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To the Beloved in Christ at Ashmont

Dear Friends,

"You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God." That is Peter's response when Jesus asks him directly, "Who do you say that I am."

At Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, we joke about how our students - all budding theologians - would answer that question. If Jesus asked them, "Who am I?" they would more likely respond: "You are the escatological manifestation of the ultimate kerygma of hope at the ground of our being." The study of theology can be dangerous....

Ultimately, of course, we must all answer Jesus' question, "Who do you think I am? Who do you believe me to be?"

Summer will be in full swing by the time we get to the Great Feasts this year. After Corpus Christi we launch into a summer succession of wonderful readings from St. Matthew's Gospel. Jesus' question to Peter, in fact, comes in Matthew 16:16 which we shall hear as the Gospel on Sunday, August 24.

I challenge you to take the next ten weeks to consider how you will answer that question.

The mainline churches in our country are declining because their members are neither hearing nor answering that question. Is Jesus just a benign teacher who long ago in a different world taught some pretty things about love? Or is Jesus the Christ, the Son of the Living God?

I often tell the Yale students whom the rector encourages me to invite to preach at All Saints': "Do not underestimate those you will be preaching to at Ashmont. This is a congregation that understands that Jesus is our window to God, that he shows us everything we need to know about God. They understand that Jesus is present - at work among us - in the Blessed Sacrament, that he is known to us in the breaking of the bread."

Many of my students are touched by All Saints': "I felt something in your congregation. They really seem to get it." One told his classmates: "Those people in Dorchester understand Jesus better than those of us who are studying theology here at Yale for three years. They know Jesus is more than a great teacher who lived long ago and said nice things. They understand that he is alive and active in their lives now, that he is God in human form."

I would like to think that's true. But we must constantly confront ourselves with the question that Jesus puts to us as much as he put it to Peter.

Endicott Peabody, the founding headmaster of Groton School, put it this way: "Christ did not simply speak the truth: He was the truth: true through and through, for truth is a thing not of words, but of life and being."

We are all - lay people and ordained - called to be preachers, to tell people about Jesus. Phillips Brooks, the great rector of Trinity Copley Square and Bishop of Massachusetts, lectured at Yale over a century ago and reminded his hearers that they must tell the story of Jesus: "It is [a story] of something that happened long ago, yet which concerns them. It is something that happened in one special time and set of circumstances, yet is universal." We are called to introduce our families, friends, neighbors, and co-workers to the Person who is central to that story, the Person who can be their life companion, the Person who can transform their lives. That Person is Jesus the Christ, the Son of the Living God.

F.W.J.

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