Matthew
16:13-20
If
you walk down the hallway and go into the chapel, you’ll see windows that have
symbols of all the twelve disciples. On
the left, the first window you come to will have two crossed keys and the name
Peter. That symbol comes from the words
of Jesus that we heard read this morning, where he tells Peter,
“I
will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth
will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in
heaven.” [Matthew 16:19]
In the window, and in other places where the symbol
appears, like the Vatican’s coat of arms, one key is gold and the other is iron
to suggest the power to open or close the gates of heaven.
There’s
something tremendously audacious in the claim that issues from this, that any
human being can open or close the way to heaven for anyone else. Sometimes when somebody dies, a concerned
relative will ask me, “Is so-and-so in heaven?”
My answer is always going to be, “That’s not my call. But I do trust that God is merciful and
loving, and that Jesus said he was going there to prepare a place for us.” It really isn’t up to you or me to make these
calls. Now, sometimes you do get that
gut feeling about someone that if anyone is in heaven, they are. For the most part, I’d advise you to go with
that. It doesn’t mean that they were
perfect or flawless. It just means that
you could see God’s grace working in and through them while they were among us,
so you can probably safely assume that God’s grace is with them still in an
even more wonderful and powerful way.
On
the other hand, there may be people whose lives or deaths leave you
wondering. Someone who is tortured by
mental illness, who goes through some horrible depression, or who spends long
years with physical pain, for example, may take their own life in despair. What about them? Again, I’ll repeat: “God is merciful.” We do not know what happens between anyone
else and the Lord.
Kevin
Hines is one of the very few people to survive a jump off the Golden Gate
Bridge. When he was interviewed on NPR a
few weeks ago, he described his experience like this:
“I went down about 70 to 80 feet, but
then I opened my eyes, and I thought, ‘What the heck?’ I thought I was hallucinating
this entire event. I thought I couldn’t have just done that. That didn’t just
happen. And I wouldn’t be alive — so, of course, it didn’t just happen. But
when I finally resurfaced after initially going down — and after nearly passing
out and drowning — I broke the surface, I bobbed up and down in the water, and
I simply prayed, ‘God please save me I don’t want to die, I just made a
mistake.’ As I bobbed up and down in the water, swallowing salt water and
trying to stay afloat only using my arms because my legs were completely
immobile, something brushed by my legs. I thought, ‘You gotta be kidding me.’ I
thought, ‘This is ridiculous. I didn’t die off this bridge and now a shark is
gonna devour me?’ Turns out it was not a shark, it was, in fact, a sea lion.
The people above looking down, who were on the bridge, believed it to be
keeping me afloat until the Coast Guard boat arrived.”
Later in the interview he said,
“I went back with my father a year after
the attempt. And, ya know… we’re driving — he said, ‘Kevin, we’re gonna take a
drive.’ And I saw where we were going and I said, ‘Dad, what’re you doing?’ and
he goes, ‘Well, we gotta find some closure Kev.’ We stopped by a flower bed on
the way and he said, ‘Pick a flower.’ So I picked a flower from the flower bed.
And we got in the car and went all the way out to the Golden Gate Bridge
parking lot and we parked and he walked with me to exactly where I jumped. We
said a prayer and we dropped the flower. The flower hit the water and, two feet
to the right, popped up a sea lion. So, I know I’m supposed to be here, and I
know there’s a reason why. I guess, I’ll just be finding that reason out as
life goes on.”[1]
So, my point in repeating his story is
simply that there is no telling how or when God is at work in anybody’s living
or dying until God lets us know.
What
we do know, however, is that even though we do not have the ability to say who
walks through the gates of heaven when their time does come, we do have the
ability that Peter had to let people know that Jesus has opened them up. That is the golden key. We also have the ability to stay quiet about
that, which is the iron key. What
happens for others may very well hinge on whether we speak out or keep silent
about the very declaration that Peter made when he replied to Jesus,
“You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” [Matthew 16:16]
It is on that declaration that the
Church is built, not Peter, but on the faith that he expresses,
”and on this rock,” said Jesus,
“I will build my Church and the gates of
Hades will not prevail against it.” [Matthew 16:18]
The faith that Jesus is the one sent to
help us is always going to be a faith that says that the door is open, that
there is hope, that there is welcome, that – no matter what – God is merciful. When we speak that, and when we live that
out, we use the golden key that may open heaven for someone who is looking for
the way in.
That
can be a powerful responsibility that shapes our own lives. John Wesley was someone who had a great sense
that the keys to the kingdom should not sit in his pocket. In his Journal
entry for Saturday, June 12, 1736 he wrote:
“Being with one who was very desirous to
converse with me, but not upon religion, I spoke to this effect – ‘Suppose you
was [sic] going to a country where
everyone spoke Latin, and understood no other language, neither would converse
with any that did not understand it: suppose one was sent to stay here a short
time, on purpose to teach it to you; suppose that person, pleased with your company,
should spend his time in trifling with you, and teach you nothing of what he
came for. Would that be well done? Yet this is our case. You are going to a country where everyone
speaks the love of God. The citizens of
heaven speak no other language. They
converse with none who do not understand it.
Indeed, none such are admitted there.
I am sent from God to teach you this.
A few days are allotted to that purpose.
Would it be well done in me, because I was pleased with your company, to
spend this short time in trifling, and teach you nothing of what I came
for? God forbid! I will rather not converse with you at
all. Of the two extremes this is the
best.”
I’m not sure that everybody is called to push things
quite that far, but I am sure that all Jesus’ followers are called to learn the
language of heaven, to speak the language of heaven, and to teach the language
of heaven, and that when we do so, it is the golden key that we hold out.
Neither
you nor I nor anyone else will ever force anybody into the kingdom, but it’s
our privilege and duty to hold the door, and not to be surprised if that means
someone we might never even expect goes in before we do.
A
preacher climbed into a taxi cab. He was
late for a flight to the airport. The
driver said, “I’ll get you there on time.
Don’t sweat it.” He took off
through traffic, and swerved from lane to lane, and ran a few red lights until
they were on the highway. Once there, he
hit eighty miles per hour. That was when
a tire blew out and the taxi spun out in front of a tractor trailer. Both the passenger and the driver were
killed. Their souls appeared instantly
at the gates of heaven, where St. Peter met them. He saw the preacher and said, “Welcome!” and
introduced him to an angel that would show him around. Then he turned to the taxi driver and said,
“Welcome! Come over here!” and he seated
him on a big float made out of a cloud with rainbows for wheels and a brass band
marching in front and behind him.
“I don’t get it,” said
the preacher. “What did he do that
merits this kind of welcome? The man
drove like a maniac and got us both killed.”
“Exactly,” said
Peter. “When you preached, people
thought about what you were saying. When
he drove them, they prayed.”
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