About a year and a half ago, my doctor suggested to me (rather firmly) that I really needed to lose some weight. I fortunately took his advice seriously and decided to make some changes in my lifestyle. One of the key changes that I made was to become much more active. The activity that suited me best and that gave me the most pleasure was walking. I bought a step tracker and over time set a goal of walking about fourteen and a half kilometers a day.
I have greatly enjoyed it and feel much better and healthier overall. But I might not have stuck to it as well as I have if had not had something to stimulate my mind while I was exercising my body.
Walking with other people has its own rewards, of course and I love those times. But I also look forward to those times when I am walking alone because I tend to listen to podcasts.
I was realizing the other day that these podcasts I have been listening to pretty much every day have been an extraordinary blessing to me. They have helped me to grow and learn. They have made me laugh and cry. Sometimes, when I am walking, it is like I have an intravenous hooked to my ears and it is feeding me a constant drip of wisdom, hope and new perspectives. I have grown to love my podcasts.
I do have one problem, though. I listen to them so often that I run out of fresh podcasts on a regular basis and end up going through old reruns. So I thought I would take the opportunity to share the podcasts that have been a particular blessing to me with my friends so they might have the chance to try them out. I'm also selfishly hoping that others will take the opportunity to share their favourites with me so that I might find some new ones to love.
Here are the podcasts that have been a consistent blessing to me. I know that many of them are already well known and popular, but that doesn't mean that everyone has heard of them. I myself hadn't heard of some of the best known until recently. Hope that they might be the blessing to you that they have been to me:
This trio of podcasts is always interesting, engaging and challenging. Canadaland exists primarily to engage critically with Canadian media and often has very important comments to make on how our media works (and fails to work) in this country. It also generally helps to keep me informed of what is going on in our country and what the challenges and needs of the day are. Sadly, I often don't seem to get this awareness from anyplace else.
The Liturgists Podcast
The Liturgists do very good work raising and discussing issues in progressive Christianity. They will push you to think about your Christian faith in new and challenging ways. Some of their episodes on topics like LGBTQ issues and Racism have been extremely moving and uplifting.
Ask Science Mike
Science Mike (Mike McHarge) is one of the liturgists on the Liturgists Podcast and I enjoyed his wisdom for the longest time before I realized that he had his own podcast where he answers people's questions on science, faith and life. He has a marvelous perspective as a science geek who has a very thorough understanding of things like physics, neurology and sociology. He started out as a deacon in a Southern Baptist Church, when through a time as an atheist before returning to faith as a sort of a post-orthodox Christian mystic. All I can say is that it all make for very interesting podcast episodes.
The Robcast
I am assuming that Rob Bell's Robcast is the best known of all the podcasts mentioned here so I probably don't need to say too much about it. Let me just say that I haven't enjoyed all of the episodes I've listened to, but the ones that I just loved have been so amazing that they would make up for listening to many many hours of less inspiring stuff.
History in the Bible Podcast
Okay, I just love how Garry Stevens says, "All the history in all the books in all the Bibles." He is mostly just running through the narratives of the Hebrew Bible - retelling the story in ways I can relate to. It is helpful because he will often remind me of something in those narratives that I have missed or forgotten. From time to time he will launch into an explanation of the critical work that has been done on the Bible from a scholarly point of view. A lot of this is what I learned in my studies, of course, but I never mind the review and, often enough, I learn something that I missed or have forgotten.
The Memory Palace
Nobody but nobody can tell a story from history better than Nate DiMeo. I mostly listen because I'd love to be able to learn to tell a story like him.
So there they are, the podcasts that have most helped me to learn and grow over the last year or so. I am so thankful for the work that these people do and how they make it available to everyone to just download and listen.
So what are yours? What do you listen to and how have they changed your life?
f you were to ask me the question, “Do you believe in God? I would answer that question without a moment of hesitation: “Do I believe in God?Yes, of course I believe in God.” In fact, that is kind of the obvious answer for someone in my position to give. It is an answer so obvious that, in general, nobody would even bother to ask the question.
In fact, being a Christian is one of the things that offers me continual assurance that, yes, there is a God because, you know, sometimes I look around at the world and I see everything that goes wrong and it does make me wonder. When I do start to wonder like that, the thing that often reassures me that there is a God who exists and cares is what I have heard and learned from Jesus.
That is why I was surprised to learn recently that one of the really big problems that ancient pagans had with Christians back in the bad old days of the Roman Empire was that they considered us to be atheists.
I mean, you could say a lot of bad things about Christians. We have our flaws and shortcomings and failures. But not believing in God? I wouldn’t call that one of them.
So I’ve thought about that accusation over the last little while. I’ve thought about it a lot. Why would pagan Romans accuse Christians of being atheists? And I get, of course, that the pagans were a bit upset that the Christians wouldn’t acknowledge the existence of their gods. But this was about more than just a question of Christians refusing to recognize Jupiter or Mars or Mercury. To tell the truth, the traditional Roman religions had been on the decline for years before the Christians ever showed up on the scene.
No, this wasn’t just about protecting the status or worship of any particular gods. This was about the Christians challenging the very concept of divinity that the Greco-Roman world had. The problem was that the Christians were a-theists. The problem was that they did not believe in theos, which was the Greek word for the concept of divinity.
And, you know what, in that sense, I think that the critics of Christianity may have been right. Starting with the very words of Jesus and continuing through the life of the early church, the Christians had ways of talking about and interacting with God that totally blew that Greek concept away. If you listened – I mean really listened – to Jesus and his disciples you simply would not have been able to conceive of God in the same way again.
Think, for example, of the way that Jesus speaks of God in our reading this morning from the Gospel of John. Jesus is engaged in a conversation with a Samaritan woman about matters of religion. Jesus has just said something to her that has made her realize that she is not just talking to an ordinary person – that he can somehow speak for God. And her immediate response is to ask him a religious question: “Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but [Jews like] you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.”
The question she is asking is a theistic question. It is the kind of question that Romans might ask about their gods. Where is the best place to worship Jupiter, they might ask. The name of the god might be different but the concern is exactly the same. There are all kinds of assumptions behind a question like that. She is assuming that God requires a certain sort of worship from us. She is assuming that place matters when it comes to such worship. Even more important, she is assuming that worship, properly done in proper places, will influence God to act in certain ways.
And everyone in that world at that time would have expected Jesus to jump into that argument and explain to the woman exactly why it was right and good to worship God only in a particular place – in the temple in Jerusalem. Because if anybody in that world knew anything about gods (and this includes both Jews and Gentiles) they knew that it was vastly important that you access those gods in the right ways and in the right places.
But, while Jesus does acknowledge that, historically speaking, Jerusalem is the place for accessing God, he also says that that is no longer true now. In fact, he announces a brand new insight into the nature of God: “God is spirit,” he says, “and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” And there, right there, you have one good explanation for why people accused Jesus’ followers of being atheists.
You see, the whole development of religion is one of the ways in humans have always dealt with the basic fears that come with life in this very unpredictable world. I mean, who can stand going through this world and just not knowing what terrible thing might happen next? Sickness and disease, war and pestilence, accidents and all kinds of other terrible things that can go wrong seem to shadow our every moment of existence as human beings on this planet. And, most terrifying of all, so much of it seems to happen for no apparent reason.
And so people looked to their gods to explain these things and especially to find a way to control all of the terrible and frightening things that seem to happen in this world. Religion developed as a way to control the things that happen to us by controlling the gods who make these things happen. Holy sites were chosen, temples were built and priests are consecrated to manage all of the ways that the gods were manipulated with rituals and sacrifices to influence them and make things happen in certain ways. I think that this is true of any religion including Judaism and even Christianity in many of its forms.
But when Jesus declared that it didn’t really matter where you worship God – whether in Jerusalem or Samaria – because God was spirit, he was really declaring but he didn’t believe in that kind of God – the kind of God who could be manipulated with our religion.
And, it must be said, that this was a very dangerous thing for him to say because what was at stake was not only the question of where one might worship God. Religion, in all of its forms, has built up these complex power structures over the centuries. If the priests and religious leaders are able to manipulate the gods and so control the terrible things that may happen in this world, then they are extraordinarily powerful and they can use that power as leverage in other areas of life. That’s how religion becomes a powerful tool for manipulating whole populations and for amassing great wealth, which is what it has been for much of human history.
But Jesus, with one short phrase, “God is Spirit,”throws all of that carefully developed power structure to the wind. And I almost mean that literally. There was just one word – both in the Aramaic language that Jesus spoke and in the Greek language of the gospel – one word that was used to speak of both spirit and wind. Pneuma, in Greek, is a word that mean both spirit and wind. Ruach, in Hebrew also means both spirit and wind. So when Jesus calls God spirit he is also calling God wind and, as Jesus says elsewhere in this same gospel, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
Jesus was saying that, if God is spirit, then God is about as easy to nail down and control as the wind. And I realize that we, as modern people do have a better understanding of where the wind comes from and where it goes, than did the people of Jesus’ time. We know about atmospheric pressures and air currents and how they can influence and change the flows of the wind. But all our knowledge has not brought us to the place where we can make it blow when, where and as hard as we want it to. If we could do that, we would have shut down the fire in Fort McMurray so easily, but we can’t. If the goal of our relgion is to bring God under our control and get him to behave and make life play out as we want, we will be sorely disappointed.
Religion has always had one other goal other than the controlling of the gods. It has also been very useful (especially for those who are most powerful in society) as a way to control populations. Religion has been used to make people to behave in certain ways, to make sure that they don’t ask for too much in the way of change or reform. The fear of the gods and the promise of the religious power structure to control the divine powers in this world has been used to impose laws and standards of behaviour on people and to teach them that they must tolerate the present structures of the world rather than to ask for change.
This power too is destroyed by that one simple phrase, “God is spirit.” We see that in our reading from the letter of Paul to the church in Galatia where Paul writes, “if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law.” If God is spirit then God is not outside of you telling you through laws and words and scriptures how you ought to behave, God is within you prompting your behaviour in quite unpredictable ways.
Now it must be said that the Christian church has had a troubled history with that declaration of the absolute freedom of believers that is proclaimed in passages like this one. The church has sought to govern over the actions and even the thoughts of its people through laws and rules and power structures, but the original declaraton of your freedom remains there in the scriptures and so, I pray, it will never be forgotten by God’s people.
