Sermon for the Confession of Saint Peter

Sunday 18 January 2015 (at the 10 o'clock Solemn High Mass)

Matthew 16:13-19

In its present form, the feast of the Confession of Saint Peter is a fairly recent addition to the Church calendar. Up until 1960, the Roman Church kept January 18th as the Feast of Saint Peter’s Chair at Rome. In the apse at the back of St. Peter’s Basilica stands the magnificent Bernini bronze sculpture encasing the chair traditionally identified as the one on which Saint Peter sat to preside at worship as the first Bishop of Rome.

The bishop’s chair is, of course, an item of great symbolic significance. In Judaism, rabbis would sit in a chair to teach. The Gospels describe Jesus sitting down to teach – most notably as he delivers the Sermon on the Mount. And so the apostles and bishops of the earliest church likewise would preside at worship from a seat from which they would teach and which came to symbolize both the content of their teaching and their teaching authority.

In the early centuries of Church history, the great see cities of the Christian world were careful to preserve the chairs on which their founding bishops had sat. According to Eusebius, writing in the fourth century, Jerusalem preserved the chair of Saint James, and Alexandria preserved the chair of Saint Mark. In the late second century, Tertullian wrote: “Visit the apostolic churches in which the very chairs of the apostles preside in their places. If you are near Italy, there is Rome.” 

One of the Latin words for chair, cathedra, is the root of the English word cathedral, the church where the bishop has his chair. So, the Feast of St. Peter’s Chair celebrated Saint Peter’s teaching authority as the first Bishop of Rome – authority which was believed to be derived from our Lord’s words in today’s Gospel: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.”

In the old Roman calendar, January 18th was identified as the date when Saint Peter first presided over an assembly of the faithful after his arrival in Rome. A second feast of Saint Peter’s Chair at Antioch was kept on February 22nd. According to Gregory the Great, after leaving Jerusalem, Peter went first to Antioch where he stayed for seven years; and then he went to Rome, where he lived twenty-five years before his martyrdom during the persecution of the Emperor Nero.

Records indicate that during the pontificate of Pope Damasus in the fourth century, a wooden chair, identified as that of Saint Peter, was kept in the baptistery in old Saint Peter’s Basilica. Following baptisms, the pope would sit on the chair, and the newly baptized would be brought to him to receive an anointing with oil, known as the consignatio, or Sacrament of Confirmation.

During the Middle Ages, the Chair of Saint Peter would be brought from the baptistery to the High Altar on February 22nd, which was believed to be the anniversary of the date on which Peter had confessed Jesus to be the Christ and was in turn identified by Jesus as the rock on which he would build his Church. At their enthronements, also, new Popes would be seated on this chair, brought from the baptistery to the high altar for the occasion.

In the seventeenth century, to preserve this precious relic, Pope Alexander VII had it encased in the Bernini sculpture in which it sits today. In 1867, however, it was exposed for veneration by the faithful, and photographed. The photographs show a very medieval-looking chair that has been added to and embellished over the centuries with panels of acacia wood and inlaid ivories. Nonetheless the original frame of oak, much worm-eaten, is also clearly visible; and there is no reason to dismiss the possibility that this is the frame of the chair on which Saint Peter sat as he began his ministry as the Bishop of Rome.

In 1960, the Roman Catholic Church abolished the January 18th Feast of St. Peter’s Chair, keeping it instead on February 22nd. In the 1970s, however, a number of churches of the Anglican Communion, including our own Episcopal Church, added a Feast of the Confession of Saint Peter to their calendars on January 18th to mark the beginning of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

So we’ve come full circle. In its current form, the feast of the Confession of Saint Peter is a fairly new addition to the Church Calendar. Nonetheless, a rich history stands behind it. Its trajectory begins with Peter confessing Jesus to be the Messiah, the Christ, at Caesarea Philippi. It continues through Peter’s subsequent ministry as bishop first at Antioch and then at Rome. The Chair of Saint Peter symbolizes both his teaching and his teaching authority, grounded in the faith that expressed itself in his original Confession of Jesus as the Christ.

I encourage us all to observe the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity between now and next Sunday. Pray not only for the healing of the divisions of the sixteenth-century Reformation, but also for reunion between the historic Churches of the Christian East and West. It seems to me that here in Rhode Island we are significantly lacking in ecumenical interaction and cooperation – including joint worship service – and I wish we could do more.

Beginning the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity with the feast of the Confession of Saint Peter reminds us that Christian unity cannot be predicated on good feelings and warm relationships alone, nor even on cooperation in matters of shared pastoral concern and social witness. Genuine Christian unity must also rest upon the rock of the faith and teaching of the apostles, of whom Peter was the acknowledged leader and spokesman. In our search for Christian unity, then, we can do no better than to seek to re-appropriate and re-immerse ourselves in this shared heritage of apostolic faith and teaching symbolized by the Chair of Saint Peter at Rome.