It is wonderful to be here in this place and on such a special occasion, as, finally, once more, we are able to meet for worship. I am reminded of what Jacob exclaimed when he dreamed the angels of God ascending and descending upon a ladder “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven”
I wonder when it was that you were last able to worship in a church building and was it here?
Or somewhere else?
It seems so long ago for me that I had to think rather carefully. I thought it would be Romsey Abbey where I usually worship, but then I realised that I avoided church the Sunday just before lockdown because I’d been to the Holy Land and I didn’t want to spread any germs in case I’d picked up a virus at the airport. We thought the trip would be cancelled, but it wasn’t, and we last worshipped in a church building on Mount Zion in Jerusalem. It was a service of sung Vespers with the music chanted by the monks of Dormition Abbey. Of course we can worship anywhere and God can draw close to us within our locked homes as he drew close to Jacob as he slept with a stone for a pillow, but humans need sacred space, places which are infused with prayer over the years, places where we too can feel like we are entering the gates of heaven for a brief while.
It wasn’t very far away from that spot on mount Zion that the action in the first reading today happened. Peter is arrested, chained twice over, and imprisoned between two guards with more lurking outside the door. In terms of security it was completely over the top! The Judean religious leaders really do not want him to escape. And yet he does escape, because the angel of the Lord releases him. Peter ends up wandering the streets, banging on the door of John Mark’s house, wanting to be let in, but, comically, Rhoda leaves him standing on the doorstep in her amazement. The Syrian church of John Mark’s house is also on mount Zion, a stones throw from where I was worshipping those long months ago.
And so it is that in these two readings we have chains, many many chains, and we have keys. We have agents of incarceration and an agent of liberation. Peter is gifted the keys to the Kingdom of heaven, and promised. “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Peter is given the power of setting people free. And yet he also experiences incarceration as part of the terrible persecutions unleashed upon Christians in the book of the Acts of the Apostles.
Like us, St Peter has experienced lockdown, a different kind of lockdown to the one we have had, but the feelings of shattered plans and dreams, sadness, and mourning for lost friendships were, I’m sure, very similar to some of those feelings we have experienced.
Peter has just lost James the brother of John, a dear friend who walked the dusty roads with him and Jesus, and Peter’s plans for a new loving community of believers are in tatters.
At the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles the early moments in the history of the church were really exciting. The group of believers were growing exponentially, and they had set up a community where no-one was in need, because everyone shared their goods with the poor and cared for one another. It seems to me to be like a tiny prefiguring of the welfare state, or the NHS which was born 72 years ago today.
But then the hard hand of persecution swoops down and brings pain and destruction. Many of Peter’s friends flee for their lives to neighbouring countries and the church is scattered far far away. It looks like a disaster. These were uncertain and troubled times, no-one knew who would die next, nowhere was really safe. Who could they trust? Again, that anxiety is something we must all have experienced in recent times, fear of strangers and even friends as we battle an unseen enemy and refrain from touching one another.
If we go to our gospel reading this day we are reminded that Peter wasn’t always called Peter. He was originally a fisherman called Simon who makes an extraordinary, almost blasphemous sounding declaration to Jewish ears. Peter does not only call Jesus the Messiah, but also the Son of God.
When we hear that word “Messiah” many of our minds are coloured by the Christian worldview of Jesus. We use the Greek translation of that word, Christ, almost as a surname. But the Jewish world thought differently. For them the Messiah was the anointed one, a king anointed with oil to liberate an oppressed nation. King Cyrus of Persia is referred to as a Messiah in the Hebrew book of Isaiah because through him the Jews were liberated from Babylon.
Thus it is that Peter proclaims Jesus as the King of Liberation, and not only King of Liberation, but Son of God Almighty.
What are the first actions of this new unmasked liberator?
They are re-naming, and gifting. Simon is renamed Peter/ the Rock. And the liberators next action is particularly interesting. He gives Peter a virtual set of keys. It is almost as if Jesus was saying “You call me liberator. Now you go and liberate some people for me.”
Jesus wants Peter to participate in the very act of liberation launched by God himself , and I believe that those keys were not meant for his hands alone. The Messiah-Liberator, and Peter the Rock want to share those keys with the church, that is, us. We too are called to be agents of liberation. Jesus will build his church within us, within you and me, and also within those who cannot be with us because they are locked down: and the gates of Sheol - death, and the fear of death, and disease, plague and pestilence, will not, will never, prevail against us!
If we go back to those turbulent times in the Acts of the Apostles, in the early church the very disaster brought about by their persecution was the very thing which spread the good news of Jesus far and wide. As the believers fled they brought their stories of Jesus, his life, his works, his death and his resurrection with them. They brought hope to those who had no hope, and a life of loving service to those wrapped up in the chains of their own selfishness.
And the same seems to be happening on lockdown too. As Christians have met virtually, on You Tube, on Facebook, in zoom rooms, in prayers shared over the radio or television, over the telephone, prayer cards posted through doors, in the loving service of food parcels or those running errands for others, the church has grown and spread.
There have never been so many people in England publicly sharing daily prayer together in so many different ways. And I loved it when I heard a few weeks ago that so many Christians were sharing coffee or worship together over Zoom that they broke the internet! Or rather they broke Zoom.
But in order to continue to be agents of liberation we need one thing. We need to hold onto the rock of faith. The level of need and sorrow and anxiety and pain in our world can be utterly overwhelming which is why we need to keep grasping onto that rock of faith so strongly held by Simon Peter that he was named Rock, and we need to stubbornly keep being agents of liberation whenever we see oppression of any kind.
But we also need to be agents of incarceration, of binding as well as loosing, stamping down on prejudice, locking up hate, chaining down cruelty and selfishness wherever we see it, including stamping down on the selfishness within our own hearts when we discover it there. We cannot do it alone, but together, in the power of the Spirit and in union with Christ: through a well timed phone call, through a kindly greeting across a garden fence, through a letter, an email or in a million other ways, we can bring people to experience a spiritual freedom that reaches beyond the locked doors, and brings hope.
Now to the Messiah, the Liberator who is able to keep us from falling be all might, majesty, power and authority, before all ages, now and for evermore! Amen.