So, with just three words, “God is spirit,” Jesus really does do a lot to destroy the traditional ways in which people have imagined God and how they have tended to work out their relationshiop with God. It is, I believe, one reason why, in those early centuries, people saw how the Christians lived and declared that they were dangerous atheists – people who did not believe in God in the ways you were supposed to believe in God.
Now, it is it is important to note that Jesus, in saying such things, is not throwing us into the chaos of a Godless world where anything could go wrong at any moment and nothing has any meaning. Jesus does still believe in God, and the God that he does believe in is clearly a God who is extraordinarily gracious and kind and caring. It is a God who he speaks of, above all, as Abba – a word that we will examine in more detail in several weeks. So clearly, it is not Jesus’ intention to leave us with the impression that we are stuck going through life in a dangerous universe where anything can go wrong and nothing ever makes any sense. There is a God and we can trust that God is gracious. It is just that we cannot expect to control that God through our religious practices. We do those things for different reasons.
In the same way, Paul insists, our freedom from the obligation to follow the law does not make us immoral and dangerous people who will inevitably degenerate into the worse excesses of behaviour. He insists that God, as spirit within us, prompts us to the highest of impulses, “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”
So do not be afraid of those three words, “God is spirit,” and where they will lead us. But they definitely disturb the ways in which the world has learned to think about God. I think it was one of the things that led to that anti-Christian accusation of atheist. Though Jesus seems to have been clear on this matter, it seems that the church has long struggled with such a view of God. It seems to be easier to fall into the old ways of thinking about and relating to God. All it seems to cost us is our freedom – our freedom from law and from fear.
Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could just get so hung up on the radical ways in which Jesus spoke about God that it would transform us? Wouldn’t it be amazing if the outside world looked at us and said, “I’ve never seen a people who believed in a God like that! Doesn’t remind me of any God I’ve ever heard of.” And then, maybe, they would ask to learn more about the God that we worship.
#TodaysTweetableTruth #Jesus said God=Spirit, presenting view of God so new it seemed atheistic. What if we had such a radical view of God?
hen I was a student studying at Presbyterian College in Montreal, I was given an extraordinary opportunity – an opportunity that few students for the ministry are afforded these days. There was a small church in the city of Laval, just across the bridge north of Montreal, called Northlea United Church. It was a church that was struggling as an English church in what had once been, but was no longer, a fairly strong English community.
The church needed a minister to care for them but couldn’t afford fulltime ministry. A student seemed like an excellent option for them, but the United Church, as a matter of policy, wouldn’t allow their ministry students to minister in that way. The Presbyterian College didn’t mind if their married students (I don’t know why, but you had to be married) did take a pastoral charge while studying, but there were no Presbyterian congregations in need of a student minister. So, when I (a married student) came along, I was asked, “Say, would you like a job preaching to and taking care of a little United Church in Laval for a bit of money and a manse to live in,” I jumped at the chance.
It worked out beautifully and not just for the obvious financial reasons. I still believe that that church taught me at least as much about being a minister as the college did. I had this wonderful place where I could take the things that I was learning in classes and apply them to the real life of the church while I was learning them. I had this place where I could go and make mistakes and get things wrong – and yes, I made lots of mistakes and got lots of things wrong – and the people still loved me and we worked through any of the ensuing problems together.
When I finally finished my studies and was ready to move on to my next steps as an ordained minister in a Presbyterian Church, the people of Northlea threw us a party. They gave thanks for all that they had shared with us. They gave us their blessing and promised to pray for us. And they gave me a gift: this preaching gown.
I have carried this gown with me ever since and worn it a lot. It has seen a lot of joyous occasions and more than its share of bad ones. It almost didn’t make it. Once, several years ago, I was wearing it at the end of a service following a baptism. I had carried a lit candle out of the service, put down the candle and then turned around and just happened to lean a little bit too far back. But, with a few minor repairs, the gown made it through. I am glad to still have it and still wear it from time to time. I reminds me of some of the really important and meaningful things I learned from and shared with the people of Northlea United Church in Laval. In many ways, they are still a part of everything that I do as a minister.
When, a little while later, I was ordained in my first charge, I received another item of clothing. This stole (designed to go nicely with my robe) was presented to me by my mother. Not only was it presented by her, it was made by her and by my three sisters each one of whom took her turn with the stitching. When I wear it, it reminds me that so much of what I bring to the work that I do is what I bring from my family who did so much to form me and build me up.
And then, a few years ago, as you all know, there was someone who I thought of as both a friend and a mentor. His name was the Rev. Ruggles Constant. When I first arrived here in Hespeler as a minister, Ruggles was dealing with many health issues and was quite limited in what he could do, but he certainly went out of his way to support me and to pass on some of his wisdom and experience in really helpful ways. When he passed away two years ago, I was honoured when he asked me to preach at his funeral and a little puzzled when he told me that I was to preach on the topic of the full armour of God – the passage we read this morning from the New Testament.
Ruggles’ daughter, Stephanie, did two wonderful things for me. She told me that her father had been kidding and I could preach on whatever I thought was best and she gave me Ruggles’ gown. When I have worn it since, I have been greatly comforted to know that Ruggles continues to be with me.
And then there is this stole given to me by someone in this congregation. Another supporting friend and, in her own way, a mentor.
This is, for me, a very special wardrobe that I carry with me. I’m sure that you understand that, for me, the value of this wardrobe is much more than just the value of the textiles.
When I came to this morning’s reading from 1 Samuel, this wardrobe was what came to my mind. In this passage we find ourselves in the middle of the tumultuous times of King Saul, first king of Israel. Saul came to be king in a time of great danger, when the people of Israel faced their greatest threat to date in the form of a very frightening enemy called the Philistines. Better equipped and better organized, the Philistines threatened to wipe the Israelites from the face of the earth. And Saul was able to do what nobody had been able to do before and created an army that could fight back against the Philistines in a disciplined and organized way.
Saul’s success was perhaps limited. It was not as if he made the threat go away, but he was able to organize a real resistance – more sustained victory than anyone, even Samson, had been able to do. Saul did slay his thousands of enemies. And his son, Jonathan, to whom he hoped to pass the kingdom someday, also became a great warrior. Everything was, well, maybe not perfect but as good as it had ever been.
And then David came along. And it wasn’t as if David was perfect; he clearly had his flaws. But he definitely was someone who had potential. He was a leader like few others had ever been. And both Saul and Jonathan seem to have recognized that immediately.
Saul saw David’s ability as a threat. Here was the man who was potentially a better war leader than Saul had ever been – who could lead men to attack and kill tens of thousands where before Saul had merely slaughtered thousands. Someone like that could get good enough to take over the kingdom from him. So Saul began to plot to bring David down.
But Jonathan, Saul’s son, seeing the exact same potential in David, had the exact opposite reaction. Of course, David was just as much a threat to Jonathan and his future as king as he was to his father. But rather than responding with fear or with that common response of wanting to put someone else down in order to bring yourself up, Jonathan was able to respond with grace.
And that is what it means when he takes off his armour and sword and arms and even his very robe and gives it all to David. In essence Jonathan is taking everything that he has built up for himself up until that point in his life – his reputation as a warrior and a leader, his skill and training, his status and making a gift of it to David. David hasn’t earned any of this yet. Yes, he did bring down Goliath with one well-placed stone, but that could have been a lucky shot. There is a great distance between that and being a great leader of men. But Jonathan’s gift opened up all of those possibilities and closed off the likelier possibility that David would have just ended up a forgotten footnote to history.
Jonathan’s gift leads me to think in two particular directions. As I have already said, it makes me think of all of those people who, in their own ways, gave of themselves so that I might become the person that God was calling me to be. It is Mother’s Day, of course, so I cannot help but think of my own mother. It is Christian Family Sunday so I cannot help but think of all of the ways in which my family nurtured me, taught me and even sacrificed of themselves for my sake. And, of course, it is not just family who do that for us, though they often do it in the most enduring way.
Families, by the way, are also so influential on our development that they can do the most damage to us when they let us down and they can put wounds in us that we end up carrying for the rest of our lives. So if you are able to remember all that you received from your family and you find that you have been blessed by them and sent on your way through this life in a positive way, you have been, in fact, extraordinarily blessed – more so than many if not most of the people in the world today. Your first application of this story, therefore, is to remember your mother and your family and give thanks to God for all that they have been to you.
On this Mother’s Day and Christian Family Sunday, if it is possible for you to do so, take the opportunity to thank your mother and those other people in your family for all of those sacrificial ways in which they acted to make you who you are.
And after your family, remember the others who invested in you – all those who, like Jonathan, took the wisdom and honour and standing that they had built up and were willing to invest some of it in you. Every single one of you has had people like that. Do you realize what an incredible gift that was? I know that I could not be who I am today without the people of Northlea United, without my teachers and mentors, without the influence of incredibly wise and gifted men and women like a certain Ruggles Constant. On this day, if it is still possible for you to do so, would it not be good for you to do whatever you could to show your gratitude to those people in your life.
But that is not the truly exciting thing about this story of David and Jonathan. The blessing in this story is that we sometimes get to be David and have other people build into our lives. The exciting opportunity about this story is that we also get to be Jonathan and to build into the lives of others. Every person here has the opportunity to do that. It may be someone in your family – a child, a grandchild, a niece or nephew. It may be some associate, someone in your social group. It most certainly could be someone in this congregation – a young person perhaps or someone somewhere on the fringes of this congregation – but I assure you that, if you look around, God is placing those opportunities to invest the human capital that you have built up into someone in your path.
You may ask why you should do that – why you should be willing to give of yourself or sacrifice of yourself for the sake of another. I will admit that it is something that seems not to make much sense according to the way of thinking of this world. This world is mostly interested in Saul’s approach – is much more inclined to want to keep others down in order to protect its own interests. I’ll be honest, this is an approach that I have even seen too often in the church. No sooner does someone start to accomplish something and build a worthwhile ministry or outreach than other people start to tear them down, criticize them and otherwise make sure that they don’t get too big for their britches.
