I want to thank you for the great honor of inviting me to preach in a congregation whose pastors included Henry Melchior Muhlenberg.  As some of you may know the seminary was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to continue the translation of his letters into English.  And, although we will not be able to complete the project, the letters we have translated stand as a remarkable testimony to the faith and courage not only of Muhlenberg but of the other colonial pastors, congregational leaders and congregants, as they carved out a place for Lutheranism in the American wilderness, as he liked to call it.  I bring greetings from the LTSP and beg you to remember your seminary in your prayers and through your giving.

 In the name of Jesus.  Amen                       276^th Anniversary of Christ, York                                    

                                                                        Matthew 16:13-18                                    The Reverend Dr. Timothy Wengert

In celebrating the anniversary of any church, there are two questions that beg asking.  Where is God and where is the church?  When we forget to ask these questions, our celebration of the church devolves into a celebration of celebrating—good for the taste buds but hard on our faith.

Where is God?  When Solomon begins his prayer at the dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem, it would appear that God is there in the Temple.  It is the Lord’s altar; Solomon is speaking to God directly.  Yet, all of that changes in the middle of the prayer, when Solomon breaks his chain of thought and asks, “But will God indeed dwell on earth?”  Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built!”  Suddenly, the Temple, which seemed glorious in the description a few verses before our text, seems very small and insignificant, and God has escaped our grasp.  God cannot be contained in the highest of heavens, let alone in a mere building on earth.

Solomon’s prayer cuts two ways.  On the one side, he rightly destroys what one of my teachers in seminary called the human edifice complex—our mistaking a building for what goes on inside it.  Build any building, any institution, you wish—let it be as historic as this one or the Temple—still we cannot capture God here.  But on the other side, this leaves us with an absent distant God, so that the best that Solomon can hope for is that God will, despite the distance, regard his prayer with open eyes and consider the Temple on account of God’s own name attached to it.

But, a thousand years later Solomon’s question received an unexpected, glorious answer.  “But will God indeed dwell on earth?”  Peter, standing in Caesar’s own city and speaking against the cult of the emperor and all worship of power, answers Solomon’s query with a resounding yes.  Others may say that Jesus is John the Baptist, Elijah or Jeremiah, but Peter sees things in an entirely different light.  “You are Messiah, Son of the living God!”  Now God dwells on earth in the son of a Galilean carpenter, in the last place you or I would reasonably look.

Indeed, Peter’s answer to “Where is God?” is so beyond our human ken that Jesus proclaims, “Blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah!  For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.”  We would scarcely look for God, Immanuel, in Mary’s lap or standing dripping wet in the Jordan at his baptism, or on the cross crying that God has abandoned him, but that is precisely where God is.

But Peter’s divinely revealed glimpse at God with us continues to this day!  After all, who would expect to find God swooping down in the waters of baptism?  Who would imagine that the words that I speak are God’s words?  And, above all, who could grasp that here, at this table, with the bread and wine, we feast upon Christ, who gives us his body and sheds his blood for us for the forgiveness of sins?  Where is God?  To be sure, not even the heavens can contain God, but God promises not just to hear us and watch us but, in Christ, to dwell with us as Messiah, Son of the living God.

So, the first reason for celebration today is because God is faithful and is here for you for the last 276 years and for the next 276 until eternity.  But, there is also a second question.  Where is the church?  Again, a quick reading of the gospel might leave you with the mistaken opinion that the church is with Peter.  Many people assume that the word Peter, Petros in Greek, means rock or cliff, so that the text would read, “You are rock and upon this rock I build my church.”  Where is church?  Where Peter or his successors are!  And yet, that is not quite what the text says.  It would be better to translate: “You are Rocky, and upon this rock I will build my church” or “You are Clifford, and upon this cliff I will build my church.”  Already St. John Chrysostom, whose feast we remembered last Sunday, realized this nuance and, preaching on this text, reminded his congregation that the “rock” in this text is not Peter himself but his confession of faith.  It is a point that Martin Luther delighted in making as well.

Where is the church?  It is precisely on your lips as you with the whole church confess your faith in the words of the Nicene Creed.  It is with children singing “Jesus loves me,” as if their lives depended on it—and they do.  It is on the lips of that mother or father who is teaching their child to pray.  It is in the sighs of the old woman in the nursing home who, when asked why she complains to God replies, “Even before I complain, God has already forgiven me.  Didn’t you know that?” 

The church is more event than building, more assembly than institution.  Where is the church?  In your 276 years of singing and sighing, praying and praising—always confessing with Peter “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”  What a remarkable thing!  God is with us, and, in confessing that very fact, we are church!  No wonder that St. Paul in our second lesson today could call us God’s field, God’s building.  And yet, the church is not our doing either—as if it were enough to pat one another on the back for nearly three centuries of success!  For we do not build on ourselves or our own works but, as Paul says, “No one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ.”  You no longer need travel to Jerusalem to the Temple of God!  Now that God has come to us in Christ, Paul concludes, “you are God’s temple … God’s Spirit dwells in you.”  You are that temple!  This is where we find church: precisely where we find God!  Mixed in with our confession of faith, our assembly around Word and Sacrament each week, that is, around the preaching of God’s grace and around Baptism and the Meal—this is where church is—hidden to our eyes and our reason but revealed by faith alone; weak in the eyes of the world but, in that very weakness, able to withstand sin, death, the devil and hell.  In Christ God is here; therefore we are the church.  Sealed in such faith, confessing our savior, we can pray with the psalmist, “How dear to me is your dwelling, O Lord of hosts.  My soul longs for the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh rejoice in the living God.”  May your celebration and remembrance rest in God with us, Jesus Son of God, the foundation of this assembly, now and always.  Amen