proper 15a: "who do you say that i am?"

yesterday's gospel was matthew 16:13-20, in which jesus asks his disciples an all-important question, "who do you say that i am?" peter's answer, sometimes called "the confession of peter," is "you are the messiah, the son of the living god." this is the foundation on which jesus says he will build his church.

i do a little volunteer work in the library of my local parish, often checking books in, so i get to see what people have been reading. if best-seller lists and discussion groups on the internet are any indication, what our parish reads is fairly typical of early twenty-first century christian fare. i am not encouraged by what i find. books by authors arguing that jesus only "became the christ" years after his death (and without any faith in his resurrection) are very popular. very rarely does anyone check out a book such as, say, n. t. wright's the challenge of jesus: rediscovering who jesus was and is or even wright's book with john dominic crossan, the resurrection of jesus.

now of course, there are many people who faithfully read daily the gospels with their firm proclamation in agreement with peter that jesus is "the messiah, the son of the living god," and that he is risen from the dead. but i suspect that if we are serious about being built into the church, we will leave aside the pop-christology that denies peter's confession. is it any surprise that the church in this country is so powerless to do anything except look for scraps from the emperor's table? if that seems a harsh observation, i ask you to consider if the church in the united states today is really any more powerful witness to the risen christ than was, say, the church of germany in the late 1930's. we read a lot of bonhoeffer's books, but we seem rarely actually to follow jesus, especially knowing what next week's gospel will be.