Recognition Equals Peace

Recognition Equals Peace

We have bookend Feasts this Sunday and next. Today, January 18th, is the Feast of the Confession of St. Peter. Next Sunday the 25th is the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul. Since 1908, the week between these feasts has been observed in many churches including ours, as the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, that we might do better in working toward Jesus’s prayer to his Father before his arrest: That we might be one as he and the Father are one.

Today, we honor the confession that you have heard from the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus has taken his disciples far from their home among their own people to a city built by Gentiles for Gentiles, originally named Panion, for the Greek God Pan, half goat half man. Caesar Augustus gave the city to the same Herod who would try to have Jesus killed. Then, Herod’s son, Philip, rebuilt the city and renamed it Caesarea Philippi, for the then-current Caesar, Tiberius, and himself. See how “tight” they were?

So, when Jesus of Nazareth, Son of Jospeh, asks his disciples, “But who do you say that I am?” They are in Caesar’s shadow. It took courage for Simon, Son of Jonah, to answer, “You are the Messiah,” God’s Chosen King and, “the Son of the living God.” No one else has had the guts to use the “M” word. Simon had to be standing on something other than his personal opinion. And so Jesus says, “You are rock, and on this rock I will build my church,” the rock being the faith and courage that Jesus makes clear was entrusted to Peter by Jesus’s Father, not his personal possession

And then Jesus makes this promise to the Rock of the Church, a rock on which we the Church still stand, “And the gates of Hades will not overcome it.” Here’s another Greco Roman god, the god of the Dead. For Jesus and his fellow Jews, the ultimate shadow of Roman power was the cross. But it has always been that human power has been assessed by one’s ability to force others to do what you want them to do on pain or death. Never mind that Death eventually beats us all. But there has always been a fleeting glory in the power to inflict pain and death on others.

And yet, Jesus promises Peter, and all the generations of his Church who have lived and died, that Death will not overcome or prevail against his Body, of which we are living members having eaten him and drunk him. All of those living members before us have died, many by the violence of power, understood as force. But true power is endurance in love and peace.

We are not the first generation of disciples to feel overwhelmed by change, to see the strong prey on the weak, to see the detours in Martin Luther King’s arc of justice. The generations have come and gone. So have the empires, once so powerful. Back in Advent, I quoted the late Roman Catholic bishop Romano Guardini. In another of his books, The End of the Modern World, published in 1956, he wrote: “love will disappear from the face of the public world, but the more precious will that love be which flows from one lonely person to another, involving a courage of the heart born from the immediacy of the love of God as it was made known in Christ,” that is Christ, whom Peter had the courage to call God’s Chosen King.

It is that rock of faith, hope, and love which us elder adults are handing on to the younger adults. There is nothing more precious or enduring. And the powers of Death will not overcome it.

January 23rd, 2026

Liturgy of the Word For Peace

The Rev. David Kendrick