The world may favour Saul’s approach, but God favours Jonathan’s. When you choose to invest yourself in others for the sake of the kingdom of God, God will bless that and bring amazing things out of it. The greatness in Jonathan, because of his choice to share it graciously with David, became something that endured long beyond Jonathan’s life. It continued through the kingdom that David built and the dynasty that he founded. It continued and continues still through his distant descendant, Jesus the Christ. That opportunity to do something important, significant and lasting is God’s gift to you.
#TodaysTweetableTruth You can be a Saul and put others down to lift up yourself up or you can be a Jonathan and invest your life in a David.
Here is a video introducing our next sermon series that begins on May 15, 2016
he story of the creation of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis was always about much more than just the question of where the human race came from. Adam was never just supposed to be a historical figure. Even the earliest people to tell and pass down this tale knew, after all, that the name Adam meant man and that he represented humanity as a whole. They knew that his wife’s name meant living, and so they understood that this story was not about history or events that took place in the earliest mists of time so much as it was about what it meant to be human beings living in this world here and now.
For example, the particular selection of verses that we read from Genesis this morning seems to be preoccupied with one particular question about being human. The question is this: why do human beings wear clothes. I mean, think about it, the story originated in the ancient Near East which has one of the most temperate climates in the whole world. They didn’t have to deal with the extremes of a Canadian winter. Even rain was a rare event. Clothing, for them, was not a physical necessity most of the time, so they needed an explanation for why human beings, alone among all the creatures on the earth, wore clothing. So if you were going to tell a story about what it meant to be human, that mystery was something that, in their minds, you needed to tackle.
And the story makes it clear that, in the ideal world as God originally intended it, clothing was not necessary. “The man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.” The need for clothing, apart from protection from the elements, is, according to this story, actually a reflection of what has gone wrong with human life in this world.
Think about what that means for a moment. The
Bible says that the need for clothing is a symptom of what is wrong with our humanity. There certainly is something to that idea. For nothing divides and dehumanizes us quite like clothing does. Did anyone here go to high school? We have a lot of people here who went to high school in very different time periods. So let me ask the question: when you were in high school, was there an “in” group and an “out” group? And was clothing used as a marker of whether someone was in or out? When you were at high school was the way that somebody dressed ever used as a reason to mock or exclude that person? Clothing is definitely used to separate and divide people in unhealthy and unhelpful ways.
Clothes, in the Genesis story, also seem to represent that human fear of being ourselves. When Adam and Eve are first created, the idea that they are “naked and not ashamed,” seems to symbolize a relationship were they are able to fully share themselves with each another. They don’t need to hide behind anything; they can just be themselves. That they suddenly feel uncomfortable with such nakedness after their disobedience is an indication that something has gone wrong. And, to this very day, we still struggle with just being ourselves in front of other people.
So clothes are part of the problem. But they also seem to be an undeniable necessity given the failures and the shortcomings of our human nature. We just can’t go through life letting it all hang out – not literally and not figuratively. Yes, there are exceptions to that. A few times in your life you might hope to have a relationship with somebody where you feel completely free to be yourself all the time. It can happen in a good marriage or an excellent friendship. But it is rare and most of us spend our lives hiding who we really are from the vast majority of people that we meet; afraid that, if we were to show our true selves, we would be rejected.
This is something that this story in the Book of Genesis is acutely aware of: human beings are flawed. We have our shortcomings and we have our failures. That is a part of what it means to be human. But the amazing thing that we see in the story in Genesis is that, although God is clearly angry at the failure of his humans and deeply disappointed in them, that does not prevent him from being entirely gracious to them.
When the man and the woman first awake to the realization that they are flawed and find this deep inner need to cover up those flaws, they attempt to improvise a solution to their problem: “they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.” But this is, clearly, at best a temporary solution. Fig leaves are simply not the most flexible or durable material to make clothing out of but it seems to be the best that we humans can do sometimes.
But then, right at the end of the story, there is a little surprise. At the end of the story, after God has handed out all of the consequences to the woman and the man for their disobedience and to the serpent for his part in it all, there is a little side note: “And the LordGod made garments of skins for the man and for his wife, and clothed them.” And so we learn that, as far as the Bible is concerned, the invention of the first durable set of clothing is to be credited to God. Think of it; the Lord God was the very first person to design a line of clothing.
And I find this idea of God as the first cosmic fashion designer to be very interesting. It tells me a few very important things about God and our relationship with God as human beings.
It tells me, first of all, that we have a God who understands our weakness and failures. God clearly understands what the man that the woman are struggling with, which means that he understands the struggles of all humanity. This is rather extraordinary when you think about it for God has no experience of shame. Why should he? And yet he understands that the man and the woman need clothes not out of their physical necessity but because they feel shame for their inadequacies.
This willingness of God to deal with us where we are as opposed to where God thinks we are supposed to be is of enormous importance. Have you ever had somebody in your life who absolutely refused to deal with you the way that you were – somebody who simply would not accept that you might be fearful or shy or lacking in confidence or whatever particular problem you were dealing with? I’ll bet that each and every one of us has had to deal with someone like that at some point. Was that person helpful to you? Probably not. In order to really help you with getting where you need to be, your friends need to start with you where you are and not where they think you ought to be.
I don’t know how often I have encountered in people this notion that they are unable to access God’s grace or be part of the church or even to pray because they don’t have everything worked out in their lives. “I can’t talk to God,” they will say, “because my life is such a mess.” Well God, fortunately, doesn’t work that way. If he did, none of us would have any hope and no one would ever belong to the church. It is very helpful to know that that is where God joins us on this journey of life where we actually are and not where we are supposed to be.
The second thing I would note about this is that God’s gift of clothing is different in substance from what the man and the woman are able to create by themselves. This is obvious: Adam and Eve’s attempt to clothe themselves is plant-based; God’s gift is animal based. And one of the problems seems to be that Adam and Eve’s approach is less durable because it is plant-based than the one that God offers.
But there seems to be more than a question of durability at stake here. Here is one thing I notice: when we wear plant-based clothing, when we wear things like cotton or linen or even fabrics like wool that are harvested from animals, nothing needs to die in order for us to be warm and cover our “shame.”
Death itself doesn’t seem to be part of the plan at the beginning of the story of the Garden of Eden. At least, the way that it is described, the man and the woman and all of the animals were supposed to live together in such harmony that nothing ever needed to die. The lion and the lamb were supposed to lie down together without anyone getting eaten and even the strongest of predators were supposed to live as vegetarians. It is rather interesting that we seem to have, in this portrayal of ideal life in God’s original garden, a world where nothing has to die in order that something else may live.
But that ideal has apparently failed with the failure of the humans, and it is interesting to see that God’s very first act upon learning that his ideal vision for life in this world is not going to work out is to kill something. Some animals (it doesn’t say which ones) have to die in order to create the right kind of clothing for the humans. These are, according to Genesis, the first recorded deaths. This has to do with more than just the relative quality of plant-based and animal-based clothing.
When ancient human beings finally became aware of their place within this world, when they realized that there was a difference between them and the other animals that lived alongside them (a realization that they came to by telling stories like this one in the Book of Genesis), they discovered something kind of scary and amazing. They realized that other living beings were dying so that they could live and be strong and healthy – so that they could eat meat from time to time and so that they could have strong and durable clothing. They realized that there was something tragic about that, but they also realize that there was something sacred about it.
Almost all ancient humans of all races and cultures came to that amazing realization and many ancient cultures celebrated that sacred tragedy with a ritual called sacrifice. An ancient sacrifice was how you killed and prepared your supper in a way that acknowledged how sacred and tragic the death of that animal was. But the ritual of sacrifice also had a great benefit. Most of the sacrificial animal was eaten by the worshippers who brought it and by the priests who prepared it for them. In addition, skins were taken and turned into clothing and leather and to make other useful things.
But some parts of the animal couldn’t be used. These parts – the bones, the fat and some other bits – were burnt up on the altar as a gift to God. In this way, they believed, the sacrifice created a meal that was shared with both God and the worshippers – a shared meal that was all about rebuilding the broken relationship between God and his people.
And I believe that this action of God who slaughters some animals in order to clothe Adam and Eve is anticipating that – all of that. It is a recognition that the world is a tragic place where things die and that sometimes animals die so that you can live and become who you need to be. It is also aware of the sacredness of such an act and the potential for healing to come out of it.
Christians don’t practice sacrifice, in part because they believe that Jesus, in himself, has fulfilled everything that could ever be achieved by animal sacrifice and that he did that by offering himself up for the sake of those who fell short of what they needed to be. If that is true, then it means that God, in his first act in the garden was already anticipating both the sacrificial system and the coming of Jesus himself. It is all right there in that short line at the end of this morning’s reading.
It is about what it means to be human because it is talking about things that we all struggle with. But, even more important than that, it talks about a God who is there with us in our struggles and whose presence makes all the difference in the world.
#TodaysTweetableTruth God clothes Adam & Eve with skins reminding us that God meets us where we are with grace and of Jesus’ death for us.
m I the only one who reads this morning’s passage from the Gospel according to Matthew and just wishes that everybody would just calm down a little bit? We have, in this passage, a parable of Jesus – a story of a dinner party. In this case, it is a wedding feast given by a king in honour of his son. The basic premise of the story is simple enough. The host of the feast wants lots of prominent guests and so he invites a large number of important people. The twist comes when none of the important people are able to attend the meal and the king kind of panics because, in that society, to give a feast and have nobody show up would reflect very negatively on the host. He ends up packing his dining hall with all sorts of undesirable people in the end.
And that is, basically, the parable that Jesus did tell to his disciples. In fact, if you were to turn over to the Gospel of Luke you would find a version of this same parable where that is all that happens. I have always preferred Luke’s version of this parable for that reason. The story is simple and straightforward without anything extra going on. I’ve always kind of avoided Matthew’s version of the parable because everybody in the story seems a little bit crazy. They all overreact.
We have, first of all, the guests who are first invited to the feast. The king sends his servants out to deliver the invitations because, of course, this was before the days of the internet when you can invite a bunch of people to your party with a few emails and Facebook messages. And the people who receive the invitations, just like in the parable in Luke’s gospel, are unable (or perhaps unwilling) to come. Now, I don’t know about you, but I was always taught that if you are invited to go someplace and you cannot attend, you politely say that you are very sorry. You return the RSVP with a friendly note that expresses your regrets. Is that what these invitees do? No they do not.
