Peter Gerts One Right
0 Amens
PETER GETS ONE RIGHT
You may be familiar with the story of the Donner Party, the name of a group of California-bound pioneers who got stuck in the snows of an early winter in the Sierra Nevada mountains in 1846. When you go there today, there is a park where you can see the remains of the foundations of the cabins that they threw up for quick shelter, and there is a memorial statue of a life-sized family standing on top of a base that is 22 feet high. The base is that high because the sculptor was trying to convey the sense of how deep the snow was that year, towering over your head as you look up at the statue.
There were 87 people with 23 covered wagons who’d left Missouri in May. They followed the California Trail until July, when the wagon train stopped at the Little Sandy River, and decided to split into two groups. One group, named after their leader, George Donner, elected to take a “shortcut” across the Great Salt Lake Desert that ended up costing them an extra three weeks. Even though they had reached the mountains in October, they decided to go ahead and try to cross, but they were caught in a blizzard in a pass just beyond what is now known as Truckee, California. A group of ten men and five women tried to snowshoe to Sutter’s Fort for help, but four of them died, and the others in the group resorted to cannibalism to survive. When the remaining 31 survivors were rescued in March of the following year, some of them had also begun to consume the bodies of those who had died.
The people in the Donner party made a reckless choice to take an unreasonable risk and paid a high price for it, and ever since have been remembered for choosing to survive through cannibalism. Cannibalism – eating the flesh one one’s own kind – is almost universally condemned, and according to anthropologists, was only practiced by a few isolated races who rarely ate human beings out of hunger, but rather, as a ritual practice intended to terrorize their enemies.
In first century writings, we learn that many people in the Greek and Roman worlds considered Christians to be cannibalistic, incestuous, atheists. Christians were considered atheists because they would not sacrifice to many gods in order to ensure the welfare of Rome. They were thought to be incestuous because called one another “brother” and “sister,” so when a Christian married another Christian, they married their sibling. Finally, they were accused of cannibalism because they ate the flesh and drank the blood of their leader based on the words of Jesus that we heard this morning.
In our text this week, Jesus is in his hometown synagogue, responding to the people in the crowd who have grumbled against him because he called himself the “bread that came down from heaven.” Remember that we learned that those people were his relatives and friends and neighbors who couldn’t believe that the Jesus that they knew could be the Son of God. Also among them are those literal-minded Jews were especially offended when he suggested that they drink his blood, because God had forbidden them to eat any meat containing blood or risk the consequence of being cut off from the tribe of Israel. God said the life of every creature is its blood, and that God’s people must not eat the life of the creature with its meat.[1] Here, Jesus is teaching that it is the Spirit who gives eternal life; that the flesh is useless. They were stupidly unable – or stubbornly unwilling – to understand the metaphor that in comparing himself to food that sustains the body and the blood that gives the body life, that he is saying it is he, God’s Son, who will sustain their lives forever.
Jesus knew before he said this that there would be some who would not believe him – there is nothing we do that is a surprise to God - and he reminded them that he’d said that no one could come to him – no one would be able to accept this teaching that he was the source of eternal life – except that God the father drew that person and, through the gift of faith, enabled their ability to believe. Our gospel lesson says that “because of this, many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.”
It is like the parable of the sower where Jesus taught about seed that a farmer drops carelessly along a hard path, instead of in the cultivated field: He said that whenever anyone “hears the message about the kingdom and does not understand it, the Evil One comes and snatches away what was sown in his heart,” like birds who follow along behind the farmer and scavenge during planting.[2]
This statement about his body and blood is the turning point in Jesus’ ministry; the place where he went from being just a curiosity or a miracle worker, to becoming a scandal. The Greek word for “a scandalous one” is “scandalon.” In English bibles, it is usually translated “stumbling stone.” When we compare Jesus to a “stumbling stone” what we mean that there is a time when everyone encounters the person of Christ and has to pull up short – the time when there is a choice to be made to believe him or not, to follow him or leave.
The text says that as most of the crowd begins to leave, that he turned to the Twelve and asked, “Do you also wish to go away?” I wonder about the tone of that question – was it said in frustrated resignation? Was it a challenge, a line drawn in the sand? Or was it a negative invitation – are you coming or not?
Once again it is Peter, the one with all the opinions - who gets it right for a change, by replying, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”
Peter’s declaration is often interpreted as a great statement of faith, that in the face of the rejection of others, Peter remains faithful. One writer, though called Peter’s statement, “loyal despair,” sort of a “if there was anywhere else for us to go, we would, but you have gone and convinced us and now we are stuck here with you.”
The Presbyterian singer and songwriter Michael Card interprets Peter’s statement as, “...Yes, the scandal is hard to bear and no, I don't understand why you seem to be driving followers away instead of doing what you can to attract them. But I also recognize that you, Jesus, have the words of eternal life and despite all the rest, there is no where else to go. The scandal forces us to make that kind of radical decision, a decision that on face value can look pretty foolish. But the truth of it all is that there is nowhere else to go, and so we believe and we trust...And it is at precisely that point where true faith is born.”[3]
This past week we traveled to Saddleback Church in California – Pastor Rick Warren’s congregation – to learn about a program called Celebrate Recovery. Celebrate Recovery is a program that was developed at Saddleback 11 years ago that is now in 12,000 churches and prisons worldwide.
Celebrate Recovery is a Bible-based twelve-step program to help free people from the decisions and behaviors that hold them back in life, that keep them trapped in dependency. It is not just about substance abuse, although it is about that. It is for people who, like the leaders of the Donner party, have at some time or another have made a reckless choice, to take an unreasonable risk, and who have paid a high price for it ever since; and it is eating them alive.
