Dr. Mark Owen Fenstermacher FIGURING OUT FORGIVENESS: Risking Real February 9, 2014 Matthew 16:13-28 First United Methodist Church 219 E. 4 th Street Bloomington, IN 47408 A resident of Manhattan was saying, a few weeks ago in the New York Times, that her mother - who moved here from the Ukraine about fifteen years ago- hasn t figured out we Americans greet one another. When someone meets her and says, How are you? she actually tells them! She hasn t yet learned that the proper answer is, Fine. So they ll be getting into an elevator, coming back to their apartment from the grocery store, and a stranger will say to her 78 year old mother, How are you? And she will say something like, Oh, life is hard. It s not easy getting old. My muscles ache and I move slow and you lose friends. Life gets harder as you get old. The stranger who has asked the question How are you? of the little woman standing in front of him, looks stunned. Anxious. People aren t sure how to respond, the guest columnist in The Times wrote. They stare at the floor or they reach out and push the button for their floor multiple times. In Russia, the journalist says, people take some pride in being brutally honest about the challenges they face and the hardships they have to endure every day. You ask them How are you? and you will get a very negative answer. We like to pretend, in America, that we are always fine. In Russia, on the other hand, people take some measure of pride in how difficult life is and all they are asked to endure. There is, I suppose, some measure of encouragement in knowing others understand your challenges. Your burdens and your joys. And that they don t turn away when you tell them about them! The guest columnist in The Times says she is still trying to teach her mother to answer the question How are you? with the single word answer, Fine. That s all they want to know, Mom, she says. We re continuing our series of messages on forgiveness today. And for some reason I chose this scene from Matthew 16 as the text. All week long I have struggled to figure out why I thought this moment in Caesarea Philippi, when Jesus and Simon Peter get into a heated argument, has anything to do with forgiveness and grace. Maybe you can help me figure this out. So here is the story: Jesus and his disciples are in the district of Caesarea Philippi. The city is located on a terrace 1,150 feet above sea level looking out over the northern end of the Jordan Valley. It is watered by a 1
spring located in nearby cave. The water from that spring, actually, is one of the sources of the Jordan River. The area was known, in the eastern end of the Roman Empire, for all sorts of temples dedicated to all sorts of gods. One of the best known pagan shrines or worship places was located in the cave with the spring. The Greeks dedicated that worship place to Pan and the Nymphs. The area was also a center of worship for the Canaanite fertility god Baal. Herod the Great dedicated a temple there to Augustus. Everywhere Jesus and the disciples look, there is a worship place or temple dedicated to another god. Jesus chooses that place to ask his friends, Who do people say that the Son of Man is? At some point, when you are surrounding by all sorts of claims about different gods, different experiences of the divine, different expressions of truth and ultimate reality, you have to make a decision, right? Those of you on campus know that. You re surrounded by different shrines to different gods. You have people telling you about all sorts of Gods and ways to experience God. So Jesus and his disciples are surrounded by all these shrines with their claims about different gods, and he asks them the question, What do people say that the Son of Man is? (Jesus, by the way, often would refer to himself by using the phrase Son of Man. ) The disciples speak up. Some say John the Baptist (come back to life), and some say you are the second coming of the prophet Elijah, and still others say you are a modern-day Jeremiah or one of the other prophets. The disciples are repeating what they have heard other people say. Then, Jesus asks the question, But who do you say that I am? Simon Peter sees who Jesus is. Simon Peter gets it. He makes the connection. And he says, You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God. I need to tell you something I ve said before: faith comes as a gift. You believe or not. You trust or not. You decide that either Jesus is the face of God, the voice of God, the truth and grace of God in the flesh, or you don t. One night Sharon was pointing out the constellations to me. I didn t get what she was saying. I didn t see what she was seeing. She was talking about a belt buckle. She was telling me that a group of stars formed a bow. I didn t get it. I looked and didn t get it. And then I glanced up at the sky, after I had stopped trying to see it, and I saw the belt buckle and the bow. Jesus says to Simon Peter, Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church. This faith, this conviction, has come to Peter as a gift from God, Jesus is saying. And it is on this conviction, this faith, this trust, that the church will be built. 2