They seize the servants who bring the invitations, turture and kill them! I don’t care how much you don’t want to go to a dinner party, there is absolutely no way that murder and torture is a reasonable way to communicate that to your host. So yes, I really wish that the invitees would just calm down a little bit.
But then, as I continue reading, I’m not sure that the king’s reaction is all that much better. The king is upset at how the people he invited to his party treated his servants. That is understandable. But his reaction is very much an over-reaction. He doesn’t just punish the murderers, no. He gathers his troops, attacks the entire city where they live and burns the place to the ground. That is definitely overkill.
So we go from a bloody RSVP to an even worse response on the part of the king. After that, however, the whole thing just becomes bizarre. The king has just filled his banqueting hall with whoever the slaves could find – a crowd that is described as including “both good and bad.” It is clearly a mixed bag and he knew that when he invited them to come in. But then the king comes across one of these guests who is, in his estimation, not appropriately dressed. Well what did he expect?
Nevertheless (and we really shouldn’t be surprised at this point) the king overreacts. He kicks the inappropriately dressed guest out of his party but he’s not even content just with doing that, as excessive as that might seem. No, his instructions are, “Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Once again, how is this an appropriate way to respond to the minor ettiquet breach of somebody being underdressed at a party?
So there seem to be all kinds of problems specifically with how this parable is told in Matthew’s gospel. Did Jesus have two wildly different versions of this one parable – one where people acted in a fairly reasonable fashion and one where everyone acted a little crazy – that he told on different occasions? And then did Luke copy one version into his gospel while Matthew copied the other?
That’s one possibility, but it is more likely that, when Matthew wrote down his version of this parable, he was trying to help his readers by making it clear to them what his own understanding of the parable was. And Matthew, plainly, saw this parable as an allegory. An allegory is a special kind of story in which every element represents something else. So, in Matthew’s mind, the king, in this parable represents God. The people invited to the feast are the Jews whom God has invited into his kingdom. The servants are the prophets who bring God’s message to the people of Israel and so on.
When you read it as an allegory, the strange overreactions make a lot more sense. The way that the invitees abuse the messengers is so crazy because it is supposed to represent how the nation of Israel historically rejected God’s message by abusing and killing the prophets.
And by the time that Matthew wrote this gospel, the City of Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Roman army and so Matthew even states that this parable predicted that terrible event by including the destruction of a city by troops in his allegorical interpretation. Again, an event that makes little sense if it is an attack provoked by an impolite response to an invitation to a party but that makes a whole lot more sense if you see it as the consequence of an entire nation rejecting the message of God that was brought by the prophets and by Jesus the Christ himself.
So that is one thing that is going on in this passage: Matthew is turning Jesus’ parable into an allegory. But that particular allegory does not especially help us to understand the part at the end of the parable where the guest is thrown out of the party because he is not appropriately dressed, so let me point out something else about the way that Matthew tells the story. Did you notice one very particularly annoying pattern of behaviour in this parable? Did you notice, in particular, that nobody seems to be able to accept a gift or to be the recipient of generosity?
I mean, the people who are invited to the wedding feast, their invitation was essentially a gift. They were turning down nothing other than an evening of good food, entertainment and conversation. And yet they set the whole story off its rails by being unwilling to receive a free gift and doing so violently. What’s more, I would suggest to you that the man who is not wearing the wedding robe at the end of the story is essentially doing the same thing.
We do not know what all of the customs were around wedding celebrations in ancient Biblical societies, but we can be pretty sure that there were a lot of them. And some people have suggested that one of the customs at important weddings may have been for the host of the wedding to provide his guests with fancy robes to wear at the wedding. If that was the custom, then everyone who heard this story would have seen the man who is not wearing the wedding robe in a very different light.
It is not that he doesn’t have appropriate clothes to wear; he has been provided with the appropriate clothes. It is just that he has refused that gift, perhaps because he thinks that his own, dirty and everyday clothes are good enough. When you look at the parable from this angle, it seems to be all about people who have a hard time accepting generosity from others.
And you wouldn’t think that should be a problem, would you? After all, every single one of us has had times in our life when we were unable to meet all of our needs by ourselves. We all have had times when we get by with a little help from our friends. And given that that is something that literally every human being will have to deal with at some point in their life, you would think that it wouldn’t be hard for anybody to accept generosity from somebody else.
But it is. I’ll bet every single person here knows somebody who just can’t stand to receive a gift or a generosity. You all know people who, if you try to give them something or do something for them, they will drive you crazy trying to stop you. Maybe some of you are like that yourself and you just cannot stand being on the receiving end of a gift.
Why do people do that? Why do we have trouble accepting the help we need when we need it? Part of it is that we believe that we are supposed to be entirely self-sufficient in all things and that, if you are anything less than that, you must have failed in some way. Even if you find yourself in a position of need because of something that was entirely out of your control, you are still made to feel that it must, in some way, be your own fault and so you resist accepting help or, if you absolutely have to take it, you do everything that you can to cover up that fact.
If you are involved in the outreach ministry of this church, or most any church, this is something that you run into all the time. We have the privilige of being involved in giving people things – things like food, clothing, good nutritious meals, counselling – that they would not be able to get otherwise or, in some cases, they would have to give up something else that they also needed in order to obtain it.
And, I’ve got to say, it is a real privilige to be able to be involved in this kind of ministry. The people involved genuinely enjoy being able to give these things away and we also enjoy the people that we give them to. But, of course, few people enjoy havingto receive in this way. Few people want to come in and access the services that we offer. Over time, the people that we serve become our friends and they enjoy coming here because our workers and volunteers create a warm and hospitable atmosphere.
And it is good that we help people to learn to receive because I would suggest to you that none of us can ever achieve our potential as followers of Christ, or as human beings, if we do not learn to receive. We cannot even be followers of Jesus without learning to receive from Christ. Our salvation, our hope and our new life in Christ are all things that we cannot make happen for ourselves. We can only receive them as gifts from God.
The robe in the parable, the robe that the guest refuses to wear, has often been seen as a symbol of those gifts from God. It is the robe of righteousness and salvation and new beginnings and we do not have the capacity of wearing such robes by providing them ourselves. We can only receive them from the hand of God. God gives these things freely but we, foolishly, often have trouble receiving them. We would like to think that we are good enough and strong enough and capable enough to achieve all of these things on our own. Like the guest at the party, we insist on wearing our own robes instead.
But the lesson of the parable is that if you do not learn to receive from God when you need to receive from God, you do not belong at the party. And I don’t actually even think God needs to cast you into the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth because you have already cast yourself out of the party by a simple refusal to receive a gift freely given. It is that important to learn to receive. Our very salvation – our potential to be all that we are meant to be in this world – depends upon it. And one of the ways in which we learn to better receive from God is by practicing receiving from others.
Therefore, I would encourage you, this week, to do one simple thing to deepen your walk with God. This week, when somebody offers to give something to you or do something for you and doesn’t want anything in return, just take it. Receive that gift and do it without feeling guilty for receiving. Receive it, without it hurting your pride. Take it without plotting to pay them back in anyway. Just receive it. Just practice gratitude and say thanks. If you are unable to do this, try to get to the bottom of why you can’t. Receiving can be just as important as giving. It is an act of grace. Practice receiving grace from others and you may just find yourself able to receive more from God and starting to grow more into the person that God has called you to be.
#TodaysTweetableTruth Ask yourself why u have so much trouble receiving from others. Receiving can be just as necessary as giving sometimes.
id you notice that nobody asked Peter to do anything? Peter was in Lydda when a highly respected and well-loved woman named Tabitha died in the nearby town of Joppa. And people had obviously heard something about Peter. He had a certain reputation for healing and for miracles, so they sent for him with an urgent request that he come, but that was the whole content of the message. They didn’t tell him that he was supposed to heal her (it was kind of too late for that anyways). They didn’t ask him to come and doanything – just come, please, as soon as you can.
And when he came, even then, they didn’t actually ask anything of him. They just took him to an upper room where they had laid out Tabitha’s body but they don’t even seem to have pointed her out to him. No, what Peter actually saw and noticed was not her body but a room full of weeping widows. They didn’t say anything, they just wept and showed him their clothes. And that is why they didn’t need to ask him to do anything. The clothes actually spoke much louder than any words ever could have.
The story of Tabitha in the Book of Acts, makes me ask, first of all, one immediate and very important question. If you were Tabitha, what would the widows show to Peter?
I am often called upon, as you would expect, to speak at the funerals of people who have passed away. I have always found it to be true that every person’s life has something profound and beautiful to say to us at such times and I do see it as a great honour and a privilege to be the one who gets to point out some of those profound and beautiful things.
But I have also noticed that there are often things that are deeper and stronger than words at times like that. They are objects or actions that hold special symbolic meaning and they often will prove far more enduring than the words we say about someone who has died. People will cling to something that the deceased gave to them or did for them and find great comfort in that. That was what those widows were doing when Peter arrived.
Widows are, in the Bible, kind of the stereotypical poor person. They were seen as the most helpless and needy people in all of society. Of course, there are problems with that stereotype. I would never be so foolish as to think of a widow (or any woman unattached to a man) in such terms today! In fact, some of the strongest and most capable people I have ever known have been widows or other women who, by choice or by circumstance, navigate this world without a husband.
And even the ancient perception that widows were helpless actually had nothing to do with the capabilities of individual women. It was just that, in that society, women were not permitted to make their way in the world without a dominant male controlling them. They were not allowed to participate in the economy in any honourable way and so they were forced to be utterly dependant on charity.
So these women in Joppa may have been very strong and confident women. They may have even been practicing the freedom of the Christian gospel by choosing not to be married. But they lived in a society that did not allow them to make their own way apart from a dominant man. These women, because they broke the conventions of society, became dependent on the community of the church.
And Tabitha, had been particularly generous to them. But it obviously wasn’t just the fact that she was generous that had moved them. She had made these clothes with her own hands. Her generosity to them had been personal, caring and individual. That’s what made the common, everyday tunics and dresses and robes they were showing to Peter absolutely priceless in their minds. These tunics represent to them everything that summed up Tabitha’s kindness, goodness and love shown to them.
