Matthew 16:21-28

21 From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed and on the third day be raised. 22 And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” 23 But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me, for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

24 Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 25 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. 26 For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?

27 “For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done. 28 Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”

We’re continuing our worship experiment for one more week.

Please keep the feedback coming!

We will not be breaking into small groups or forcing anyone to talk!

But we will be offering time for discussion.

It’s perfectly OK for you to just listen and hang back during the discussion time – and online folks – you are welcome to just unmute yourselves and chime in at any time!

This is one of those sections of scripture that has so much going on that as a preacher, I usually choose just one thing to focus on.  But since we’re doing a discussion, I’m going to unpack this whole passage piece by piece and let you decide what you want to discuss.

You may want to have your bulletin out to follow along!

Choosing where a passage begins, where it ends and how much of it to use or skip is an interpretive act.  When the Committee who updates the Revised Common Lectionary decided when this passage began and where it ends they made choices about how much context we have for this story.  So a good preacher is always going to look up the passage in the Bible and see what comes before it and what comes after it – rather than just accepting the passage as presented.

So what comes right before this passage is Jesus renaming Simon, to Peter – The Rock upon which the Church will be built, “and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.” (Mt 16:18)

So imagine with me for a moment if the Lectionary Committee had chosen Matthew 16:13-23.  The story becomes about Peter having whiplash, the way one minute Jesus is calling him the Rock and the next, Jesus is calling Peter “Satan.”

What Peter isn’t seeing is that Peter being the Leader of the Church only happens after Jesus dies, resurrects, and ascends into Heaven.  Because, how would Peter know that???  It hasn’t happened yet.

So Peter takes Jesus aside and tries to tell Jesus to stop talking nonsense about Jesus being killed.  Because if Jesus wants Peter to be a leader in the Church, then Peter is going to try his best to be a good second in command and that means telling your boss when they’re saying something stupid, right?

But Jesus understands the situation in a way that Peter can’t.

No matter what Jesus says, Peter cannot imagine Jesus not being here, actively leading the movement.  Peter did not sign up for the position of Pope!  And yet, the previous passage, Matthew 16:13-20 is exactly the scripture that the Roman Catholic Church uses to define and defend the role of Pope.  

Which makes total sense if you don’t pair that story with verses 21-23, where Jesus calls Peter, “Satan.”

The word Satan is a borrowed word from the language, Chaldee.  And this word only appears in Greek versions of this text, not in Aramaic versions of this text!  It’s a word that shows up several times in Gospels written in Greek and it means what you think it means.  Some sort of deceptive spiritual being who is an enemy of God.  

But in Aramaic, “Get behind me Satan”  is ‘labasatari satana’

Which was a common phrase used by parents to their sons when their sons were talking like a fool – that is- sharing misinformation because they didn’t know better. https://www.chaimbentorah.com/2023/09/aramaic-word-study-get-thee-behind-me-labasatari/ 

Labesatari which is translated as get behind me – is based on the root word satar, which means to conceal or hide, and satana literally translates as “decever” 

So to translate ‘labasatari satana” into today’s English, Jesus was saying to Peter – “Hide your ignorance, deceiver!”

Or 

Don’t talk like a fool in front of everyone!  Not when I just made you the Leader!!!!

Then Jesus turns back to the whole gathering of the Disciples and addresses the elephant in the room.

Following Jesus is not easy.

Accepting the cross is not easy.

Verse 24: Following Jesus means saying no to doing things the easy way and shouldering the cross of our calling.  Jesus did not take the easy way out.

Verse 25:  If we spend all of our effort trying to preserve our preferred lifestyle it’s not going to work anyway, but if we surrender ourselves to God, we’ll discover a whole new way of living.

Jesus did not try to preserve his life.

Verse 26: It’s really about a choice between the ways of this world and The WAY that leads to Life.

Jesus is explaining to them that 

trying to save his life 

or 

save the nation of Israel 

or 

save their own lifestyles

Is not what matters.

What matters is our praxin – which is the Greek word in the phrase, “repay everyone for what they have praxin,” in verse 27.

“repay everyone for what they have practiced,”

Praxin or Praxis – a word that English borrowed from Greek and that we  pronounce – Practice.

