August 21, 2011 | 8:00, 9:30, and 11:00 a.m.

Simon, You Rock!

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 124
Romans 12:1–8
Matthew 16:13–20

“And I tell you, you are Peter.”

Matthew 16:18 (NRSV)

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title.

William Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet

I recently came back with my family from our regular summer sojourn back to the homelands of Scotland. We spent some time in my home town of Glasgow, and then went to the Isle of Lewis, where my father is from and where he spends the summer in his family home there. Then a couple of days in London, where thankfully the looting had ended by the time we got there, so that was a relief. But I am, of course, reminded by my colleagues that whenever I go home to Scotland I get back into a thicker Scottish accent and come back here and then I’m completely unintelligible to the congregation.

There was an old Scottish minister in the United States who told his congregation that he went home to thicken his accent precisely so they wouldn’t understand anything he said in the pulpit, but I will seek to slow down so that I am at least understandable for you this morning.

While I was on the Isle of Lewis, I picked up a new anthology of poetry that had been published on the island, These Islands, We Sing. It contains poems written by poets who live on the various islands off the coast of Scotland. It was beautiful to read poetry about the rhythm of island life, about cutting peat for fuel, of farming on the smallholdings that are called crofts, of fishing in the sea. In amongst these there is a recurring theme of exile, of leaving; it’s amazing the number of poems and folk songs that incorporate the word leaving. Leaving Barra; Leaving Lewis. One part of the rhythm of life of the islands was that that people left. It was partly due to the way society worked historically in that that the crofts, the smallholdings, would be passed to the eldest son and the other sons in a family would have to find other ways of making a livelihood or leave the island, go to the big city, to Glasgow or to London. Or, of course—and this has happened for three centuries—to cross the Atlantic to come to North America.

America is used almost in a mythological way, this land across the sea that people left to go to. There’s a very poignant poem in the anthology written in the nineteenth century by a local minister on Lewis, Reverend John MacLeod (no relation to me). He wrote this poem in Gaelic about something he witnessed, the death of a village, a township, because all of the young people had left to emigrate across the Atlantic.

He writes,

By way of passing a winter’s night,
the lads went to the schoolhouse
to see pictures about Canada with a magic lantern.
What was the harm?
And they saw cows up to their ears in grass,
a lovely girl leaning on a gate, smiling with a straw in her mouth.
And they went home saying, “We’re off.”
The girls said, “So are we.”
Death of a township.

People emigrated from Scotland for varying reasons. One was that they were forced off the land in what is known as the Highland clearances, which, for Scottish history, has the same impact really as the potato famine in Ireland. One of the finest histories of emigration from Scotland to North America is written by Dr. James Hunter, a Scottish historian and it is titled A Dance Called America. He writes about how on the Isle of Skye there was a traditional folk dance that’s name was America and it tried through dance to express the feeling of what is was like when people left on the ships to cross the Atlantic.

Interesting for me, not just because I myself have taken that journey and made this my adopted country, but interestingly my grandfather actually emigrated from Scotland in the 1920s and came to Canada. He then came down into the Great Lakes and worked the lakes. He jumped ship in Chicago, taking on an assumed name, and so he was an illegal immigrant in Chicago in the ’20s. And I fondly remember my grandfather telling us these stories as we grew up and we spent time with him. He was a laborer on the Board of Trade building as it was being built and the Singer building, and then he went to Detroit and worked in the Ford factory in Detroit. But then when the Depression really hit, the worst part of the Depression, he went back; he reversed the trend and he went back to the Isle of Lewis and married my granny. So there’s something about this whole theme of exile and America that’s very profound, I think.

As I say the name, America holds an almost sort of mythological meaning, and I think that’s not just true for people in Scotland or in the UK, but as the United States continues to be a place of hope for people whose lives do not have hope, that mythological meaning is so important. Names. Names are important. They hold meaning.

Now I was reading about the naming of America. It was almost an accident or arbitrary act. A random cartographer working in Strasburg in the early 1500s produced a map and decided himself that the new land mass that had been discovered, which we know now was South America, should be named after the Florentine explorer who discovered it, Amerigo Vespucci. And so this obscure character called Ringmann named America.

Names are important in the Bible as well. Right back at the start of the historical witness of scripture in the stories of Abraham and Sarah we find that names take on an importance because they relate to God’s relationship to the people that God is calling. You might recall that Abram becomes Abraham, Sarai becomes Sarah; that Jacob, after wrestling with God at the river, is given a blessing and with that blessing comes a new name, Israel.