And I don’t know about you, but if that were me and I had died or moved on in some other way, I just think it would be really nice if, after I was gone, someone could just hold up something and point to it and say, “This is something that tells me that Scott was here and that his presence in this place mattered.” So it is a really good question to ask, “what tunics would people show to Peter after you were gone?”
But actually, I have a much more urgent question to ask here today. The story of Peter and Tabitha is a terrific story to read just after Easter because it is a story of resurrection. Maybe I should have said, “spoiler alert,” before bringing that up, but we did actually read the story and you heard how it ended. Tabitha didn’t stay dead. So it would be very easy to take this story and apply it to our post-resurrection hope as followers of Christ.
Certainly one of the reasons why the early Christians remembered and repeated this story was because it reminded them of their Easter hope in a life after death. The life after death that we hope for is not exactly what happens to Tabitha. We don’t expect Jesus to restore us to thislife again after we die, but rather to a different kind of life in a new place that we can scarcely even imagine. But what Peter does for Tabitha is a symbolic reminder of that hope for life after death.
But there is, I think, another way to read this story as a story of resurrection. After all, it is not just people who die. Groups and organizations and institutions, they can die too. And, as a matter of fact, we are living in an age when institutions are passing away more quickly than ever before. Churches and congregations, in particular are affected by this and they are passing away (or amalgamating or changing to such a degree that they are unrecognizable) at an unprecedented rate today. So would it not be a good question to ask, as believers in the power of resurrection, what is the hope for resurrection for our churches and Christian institutions?
If your church were to die (or go through a radical change that might feel like death) what would you like to leave behind from its life right now that would tell the world that it was worth being here? Now, I know that when we think of our churches and the things that make them special to us, we tend to focus on the things that have been meaningful to us personally. We talk about our beautiful buildings and sanctuaries. We talk about memorable moments in worship services and about the things we have done there with our friends. We also have a certain tendency to go on and on about past glories and to celebrate the way that things used to be.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with loving these things about our churches. But the story of Tabitha makes me wonder, when our congregations are dead (or when they are transformed in coming years) what will make people remember them as they were and believe that they were important? This story makes me think that it may not be the buildings or the activities or the musical moments. What if, in the end, what really matters are the pieces of clothing.
I can think of this quite literally because we have, in this congregation, a clothing ministry called Hope Clothing where we are regularly handing out really good quality used clothing to people simply because they need it and can make good use of it. So I do know just how meaningful such a simple act can be. I am in the church often enough when people come in and bring their donations of clothing. Just knowing that it is our intention to give it all away according to need means a great deal to people in the world today – a world where used clothing has become a big business that creates large profits for some.
I also get to hear the stories that they tell me as they bring the clothes in. Not too long ago, I had a woman come in bearing the clothes of her mother who had passed away recently. She joyfully and sorrowfully (it’s amazing how the two of them can go together sometimes) told me very sacred and holy things about her mother and her sense of style and how she dressed and some of the things she had struggled with over recent years. I know without a doubt that it was a healing moment for her to be able to share her mother’s clothes and her stories in that way. And providing that opportunity is absolutely something that will last long beyond the present state of this congregation.
Of course, I also get to be part of it when people come to take the clothes that they need. We could tell you so many stories of people finding just the right piece of clothing at the right time in order to go to a job interview or a wedding or some other really important event. We could tell you stories of the right piece of clothing showing up as a donation only minutes before someone comes looking for that very thing. It is a little shop where minor miracles happen every week. Sometimes you know you’re participating in a miracle when you are just there and ready to respond when someone comes up against an emergency – a house fire, a situation of abuse or whatever it might be.
And let me tell you, if someday our congregation should cease to exist and the Apostle Peter were to drop by and ask me what really mattered about St. Andrew’s Hespeler, I think we could do a lot worse than to show him those pieces of clothing that were shared and the impacts they had on people’s lives. I know he would be moved by that. And of course, it is not always literally clothing but it is the acts of kindness that manifest themselves in concrete things that are shared with others.
For example, last week I preached this sermon at St. Andrew’s Church in Guelph and they don’t have a clothing ministry. They are, however working diligently towards welcoming a refugee family into Canada. I promised them that the concrete things that they do for that family will be of eternal value and will indeed endure beyond the present life of their congregation.
So I hope that this story of Tabitha might make us re-evaluate the things that we feel are really important about our churches and ask ourselves what we really need to spend our time and energy investing in as congregation. Maybe it is time for some of those priorities to change.
But remember that I said that this is a post Easter story. It is a story of the power of Christ’s resurrection and what it can do for us in our churches today. And I do see us living in an age where death is a real possibility for our congregations. Please understand, however, that I am not, in any way, predicting the death of St. Andrew’s Guelph or St. Andrew’s Hespeler. In neither case do I see that as a likely possibility and I am not here as a prophet of doom today.
But I will tell you this: we are living in days of great change for the church. We have a Lord who will not abandon his church in these days. Christ will be with his church through whatever change may come. That’s the good news. The somewhat more troubling news is this: Christ has a particular strategy for renewal in his church and in his people’s lives. And it is not a strategy of incremental change that never makes us feel uncomfortable. Christ’s favourite strategy for change is death and resurrection.
For me that means that maybe even many of our strongest and liveliest churches may be heading for a Tabitha moment – for a time when it may just feel like we have been washed and laid out in a room upstairs and that we are done. I fully expect many of our congregations to deal with moments like that in coming years.
Why would God allow us to go through such painful moments of loss? Not because he has abandoned us. He will send for Peter to come and raise us up again to new life and new beginnings. Christ will not abandon his church. So why would he put us through that?
Well maybe, just maybe, it’s because he wants us – like those widows in Joppa – to realize what really matters about who we are and what we do as a church together.
#TodaysTweetableTruth The widows showed Peter Tabitha’s tunics proving she had mattered. What would they show him after yr church was gone?
Note: I have created the backstories of Mary and Joanna that are featured in this sermon. My speculation on these two characters began with the introduction of these disciples of Jesus in Luke 8:2-3 and has spun off in some interesting directions as I have been working on a future book that may be titled something like “The Seven Demons of Miryam of Magdala.”
Luke 23:50-24:3, Luke 24:13-32, Psalm 118:1, 2, 14-24
M
ary Magdalene opened the package of spices and ointments that Joanna had brought back from the market and inhaled deeply. She was suddenly overwhelmed by the scents: cinnamon, cassia, balsam and resin. She could even smell the small amounts of frankincense and myrrh that her dear friend, Joanna, had only been able to afford by selling the very last pieces of jewellery that she had plundered from her abusive husband, Chuza, when she had fled his household to follow Jesus.
It smelled beautiful, but it was also emotionally dangerous for her. Smell is a powerful trigger for the memory. The part of your brain that processes olfactory information is only separated by a few synapses from your amygdala which is the part of your brain where your most powerful and emotionally charged memories are stored. That is why sometimes just getting a whiff of some scent that is connected to your past can transport you back to events that you may have thought you had completely forgotten.
And there was no question that the smells of these spices and resins were connected to many traumatic memories in the lives of all the women who were there in that room. Mary herself was instantly transported back to the day when her intended husband was drowned while fishing on the Sea of Galilee. She remembered the deep grief and confusion that she felt as they carried the body of her promised husband to his family tomb outside the town of Magdala. At that moment it had seemed as if her entire life had been over and, in a very real sense it was.
Beside her, Joanna was reeling from the fact that the same smells had taken her back to the day, so many years ago, when she and her servants had laid to rest the tiny, stillborn body of her only child. She was suddenly filled with a grief that was so raw that it was as if no time had passed at all. And the same was true for every woman who was present as each one of them felt as if a scab had been ripped off the poorly healed wound in her life that had formed when she lost someone whom she loved: a parent, a child, her sibling or cousin or best friend. Life in Galilee could be very brutal indeed. Their new grief at the loss of their teacher, Lord and friend mixed and mingled with so many old griefs.
There was a reason why they all reacted so similarly. Women in that culture had very well defined roles and duties around death. When someone died, everyone always automatically looked to the women to do what needed to be done. They sang the laments and songs of grief. They told the story of the person’s life and death. They led the procession to the tomb. Most especially they washed and prepared the body with the traditional mixtures of ointments and spices and wrapped it in the linen cloths.
Everyone (even the men) agreed that men just weren’t any good at that kind of thing. So heavy were the expectations of so-called “manly” behaviour placed upon them that men could not express emotions like grief or sorrow in any sort of helpful way. So it was always left to the women – one of the few places in public life where they were actually allowed to take a leadership role. So they had all done it so many times before.
It was somewhat distressing to the women that they had not been permitted to prepare the body of Jesus for burial – that a man named Joseph, a secret ally on the council – had taken care of it by quickly wrapping the body in linen cloths and stowing it in some tomb that had no connection with Jesus’ family. But there was no helping that. Not only had there been no time to do things properly as the sun was setting and the sabbath was about to begin, the situation was also far too dangerous for any open displays of grief on the day when he was crucified.
But the women were determined that they would do whatever they could to make it right. A lot of people have wondered why the women would have returned to the tomb where Jesus had been laid on the third day and why they would bring with them the spices and ointments that were commonly used to prepare a body before burial when he had already been buried, even if hastily so. It is not as if they could have unburied him in order to do it all over again. Even if it had not been for the large stone covering the tomb and forming an impossible barrier, such an act would have unacceptably disturbed the dead.
But we do know that there was a custom in many ancient Mediterranean societies – and in ancient Palestine as well – of a special visit to the grave that took place on the third day following a death. It was a celebration that was led, like all other activities around death, by women. The mourners would go out to the tomb where a beloved friend or family member had been laid and they would take with them a simple meal: bread, wine, maybe some fish and olive oil. These things would be taken as a special gift to the dead, so it wouldn’t be all that surprising if women were to take as well such things as burial spices and ointments.
But the point of the third day gathering by the tombs was not merely to honour the memory of the dead with gifts. There was a belief, common among many cultures and, the evidence suggests, also among first century Jews, that when they gathered to share this simple kind of meal by the tomb of a beloved friend or family member, the dead would join with them in that meal. This was something that all of the women who followed Jesus from Galilee would have experienced before. They had gone with other women to tombs and experienced the presence of the dead on the third day.
