Over the years I have spent an awful amount of time considering rocks and their placement. I know all the rocks that I have dug up and not dug up, and the ones that turned out to be ledge. I have climbed up the biggest rock pile around, Mount Washington. I have marvelled at car-sized boulders scattered down a slope, boulders that are surrounded by gaping holes into which a hapless hiker can fall. I have delighted in seeing our mountains always there for millennia. Basically, if you live in the Greens or Whites, you know rocks and assume they are solid.
But speak to the residents of China, whose ground has been anything but solid, whose ground moved to the terrifying force of a powerful earthquake this past May. Earthquakes, those moments in the earth’s life when the earth must realign itself and refind its equilibrium, shifting two plates one against another, cause massive upheaval. An editorial in the New York Times from several years back about the earthquake in Turkey stated that as the earth finds its balance, ‘it radically unbalances humans. In a tornado or hurricane, there is something roaring and visceral out there, something embodied, something approaching, a force acting on a human scale of time and amenable to a human sense of narrative. An earthquake is simply too swift, too impersonal. It offers no sense of sequence, just a dramatically compressed time scale, before and after. That is especially true in this earthquake, when everyone awoke only to the sequel. Restoring the survivors to a sense of living continuity, a sense of Earth’s stability, will be as hard as rescuing the missing.’ (1)
The scope of this calamity surpasses our understanding. The numbers are numbing. The earth is anything but solid and that thought unsettles even those of us thousands of miles away. We prayed and continue for the thousands of dead and missing as well as the survivors and we reached out to them as best we could with a special offering to ERD. And, most likely, deep down inside, we gave thanks that such an earthquake did not happen to us.
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Without belittling the terrible earthquake in China and others, I want to turn to another seismic event that has shaken some over the past half century. And that what has happened to the church, the rock that was supposedly as stable as the earth. But, as we have seen, the earth is hardly stable but able to move with great force. And the church, as an institution, has not remained stable either. Unlike an earthquake, however, where massive destruction and death result, the changes that have taken place in the church have brought new life and fresh air into an institution that was not only a rock but a rock getting covered by moss. Nonetheless, the changes have been unsettling for many and, as a community, we need to respect those feelings.
What earthquakes have transpired to the church? In my lifetime of 51 years, all spent in The Episcopal Church, I can point to some shifts… I remember as a kindergartner, going to Morning Prayer in the parish hall, segregated from the adults. No child under ten was allowed in the church where they had communion the first, third and fifth Sundays of the month. The minister, as we called them, celebrated the service in cassock and surplice, not alb, his back to the congregation. Women and girls wore white gloves (o, how I hated them!); female choir members wore little beanies. Boys could be acolytes, girls couldn’t. You couldn’t receive communion until you had been confirmed. Confirmation class, a rite of passage, was reserved primarily for sixth and seventh graders who sorely tested the patience of the rector. Baptisms were private affairs, done at the convenience of the family. Vestries were composed of men (though I know historically that Saint Mary’s broke the mold on this point!).
And then in the mid-nineteen sixties, all this began to change. Away with the gloves and skull caps, the altars were pulled out from the walls. We had several versions of the prayer book enter our lives. By the mid-nineteen seventies, depending on where you were, girls could acolyte, women could join the vestry, the words of the 1928 Holy Communion service were replaced with the words we use at the 10.00 liturgy. By the early nineteen eighties, there were women priests, a new prayer book, and a new hymnal. Baptism now was celebrated in the middle of the eucharist on Sunday morning. By the early nineties, there were women rectors and bishops, inclusive language and the idea that the ministers of the church are all the baptised, not just the ordained.
The revolution, or earthquake, is still going on but on a larger scale. The Anglican Communion is no longer composed of white northern colonialists. With these changes has come much conflict over how we look at authority, interpret the bible, understand human sexuality and understand the role of the bishop in relationship to the people and clergy. Some say we are going through another reformation.
All of this is to say that the church is changing, growing into less of a solid, stuck rock. And while these changes have been painful — someone used to remind me still that one of her first conversations with me in 1983 was how I found the new words of the prayer book unfamiliar — I believe they really are for the best.
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What, then, do we make of Jesus’ statement to Peter, ‘upon this rock I will build my church’? We know what the Roman Catholic Church did — they based the primacy of the papacy upon this statement. Tradition and history have borne out the understanding that Jesus founded the church on Peter. But did Jesus mean only upon Peter (Petros in Greek), on a rock (petra in Greek) or upon his teachings? One’s bias determines the answer.
The gospel of Matthew takes the story of Peter’s confession of Jesus, as found in Mark, and expands upon it. Three verses — 17-19 — are not found in Mark’s or Luke’s version of the same story. These three verses seem to make all the difference.
After Peter exclaims that Jesus is ‘the Messiah, the Son of the living God,’ Jesus blesses him. His blessing confirms Peter’s insight about Jesus as coming from divine revelation. Peter is the only individual disciple named as a recipient of Jesus’ blessing. Jesus then goes on to speak of the church, and Peter’s role in it.
Those who interpret Jesus’ statement to mean that Peter is the rock upon which he will build his church have to deal with the inherent irony that Peter is more like sandstone or shale in his ability to falter, lose faith and deny Jesus. Peter, the rock, is too much like us, too fallible.
Another way of looking at Jesus’ claim, ‘upon this rock I will build my church,’ is to understand ‘rock’ as God’s revelation to Peter that Jesus was the Christ. Indeed, belief in Christ is what Matthew narrates. And so, in this interpretation, the church is based on this revelation, not on a person.
If, then, we go with the understanding that the rock of which Jesus speaks is his teachings of God’s love and mercy, then we can find in him a rock that will remain solid. If we go only with the understanding that the rock is the church, we are bound to find that over time, it too, will experience shifts.
The seventh-century Latin words of Hymn 518, translated in 1861 and included in Hymns Ancient and Modern, state:
Christ is made the sure foundation,
Christ the head and cornerstone.
Chosen of the Lord and precious,
binding all the Church in one:
holy Zion’s help forever,
and her confidence alone.
The rock, then, is not only Peter, but Christ. It is Christ who unites us into one Body. That one body of inclusion where all are welcome forms a rock far stronger than any building or human. Let us then root ourselves in the confession of Jesus as Messiah, Son of God. That confession is solid, rock solid. That confession will help us weather any earthquakes of change in the church that will come our way.
As the words to hymn 779 (in Wonder, Love and Praise) say: ‘The church of Christ in every age, beset by change but spirit led, must claim and test its heritage and keep on rising from the dead.’ All will be well; it really will be. The church, that wonderful and sacred mystery will continue to change and be alright.
(1) Beneath the Rubble,’ The New York Times, Wednesday, 18 August 1999, A24.