It’s all about the life we chose to practice.

Verse 28 – caused a lot of trouble in the early church, because they thought it meant that Jesus would return within the lifetime of at least some of the Disciples who were there.  Which, of course, Jesus didn’t.

But the next story in the text of Matthew is the story of the Transfiguration – where Peter, James and John get to see Jesus, Moses and Elijah looking all white and shiny in a Mountain top experience.  

Almost as if the author of the gospel of Matthew was hinting that they saw the glory of the Kingdom of God at the Transfiguration, so Jesus wasn’t lying about the disciples being alive for the second coming.  You see,  Matthew was written after all the original disciples were dead…and Jesus still hadn’t come back.

For this reading.  Context and translation matter a lot!

Discussion Questions:

1.  What stood out for you?
2. What mechanism of self-defense do you employ when you are faced with a hard truth you aren’t ready to receive?  Peter’s was to try to stop Jesus from talking about it – so avoidance, what’s yours.
3. Looking at this  from Jesus’ perspective:  Have you ever felt abandoned by your community while doing the right thing? Have you ever abandoned someone else who was doing the right thing?

Hebrews 13:2

2 Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.

 

Genesis 18:1-5; 10a

The Lord appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day. 2 He looked up and saw three men standing near him. When he saw them, he ran from the tent entrance to meet them and bowed down to the ground. 3 He said, “My lord, if I find favor with you, do not pass by your servant. 4 Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree. 5 Let me bring a little bread, that you may refresh yourselves, and after that you may pass on—since you have come to your servant.” So they said, “Do as you have said.”

 

10 Then one said, “I will surely return to you in due season, and your wife Sarah shall have a son.”

 

Thank you all for your feedback so far!

We will not be breaking into small groups or forcing anyone to talk!

It’s perfectly OK for you to just listen and hang back during the talk back time – and online folks – you are welcome to just unmute yourselves and chime in at any time!

I’m going to start with a story, move into some Bible study, and then we will discuss.

This isn’t my story, so I’m changing the names and story a bit to protect the privacy of the innocent.  This is a true story, and it happened about 30 years ago.

Kay,  I’m going to call her Kay, was being abused by her grandfather whom she and her mother lived with because her mother didn’t make enough to afford their own place.  Kay was 16 years old and had a job at the mall and had been thinking a lot about running away, because she was tired of being abused and tired of her mom not listening, and was tired of worrying about being pregnant — because it was that kind of abuse.

One day on Kay’s lunch break, Kay went outside to eat her sandwich and a stranger – another teenaged girl asked her for money.

Kay didn’t have any more money, but she had bought herself a footlong sandwich, planning on saving the other half for dinner, so she offered the strange girl the other half of her sub sandwich, so the girl sat down to eat it next to her.

And the girl began to talk.  

The girl talked about her own abusive family.

The girl talked about running away and ending up on the streets of Portland as a sex worker. 

Kay told the girl about her own life – her abusive grandfather and Kay’s own thoughts about running away.

And the girl looked her right in the eyes, licked the mayo out of the corner of her mouth and said to Kay, 

“Don’t do what I did.  It’s not better on the streets.  Stay at home, just try not to be there much.  Stay in school.  Graduate, then you can get student loans to help you live.”

Kay told me that she looked for that girl the next day and every time she was at the mall for the next several months, but she never saw her again.  When Kay told me her story, years later, Kay said she had come to think of that girl as an angel sent by God to help her.

Before we step into some discussion, I’d like to give you a little bit of Bible study stuff to consider.

The Greek word ???????? (angelous) in Hebrews 13:2 literally translates as “messangers” – but with a contextual flavor of “spiritual messangers”

And the original Greek does not contain the word “strangers” at all.

Here’s Hebrews 13:2 in its original Greek in an interlinear Bible format:

The English translation is in orange, the Kionia Greek is in black, and the blue links are to the word  study of each word.  Personally, I won’t buy interlinear Bible’s anymore, because it’s so much easier to use the free online ones!  Just google:  the scripture address and interlinear and you get this!  So easy!

