Does the Answer Come from the Head or the Heart? Matthew 16:13-20 August 24, 2005, Year A, Proper 16 The Rev. William V. Livingston, Rector Church of the Resurrection, Starkville, Mississippi Imagine being at a party-let's say a cocktail party of assorted people, some you know well, some casually and some total strangers. Perhaps you're wearing a cross around your neck or as a lapel pin or someone references your membership at the Church of the Resurrection. Whatever the stimulus, it prompts one of the strangers standing in the midst of your conversational circle to ask, "Who was this Jesus? What is this church you attend?" How do you respond? We Episcopalians (or probably most us) are not comfortable answering such questions-especially giving heart answers rather than head answers. Yes, we can give some of the doctrinal answers about Jesus; yes, we can say, "Oh, I attend the Episcopal Church of the Resurrection. It's located on North Montgomery, just behind McInnis Barber Shop." (Have you ever wondered why it is that we describe our location as behind McInnis Barber Shop, but no one would ever describe McInnis Barber Shop as being just in front of the Episcopal Church?) Would you be able to give more than a doctrinal answer to who was Jesus, would you be able to give more than a physical description of church? Those of us who attended the Diocese Tent meeting this weekend heard the challenge that our personal responsibility as Christians, as Episcopalians is telling the story. Then, we are people of the story. We are to find our place in the story. We are to tell our story. Our problem with answering the question is that we want to answer the "who do people say that I am" question. It is there that we find the media answers about the church being the keeper of the rules. It is there that we give doctrinal and historical answers. However, the question eventually has to come down to "Who do you say that I am?" If the Church is the embodiment of Jesus after his ascension, then it also has to come down to "What is the Church for you?" Oh how we Episcopalians squirm when we talk about an inner relationship with Jesus or with God. However, understanding today's Gospel text requires that we do so. You can have and read all the maps of the Rocky Mountains you want; you can see photographs and videos of them. These are pointers to get there and impart knowledge about them. However, you will not know Rocky Mountains until you have stood on one of the peaks looking out over the expanse of the valley below, touched the ruggedness of the rocky incline, heard the crisp cold air blowing across those rocks and over the Alpine tundra, smelled the scent of wild flowers, and breathed in the thin air with so little oxygen at that altitude. Anthony DeMello, who was a Roman Catholic priest and was a native of India, taught various methods of prayer for experiencing God on a personal level and said the Bible and the doctrines, serve as road maps, as information about God, as fingers pointing toward God, but God invites us so far beyond that. I share a story I hope distinguishes between someone experiencing Jesus and the Church and just knowing about them. It comes from the opening pages of Elaine Pagels' Beyond Belief. With degrees in history and classical studies, with specialties in ancient and Middle Eastern histories, Dr. Pagels knew a great deal about the historical Jesus and church history, but was pretty much an agnostic. She tells her story this way. On a bright Sunday morning in February, shivering in a T-shirt and running shorts, I stepped into the stone vestibule of the Church of the Heavenly Rest in New York to catch my breath and warm up. Since I had not been in church for a long time, I was startled by my response to the worship in progress-the soaring harmonies of the choir singing with the congregation; and the priest, a woman in bright gold and white vestments, proclaiming prayers in a clear, resonant voice. As I stood watching, a thought came to me: Here is a family that knows how to face death. That morning I had gone for an early morning run while my husband and two-and-a-half-year-old son were still sleeping. The previous night I had been sleepless with fear and worry. Two days before a team of doctors at Babies Hospital, Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, had performed a routine checkup on our son, Mark, a year and six months after his successful open-heart surgery. The physicians were shocked to find evidence of a rare lung disease. Disbelieving the results, they tested further for six hours before they finally called us in to say that Mark had pulmonary hypertension, an invariably fatal disease, they told us. How much time? I asked. "We don't know: a few months, a few years." The following day, a team of doctors urged us to authorize a lung biopsy, a painful and invasive procedure. How could this help? It couldn't, they explained; but the procedure would let them see how far the disease had progressed. Mark was already exhausted by the previous day's ordeal. Holding him, I felt that if more masked strangers poked needles into him in an operating room, he might lose heart-literally-and die. We refused the biopsy, gathered Mark's blanket, clothes, and Peter Rabbit, and carried him home. Standing in the back of the church, I recognized, uncomfortably, that I needed to be there. Here was a place to weep without imposing tears upon a child; and here was a heterogeneous community that had gathered to sing, celebrate, to acknowledge common needs, and to deal with what we cannot control or imagine. Yet the celebration in progress spoke of hope; perhaps that is what made the presence of death bearable. Before that time, I could only ward off what I had heard and felt the day before. I returned often to that church, not looking for faith but because, in the presence of that worship and the people gathered there-and in a smaller group that met weekdays in the church basement for mutual encouragement-my defenses fell away, exposing storms of grief and hope. In that church I gathered new energy, and resolved, over and over, to face whatever awaited us as constructively as possible for Mark, and for the rest of us. When people would say to me, "Your faith must be of great help to you," I would wonder, What do they mean? What is faith? Certainly not simple assent to the set of beliefs that worshipers in that church recited every week ("We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth . . .")-traditional statements that sounded strange to me, like barely intelligible signals from the surface, heard at the bottom of the sea. Such statements seemed to me then to have little to do with whatever transactions we were making with one another, with ourselves, and-so it was said-with invisible beings. I was acutely aware that we met there driven by need and desire; yet sometimes I dared hope that such communion has the potential to transform us.1 "Blessed are you, Simon of Johnah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter." So transforming is this personal experience with the Holy that we are called by a new name. The giving of a name at Baptism is more than symbolic. This church that the Lord began with Peter, and that we are a part of, is a holy and a sacred thing. It is not merely or mainly a voluntary association of like-minded people; it is not primarily or at its heart a human institution. It is instead a divine mystery, a holy thing, much greater than we can see or imagine-stronger even than death itself, vast in space and time. We have been trusted with "the greatest story ever told," now made alive in our own experience. The two questions that Jesus poses to His disciples today - "Who do people say I am?" and "Who do you say I am?" are questions that all disciples have to face at some time in their lives. They may be questions that we have to keep returning to as we learn more - and change throughout the course of our lives. Do we answer with our head or do we answer with our heart shaped by that which is not of human making? The head answer changes nothing. The heart answer can transform the world.   1Pagels, Elaine, Beyond Belief, pgs. 3-5. Random House, New York, 2003.