Names are important. They signify new forms, new opportunities of relationship with God, and this is true in the New Testament as well. It is worth looking out for this, and we see it today in this important scripture in Matthew’s Gospel. Some see it as a pivotal story in the Gospel according to Matthew, where Simon Peter is the first individual to make a profession of faith of Jesus as a Messiah (in Hebrew), Christos or Christ (in the Greek.)

Jesus’ response to this is to rename Simon, to give him a new name or maybe a nickname, we would say. He says, “you are Peter,” which in Greek means “rock.” In Aramaic, which Jesus spoke, the word is kepha. “Simon, you rock,” says Jesus in response and with blessing, but more than that there is not just a creation here of some kind of plaster perfect saint in Peter. The renaming of Peter gives potential for there to be transformation and newness, but it doesn’t necessarily happen right there. If you just read three or four verses on from there, you find Jesus calling Peter by another name. He calls him Satan, my adversary, because Simon Peter pushes back against Jesus’ explanation of his own need for suffering and to die. And yet here we have this important text in which Jesus says to Simon, “You are rock, and on this rock I will build my church.”

Now we know that that is a proof text that our sisters and brothers in the Roman Catholic tradition use as the basis, really the cornerstone, for their form of church governance, the papacy, the belief that Peter was the first pope and that the apostolic succession is sent down through each pope and bishop.

We could get bogged down in this, but I find it helpful reading what one commentator said. Leith Fischer, writing in his commentary on Matthew, says, “The evidence points to a strong tradition of the leadership of Peter within the church from an early date and now whether that tradition is sufficiently strong to support the structures of hierarchy and authority, which later generations have built upon it, is of course a matter of continuing ecumenical debate.” I think for us this morning we’re best to leave it as continuing ecumenical debate, but to look at this important concept of the church being built. There is another place in Matthew’s Gospel where Jesus uses similar language, but this time in a parable. It is in chapter 7, where Jesus describes the response of people who hear God’s word through Jesus and act upon it. They are described as people who build their house upon rock that will withstand flood and weather; those who hear but do not do are like those who build their house upon sand, which is washed away by the rain. So there is in this a call to us who would be builders of the church; there is in this potential for us to undergo a renaming, which brings us into the possibility of new relationship with each other and with God, the possibility of not just being but becoming, to become, not just to be.

And it happens. It happens in the letter that we know today as First Peter, whether it was really written by the disciple Peter. (Most scholars think probably not; it was probably later.) But it bears his name, and in it there is this renaming of the church, of the body of Christ. “You are a chosen race. A royal priesthood, a dedicated nation, a people claimed by God. Once you were not a people, now you are God’s people.” This is renaming by God. It’s at the heart of Paul’s letter to the Romans—Paul, another who has been renamed in his encounter with the risen Christ, going from Saul to Paul. Paul writes, “Do not conform.” Do not stick with the status quo; do not just be. “But be transformed in the renewing of your mind.” This is how God chooses us—chooses us to be builders of the church.

Now we have to be careful in our tradition when we talk about chosenness or election; we get all caught up in predestination as being the central mark of Reformed theology. This has been interpreted historically in ways in which people are excluded and written out of the book of life. That is not what predestination means. John Leith, one of the best known interpreters of the Reformed tradition in the United States, talks about this, this chosenness by God. “Predestination,” he writes, “means simply that human life is rooted in the will and the intention of God.” God intends this. Like the beautiful prayer from the Iona community that gives thanks to God who “made the world and meant it.” God means this, means us to be. It’s not about you or me or our denomination and how we’re doing or we’re fine and others are not. “Our relationship with God,” John Leith says,” lies not first in the decision of individuals or the community, but in the election of God.” God’s choice is first, and that is what grace is. Grace is that “we love because God loved us first,” as the scripture says.

Go back to Calvin. You find it there. He writes that God’s love is one that “persistently and invincibly pursues the distraught and the alienated.” Isn’t that a word of comfort and of challenge for those of us who know what it is to be distraught or alienated? That it is to us that God comes and says, “You’re a chosen race. You’re a royal priesthood. You once were no people, but now you are God’s people.” This chosenness is not to have easy grace or to languish triumphantly or exclude others; there is, of course, cost involved—what Bonheoffer called the cost of discipleship.

It’s put beautifully, I think, in a modern hymn written by Scottish hymn writer John Bell:

We rejoice to be God’s chosen,
to be gathered to God’s side.
Not to build a pious ghetto
or be steeped in selfish pride.
But to celebrate the goodness
of the one who sets us free
from the smallness of our vision
to become, not just to be.

Thanks be to God. Amen.