There are some amazing months and weeks that precede their arrival at Caesarea Philippi.  Jesus walks on the water of the Sea of Galilee and challenges Peter’s faith.  Jesus takes on the Pharisees and the scribes and challenges the integrity of their laws and rituals.  Jesus heals the lame, the maimed, the blind, the mute, and he feeds thousands with a meager seven loaves and a fish.  Great crowds follow Jesus and praise God for the great works they have seen Jesus do, but the Pharisees and Sadducees come out to test Jesus, and Jesus challenges them, too.  And everyone apparently is speculating about who this Jesus really is.  People clearly think he is not your average person.  Perhaps he is John the Baptist come back to life.  (The disciples buried John only a short while ago.)  Or maybe one of the great prophets of ancient Israel - Elijah or Jeremiah perhaps.  People clearly think he is not your average person.

    It is out of this context that Jesus begins to build his church . . . not an historic monument . . . not a museum.  Among a vast array of people - some amazed, some confused, some wondering, some wavering, some needy, some threatened - Jesus builds his church.  Sam Showmaker, the Episcopal clergyman who articulated the spiritual principles on which Alcoholics Anonymous was founded, said that the church is not a museum but rather a hospital for “a scratch company of sinners” -  a haphazard group of scamps.

    Across the street from my house Watterson High School has been moving forward with a major building project over the summer.  They tore up the parking lot at the corner of Foster and Indian Springs, dug a gigantic hole in the ground, and now are in the process of laying the concrete foundation and building blocks of what will house a new gym, a guidance center, music rooms, and I don’t know what all.  The foundation on which the church is built, however, is not concrete poured into a hole in the ground or concrete blocks stacked neatly on top of one another, but the foundation on which the church is built is the reality of Christ.  The pressing question for Jesus is not so much who everyone else says he is.  Rather the pressing question he asks is, “Who do YOU say that I am?”  For all of us who profess to follow Jesus that is the ultimate theological question on which the church is built.

    When Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do ALL of you say that I am?,” it is Peter who answers on their behalf, saying, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”  We might assume that with such a confession we begin to lay the floorboards and raise the walls of the church, that we begin to do our part.  But Jesus draws us up short and reminds us that revelation is the prerogative of God.  He says, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah!  For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.  You have not figured this out because you are so smart but because God has revealed it to you.”

    In his autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain Thomas Merton talks about being at a boarding school in England where, for the first time, he went to church and actually prayed, and even said grace before meals.  He says that later on he scoffed at this period as his “religious phase.”  Reflecting on this, he goes on to say, “ . . . If the impulse to worship God and to adore God . . . is nothing more than a transitory and emotional thing, that is our own fault.  It is so only because we make it so, and because we take what is substantially a deep and powerful and lasting moral impetus, supernatural in its origin and in its direction, and reduce it to the level of our own weak and unstable and futile fancies and desire.  “Blessed are you,” says Jesus, “for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.”  It is at God’s initiative that the foundation of the church is laid and at God’s initiative that our movement toward a confession of faith is stirred.  Revelation is the prerogative of God.

    There is a beautiful medieval manuscript which is a picture of God creating the universe, and God is represented as an architect, holding an architect’s compass and tracing out the dimensions and shapes of the sun and the moon and the stars.  I imagine a similar image could represent Christ as the architect of the church, sitting at his easel, drawing up blueprints.  God in Christ is foundation and architect of the church.  It is God in Christ through which the deep and powerful impetus to worship God and confess Jesus as Christ comes.

    Christ is foundation and architect, and Christ is master mason as well.  “You are Peter,” he tells his faithful disciple, “and on this rock I will build my church.”  Having given up the architect’s compass for a stone cutter’s saw and a mason’s level and trowel, Jesus lays the first rock of his church - not an historic monument, not a museum.  Yes, with such a one as Peter, Christ begins to erect the walls of his church.  Out of a scratch company of sinners Christ builds his church.

    Particularly in Matthew’s gospel Peter plays a special role.  He often represents all the disciples as their spokesperson - as he does here at Caesarea Philippi.  But with all his strengths and weaknesses he stands for the typical follower of Christ.  He is volatile, impulsive, liable to failure.  When he sees Jesus walking on the water, he tests Jesus and tests his own faith.  When Jesus speaks of his own impending death, Peter refuses to believe that could possible happen and tries to thwart Jesus’s purpose.  At Caesarea Philippi Peter confesses Jesus as Messiah, but at Jesus’s final hour Peter denies ever knowing him.  The rocks with which Christ the master mason builds his church are fragile, volatile, impulsive, imperfect human beings - like you and I.  Among a scratch company of sinners, a haphazard group of scamps, the church is built.

    And building the church is not a simple matter.  It’s not like throwing up some tract house on a slab.  While the language of the gospel is somewhat obscure, it seems clear that the church does and will participate in a struggle between life and death, but our assurance is that evil and death - “the gates of Hades” - will not prevail.  Just as this old church building constantly needs to be patched and repaired, so the church of Jesus Christ is always needing to patch its roof, seal the cracks in its walls, smooth out the crumbling plaster, sweep up the dirt, and sometimes has to practically completely rebuild.  But the foundation is secure, and the one who lays the stones is reliable, and in this we find our hope and reassurance.

    The wind and rain and sleet and hail that batter the church of Jesus Christ come in many forms.  Inside the church Christians argue and become divided over all kinds of things - from whether or not to preach in or outside a pulpit to the “correct” way to serve communion to standards for ordination to whether or not denominations should be in full communion with one another.  Creaks in the walls appear.  On the global scene Christians run head on into the tragedies of real life that make the mission of Jesus Christ seem overwhelming.   We can never read a newspaper or hear a news broadcast without hearing something about military conflict throughout our world.   From Afghanistan to Algiers violence racks our world.   The United Nations reports that as many as fourteen million in Ethiopia alone need help as a new food crisis sets in.  But food shortages travel the globe from Africa to India to North Korea to Columbus, Ohio, where Neighborhood Services continues to serve the hungry who are in our own backyard.  Holes in the roof appear, and the plaster begins to crumble.

    And here we are . . . a scratch company of sinners - often confused, distraught, heartbroken, and overwhelmed - the building blocks of Christ’s church.  Thank heaven the foundation is secure.  For in that rests our very hope.  A haphazard group of scamps, we are, yet given the keys to God’s house and asked to manage it.  And not only to manage it but, using the language of authoritative rabbinic teaching, Jesus says we are to teach the ways of the kingdom . . . to teach with authority.  A scratch company of sinners, yes, and the building blocks of Christ’s church.

    The question Jesus puts to each of us is, “Who do you say that I am?”  As long as a decade ago in a prayer at a Presbyterian Peacemaking Conference, Donald Shriver, former president of Union Theological Seminary, said,  “You [O Christ] are the one who breaks down all the barriers that divide us from you and from one another” - a provocative statement that the architect, builder, and foundation of the church is also in the demolition business and breaks down the destructive walls that we erect.   As we go about building Christ’s church in our haphazard and faulty way, it is a good idea from time to time to go back and take another look at our blueprints.