What exactly had they experienced previously, I suspect, would have been something like the kinds of experiences that people still sometimes report to this very day. I have often had people tell me about the ways that they were comforted after losing a loved one – how they just felt the presence of that person watching over them or saw something that confirmed to them that their beloved was still with them in some very important way. These are not unusual experiences. Many have had them following a death. People doubt such experiences, of course, because it is notoriously hard to prove any very personal experience, but many have been greatly comforted by these things that reassured them that their loved ones were still with them.
So it wouldn’t really be that surprising if these women were preparing to go out to the tomb and minister to their dead Lord and friend with an expectation of finding some kind of reassurance of his presence. They packed up the spices and ointments, some bread and wine and the other elements of a simple meal and they waited for the dawning of the third day. But it seems that they were about to get more than they had bargained for.
The women who went out to visit Jesus’ tomb at the dawning of the third day had all experienced grief and loss before. Everyone in that society agreed that grief was women’s work. So it was all so very familiar to them – the feelings, the smells, the songs that they sang and the atmosphere. And, given that human life was cheap in Galilee, they had all doubtlessly lost people that they loved. It had been very personal before.
But this was different. Jesus hadn’t just been a friend or a teacher to them. He had been a reason for them to start to live again. He had given them hope that things could actually be different. And so, as they headed out to the tomb to share a meal there and bring offerings for the dead, they may have expected to experience the presence of their now-dead Lord in the same way that they had experienced it before for their other loved ones, but surely they were hoping for something… more.
Christians believe that they did experience something more than the commonly experienced reassurance of the presence of the dead. What exactly happened to them would be impossible to describe precisely because even the Bible has a hard time pinning it down. There are four different accounts of what those women experienced at the tomb in the Bible and not one of them agrees in all the details with the others. But I don’t necessarily think that that is a problem because what these passages are describing are deeply personal experiences that changed the lives of the women who had them irrevocably. It wasn’t just about what they saw and felt and heard and touched, it was about what all of that meant on a very personal level.
I imagine, though, that they arrived at the tomb and they told, one more time, the story of how he had died and what his death meant, just as it would continue to be told whenever the church gathered in the years to come. And then, as was traditional at these sorts of third day gatherings, they took some bread and they broke it. And how could that not have made them think of him – not only because of the last meal he shared with this disciples but also because of how he loved to gather and eat with all sorts of people and especially with outcasts and sinners and all the other people that everyone else rejected. That act alone must have made it seem as if Jesus was very near.
But there was more to it than that. As they took the bread and shared it, as they drank wine from a common cup, they knew that he was there – not just in their memory (though, of course, he would always be there), not just in spirit as they may have experienced it with others they had lost, he was there in body, in whole person. Most of all, he was there in reality. It was like the realest thing that any of them had ever experienced.
And that experience, my friends, is the basis of our Christian hope. I believe that those women experienced it there outside his tomb on the third day after his death. That was when it all started. That is not to say that they immediately understood everything that they had experienced. I wouldn’t be surprised, in fact, if it took them years to really put it all into words that could even make sense to people. And, of course, it wasn’t just that one time outside his tomb either. None of it would have probably amounted to anything if people had not continued to consistently experience the reality that he was alive.
Each experience of the risen Christ was unique, but clearly one of the ways that people continued to experience him was when they shared these same kinds of simple meals of bread and wine and common foods when they gathered. They were often surprised that he was present in those meals with them just as the women had experienced.
That kind of process is described to us in the story from the Gospel of Luke. It takes place on Easter day when two disciples are walking to Emmaus. They have heard about what the women experienced at the tomb: “Moreover, some women of our group astounded us,” they say. “They were at the tomb early this morning, and when they did not find his body there, they came back and told us that they had indeed seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive.” They know about what the women experienced, but they don’t seem convinced – not until they experience it for themselves as the stranger with them breaks the bread and shares some wine and they are suddenly part of the same feast that the women shared outside the tomb.
And that is what Easter is really about. It is not just about what they experienced, as real as that was. It is an invitation to all of us to share in that experience together. It is an invitation to share a bit of bread and some wine and to know that this is an event that is not limited to this particular place and time. If you are open to it, it is a meal that can transport you back to the moment when those women gathered on the third day outside his tomb. I pray, and I hope that you join me in this prayer, that at least some of us here today might find some small taste of that in this simple shared meal. That is why we do it.
#TodaysTweetableTruth #Easter isn’t about their experience at the tomb. It is an invitation to experience an event unlimited by time & space
n the Gospel of Mark we are told that, as Jesus was approaching the city of Jerusalem, he stopped and he pointed at two of his disciples and asked them to do something for him. He told them to go into the village just ahead of them, find a donkey, and untie it and bring it right back. He said he needed it in order to make his big entry into Jerusalem. It doesn’t say which two disciples he sent in the gospel. I’ve always wondered about that. Who were they? Surely, if it were two of the famous twelve, they would have been identified. If it had been Peter, James, John, or even Bartholomew, wouldn’t Mark have wanted to tell us?
So do you know what I think might have happened? I think that Jesus went to the second string. He didn’t send any of these big name disciples or top talent. He sent a couple of the other guys, the ones who didn’t quite make the cut. They were the sort that history doesn’t quite remember, of course, but I’ve heard that their names were Donald and Ted.
And, in fact, I have some good news. It seems that an amazing new archeological discovery has been made in the Holy Land. Apparently, Donald and Ted kept a record of the conversation they had as they made their way to pick up the donkey. And eventually this conversation was written down as the Gospel of Donald and Ted which was, unfortunately lost to history when one of them left it behind one day in the back room of the Jerusalem Tim Hortins. Well, that long lost gospel has finally been found and I am pleased to announce that I have it here today.
So here’s what this long lost gospel says: “And lo, it came to pass that as the two disciples made their way even unto the village where the donkey lay, Donald did say unto Ted, “Hey, Ted, I am just so excited about this assignment. This is finally it. We’re going to Jerusalem and the teacher has obviously decided to make an entrance. And we get the job of making sure that it’s spectacular. It’s going to be huge.”
“Yeah,” replied Ted, “it’s all finally happening. Jesus is going to restore the kingdom of David. It’s going to be the glory days of the past all over again. Jesus is finally going to deport all of those Romans from the country, he’s going to make sure they never come back again. In fact, you know what I heard some of the other guys talking about? I heard them say that he’s going to build a wall around the whole country so that they can never come back here again.”
“I heard that too,” said Donald. “But that’s not all. I heard that he’s going to get the Romans to pay for the wall. And if they give him any trouble, he just said that the wall got ten feet higher.”
“Yeah, I heard that too. But I was wondering, everyone seems so sure that this is what it is all about, but nobody seems to have heard Jesus say exactly that. How can we be sure that that is what he’s going to Jerusalem to do? I mean, maybe he’s expecting something different to happen there.”
Donald thought about this for a few moments. “Well, I do remember a few months ago he said something about going to Jerusalem and then being arrested and put on trial and something about dying, but I think that Peter told him off about that – said that he shouldn’t talk like that – and I’m sure that must have straightened him out. After all, he’s been going on and on about establishing a kingdom. And everybody knows how kingdoms work. A kingdom is only established through strength.
“And now he’s sent us to fetch him a ride for the grand procession that will start his great revolt. What an honour! When people look back on this day, they’ll remember that it was us who started the whole thing, you mark my words!”
“Yeah,” said Ted, “but there’s one thing that’s been bothering me. Why did he send us to get a donkey? Why not a beautiful white horse or, I don’t know, an elephant or a tank to ride on? Wouldn’t a conquering king ride something like that? A donkey is, well, just not so impressive.”
Donald smiled, “Don’t you worry, I’m sure it’s going to be the biggest, most impressive donkey you have ever seen. It is going to be huge! Did you hear him tell us what we’re supposed to say when people yell at us for stealing the animal? We’re supposed to say, ‘The Lord needs it.’ Get it, we have to call him ‘the Lord.’ and everybody knows that being a lord is all about being big and impressive and strong and huge.”
And so it came to pass that Ted found that his fears were assuaged and, greatly comforted, he and Donald pursued their road to find the donkey. And lo, as they walked they began to make up the cheers that they would get the people to shout as they entered the city. They decided that they would get everyone to chant “HO SAN NA” They liked that one because it meant “save” and they figured they knew exactly how he would save the nation from all their enemies. And then Ted came up with on that went, “Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!” which Donald thought was good, but maybe not everyone would get it because some people weren’t that great with history.
“Why don’t we just yell, “Make Judea great again”? That’s what bringing back the times of King David means, isn’t it? Oh, and wouldn’t it be great if we made up some hats and put that slogan on them. Man, Jesus is going to be so happy that he sent us to do this job, won’t he?
Here endeth the lesson from the Gospel according to Ted and Donald. And I know that you of have figured out by now that there is not and never has been a Gospel according to Ted and Donald. But the creation of this gospel seemed to me to be the best way to make a little bit of sense of a pretty amazing phenomenon that we see taking place in the United States these days.
I don’t know how many people I’ve had express to me their dismay at what they see happening in American politics right now. People just don’t understand the rise of Donald Trump and the likelihood that he will be the Republican nominee for president. They also express even more dismay at the thought that he could actually becomepresident. And, of course, a lot of it really is very hard to understand. But, as I was reading again the story of Palm Sunday this year, it seemed to me to be a story that might help us to understand some of what is going on.
It seemed to me that the crowds that were shouting out to Jesus that day, many of them at least, had a lot in common with those who cry the name of Donald Trump these days. Now, I know that the two men, Trump and Jesus, don’t really have a lot in common. In fact, I think that they would disagree profoundly on a number of topics such as money, how to treat strangers and outsiders and poor people just to name a few. But Jesus, at least for a certain time around that day that we call Palm Sunday, seems to have attracted a crowd who at least thought that Jesus was promising to give them very similar things to what Donald Trump seems to make his followers today expect, despite the fact that Jesus made his very best effort to tell his followers that he was heading for something quite different.
