Sermon on the Confession of Saint Peter, January 18, 2015

Texts: Acts 4:8-13; 2 Peter 1:1-15; and Mark 8:27-35.

            Beloved in Christ, we love reading the first paragraph of today’s gospel. Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ and is commended for his confession. And then Jesus says that Peter can keep mum about our Lord’s real identity. We love that approach. We too confessed our faith in Jesus when we were confirmed. The pastor praised us as good students and allowed us to take communion for the first time. And now that is all over with. We can sit down, relax, and enjoy a nice retirement from having to learn the faith and confess it. Because we confessed our faith once, we can now keep mum.

            But if you read the entire New Testament, you see that that is not the case. Yes, there were a number of times when Jesus ordered people to keep quiet, but that was because He had not yet completed His ministry and people were bound to misunderstand it. Once He had been crucified and raised from the dead, then people would see the totality of His ministry and then it would be appropriate to talk openly about His being the Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed One sent by God. But until then our Lord asked people to keep quiet, since He knew that a little knowledge could be more dangerous than ignorance. But once His earthly ministry was over with, it was no longer time to keep mum. He poured out the Holy Spirit upon the church on Pentecost, and since the church is not to be silent. No, we are to confess Jesus as the Christ again and again.

            Today I would like to look at three aspects of confessing the Christian faith, as described in today’s readings. First of all, if we take our task seriously, we will have to deepen our confession of faith. It isn’t that we set aside what we have confessed before. No, we underscore what we have said previously and we go even deeper into those matters than we had done previously.

            Consider Peter’s confession in the first paragraph. It was spot on. Jesus wasn’t John the Baptist. How could He be, since John had baptized Him? He wasn’t Elijah come down in a fiery chariot. He wasn’t an ordinary prophet. No, He was the Christ, the one especially sent by God. As far as who Jesus was, you couldn’t beat Peter’s confession. But just because Peter knew who Jesus was, it didn’t follow that he knew what Jesus was supposed to do. Jesus tried to explain God’s plan for Himself, but it all sounded as nonsense to Peter. He didn’t want to embarrass Jesus and so he tried to correct Him privately. In return, Jesus rebuked Peter and said that he had a satanic understanding of what the Messiah would do. He told him to get with the program, to stop thinking the way most people do and to start seeing things the way that God does.

            You, like Peter, need to go deeper. Do you believe in God and confess that there is only one God? Good. Deepen your knowledge by learning to confess that there are three Persons in one Godhead. Do you believe that Jesus Christ is true God and true man in one person? Good. Deepen your knowledge by learning why He came as the true God-man, namely, to be your Savior and the atoning sacrifice for your sin. Do you believe that He came two thousand years ago, died, and rose from the dead? Good. Deepen your knowledge and learn of His glorious return some day in the future. Do you believe that God forgives your sins? Good. Deepen your knowledge and learn of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, both of which were instituted to convey that forgiveness.

            That is the point Peter is making in his second epistle. It is fine to have faith in Almighty God and in the Christ whom He has sent. But Peter does not envision some kind of lackadaisical faith that is stagnant and immature. No, he wants an excellent faith, and so he urges us to “supplement your faith with excellence”—“excellence” is a better translation than mere “virtue”—and to have that excellent faith grounded in “knowledge.” He goes on to describe other outgrowths of faith: “self-control,” “steadfastness,” “godliness,” “brotherly affection,” and “love.” In each of these instances Peter shows that faith in Christ is not shallow or lazy. Those who refuse to grow in this way show that they are “so nearsighted” so as to be “blind, having forgotten that [they were] cleansed from [their] former sins.” This is how you “make your calling and election sure, for if you practice these qualities you will never fall.”

            However, that faith doesn’t just need to be deepened, but it also needs to be confessed repeatedly, which is the second truth we learn from today’s readings. As we look at Peter’s life, we see that he didn’t just make the confession the one time. Yes, for a while he was told not to repeat that confession until Christ could complete His work. But that would have given him a break for a year or maybe even just a few months. But after Christ completed His work, Peter began confessing the faith again and again.

