are the Messiah, Son of the Living God. The question, he asks as Caesarea Philippi remains the question beneath the life of the whole church. Who do you say that I am? The church lives by the confession that Jesus is the Messiah, but the confession is not something we just say on Sundays. It is the truth by which we live to be built up into his people. He builds with fragile disciples in case you haven't noticed, people who understand in parts, people who misunderstand in parts, with people like Peter and with people like us. Yet the promise remains death will not finally prevail against the community built by the living Christ. This morning we have the opportunity to confess him, to trust him, and to live under his authority. Because church belongs to Jesus, and because it belongs to Jesus, the gates of hell does not overcome it. And as I look around, I know that this morning we are indeed in the hands of our Lord and beneath the roof of his church. And I don't know about you, but I can't imagine a safer place to be. Do I believe Jesus is the Messiah, Son of the Living God, like Peter? Heck yes I do. What about you? Amen.