Hebrews probably wasn’t written by the apostle Paul.  Origen, who lived in the 200’s said that the author of Hebrews “was known only to God.”  But whomever wrote it did have a thorough grounding in the Hebrew Bible and excellent Greek grammar – better than Paul’s!

I took this verse out of context, which I don’t usually do, because it was written into a “laundry list” of instructions for believers – a whole bunch of pretty much unrelated do’s and don’t, so the context of the verses around it isn’t particularly helpful to understanding this verse.

I instead chose to give you the foundational Jewish context of the understanding of hospitality – the story of Abraham welcoming the strangers who turned out to be messengers from God.  

The English translation in the bulletin pretty carefully follows the original Hebrew text, except in the original Hebrew it reads that YHWH appeared to Abram rather than the LORD – which is the usual translation, because Jewish people do not pronounce the name of the LORD out of respect for God.  So there is no mention of angels, messengers or strangers in Genesis – and yet we know from the Rabbinical tradition that this story is considered the Biblical roots for the requirement of hospitality towards strangers, that is then reinforced in the time of Moses in 

33 ‘And if a stranger dwells with you in your land, you shall not mistreat him. 34 The stranger who dwells among you shall be to you as one born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.

I had to use the New King James Version to get the word stranger in this passage, because every other translation – including NIV, which is a very conservative translation  translates garim, hager, ger and all of the other grammatical forms of this word “stranger”  as 

Alien

Foreigner 

or

Sojourner

Wycliff used the old English term, “comeling” which means newcomer

But the general idea is that the concept of welcoming strangers isn’t  just about people you don’t know, but people who are from a different place or from a different country – because God asked the Israelites to remember that they way the Egyptians treated the Jews while they were refugees from famine in Egypt, was not OK.

Let me say that in a less complicated way.

The Jews didn’t have a lot of fun in Egypt, so God said, don’t do to your neighbor, what you don’t want your neighbor to do to you!

Or treat strangers in your land the way you would want to be treated if you were a stranger in a strange land.

Because, when we show hospitality to strangers, sometimes we encounter a message from God.

But hospitality is complicated when we are afraid all the time!

Like when that unhoused person came into the side door of the sanctuary on the 9th, during worship just as we were talking about fear and faith!

Is that literally God interrupting our worship to challenge us to practice our faith through hospitality or was that person a threat?

Questions:

1. So what stands out for you in today’s readings, story and Biblical exegesis?  What would you like to talk about?
2. How is hospitality here and now, different than hospitality was there and then?  What factors go into how we practice hospitality differently now?
3. Have you ever encountered a stranger who said what you needed to hear?

Matthew 14:22-32

22Immediately he made the disciples get into a boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds.

23And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, 24but by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them.  25And early in the morning he came walking toward them on the sea.

26But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, “It is a ghost!” And they cried out in fear.

27But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”

28Peter answered him, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.”

29He said, “Come.” So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus.

30But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and, beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me!”

31Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?”

32When they got into the boat, the wind ceased.  33And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”

Barbara Brown Taylor writes of this moment, “What if Peter had not sunk? What if he had jumped out of the boat with perfect confidence, landed splat with both feet flat on the water and smiled across the waves at Jesus, gliding toward him without a moment’s hesitation? What if the other disciples had followed suit, piling out of the boats after him…It would be a different story. It might even be a better story, but it would not be a story about us.”  

I like this quote because Rev Brown Taylor is pointing out that real people like us are not perfect.  Tom and I went canoeing and swimming in Estacada lake last weekend, and you should have seen me trying to wade out across the slimy rocks to where it was deep enough to swim.  I was all shaky, and sliding, and making all kinds of undignified noises and then there were crawdads in the water, right in front of my toes.  My Toes were naked and afraid!  

Friends – I can barely walk through ankle deep water.  

I totally would have sunk faster than Peter!

And yet, I was taught in Sunday School, and my Sunday school teachers before me and their Sunday School teachers before them — because I promise, I did not have the world’s worst Sunday School teachers!  They just didn’t know better and neither did I until I learned!

But I was taught that Peter was a failure because he sunk.

That Peter’s faith was pathetic.

That Peter was always getting things wrong because Peter was some kind of no-faith Nelly.

