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The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost(Proper 16)23 August 2020All Saints’ Church, Peterborough, New HampshireThe other day, I came across an excerpt from something called On the Mortality Rate. This surprised me, since I wasn’t looking at a newspaper or a magazine, but a book of daily readings for the Church Year, and On the Mortality Rate was written by Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, around the year 250. He was writing about an outbreak of plague that had come to his city, and people were dying. In this piece he took note of the surprise expressed by some of his fellow Christians at the fact that the plague didn’t distinguish between pagans and Christians, who were dying at the same rate. The Christians were, after all, risking their lives already by belonging to an illegal religious group; surely God would give them a break on the plague!No, Cyprian says, it doesn’t work like that. The followers of Jesus the Messiah are indeed different: they belong to a community of great power and authority, which will be revealed in due course. But in the meantime, they are subject to the same laws of nature as everyone else. If they are to be distinguished from others in a time of plague, it will have to be by how they act in response. Will they be people without hope, paralysed by fear? Or will they continue in the Way of Love and Mercy, helping as they can, but not putting God to the test? Pull yourselves together, says their bishop; go about your true business with fortitude and trust.To the Church is given power and authority. In today’s Gospel, Simon son of Jonah states that, regardless of other possibilities, who Jesus actually is, is not the return of a mighty historical figure from Israel’s past, but someone unique, the Messiah and Son of the living God. To this confession of faith, there are consequences. First, Jesus blesses Simon, and observes: ‘flesh and blood have not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.’ This is not Simon’s own brilliance at deduction; clearly, it is pure inspiration. ‘And I tell you, you are Peter, Rock, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.’ The gates of the Underworld, the presence of Death, will not be able to conquer this church, this ekklesía, this group ‘called out’ from the world; it is a permanent fact in the life of the world thereafter. We must not lose sight of two things. First, Simon, now Peter, stands in for all of us. He is not a person of unusual gifts or saintliness: he can only walk on water for a little while! He will pretty soon be panicked into denying his Lord, briefly. But the Father has revealed the truth to him, and, as best he can, he will follow that truth and lead its other followers. The church will stand on that foundation. Since he is just one of us, though a leader, when he is no longer there the Church will continue: that bit of rock will have done its job, the foundation is stable, and Death will not overpower it.But second, the Lord gives him authority. The Church has always had a hard time figuring that out. For instance, if Peter has unique authority in the Church, does that convey to his successors? If so, who are they? Eventually it was claimed that they were the bishops of the church in Rome, of which Peter was presumed to have been the first leader, and that their authority over the whole Church was something quite specific and concrete. But for those who reject that as both far-fetched in theory and sometimes iniquitous in practice, there is still the troublesome fact that the Gospels do seem to show the Lord Jesus transmitting some kind of authority to His Church, authority that is real and transcendent: ‘Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.’We have been reluctant, in recent times, to acknowledge that awkward fact of authority, let alone claim it—and for good reason. In our history, the Church has often shown itself far too eager to claim and exploit worldly power. But that is not where its proper authority comes from. Its power resonates with that of the Kingdom of Heaven, not the kingdom of this world.The authority of the Church is in fact the power of the Cross. Peter will shrink from this; so do we. We want to be spared the plague, not use it to build our spiritual muscles. But our duty is clear. It was clear to Cyprian of Carthage, executed in 252 for refusing to offer pagan sacrifice. His authority was real: he lives in memory. So, too, does Jonathan Daniels, Episcopal seminarian from St. James’, Keene, taking a bullet for a black teenager in Alabama in 1965. So do the ‘Martyrs of Memphis’, Episcopal nuns and others who died in 1878 nursing the poor in a cholera epidemic when those who could, had fled the city. And still vivid is Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who, in the midst of the apartheid struggle, told our General Convention that the government of South Africa had not reckoned on the moral strength of the Anglican and other churches who defied it at the risk of imprisonment and death: ‘This is not some tuppenny-ha’penny organisation!’, Tutu proclaimed; ‘this is the Church of God!’We are not called to exercise mindless heroics. The Martyrs of Memphis certainly took every precaution not to catch the disease while they ministered to their patients, though four nuns and two priests died. It is spiritual arrogance to ignore science and common sense. Rather, this is a time when we need to exercise both prudence and courage in the service of love and faithfulness. We have seen crisis, plague, oppression, many times before. We are the Church of God. May God keep us in the Way, mindful of the rock from which we have been hewn, that we may, with all humility but also persistence and strength, inoculate a fearful world with the blessing of hope.Richard Ca?ius Lee Webb.

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