25 Aug Sermon for the 12th Sunday after Trinity, Year A

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Sunday 23rd August, 2026

Jesus ask  his disciples a rather extraordinary question:

“Who do people say that the Son of Man is?”

And they give him the usual answers. John the Baptist. Elijah. Jeremiah. One of the prophets.

In other words, they tell Jesus what other people are saying about him.

And then Jesus makes the question much more personal:

“But who do you say that I am?”

It is a very different question.

It is one thing to know what other people say about Jesus. It is another thing to say who Jesus is for me.

And I wonder whether there is another question hidden inside it too:

“Who do you say that you are?”

That is a question I have spent quite a lot of my life wrestling with.

Growing up gay, particularly in the years when I was young, was not always a very easy thing. Society had plenty of ideas about what a man was supposed to be. And plenty of ideas about what a gay man was supposed to be too.

There was shame. There was secrecy. There was the constant sense that perhaps you ought to keep some parts of yourself hidden.

And then came the terrible years of HIV and AIDS.

For many of us who lived through the 1980s, it wasn’t simply a medical crisis. It became tangled up with identity, sexuality, fear, prejudice and grief.

People we knew became ill.

People disappeared from our lives.

Sometimes you would ask about somebody you hadn’t seen for a while, and the answer would simply be that they had “gone home”.

And sometimes you knew what those words really meant.

There was so much that could not be said.

And yet, looking back, I think something rather remarkable happened too. In the midst of all that fear and loss, people discovered the courage to say:

“This is who I am.”

“This is the person I love.”

“These are my friends.”

“This is my life.”

And perhaps that connects more deeply with today’s Gospel than we might first imagine.

Because Jesus asks Peter to make a confession.

Not merely to repeat something he has heard.

Not to give the approved answer.

But to speak from somewhere deeper:

“You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

Peter is saying, in effect, “This is who you are to me.”

And perhaps faith is something like that.

It isn’t simply knowing the correct answers.

It is discovering, slowly and sometimes painfully, who Jesus is for us.

And perhaps it is also discovering who we are when we stand before him.

Because there have been times in my own life when I have allowed other people’s voices to become louder than God’s voice.

Voices saying: you are not quite right.

You are too different.

You should be somebody else.

You should have lived your life differently.

And yet the extraordinary thing about Jesus is that he seems much less interested in all those labels than we sometimes are.

He looks at Peter and sees Peter.

He looks at the woman at the well and sees her.

He looks at Zacchaeus and sees him.

He looks at the people whom respectable society has pushed to the edges and says, in effect, “You belong here too.”

And perhaps that is part of the good news for every one of us.

Jesus does not say, “Become somebody else, and then come and follow me.”

He says, “Come.”

Come with your history.

Come with your questions.

Come with your failures.

Come with the things you are proud of and the things you wish you could forget.

Come with the people you have loved and the people you have lost.

Come with the parts of yourself that the world has welcomed — and the parts it has not always understood.

Come as you are.

And perhaps that is why Peter’s confession matters so much.

Because before Peter becomes the rock, before he gets everything right — which, of course, he doesn’t — he discovers something about Jesus.

And perhaps we are invited to make that same discovery.

Who is Jesus for me?

For me, he has been the one who has met me in some of the complicated places of my life.

In questions of identity.

In love and loneliness.

In memories of people who are no longer here.

In grief.

In joy.

In the long process of becoming a little more comfortable with the person God created me to be.

And perhaps, after all these years, I am beginning to understand that the Christian life is not so much about becoming the person everybody else thinks I ought to be.

It is about becoming the person God already sees.

The person Jesus already knows.

The person Jesus already loves.

So perhaps there are really two questions for us today.

“Who do you say that I am?”

And:

“Who do you say that you are?”

And maybe the answer to both begins in the same place.

Not with the judgement of the crowd.

Not with fear.

Not with shame.

But with Christ.

Because when we finally stand before him, perhaps the deepest truth is wonderfully simple:

“You are known.

You are loved.

You belong.

And you do not have to pretend to be somebody else.”

That, I think, is a very good foundation on which to build a life — and a very good answer to the question Jesus puts before us.

Br. Philip

Raphael, 1483-1520 . Christ’s Charge to Peter, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt University Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://act.library.vanderbilt.edu/artworks/55924 [retrieved August 25, 2026]. Original source: http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/t/raphael-cartoons/.