But Jesus did not actually say to Peter that his faith was too small.

What Jesus actually said was that Peter’s faith was undeveloped.

Warren Carter, in his commentary, “Matthew and the Margins,” notes that Jesus’ words, “you of little faith” is used a few times in Matthew and “indicates not the absence of any faith, but” an out of shape faith.  A faith that needs exercise, as if courage is a muscle and us as individuals, and as a church community, need to exercise our faith in order to grow it.

Jesus was not telling Peter that he was a failure!

Jesus was telling Peter that his faith needed exercise.

Peter needed to keep climbing out of the boat, again and again and let God show him just how much God can do.

We are living in a time that calls all of us courage. To be intentional about the risks we take. To make sure we are working towards those first steps, 

knowing and accepting we will sink. 

We will fail.

Things will not go as planned.

We will sink.

And, God will catch us.

And what we didn’t plan just might be better.

bell hooks writes of courage and fear in cultures like ours: 

“Cultures of domination rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience. In our society we make much of love and say little about fear. Yet we are all terribly afraid most of the time. As a culture we are obsessed with the notion of safety. Yet we do not question why we live in states of extreme anxiety and dread. Fear is the primary force upholding structures of domination.”

What is one thing you are afraid of right now?
What are you doing with that fear”When are you most likely to mistake someone as a threat, a ‘ghost’ coming your way, when they are actually a companion or a spiritual teacher?
What makes the difference between believing God can empower us and work through us and having an over-inflated sense of self or a savior complex?

Matthew 14:13-21

13Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. 14When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion for them and cured their sick. 15When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.”

16Jesus said to them, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.”

17They replied, “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.”

18And he said, “Bring them here to me.”

19Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven and blessed and broke the loaves and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. 20And all ate and were filled, and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full.

21And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.

Sometimes even I am shocked at how political Jesus was.

When I saw that loaves and fishes was our gospel for today, my first thought was, didn’t I just preach on this?  But no, I in fact have not preached on this text in a little while, it’s just a very familiar story of our faith.

Starting in verse 13 – what Jesus had just heard, is that his cousin John the Baptist had just been beheaded by Herod – not Herod the Great who was king at Jesus’ birth, but the next Herod, who was an even more insecure bully of a leader.

The people of Judea were not happy with the Herod family.  

First of all, the Herod’s weren’t even Jewish, they converted to Judaism in order to take power and then they conspired with Rome to overthrow the last Maccabeans – There’s a couple of books in the appendix of some Bibles called first and second Maccabees that tell the story of Hanukkah – where Judea briefly won home rule after the Persians were defeated by the Greeks.  So that’s the geopolitical context of this story!

So most Judeans were really annoyed that the Herods turned over their country to Roman occupation in order to take power.

It was a custom of the Roman Empire to calm unrest and maintain support of the Emperor by handing out the cura annonae – also known as daily bread – a ration of heavily subsidized or free grain or bread that was given to poor male citizens of Rome (not women or children, just men) – mostly those who lived in the City of Rome and other large cities.  The Emperors also built amphitheaters and colosseums to provide entertainment to keep the people happy.

The Poet Juvenal, sarcastically called this practice, “bread and circuses,” used to distract the common people from the injustice and corruption of the Empire.

Here’s where Bread and Circuses connects with the story of the loaves and fishes…

You might think that the Roman Governor of the area would be providing Bread and Circuses to quell the unrest in Judea, but that wasn’t the case.

Partially because there were not many Roman Citizens in Judea, but also because the whole system of Daily Bread was based on Rome moving agricultural land and fishing rights out of the hands of local people and into the cura annonae – which literally translates to “care of the grain” – cura annonae was a giant logistics system that procured food from the provinces of Rome, like Egypt and Judea and shipped it to the big cities, like Rome and Pompeii.  The cura annonae then taxed and tariffed the local foods in the provinces to pay for the system.  Forcing local fishermen to pay for a Roman license to fish the Sea of Galilee and forcing local farmers to sell out to Roman agribusiness.

Sounds rather familiar doesn’t it… 

So bulk of the grain and fish produced in Judea went not to feed the Judeans who fished and farmed it, but was put on Galleys and shipped to Rome.

