Have you ever been nervous giving the keys to your car to a teenager? I was blessed with a very trusting brother, who when he went to war in the Army Nurse Corps left his mustang convertible to me to drive while he was gone. When I look back on that act of trust, I am amazed at my brother.
So it seems when Jesus is proclaiming the giving of the keys of the kingdom of heaven to Peter, it is an amazing act of trust. Look at the track record of Peter’s deeds—he fails to understand, he lacks enough faith to walk on water, and we know that he will deny even knowing Jesus at the last. But Jesus has trust in the rock that is Peter, his ultimate steadfastness, not because of what Peter does but because of what Peter says. Peter proclaims Jesus as the messiah.
Testimony is a word used in Christian churches to describe the people’s proclamation of what and who the Christ is to them personally. In more evangelical churches, personal testimonies are key to being part of the church. Altar calls are made to ask people to come forward to proclaim and be saved. Here in our church, we tend to have testimonies about the meaning of a person’s faith and especially what this parish means, at times of stewardship, to be a sort of cheering section for pledging and giving time and talent. So maybe we are missing something important.
Proclamation about our faith may seem undignified. Some of us don’t like to talk about ourselves. And meditating on our faith seems self-indulgent or not useful. When I began the process for the priesthood, I was asked to write about my faith journey (also called a spiritual autobiography) several times—for the parish discernment committee, the diocesan ordination committee, and the seminary, and after I was ordained, to write a spiritual autobiography again for each parish to which I was applying for a job.
The first time, this proclamation was hard, took some time; and even though it may seem that it should have been easier the more times I wrote about myself, this kind of introspection continues to be hard. For you don’t merely decide what your faith story is and be done with it. Your faith story continues in parallel with your life story. When you come through different phases in your life, your faith takes on meaning particular to the life you are living.
That’s because God continues with us in our life, making meaning out of babies being born, graduating from school, new jobs lost or gained, marriage or divorce, health, sickness or even death that happens to us and around us. We are fully engaged with our faith when we acknowledge God’s presence in all we do and are. Our proclamation of the messiah with us, of God with us, is colored by our experiences, our hopes and dreams, our sorrow and disappointment, our joy and celebration, and our faith grows as we grow into our lives.
It is that experience of Jesus that Peter proclaimed. Peter was paying attention to the encounters he witnessed—of the baskets of fish and bread left after feeding 5000 people, of the healing of a Canaanite, the walking on water. Peter, in experiencing the life and healing presence of Christ, saw that the messiah was part of his own life and death. In a way, Peter was writing his own gospel of who this messiah was.
Each of our proclamations about our faith writes our own gospel. We tell the story of how we were comforted, given courage, healed, upheld in our pain, and made bright shining as the sun in our own glory as Christians. The embodiment of Christ in our lives gives us the words for our own story of faith, our own gospel.
It is this personal faith, this story, this personal gospel that our family, friends and neighbors and even strangers see as we live our life. We are witnesses of this story in our actions, our prayer life, our church life, the very way we see how god leads and guides us. This witness, this personal gospel, then becomes the world’s way of understanding what Christians are and how they are in the world.
We live in a time of faith cynicism, when people say they can’t be Christian because of what Christians have done and said that do not jibe with the teaching of a loving messiah. So our personal gospel is even more important to the world, to setting straight what Christianity means and how Christians act in the world.
What is your gospel going to say? Will you be hard pressed to say where your faith is in your life? Are you paying attention to the little ways God leads you, guides, heals you? How will your gospel be read by the people around you; are you ready to be a witness?
Jesus is ready to trust the keys to heaven to every Christian who can tell the story, proclaim the messiah. Are you ready for your keys?
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