            We see that in today’s first reading, where Peter confessed who Jesus Christ was. That is Acts chapter 4. But we could go back a couple of chapters and see that Peter made a big confession of faith on Pentecost Sunday. And we could go forward a chapter and see him making another confession of faith in Acts 5. He will go on to give similar confessions of faith in Acts 8, 10, 11, and 15. In other words, wherever we find Peter in the book of Acts, we discover him confessing the faith.

            Peter shows what it means to be a Christian. The Christian Church confesses her faith in Jesus Christ not just once, but as often as she can. Unfortunately, we all have the tendency to rest on our laurels. We praise our forebears for being orthodox and making an excellent confession of faith in difficult times. But sometimes we assume that because we are personally orthodox in our faith that their confession of faith long ago suffices. We don’t have to repeat it aloud again, but just say, “Ditto.” But every generation of Christians is called to confess “the faith once delivered to the saints.”

            It is particularly important now when we live in a post-Christian society. Not everyone believes in Christ or even knows about Him. Even at a Christian university, such as where I teach, not everyone knows some very basic things about Christianity. That was underscored this past week. Early on in my course I show my students how various tools such as concordances and Bible dictionaries can help us understand a passage in the Bible. So I have my students summarize the parable of the prodigal son, since these tools can help us capture some nuances that are commonly overlooked. I choose this parable since most of them (even the non-religious students) are likely to know it. In fact, if someone knows only one parable of Jesus, this is likely to be the one they know. But after one of my students told the parable fairly well, another student raised his hand and asked for some details to be clarified about that parable, since by his own admission he had never heard it before. I’m sure that he was not the first student not to know it, but he was the first to admit as much.

            Well, one of the reasons we are in the situation we are today is that we didn’t confess the faith adequately in decades gone by. People assumed that the young folks would pick up the faith from the culture at large or in school or on their own. There wasn’t a big effort to say exactly what it was that we believed and why. We might have talked about the advantages of joining our church instead of the church down the street, but we assumed that everyone knew the Bible and believed in Christ. But in a post-Christian society like ours, we don’t have that luxury any more. We have to assume that people do not know who Jesus Christ is. We will also have to assume that what little they know about Christianity is probably all distorted, anyway. And so we will need to confess the faith to people inside the church and outside of it. We cannot assume people know the faith or know it well or accurately. We are going to have to be patient and carefully explain the faith. We may have to do so a number of times before it makes sense to someone, which is why we must also cultivate a loving relationship with others, so that we can be heard.

            And now we come to a third consideration. We have already noted that we need to deepen our confession and repeat it often. But as we do so, we acknowledge that confessing our faith will be the death of us. This is a point that Jesus made in the last paragraph of today’s gospel, where He called us to “deny [ourselves] and take up [our] cross and follow [Him].”

            Whenever we confess Jesus Christ to be our Savior, we are denying ourselves in some way. We are crucifying our sinful self, which does not want to admit that we need a Savior. And it is not just death within that we face, but death from without. When we confess that Jesus Christ is the Savior of the world and all the articles of faith that flow from that statement, we will be rejected by those around us, at least to some degree. The world doesn’t want a Savior any more than our sinful flesh does. And so confessing the faith may lead to us being rejected at the very least; in some extreme circumstances it may even get us killed, as has happened to many of our brothers and sisters around the globe.

            But if we are hesitant to confess the faith, our Lord assures us that this is actually the best way to save our lives. If we try to keep mum so as to “save” ourselves, it will only harm us in the end. But if are willing to risk even our lives by confessing Christ, we are assured that nothing will separate us from God and His love in Christ. So our confession of faith kills us, but it also gives us life—and that abundantly.

            And so, beloved in Christ, confirmation day cannot be the last time we confess the Christian faith. May we learn from Peter to deepen our faith, confess it often, and embrace the life it gives! In Jesus’ name. Amen.