What were they expecting? We cannot know exactly, of course, but they seem to have been looking for some sort of shortcut to glory and the solution of all their problems. The word most associated with Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem that day is the word “Hosanna,” a Hebrew word that means “save” or “help.” It is a phrase that is sometimes used as a prayer for help or salvation in the Bible, but in the stories of Palm Sunday, it is used in a different way because the people shout it as a sort of a cheer. It is a hurrah as much as it is a call for help. This makes it clear that the kind of salvation that they are looking for is an immediate triumphant victory. They are looking for their enemies to be swept away before them, for everything to be immediately made right as they understand it.
The other phrase that they are shouting, according to the Gospel of Mark is, “Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!” I find this one particularly telling. It is not even immediately clear what this means. How could people be welcoming the arrival of the ancient kingdom of a long dead ancestor? But the recent rise of Donald Trump in the United States has helped me to understand what this actually means. It means the same thing as the Trump slogan, “Make America Great Again.”
That slogan also doesn’t make a lot of logical sense. People have just been accepting it at face value and without asking critical questions like, “When exactly was America great before and at what moment did it stop being great.” It really works best if people don’t think about it very much at all because it works in the same way as that slogan shouted out by the crowd on Palm Sunday: “Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!” Basically they are holding up a past idilic time that nobody actually remembers and saying, if we just go back to that time, everything will be alright and it will happen with no trouble or pain or difficulty. That’s what I mean when I call it taking a shortcut. It’s the idea that all you have to do is set the clock back to an earlier time that no one actually remembers and every problem is just solved.
And I get why people want that and I certainly don’t blame them for that. There are lots of good reasons why people are upset at what has gone wrong in their society, the lost opportunities, the corruption of a political system and a party system that doesn’t really listen to what people want. There is a lot that is right about that impulse to tear apart the whole system so you can rebuild it all from the ground up. But the thing that people miss is that are no shortcuts to the kind of change that is really needed. You can’t just get there by marching into Jerusalem or by building a wall and making Mexico pay for it or slapping on a hat that says, “Make America Great Again.
The thing that sets Jesus apart from Trump and others like him is that Jesus kept repeating over and over that there were no shortcuts to glorious victory. He chose to ride a donkey into Jerusalem and that was no traditional mount for a great victor according to the rules of this world. He had told his disciples at least three times that he was going to be arrested and killed when he went to Jerusalem. He knew what was in store for himself and he had decided that he couldn’t avoid that route. There really were no shortcuts to the victory that Jesus was heading towards.
Jesus has a plan for bringing redemption, hope and new beginnings to this world in spite of all its troubles. He probably would have had the power, had he called on it, to sweep into Jerusalem and take over and drive out his enemies and impose his idea of the kingdom of God by force. Does anybody believe that would have ended well? Jesus knew that it wouldn’t. People still try and take that shortcut, though. Some are pushing for it right now. That is why I will put my faith in someone who chose to ride into town on a donkey and who knew that rejection, suffering and death were what waited for him. He may not be the saviour that people are shouting for in the streets, but he is the kind of saviour we need.
#TodaysTweetableTruth As Jesus comes to Jerusalem, they cry #MakeJudeaGreatAgain Jesus knows there’s no shortcut to change the world needs.
very year the National Hockey League, the NHL, pauses in middle of its season to celebrate its very best players. The All-Star game has always been a big fan favorite – a chance to celebrate the players that the fans love most. And, in January of this year, the league really needed a successful All-Star game as it found itself in the midst of a season that many fans seem to find rather uninspiring. Instead what it got was a bunch of really bad mistakes. And I know that you may not think that the story of an All-Star game has much to teach us about the Biblical truths, but I hope you’ll stay with me for a little bit here because I think that it can.
The first mistake that the NHL made was to include the fans in the selection process of the All-Star team. Now, that was not a new mistake this year. Fans have been helping to choose team members since 1985, but a lot has changed since way back then. Today fans are connected to each other through social media in ways that could never have been dreamed of back in 1985. And this year someone somewhere on the internet decided to disturb the NHL’s plans for a nice little, brand-boosting All-Star game.
A social media campaign was started to get people to vote John Scott onto the team under the hashtag, #VoteJohnScott. I’m not sure why someone started this campaign but it seems that people lashed onto it as a way to get back at the league for all kinds of reasons. Scott was a player who really had no business being on the team according to any regular measures. Some people have suggested that he had no business being in the NHL at all. Playing for the Arizona Coyotes this season, he has spent as much time in the minor AHL league as he has in the NHL. He had only played 11 major league games, scored no goals, had only one assist and spent about a half hour in the penalty box. An enforcer and big brawler on the ice, he seemed anything but a good representative of what is good in the game.
But the campaign really took off and before long Scott had not only got on the team but came in ahead of all the other top players. The fans made him captain of the Pacific Team. Clearly the NHL had made a mistake in letting the fans have the kind of power that they could use to sabotage the league’s plans. But it probably would have been alright if they had just left well enough alone. They did not.
The league (and I think that most people have blamed everyone’s favourite commissioner, Gary Bettman) decided that it would be too embarrassing to allow Scott to play. None of this is proven, mind you, but it seems that they tried any and all means to get him off the roster. They tried to bribe him to decline. They even went so far as to tell him that his children would be ashamed of him. When that didn’t work, they got mean. He was suddenly traded from Phoenix to Montreal and no sooner had he arrived that the Canadiens immediately sent him down to their minor league farm team in Newfoundland. The argument was that since he could no longer represent either the Coyotes or even the NHL because he no longer played for either.
So all of a sudden, in the middle of winter, Scott and his family are moved from hot and sunny Arizona and into exile in deepest darkest Newfoundland. But, I have to ask, what did John Scott do to deserve such treatment? He is, by all accounts, a really nice guy who loves hockey and loves his kids and is only dangerous if you meet him on the ice. He also didn’t make any mistakes. If anyone did, the league did. But it looked as if he and his family were going to be the only ones to pay the price.
But isn’t that the way it always goes. It is a story as old a human society. It is certainly as old as the Book of Isaiah. There are a series of passages in the Book of Isaiah that are sometimes called the Songs of the Suffering Servant. These songs are found in Isaiah 42, 49, 50 and 53. We read the final song of the Suffering Servant this morning.
All of these poems tell the story of an unnamed figure who is simply called the Servant of the Lord. This is a man, called to serve God in the world and to do much good and no wrong, who is nevertheless terribly abused over and over again. As it says in our reading this morning, “He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account.”
In all likelihood, when the prophet talks about this figure, he is thinking about somebody he knows personally – someone in his nation whom he has seen God use to do good but who has been terribly mistreated. He may even be talking about himself, in a roundabout way, and how he has been abused despite being a prophet of God. But whoever the prophet was initially thinking about, there is something universal about his description of the Servant of the Lord. He is describing something that seems to have happened over and over again in the history of the world when a good person is unjustly punished for doing good.
Christians have taken these passages, for example, and applied them to the story of Jesus and his death upon the cross – and rightfully so – for there is no question that Jesus’ story is absolutely a working out of the same theme that is found in the Book of Isaiah. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the suffering and death of Jesus is the definitiveexample of somebody living out this pattern. Jesus lived out the universal story of the suffering servant more perfectly than anyone else in history both before and since. And, since the death of Jesus is an eternal event – an event whose impact far exceeds the moment in time when it happened – it is even possible to say that the Songs of the Suffering Servant in the Book of Isaiah are based on the story of Christ even though they were written long before his time. That is one of the things that it means when we call them prophecy.
But, as I say, the story of Jesus is just the most perfect example. It is far from the only one. And I told you the story of John Scott this morning because I also see it as an echo – perhaps a dim echo, but an echo nonetheless – of the same universal story. Of course, I would never suggest that Scott’s abuse was anywhere near what was suffered by Jesus or even what was suffered by Isaiah’s Suffering Servant. To suggest any sort of parity would be ridiculous. But Scott’s story is a reminder that nothing really changes in the world – the pattern remains the same. The powers of this world, whether they be kings or priests or commissioners or sports franchises, have their plans. And a key part of their plan is that they don’t really have to suffer for their own mistakes – they’ll always find a way to get someone else to pay the price. That’s what the John Scotts and the Suffering Servants and the Jesuses of Nazareth are for.
To give another rather egregious example from recent events, when Michigan State officials made the very serious mistake of choosing to save some money by drawing the City of Flint’s water from the terribly contaminated Flint River, who paid the price? Not the officials but the ordinary people of Flint who, for generations, are going to be dealing with the effects of lead poisoning.
But the best part of the universal story of the Suffering Servant is that it doesn’t end there. It doesn’t just end with John Scott finishing his career playing for the St. John’s IceCaps in the AHL. It doesn’t end with Jesus on the cross. If it did, we might get mad and enraged, but we would in no way see our need for justice satisfied.
Let me just quickly tell you how John Scott’s story ended. The fans didn’t buy the excuse that he couldn’t play in the All-Star Game because he was no longer in the NHL. They said, “We don’t care, let him play.” On twitter, the hashtag was #FreeJohnScott. The fans said it so loud and so insistently that the league really had no choice. And Scott went and he played as beautiful a game as he had ever played in his whole career. Everyone could see that he had made the game. Yet, despite that, the league wouldn’t put his name in on the ballots for Most Valuable Player. Do you think the fans cared about that?
No they did not. At the game they started chanting, “John Scott” and “MVP” and before you knew it, John Scott, despite not even being on the ballot at all, had taken the whole thing as a write-in candidate. All of this led to the most beautiful moment when Gary Bettman, commissioner of the NHL and the guy that most people blamed for the whole debacle, had to stand at centre ice and smile and pretend that he was happy as he handed John Scott a check for one million dollars.
I have heard people predict, in the midst of a rather unimpressive NHL season, that perhaps the one thing that people will look back on and see as the high point of 2015-16 season will be the All-Star game and it is all because of John Scott. We will see, of course, once we get into the post season, but I think that it might be true. John Scott, the guy that they tried to get rid of, may end up redeeming the entire season.
