“Power” by The Rev. Kaji Douša

Today in church we were reading from the Gospel of Matthew chapter 16, which is such an important chapter, especially verses 13 to 19, in which Jesus is talking to his disciples and asks them who they say he is. And Peter takes a huge risk. While others are talking about what everybody else is saying about Jesus, when Jesus says, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter says, “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God.” What we were considering in church today was just how risky a statement that was – it was a political statement really, because the Messiah, as they understood it, was coming to restore the Davidic kingdoms and bring people back to this sense of great power. But what people were missing was that Jesus came, yes, to be a king, but not in the way that they were expecting. And what Jesus wanted to do, and the power that he gave to the Church, as he built the Church on the rock that was Peter (and by the way “Peter” means “stone” in Aramaic) was that they had the power to make everyone’s experience of life an experience of heaven on Earth. God, through Jesus Christ, burst open the gates of heaven. And the Church’s job is to make it so that we each get to experience heaven. A lot of people talk about this as something for the by and by, and that is good to think about, but it’s not the only thing to think about. And so, if life is not heaven for you right now, what Jesus is saying, I believe, is that it’s your church’s job, it is the job of Christians, of all of us who proclaim Jesus Christ as the Messiah, son of the living God, to make heaven and the heavenly experience of blessing upon blessing upon blessing, what life is like right now. Because Jesus isn’t just about the kingdom of heaven in the years to come – Jesus is about heaven right here, right now: the kingdom of heaven is at hand. What are we doing to help in God’s mission for that? Amen

Pastor Kaji’s sermon on this message: https://parkavenuechristian.com/heaven-hell-by-the-rev-kaji-dousa/