Peter is human and so are we

Proper 19 Year B
September 16, 2018

    Back in the days when my friend Bill Mahedy was around, he and I would often get at least mildly irritated at the various goings on in the world.  Bill would always say, “Well Trace, I’m not God, and no one asked me. It’s probably why I’m not God. I’d do it differently.” We would both laugh at the thought of Bill being in charge of the universe, and decided that maybe things were better off left untouched by either of us.  But Bill was also very clear that as crazy making as humanity was, present company excluded, of course, that we were all God had to work with. “Well Trace,” he said, “the problem with the church is that it’s full of people; and, if God wanted us to be perfect, God should’ve done it differently.”

    We know of only one perfect person, Jesus, the Son of the living God; and his complete perfection didn’t save him from the rest of us.  In fact, it might just have been his undoing…

    I find today’s gospel reading interesting, and as is usually the case, if I really look at a passage of scripture carefully, even if I’ve read it countless times before, sometimes there’s something new and different that I hear.   Peter, champion of those with foot in mouth disease, once again gets really pretty upset with Jesus after Jesus tells the disciples about the future that awaits him in Jerusalem. I imagine, that Peter is not only shocked and afraid, but may also be thrown into a state of grief, and he doesn’t hide his emotions, but confronts Jesus with what I imagine is some pretty sharply worded language.  Of course, Jesus turns on him and offers his own sharply worded criticism, comparing Peter to Satan and telling him he’s too focused on earthly things. What I find interesting is the concept of denial that is at play here… First, Peter denies Jesus, something that Peter gets better at as things heat up; he denies Jesus by his inability to accept what Jesus is telling him; in a sense, Peter is denying Jesus and the cross; and then, after Peter gets a stern talking to,  Jesus turns around and says that his followers must deny THEMSELVES… and take up THEIR crosses and follow him. There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to be a follower of Jesus; his followers have to be willing to walk to the same dark places that Jesus will walk, and they have to be willing to carry their own cross… crosses, that aren’t about them, but are about the lives and hurts of others, because the cross that Jesus carried, he carried on our behalf… so Peter had the identity of Jesus right, and the denial of someone or something part right, just not who or what he was supposed to deny; he let his fear and his concern for himself get the best of him; and if cross bearing is about anything, it’s not about us…

    What we don’t hear in Mark’s version of the story, is the part of the story that is in Matthew’s gospel, where after Peter confesses that Jesus is the Messiah, that Jesus tells him that he, Peter, once known as Simon, is the rock upon whom the church shall be built.  So there he is, Peter, a name that comes from the greek for rock; he is the one on whom the church shall be built, and in just a few sentences, we see that this rock really isn’t as strong as we might like. Peter becomes humanity personified… not strong and resilient, but rather someone who makes mistakes, someone who fears, someone who denies Jesus… and yet, this one, this imperfect human is whom Jesus chooses to build the church… and we know that after the resurrection, Peter travels to Antioch and Rome and other places preaching about Jesus and helping the early church settle matters about which they disagreed.  

    Peter is far from a perfect person, and while we don’t have accounts of all of his conversations with Jesus, the ones we do have, always seem to show how much Peter gets wrong.  But here’s what he gets right… he keeps showing up; he stays in relationship with the other disciples and with Jesus; even when things go horribly wrong, Peter always manages to turn himself and his will back toward Jesus and the gospel.  That’s really great news for you and me; at least I think it is… Like my pal Bill would say, we’re all God’s got to work with; we are the ones who are given the gift of the Son and the Holy Spirit, and we are the imperfect people that have been called to take up our crosses, follow Jesus, and become living temples of the Holy Spirit.  Yikes. That’s a lot of pressure. Yet even when Peter got it wrong, horribly wrong, Jesus never said, “Nevermind dude, I was wrong about you”. Rather, Jesus kept calling Peter to be more than Peter thought he could be, and even though he didn’t always do the right thing, he loved Jesus and tried so very hard to live his life as a faithful disciple.

    Being a disciple is hard work, especially when we take the cross of Jesus seriously.  You and I have denied him before, and we all will do it again; we will long to take the easy way out and run from the hard stuff; we will call Jesus Messiah and Lord in one breath, and say, “Oh hell no, I’m not doing that!” with the next.  It’s who we are as humans. Self preservation is always at the heart of what we desire; sometimes, we are able to rise above that desire and do the right thing, regardless of the consequences to ourselves…

