A Sermon on Matthew 16:13-20

Preached August 25, 2002

First Christian Church, Corpus Christi, Texas

By Donald M. Tuttle

Up the road a ways, in the heart of San Antonio, sits the Alamo. I can’t imagine that there’s anyone here who hasn’t been there or that doesn’t know the story. It was in December of 1835 that Texian and Tejano volunteers captured the Alamo from Mexican troops. It was a great victory, but it would not last long. In February of 1836, General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna arrived with his army. For 13 days the less than 200 volunteers held off the vastly larger Mexican army in a display of incredible courage and devotion. Even today, more than 160 years later, one can’t watch the film recounting that event or walk across the stone floor of the old mission without a deep sense of awe and reverence. It remains a truly heroic moment in history and a sacred place to visit.

I share the story of the Alamo with you because I wonder if it isn’t the way many Christians see the church. Like the Texian and Tejano volunteers, Christians today find themselves in an often-hostile world. We look around and are surrounded by much that, for good reason, frightens us.

Take the demographics of our community. At one time, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants dominated Corpus Christi. Government officials and leading citizens were almost exclusively drawn from their ranks. But times have changed—dramatically, in fact. Today the majority of those in Corpus Christi are Hispanic. Catholicism is the dominant expression of the faith. We are no longer known as the city of Governor Allred but as the home—and burial place—of Selena. Some people look around and are frightened by such changes.

Consider the anti-religious bias that has emerged in our culture. Fifty years ago, clergy were virtually untouchable. Religious figures in the media were not uniformly but at least often portrayed sympathetically. Not anymore. Father John Richard Neuhaus does not in anyway defend priests who have abused others. But he rightly notes that the percentage of priests guilty of such behavior is exceedingly small given the number of priests in the United States. In fact, he suggests that if the media bothered to ask, it would find that the number of teachers, coaches and others who have abused children is at least as high if not higher. But, he says, the media won’t ask because of an anti-Christian bias. It sees every priest as corrupt, every evangelical as a redneck and every church as oppressive. Rarely do we see a clergy or the devout layperson presented positively in the media. And if that doesn’t frighten us, it at least makes us feel uncomfortable about being open about our faith.

And then there are the social problems that beset our culture--divorce, poverty, and addictions, teen pregnancy, violence and greed, the collapse of a common morality and an increase in the coarseness and contentiousness of the culture. It can be overwhelming and frightening. Watching the news can be a reason for despair.

In the light of such changes, it is tempting to see the church as a sanctuary—as a place where we can gather among like-minded friends and for a while shut out the world. We are tempted to see the church as the place to make our final stand—a place to bar the doors and keep the world’s troubles at bay.

Such an attitude shows up in many ways. Not long ago a colleague had addressed one of the hot-button social issues in his sermon. He spoke on abortion and tried to offer a Christian approach to the debate. But he was met at the door by more than one member of the church who was upset. They were not upset as much by the content of his remarks as by the fact that he spoke at all on a social issue. Said one person, "I didn’t come to church to hear that. I came to hear that Jesus loves me."

It is true that Jesus loves us. It is true that we need to hear it. But what the comment reflected was an Alamo Church—one hoping to shut out the nasty realities of the world around them, to simply ignore a truly significant problem within our culture.

We see it in other ways—like when churches begin to reach out to new people, people different than those already there. One congregation introduced an acoustical guitar and a electronic keyboard to its worship service. The response? "Next thing you know we’ll have rock concerts in the sanctuary," one member said. Of course, it was far from true. But for some such attempts amounted to nothing less than a breech in the wall that held out people with purple hair and pierced eyebrows out.

Often—too often—we create Alamo churches—congregations that lock out the world around them, congregations that view themselves as defenders of holy territory.

Of course, the problem with Alamo churches is two-fold. First, like the Alamo itself, they inevitably fall. You can only play defense so long. Sooner or later, those on the offensive win.

But the second reason—the more important reason—Alamo-churches fail is because Christ did not intend the church to be a sanctuary in to which people flee but a base camp from which Christians go forth in ministry.

Consider Jesus’ conversation with his disciples in Caesarea Philippi. After Peter successfully identified Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of the living God, Jesus proclaims Peter blessed. He says that God has revealed this to Peter and that on Peter he will build his church. But notice what Jesus says about the church. He says that "the gates of Hades will not prevail against it." Or as another translation puts it, "the gates of Hades will not prove to be stronger than it."