But, once again, I think that story is most interesting because it contains the merest echo of a story that matters on an eternal scale. Jesus was the ultimate victim of this world’s systems of power, privilege and domination. And they thought that they had beaten him – that they had put him exactly where they wanted him, upon a cross. But it was in the very moment of his defeat that, we believe, Jesus actually defeated the dark powers of this world. The truth of what Jesus accomplished for us is perfectly spelled out for us in the Book of Isaiah: “The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. Therefore I will allot him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he poured out himself to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.”
For that is how our God operates. Yes, the powers and authorities of this world will lay their plans. They will decide that they do not need to pay for their own mistakes, their own sins and their own errors. That is what the “little people” for. And they may even get away with it for a season. They may seem to thrive and get richer and stronger and feel ever more secure. But we have a God of justice. He will not let that stand forever.
But God has a particular way of making his justice work out in this world. He doesn’t necessarily go for that straightforward confrontation with the powers of this world. That kind of clash often doesn’t make things better and can often make things worse. God’s plan is to stand with the victims, the lost and neglected, those who are not allowed to prosper in this world. And God has a sense of humour – I’m sure of that, because he loves to use those very downtrodden and abused people and win the victory through them. Jesus showed us the absolute power of the seemingly powerless victim and he is the model for all the rest.
When this world has got you down. When you start to be discouraged and to believe that the weak will just continue to be used and robbed, hold one picture in your mind: John Scott holding that check at centre ice. Sure, but maybe even a better picture – one that gives the model to all the others – Jesus, taking on the powers of this dark world, doing it by dying before their very eyes. He wins, not just the battle, but the entire war.
This is the message of Easter – the message we get to celebrate in a couple of weeks. And it is a message that brings us hope by exposing the weakness and emptiness of this present world’s power system.
#TodaysTweetableTruth The powerful tried to make #Jesus pay for their #mistakes. Jesus, as #victim, exposes how empty this world’s power is.
ave you ever made one of those mistakes that just kind of haunts you, the kind of mistake that lurks there in your memory waiting to pounce on you? You can just go along with your life and engage in ordinary activities and, when you get absorbed in what you are doing, you can even forget about that one big mistake that you made for a while. But then you come to a moment when the activity stops and you are alone with your thoughts and the memory is just waiting there for you. You wince, you may physically shudder and think to yourself, “I just cannot believe that I did that thing. How could I have been so dumb?”
I’m sure that just about every single one of us has a few mistakes like that in our personal histories. We’ve all made them and, like it or not we carry them around with us. In one sense, it is probably good that we remember them and even feel bad about them because, of course, remembering your mistakes is one way of making sure that you don’t repeat them. But in another sense, the mere fact that we carry these things around with us can be very destructive to us. As we brood upon them, they can begin to define us and to limit us and what we think we can do or be.
I am certain that that was exactly how Simon Peter felt about the matter. For days he had been unable to think of anything else. He just kept replaying the scenarios in his head. When his Lord had been arrested, Peter had wanted to run and to hide like the others, but as he saw them taking Jesus away, he had found a small reserve of courage in himself and he had followed, staying at what seemed to be a safe distance.
When Jesus was taken into the high priest’s house, where the Sanhedrin often met, for an initial questioning before taking him before the Procurator, Peter found himself unable to follow – stopped by the slave who tended the door. He dared not seek admittance for fear that someone might ask him to identify himself, and so he just lurked by the door. Eventually one of the other disciples, who had some connections in the household, came over to try and get him in. All was going well until the woman on the door held out her hand to stop him. “You look familiar,” she said as Simon Peter felt himself break out in a cold sweat. “Weren’t you one of those who came down from Galilee with this man they have put on trial?”
And, in the moment, it had just seemed so easy to justify what he said. Surely Jesus would not have wanted him to just throw away his life like that. Surely Jesus would understand just how terrified he felt in the moment. So when he said, “Sorry, you must be thinking about somebody else,” it had just seemed like the right thing to say.
It got easier. The next time he was challenged it almost slipped out without him having to even think about it. The third time, to deny even knowing Jesus seemed like an obvious thing to say – it almost felt true. But then the cock had crowed and everything that Jesus had said at the supper came flooding back to him. Jesus had told him that he would do this even while Peter had protested and said never, not in a thousand years. And now, just a few hours later, it had happened just as Jesus had promised.
And the words had been said. There was no taking them back. Maybe the actual sound of them would dissipate and fade away, but Peter had the sense that the words themselves would echo on throughout eternity. It certainly felt like they would echo in his own skull for at least that long. There is no coming back from something like this.
And surely that was why, after he was crucified and after the reports came out of people seeing him alive again, Peter found that he had no desire to see Jesus again. He still loved him, still believed in everything he’d stood for. But if he really was back – and how could he believe that he could be back? – then it was better that Peter stay far away. The mistake stood between them. Never again could there be any kind of positive relationship between the two of them. And so he went away – went back to the old, simple life of a fisherman he had once known. He tried to act like the last three years with Jesus had never even happened.
I know that we’ve all been there. We have all made mistakes that made us feel that embarrassed. And you’ve probably all known at least one person who has made that kind of mortifying mistake that they feel that there is no coming back from. All of us can feel sympathetic to Simon Peter. But my question today is this: how would you help him? What do you think would be most helpful for someone in that kind of situation to help them get through it and move on with their lives?
I know what my first impulse would be, and that would be to seek to comfort him by minimizing the mistake. “That’s okay, Peter, it was just a momentary lapse. You didn’t mean it. And it’s not like Jesus probably even knows that you said it. I mean, he was kind of distracted with other things. Your denial was hardly the worst thing that happened to him that day, after all. I’m sure it will be fine – just go up to him and act like nothing ever happened he probably won’t even mention it.
At least that’s how I’d be tempted to react after a serious mistake like that. And I don’t think I’m alone. Most of us don’t like conflict. We don’t like that awkward feeling that you have disappointed someone. Our most common reaction is just to wish the whole thing forgotten as soon as possible. But, though that is a common impulse, it often only has the effect of making things worse.
The wonderful thing is that in the Gospel of John we have an example, from Jesus himself, of a much better way of dealing with it when you have a big mistake ruining your life. Jesus, first of all, doesn’t let Peter get away with running from his mistake. When Peter runs back to his old life of fishing on the Sea of Galilee, Jesus follows him – chooses that his next appearance will not be in Jerusalem where he has been previously seen but in Galilee where Peter has fled. What that tells me, first of all, is that running and hiding from your mistakes is not going to work – not in the long run anyways. You may succeed, for a time, in putting it out of your mind, it might seem like it has been forgotten, but a wise person learns that that you can’t just hide from your mistakes. So long as they are not, in some helpful way, dealt with, they will follow you wherever you go.
So Jesus shows up by the shores of the lake where Peter has fled. And it is there that he helps Peter to deal with his mistake. What Jesus does for Peter there is clearly connected to his mistake – his denial. Three times Peter has denied even knowing Jesus and three times Jesus asks him the same question. It is obvious to everybody that this is no coincidence.
And none of this is particularly comfortable – in fact it’s downright awkward. By the third time that Jesus asks the question, we are told that Peter is feeling hurt and his response is clearly one of exasperation: “Lord, you know everything,” – in other words, why are you torturing me with this uncomfortable line of questioning? But Jesus continues on because he knows that there are things that are more important than avoiding awkwardness – his friend, and helping his friend to get over his remorse for his mistake is more important than avoiding awkwardness.
And then there’s the question that Jesus focuses on. You know what we tend to do when somebody makes a mistake or when somebody gets something wrong: we tend to focus on the mechanics of the thing. We focus on procedure. In fact, we do that an awful lot, particularly in the church. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen it in a congregation or a meeting of a presbytery or some other church court. You see some people get into a disagreement over something – for example, say that you have one group of people over here who want to bring in a refugee family and another group over there who have a problem with that. You know, there is a substantial difference of opinion that is, at the very least, well worth discussing. But I’ve noticed that, in the church, we don’t discuss the difference of opinion.
What we tend to do instead is argue over procedure – the opponents to welcoming refugees might complain, for example, that the people who want to bring them in failed to seek the proper approvals or something like that. And we spend all of our time arguing over that rather than about the substantial, and I would say very important, issues about welcoming refugees. I don’t know if you realize this, but we do that kind of thing all the time.
Did you notice the Jesus doesn’t do that with Peter? In fact, he doesn’t even bring up the specific action that Peter got wrong. Jesus doesn’t ask him, “Peter, um, have you ever met me? Do you know me?” That is what we would likely focus on. But Jesus knows that that is not the issue and goes directly to the heart of the issue. We could learn a lot from Jesus at this point. Deal with the real issues rather than getting hung up over procedure.
The real issue, apparently as far as Jesus is concerned, is love: “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Jesus doesn’t care about the particular things that you’ve gotten wrong or the particular mistakes that you have made near as much as he cares about where your heart is. That is always where he will direct the question and that is always where the healing that he wants to perform in your life will begin.
So, basically, Jesus communicates to Peter that he understands what Peter has done, that he cares and that he’s not going to beat Peter up over what he got wrong – that he cares more about what Peter’s underlying motives are than he does about the particular things he got wrong.
But then, Jesus does something truly amazing. He gives Peter an assignment: “feed my sheep.” It is at this point that God’s grace shines through for Peter. For Jesus, with eyes wide open and knowing completely what Peter has done wrong and why, is calling Peter to be a leader. And he is not calling Peter to be a leader in spite of his mistake. He seems to be calling Peter to be a leader becauseof his mistake.
This is how God operates. He knows that you’ve made mistakes. He knows that you’ve gotten things wrong. But he also knows if you love him and if you desire to serve him. Jesus chooses not to hold your mistakes against you and he chooses to entrust you with leadership in his church. And here is the secret: there is no leader anywhere in the church for whom that is not true. It was true right from the very beginning – right from Peter. It was true for some of those giant figures of church history. They all got things wrong. They all fell short in one way or another. They were no different from you and Jesus would love to use you too.
Mistakes mess us up. They hurt our relationships, make us feel bad about ourselves and make us feel like we are disqualified from doing anything that really matters. Basically, what Jesus told Simon Peter by the side of the lake that day was that he had come back to tell him and all of us that that is no longer true. Jesus rose from the dead to set us free from the tyranny of our mistakes. All you need to do is claim the freedom that Jesus’ resurrection gives you.
