Where We Get It From & Where We're Going – Matthew 16:21-28

If your week was anything like mine, it was filled with Dolly Parton. Quotes, songs, outfits, testimonials, what a week. I was especially moved by a replay of an interview she gave about the Imagination Library, her book gifting program that sends free books to kids from birth until school age to promote a love of reading and literacy development. She said, “Before he passed away, my Daddy told me the Imagination Library was probably the most important thing I had ever done. I can’t tell you how much that meant to me because I created the Imagination Library as a tribute to my Daddy. He was the smartest man I have ever known but I know in my heart his inability to read probably kept him from fulfilling all of his dreams.”

It’s remarkable to think about how one man’s circumstances and temperament influenced a daughter who had the inspiration and resources to change so many lives in response. We are all influenced like that, in big ways and small. And our conditioning goes much further back than the people who raised us. Maybe you had a great-great-grandfather who was charming and witty and really good at pinochle, but he had a temper. And while you share his charm and card shark skills, you might also be quick to anger. Things tend to run in families, because families are a kind of system, and systems prefer to maintain the status quo. Other kinds of systems work this way too, like organizations and governments. They're notoriously hard to change by virtue of being a system.

The fancy name for this is systems theory, and one of its insights is that systems tend to carry the marks of their beginnings. You can often trace both the genius and the pathology of a system back to its source. Systems inherit and perpetuate the original good and bad. As in, you get your charm and your temper from a family ancestor. Companies work this way too. Apple will always reflect some of Steve Jobs's genius, and the rougher sides of his temperament. Like families and companies, churches are systems, too. Their spirit can be traced to the original founding families. We have an early band of Episcopalians to thank for starting Christ Church back in 1839. Whatever they were like, we carry some of their spirit with us today, overwhelmingly to the good, I think.

As Christians, our system goes further back. We trace the church to Jesus, of course, but also to Peter. As we move through Matthew’s gospel, we can see his genius and pathology playing out in back-to-back lessons. Last week we heard Jesus refer to Peter as the rock, the cornerstone on which he would build the church. That’s the good part, Peter's solid foundation of faith. This week, when Peter rejects the suggestion that Jesus will be killed and rise again, Jesus calls him Satan and tells him he's a stumbling block. That’s a nice play on words, from cornerstone to stumbling block. But it's also a revelation of the genius and the shortcoming of the church, its faith and doubt, its strength and failure. Peter was a brave and brash disciple. Without hesitation, he walked on water toward Jesus, but also started to sink when he began to doubt. He loved Jesus, but also denied him three times before the cock crowed the night before the crucifixion.

If Peter is, in fact, the rock of the church, it makes you wonder how the church has been shaped by him all these years. It seems to me that we collectively, like him, grasp the gospel whole heartedly, and boldly live it out on our good days. On other days we stumble, we doubt, and we cling to what we're comfortable with. Peter tried to hold on to his own notion of a messiah, one that wouldn't be crucified. Perhaps we, too, cling to what we know, afraid to let go into an unknown future. I think the challenge for us in today’s gospel is whether we can imagine something different than the systems we're in. Peter certainly struggled with that, and Jesus called him again and again to believe, and to imagine something different. Take up your cross, he said, and follow me.

I find this gospel deeply hopeful. The same question facing Peter faces us: can we imagine something different (David Lose)? Maybe that question resonates in your own life right now, as something feels stuck or impossible to change. Or maybe it resonates for the larger systems we're in, our homes or workplaces, or even church. Powerful systems try to maintain their status quo. The gospel breaks in this morning and asks us: can we imagine something different than what’s familiar? Will we shape our lives not only on the ways we’ve inherited but on the way of the cross, starting with a fundamental pattern of love and forgiveness, of compassion and hope? Sometimes systems don't change when we fight them on their own terms. They begin to change when we lay those ways down and take up something different and life-giving.

I give thanks for all the quirky relatives in my own family system. For good and ill, such folks inform who we are in this world. And today I also give thanks for Peter, our ancestor in the church, a man who stumbled and who also stuck it out until he truly understood the message of the cross and witnessed the resurrected Christ. That's in our DNA, too. He went on to an important preaching career and a major role in shaping the early church. He's part of who we are in this place centuries later, sometimes doubtful but mostly strong in the radically different order of the cross.

The same is true of our history here at Christ Church. As we close out this season of renovation and step into a new chapter, it feels like the right moment to look at where we came from. This fall on Wednesday nights we’re offering new opportunities for fellowship and learning, including a short course on our parish history: who those early Episcopalians were, what they built and why, and how their spirit has carried forward into who we are now. It's based on the same wisdom Peter teaches us. We can't fully imagine a more faithful future until we know clearly what we're carrying with us, the genius and the pathology both, so that we can keep the one and let go of the other.

As we look ahead, may we be inspired by Peter's faith, a faith that doubts and stumbles at times but always follows Jesus. And as we step into this next chapter, may we hold on to the best of what those early Episcopalians started at Christ Church, and pass it on to those who will come after us.