One in four women is an adult survivor of child sexual abuse. It is widely believed that more women abuse alcohol than men do, often because of depression as a result of long-ago, or ongoing, abuse.
There are those who live in co-dependent relationships. The co-dependent person, whether male or female, is overly involved with their partner, spouse or family member often to their own detriment. The patient becomes a care-taker for the other person and strives to help them be successful, or maintain health and well-being, often enabling the other person’s behavior by putting out fires for them, paying their debts, and taking care of their basic needs. There are a lot of codependent parents of adult children.
There are those people whose adult behavior is scripted by the events of their pasts, not only by overt abuse, but by other wounding events, like guilt over abortion – among both women and men; abandonment, loss and grief; emotions triggered by handling money; even stuttering.
There are men and women who enter into serial marriages, never coming to a place where they realize that they may be choosing mates with different names and faces, but who nevertheless have the same personal characteristics each time.
There are people who think that their mate, or one or another of their parents, is the source of most of their problems in life, or who believe that anyone else is the source of a relationship problem, rather than their own reactions within the relationship because of their personal trigger points.
There are people crippled by anxiety. There are people who have a problem controlling their anger, or people who are in emotional pain, and who mask their stress and suffering with workaholism, shopping, gambling and pornography.
Everybody has something. Like the Donner party, in the world “we must fend for ourselves in an often hostile environment.”[4] And one of the ways we fend for ourselves is to tell ourselves and others who care, that “I’m fine.”
When we live in the place where everything is “fine” – where the things I’ve just described are the disabling characteristics of others, but not ourselves, we not only label those who are suffering as “Those People” who need a program like Celebrate Recovery, we build a wall between ourselves and the grace of God. Because as long as we’re fine, we don’t need the grace of God. As long as we’re fine, we don’t need transformation. As long as we’re fine, we can sit shoulder-to-shoulder in pews beside people we’ve known all our lives – maybe for more than thirty or forty years - and none of us has any idea at all about the suffering of the others because if they tell us how they feel, they might ask us to tell them how we feel.
Being “fine” allows us to stay separated from people who need us to come alongside them to help them work through their problems. Being “fine” keeps us from having to into reciprocal relationships - we can keep them one-way, and we can keep the upper hand, and stay in control.
If you one who thinks, “If they knew what I struggle to hide, if they knew what I’ve done, or what I’m really like, they would think I’m a terrible person, they would leave me,” I ask you, what part of that litany of fear and despair - what part of that list of disabling, anti-social, controlling behaviors that I just recited, do you think anyone finds attractive or desirable?
Why am I talking about this? Why is it anybody’s business but yours? Because God has called me to speak the truth to you, and to myself as well. Trust me, seminaries are FULL of people who haven’t worked through their own issues of dependency, insecurity and anger, and the decline of the many churches can be traced straight back to their patterns of calling pastors who avoid confrontation, who allow secrets to fester, and who don’t make their churches safe places for people to heal and find their way to wholeness.
But a safe church, full of people who have come to Jesus for healing from the wounds of life, is a place where transformation takes place, where families are restored and people reach their full potential. A safe church is a place where festering infections of the heart and spirit can be drained away and where wounded people can expose their hurts to the air. A safe church gives sight to the blind and the lame walk; the dead are raised and those imprisoned and oppressed are freed!
Does this sound to you like what you read in your Bibles? If you think not, remember that Abraham tried to prostitute his wife to another by pretending she was his sister; Jacob was a thief and a con artist who had an unhealthy relationship with his codependent mother and his emotionally distant father. Joseph was abused. Samson was codependent. Moses stuttered. Rahab was a prostitute. Naomi was a grieving widow. Bathsheba was taken in adultery. David was a murderer with emotionally stunted and out-of-control children. Elijah was suicidal and Jeremiah was depressed. Zaccheus was unpopular. Thomas had doubts. Martha was a perfectionist who suffered from anxiety. Peter was impulsive and hot tempered. Paul was an accessory to murder and suffered from poor health. Timothy was painfully shy. Barnabas – the “Encourager” was jealous of Paul and had a church fight over it.
If these people whose stories are recorded in the Bible and translated into more than 2,000 languages for literally all the world to read, then how come your story is a secret? Christian: the Bible won’t let you play nice, the Bible has dirt under its fingernails.
Like the statue in the air of the family on top of snows long melted, the stones at the base of our font are a memorial – they were put there yesterday by the women of Cimarron Presbytery, each stone commemorating an event in a life where God provided for them in a time of trouble, or delivered them out of a trial. These stones represent spouses delivered from alcoholism, babies who didn’t die and babies who did, reconciliation with enemies and reunions with sons and daughters, deliverance through the challenges of cancer, and restoration of sanity. These stones represent lives restored by the transformative body and blood of Christ, taken into ourselves and our spirits, bringing healing and transformation to broken lives, taking secrets hidden in the dark, buried under years of telling ourselves and others “I’m fine,” and exposing them to the light of day where they can be seen for the hard, shriveled, powerless things that they really are.
With Peter, we need to ask, Lord, to whom can we go? And we will hear Jesus’ words that it is the Spirit who gives life, the flesh is useless: we cannot fix ourselves – we are not the answer to our own problems. The answer is waiting for us on the other side of truly trusting the Holy Spirit to do the transforming work of Christ among believers in a safe church.
Dare to be one of “Those People.”
©2009 Deborah Hollifield
[1] Leviticus 3:17; 17:11, 14; Deuteronomy 12:23
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[3] http://www.michaelcard.com/details_product.php?com_type=song&com_id=46
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