What are these keys?
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Heartbreakingly, it happened again this past week. On Monday, the New York Times published an article about another eruption of the huge and ugly sexual abuse scandal currently wracking the Roman Catholic Church.
This time it’s “painfully fresh” and involves the current Catholic bishop of Kansas City, Missouri, who has been looking the other way while a priest, accused of abusing his authority with little girls, continued in his post, interacting with children and adults. And once the people found out, they have been up in arms, agitating for the bishop to leave. [quote and paraphrase from “Bishop in Missouri Waited Months to Report Priest, Stirring Parishioners’ Rage” by Laurie Goodstein, New York Times, August 15, 2011]
Now, as we know, this is more than a scandal; the culture that encouraged and continues to encourage the proliferation of this deviant behavior is gravely sinful and still seems often to be in denial. In some places, that branch of the Church is not being the Church that Jesus founded upon the shoulders of Peter. Parishioners who thought they were safe are realizing they have been hoodwinked. Their children are being violated.
And more and more Catholic laity are becoming enraged, to their great credit.
Now, lest we get too smug here, we would do well to remember that all churches have a few pastors who are abusing their authority and bringing great harm to innocent people. But it certainly makes the news more often in the RC church, and perhaps that’s because it’s a reflection of an endemic cultural sickness in some of the clergy.
That’s how it seems to me.
So, here is the question of the day--What is the church supposed to be, anyway? We can find the answer in today’s readings.
Our gospel tells us that after Peter saw and affirmed that Jesus was the “Son of the Living God,” Jesus invested him with the keys to the kingdom. What a great Biblical phrase. The keys to the kingdom. What are these keys?
I’d propose that Peter’s key ring includes the following keys ~ for they are what unlocks our lives so that we live cognizant of the love and the authority of God. Here are some of the keys on the key ring:
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the sure knowledge that Jesus is both God and our brother;
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the sure knowledge that the essence of God is love;
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the sure knowledge that we’re called to reflect that love in our own lives;
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and the sure knowledge that we are to share this Good News with other people.
In today’s gospel excerpt, Jesus also gave Peter (and the other disciples) the authority to bind and to loose. Most scholars are in agreement that binding and loosing are Jewish legal terms. To bind means to declare something to be forbidden. To loose means to declare something to be allowed. So we’re talking about Jesus giving the authority of God to the early Church regarding moral living and the interpretation of Scripture.
Take a look at the Epistle today and we see Paul using another metaphor for the Church, besides the idea that the Church is the keeper of the keys. Paul says we collectively constitute the Body of Christ.
As we know, the Church is like a human body. All our members have different gifts, abilities, needs, hurts, and aversions. Collectively we are the Church, which is capable of so much good—and so much harm! It’s up to each of us to use our gifts to help the Church and its subdivision, the Parish, to function well. Administrators, care givers, teachers, gardeners, coffee lovers, singers, people with deep pockets—you name it—all of us together are very strongly needed in order for the keys of the kingdom to be used rightly and in order for Jesus’ word to be obeyed.
And the last metaphor for the Church in today’s readings is that the church is the vessel that shelters us in storms and brings us safely to the Other Side. Think about that little basket that Moses’ mother waterproofed with tar. She made it watertight so that it could carry baby Moses across the waters to safety. And it worked.
The Church is like a ship in a stormy sea for us. In fact that metaphor for Church has been around a good thousand years. It’s even influenced church architecture. Use your imagination and turn the nave of our church upside down. It resembles a boat, kind of like an ark with a very broad hull. Like Moses’ basket, maybe. Some churches look more like a typically keeled boat. Even the word “nave” that we use for the part of the church containing the pews comes from the Latin word “navis”, which means “ship.”
The Church—and the local Parish especially—is intended to be a ship that helps people get across the ocean from this world to the next—from earthbound struggles to the beatific vision of God. The Ship that is the Church carries us when our lives are falling apart and we need to be held up, just like that little basket of Moses. It supports us when life’s storms are almost too great to handle and threaten to take us down. It doesn’t allow the waves and the wind to capsize us and throw us in over our heads.
The Church is intended to carry us in times like now, when, in the words of columnist Frank Bruni, “the European debt crisis threatens to become a worldwide contagion, London is burning, the Arab world is convulsing, the Dow is jackhammering, and America’s crisis of joblessness is grinding on and on.” [Frank Bruni, New York Times, August 14, 2011] These events produce anxieties in most of us that cry out to be put into a divine perspective. That’s what the Church is called to do.
And many of us have felt the support of this parish when we were going through some really difficult things in our own lives. Frightening diagnoses, teenagers who may be acting out, alcoholism or drug addiction, hard personal crises—the parish provides a refuge of peace and a place of support. May we continue to be strong so that others in the future can draw on our support and our care.
And we know that the Church loses its power and credibility in the world unless we confess our shortcomings and our abuses, and seek healing—in all humility. With the keys of the kingdom and the powers to loose and to bind comes great responsibility.
May we see the meta-level of Reality, a God who wishes the best for us and who is among us as Spirit to help us thrive. May we contribute our gifts to help the wider Church and this parish be what God is calling us to be, now and in the future. May our hearts and hands be open to people who need us right now. May we confess with our mouths and feel in our hearts that Jesus is the Son of the Living God—and may our lives line up with our confession.
Come, Holy Spirit, enable us to be the flourishing Church you desire.
Amen.
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