So here’s Jesus, out in some rural area whose Daily Bread is being exported to Rome so that poor, lower class, Roman men will blame their problems on non-citizens instead of the Emperor…

Here’s Jesus with a bunch of non-citizen farm workers and fishermen and Jesus decides to feed them fish and bread.

The very food that the Emperor is taking from them.

Daaaaaang, Jesus was more political than I thought!

I was Monday years old, when I learned this by reading a commentary by Nichola Torbett and then going farther down the rabbit hole researching cura annonae.

And there’s a part of me that is deeply annoyed that nobody taught me this before.  Not in Sunday School, not in another Pastor’s sermon, not even in Seminary.

But also, 

it totally makes sense that most people have never heard about the context of cura annonae and how it affected Judea’s fish and bread supply.  

And how this connects to Jesus responding to the hungry crowd of rural folks by giving back to them, their bread and fish, out of God’s Abundance — replacing what Rome had taken from them.  Because it is God who provides us with our daily bread, not Empire.

Which causes me to read that line from the Lord’s Prayer – give us this day our daily bread – in a whole new way!

I can see why most people have never heard of this radical political context for the miracle of the loaves and fishes!

Because these kinds of logistics systems have been going on for a long time and are still happening today.

Where the rich resources of colonized places are being systematically redirected into the hands of the rich and powerful without any semblance of fair compensation.

Did you know that the World Bank and World Trade Organization has currently licensed most of the fishing rights in Africa to European food Processors?

https://qz.com/africa/2092998/who-benefits-from-africas-24-billion-marine-fisheries-industry 

https://story.futureoffood.org/beacons/south-africa/ 

https://www.emerald.com/jitlp/article/24/3/290/1277032 

This is why there are Somali Pirates, like the ones portrayed in the 2013 Tom Hanks movie Captain Phillips.

Because the cura annonae didn’t end with the fall of Rome – now it’s being used to steal fishing rights in Somalia – which turns former fishermen into pirates.

So we don’t hear about Jesus’ stance on the cura annonae in church because those with wealth and power who own these distribution systems don’t like it when the Church starts talking about justice for the poor.

Because it’s hard to become a Billionaire without exploiting workers and creating poverty.

So let’s just pretend that God only cares about sex, gender and a personal relationship with Jesus.

Because if the church awakens to the fact that God has called us to love our neighbors as ourselves – and that our neighbors – our farm worker neighbors, our Somali fisherman neighbors, our Congoleese neighbors – whose wealth of rare metals that are used to make our cell phones are not being fairly compensated for their labor much less the extraction of their natural resources.

If the church awakens to the fact that it is God’s will that all people should have Daily Bread – that, in fact, God has already provided for all people, including the poorest people in the world – it’s just that Billionaries are stealing the food of the poor.

What trouble might the church cause for these Billionaires? 

I’m going to freely admit that I am still processing this new theological understanding.

I don’t have a nice tidy, because Jesus did this, we should do that, answer for you.

I mean, obviously, Jesus fed people in need and so should we.  

And we do.  

I am so grateful to be a part of a church who just decided to create a food pantry for Haven Dinner while I was on vacation.

I am so grateful that y’all have been active in supporting Family Promise, because that is helping to give housing back to people that the housing cura annonae has purposefully made unaffordable for the sake of hedge fund profits.

I’m so proud and grateful that every single one of you has been working on and praying for and sharing about our Affordable Housing project that is taking our small offering of one, old, falling apart, church building and turning it into about 72-ish units of housing and space for Rahab’s Sisters and ourselves to keep doing life-changing ministry in our community.

So please don’t hear this, new to me, theological discovery and think that we are not doing enough to fight the systems of Bread and Circuses that are purposefully designed to distract people from all the injustices of this world — because I think that we are doing A LOT ALREADY!

My point in sharing this with you now is that I wish somebody would have had the courage to share it with me before now.

And I think that the average church goer is smart enough and courageous enough to wrestle with some pretty challenging theology.  And I think that y’all are pretty above average.

So, perhaps you will be better than I am at figuring out what to do with this new idea.  

So here’s what I learned about God this week.

Let’s see where Spirit takes us!