What is significant is the imagery. Jesus presents the "powers of death"—all of the powers that hold and corrupt humanity, all of the powers that frighten us and control our lives—as a walled city or a fort. What Jesus suggests is that the powers of death are on the defensive—they are the ones trying to hold the fort, they are the ones trying to keep those they have claimed imprisoned, while the church serves as the battering ram, hammering away at the gates of Hades, determined to set those within its walls free.

For Jesus, the church is to be on the offensive, constantly reclaiming people from death’s control.

One could easily say that it is just a matter of imagery or language. One could argue that it is just one phrase among many that might be used to describe the church. But it is more than that. What Jesus promised to build, what Jesus envisioned in the church, was a community of people that did what Jesus did.

It is easy to take for granted Jesus’ ministry. But he did not have to do what he did the way he did it. He could have gathered a few disciples and retreated to the mountains above the Sea of Galilee. He could have started a "holy club," a gathering of the faithful, like the Qumran Community of his day. People could have come to him, fleeing the world around them, waiting for it to collapse.

But Jesus didn’t do that. Instead he came into the world and went on the offensive. He confronted the powers of death. Every time he healed the sick or cast out a demon, every time he forgave sins or challenged hypocrisy, he was hammering on the gates of Hades. Even when the powers of death struck back with vengeance through the Jewish leaders, the Roman officials and even the crowds, Jesus hammered on, rising from the dead and guaranteeing death’s ultimate demise.

For Jesus, faith in God was not a sanctuary into which he could flee; it was the beachhead from which he went forth to save humanity.

The church was created to do the same.

There was a brief moment in the early days of the Christian faith when the disciples gathered inside the Upper Room, locked the door and feared the world around them. But it didn’t last long. On Pentecost, the church burst forth. It left the safety of the Upper Room and safety of its intimate fellowship and began to call people to repentance; heal the lame, blind, deaf and ill; confront greed with generosity and bigotry with acceptance. They began to break down the walls that had separated people from God and from each other.

Oh, they encountered a lot of resistance. The gates of Hades are strong. But they kept hammering away so that the whole world might know Jesus Christ and him crucified.

And the church has always been its best when it is knocking on Hades door. In the first few centuries of the Christian faith, the church—not the government, but the church—saw the devastation being created by illness and disease. It saw how the powers of death were destroying people and families, even whole communities. So it began hospitals and hospices. It began to relieve the suffering of people and in so doing shook the power of death.

In the years before World War II, many in Germany—many Christians there—were frightened by their economic troubles. The powers of death began to capture them, one by one, in the rhetoric and actions of a man named Hitler. Some in the church knew what he was doing was wrong. Some retreated into the church, hoping it would all one day go away. But the church at its best became the Confessing Church—men, women and even children who boldly called evil evil. Some paid for it with their lives, but in doing so began to shake the gates of Hades.

The same could be said for the Civil Rights movement. It would have been easy for African-Americans to retreat into the safety of the church. It would have been easy to go there and pray for a better day. It would have been "spiritual" to do so. But to confront the power of death that came in bigotry and inequality, they had to do what the church is called to do, go into the world and proclaim the Gospel even to the powers and principalities. The power of death was strong, but it was not strong enough to stop the work of God. Such is the power of the church.

Down the road a little ways, there is another historic site. It sits on our own bay. It is the U.S.S. Lexington. She was commissioned in 1943 and went on to play a role in every major naval campaign of World War II. She did what she was designed to do. She would sail to where there was trouble and then from her vast deck planes would be launched to confront her enemies.

If you want an image of the church, it sits on our very own bay. That is what the church is meant to be. Today we sit not in an Alamo but on a Lexington. Here we gather not to keep the world outside, but so that we can be trained, inspired, and sent forth to carry Christ into the world and confront the powers of death.

And we do it every time we help a friend understand what it means to confess Jesus as Lord. We do it every time we baptize someone in this baptistry. We do it every time we tell a co-worker I am praying for her—and then do it. We do it every time a handful of adults and children slap together ham sandwiches for the hungry and hand out socks to the homeless.

Every time that we go forth from here to intentionally share Christ, to make disciples, to minister in Jesus’ name, to live as the Body of Christ, we shake the gates of Hades, push back the power of death, and set people free to know the love and grace of God. That is the church Jesus founded. That is the church we are called to be.