    And here’s the thing; we are all broken in some fashion, and probably in more than one; some of us are battling physical issues that make it harder for us to do some of the physical work of ministry that Jesus asks of us; some of us are battling mental illness or addiction that makes it difficult to see beyond ourselves; some of us are too busy trying to support families; and of course, some of us are just plain stubborn or too afraid to get involved, or we get tired of the grind.  I get it. I have fallen into all of those categories at some point in my life; but the life of Peter, the life of my cantankerous buddy Bill, the lives of all of you tell me this; Jesus loves us… and, Jesus can use even us to advance the kingdom, because, as my friend Bill said, “we’re all he’s got”. And there’s a certain peace and celebration in that, because there’s always SOMETHING that we can do, no matter what the obstacles are in our lives. Like Peter, we can just keep at it, knowing that the Spirit lives within us, helping us to move forward towards the kingdom; all of us can do something to help others realize the gospel of Jesus.  We sometimes think praying isn’t enough; but as someone who has been lifted by the prayers of others, I know how important it is; take your weekly service bulletins home and pray for the people and places on the list; we all need to make the work of the kingdom a priority, no matter what we place in our way to stop us. Whoever we are, whatever we have done, whatever ways we have denied Jesus, those are not what defines who we are; it’s Jesus who defines us, because he loves us enough to stay by our sides no matter how many times we deny him. And that, is why Jesus is God and we are not; his radical love and forgiveness is just not something you or I are capable of… but like Peter, we can learn from our mistakes, and keep on going, acting like the disciples that we are.  Today, may we discover some of the obvious and perhaps not so obvious ways that we deny Jesus… and may we know that with his love and acceptance, we can overcome the obstacles we place in the way of our relationship with him, and move toward realizing the kingdom without shame or fear or lack of confidence. Our opening collect for today I think sums this up well:

Let us pray:

O God, because without you we are not able to please you, mercifully grant that your Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Be doers of the word

Proper 17 Year B
September 2, 2017

    I remember the first biography I read in elementary school; it was the biography of Arthur Ashe, the tennis player.  I was fascinated by this amazing man who is still the only African American man to win the US open and Wimbledon. He used his fame to help African American youth by teaching tennis clinics in the inner city. I continued to try and follow Ashe’s life throughout the years; even when his own health became an issue, he was a spokesman for the American Heart Association.  Later when he learned he had contracted HIV/AIDS from a blood transfusion, he was incredibly active until his death, educating people about this disease, creating the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the defeat of AIDS. He was also politically active, protesting about the treatment of Haitian refugees. I admired him greatly. He was one of those amazing people that managed to overcome obstacles and use even a deadly illness for the good of others.

    I loved reading biographies when I was in school.  I loved finding out about people and the things they accomplished.  I still enjoy a really good historical novel for the same reason; I find it fascinating to think about what might have motivated people to act in certain ways.  It’s obviously not entirely easy to understand motives and reasons… but that’s what makes it interesting. But scripture is a different story, isn't it? It's not like reading a novel or biography simply because we are interested in the person or subject… Scripture certainly helps us to learn about God and about the life of Jesus;. But for us scripture is a living story, where we find our own connections to what we hear and read.  And hopefully, no matter how often we hear or read parts of scripture, we still find something new and different to inspire us.

    We hear a great deal this morning about the law, and how important it is for those who want to live a Godly life, to follow God’s law.  The letter of James even calls it the law of liberty. Kind of funny to think about following the law as a path to liberty, isn’t it? And yet, when we have a path before us that helps us to live our lives according to God’s desires, rather than ours, there is a sense of freedom that I think can be experiences by not having to think about some of the choices in front of us; it’s kind of like the person who has been sober for a while, who might think the occasional drink sounds good; yet he knows, that if he continues to remain sober, he will not fall victim to his addiction that keeps him imprisoned in so many ways…

    “...be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves. For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like. But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act-they will be blessed in their doing.”  

    Doers of the word… As I thought about this part of the letter of James this week, I had  few thoughts… My first, rather silly thought, was that whoever coined the term “actions speak louder than words” must have paid close attention to this part of scripture; I discovered later in the week, that the term was first used in the U.S. by Abraham Lincoln, whose biography was the second one I read in elementary school.  I knew I liked him! My second thought had to do with being doers of the word, and the word being the perfect law, and I began to wonder… So often, in the New Testament when we talk about the word, we are speaking of the Word as the second member of the Trinity, Jesus the Son. I think that James is speaking of the law, the Torah given by God to God’s people.  For us, though, Jesus is the embodiment and the new translation of the law. In Jesus, the law becomes a living being that responds to God’s people and God’s world, as the law reinterpretted. In Jesus, the disciples and you and I are given not just someone to admire and copy, but we are given the one whose adherence to the law is perfect… We can certainly read all day long about what we are supposed to do, right?  But written words by themselves, while important don’t tend to make the kind of impression that knowing a person or knowing a person’s actions tend to make. It comes down to relationship, I think. If you and I have a relationship with Jesus, if we participate in the sacraments of the church where we receive God’s grace, if we read scripture and truly engage the stories we find there, I think we begin to see and act differently.  If we believe that the Holy Spirit lives in us through our baptism, and if we believe, as we have heard for many weeks now that Jesus is the living bread that came down from heaven, then, we cannot help but be changed. We no longer sit by as observers in God’s world, but because the Spirit moves and prays within us, we long to be like Jesus, we long to be those who reflect his law in the world… the law of liberty lives in us and we are not imprisoned by the death dealing desires of the world… but rather are moved to be in relationship with all of those whom God loves… our hearts become filled with the desire to do the things that Jesus does, things that look like the perfect law that walked on the earth.

    May we be always be doers of the law, no matter how difficult that may be.  May we never deceive ourselves into thinking that God isn’t calling us to move beyond ourselves into the world that God has created… may we always know that God’s law is the law of love that moves us to live God’s law in all that we do.