Jesus then talks about going to Jerusalem, undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and the chief priests and scribes, and be killed. On the third day he will be raised from death. Peter is shocked. This is certainly not how the story of Jesus is supposed to end. Someone this good, someone this true, a movement this beautiful and powerful, shouldn t get crushed. The rascals and cheats and power hungry shouldn t be able to take someone like Jesus, this friend Simon Peter loves more than words can say, and silence him crush him. No! No! No! Peter pulls Jesus away from the other disciples to, Matthew says, rebuke him. The word rebuke is a strong word. It suggests there was yelling. Strong language. This must never happen to you! Peter shouts. Jesus spins around and calls Peter the devil. Get behind me, Satan! he says. You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things. It s rather shocking. Some people want God to be always in control, always restrained, a stranger to anger or fear or sadness or laughter. They want a brilliant, controlling-the-cosmos, always emotionally neutral God. But here we see the Messiah, the eternal Word made flesh, cursing his friend calling him the devil. This is a heated exchange. It is an argument that is, in its intensity, sharp violent. Jesus and Simon Peter see this decision very differently. Their disagreement is passionate and deep. And yet both aren t afraid to say what they feel, say what they think. I wonder how many of the other disciples, the other people in the crowd, thought the same thing Simon Peter thought, but they wouldn t say it? There had to be other disciples, other followers, who were thinking, I signed up to fish for people. I signed up to catch people in God s net of grace and truth. I signed up to help you feed the hungry, and bless the children, and heal the broken. I signed up to take on the Romans and throw the rascals out of city hall, but I didn t sign up for a cross.i don t want you or any of us to get near a cross, Jesus. A few of them have got to be thinking that or maybe most of them are thinking that? Simon Peter, though, says it. He lets Jesus see what he is thinking...feeling. Simon Peter is transparent. He loves Jesus so much, and he trusts the love Jesus has for him so completely, that he risks being real with Jesus. He doesn t pretend. Truth is if this kind of moment happened in a lot of relationships, the relationship would end. The friendship or family or church relationship wouldn t survive. Aren t you more than just a little surprised, after this exchange up at Caesarea Philippi, that Jesus and Simon Peter keep traveling together? 3
Because this kind of disagreement, this kind of name-calling, these kinds of competing visions about life and the mission and the way forward, often break a relationship wide open. Ends things. ++++ Honestly, I m not sure why I chose this text from Matthew 16 to use for a sermon on forgiveness. Why did I think of that moment on the road when Jesus and Simon Peter are yelling at one another in the kind of argument that sometimes ends friendships? What does that -what does the relationship Simon Peter and Jesus have- say to us about forgiveness? Maybe it has something to do with our tendency to move through relationships -with the people around us or with God- pretending. Never saying what we really think. Never admitting what we really feel. Never telling a soul what we re afraid of. Never sharing our deepest hopes or dreams. We spend a lot of energy holding up these masks in front of our faces so that no one will figure out who we really are and where we really are and what we love and what we hate and what we re struggling with. And for a lot of us the last place in the world where we can be real, where we say what we are really thinking or feeling or fearing or dreaming, is the church. One of my best friends is a pastor and a therapist. He told me one day, when we were having lunch, that he thought I was remarkably open letting the world see 85% of who I am. But he also said he thought I keep the last 15% hidden from almost everyone. Maybe he s right. Maybe keeping 15% of who we are hidden is a part of what it means to have healthy boundaries. And then again maybe part of the reason we keep that last 15% hidden is because we re not sure anyone -even God- could handle or love or forgive the real us. Or maybe we hide who we are and what we re thinking because we re scared of conflict. And when people are real with one another there is going to be conflict. Healthy, thinking, living people are going to see things differently. They re going to feel things differently. They re going to have different ways of solving the same problems. It is tempting to tip-toe through life, through relationships, doing everything we can to keep the peace even if that means hiding who we are and what we think and what we re feeling. The problem with peace built on hiding and pretending is it really isn t peace. It is false peace. The Hebrew prophets spoke about false prophets who went around saying Peace, peace when there wasn t peace. Real peace happens when we are real, when people work through issues and challenges honestly, not when we run and hide and pretend. For much of the early third or half of my adult life, conflict of almost any kind made me very anxious. I grew up in a home where people really didn t fight. When my Mom and Dad would get into a rather loud conversation, not seeing eye-to-eye on a particular issue, I would ask, Are you guys fighting? Their answer was usually, No, we re not fighting. We re having a conversation. 4
So we didn t fight in our family. Christians were better than that. We were beyond that. So there wasn t a lot of open conflict in our family. But here is the thing: when people were hurt, and they didn t speak about that hurt, the wound lingered. Little things had this way of hurting for a long, long time. But we would avoid talking about them. Avoid risking the anxiety and mess that comes with conflict. During one chapter in my ministry a pastor on our church staff and I were tip-toeing around one another. I wasn t sure he was doing what we had agreed needed to be done, but he was a friend. And I didn t want to embarrass him or harm our relationship. So I kept my mouth shut and did my best and pretended we were good. And then, one day in a staff meeting, he surprised me by apologizing to me in front of the staff for agreeing with me to do things and then going off and doing what he wanted. We were all shocked by his apology to me. It wasn t expected. After the meeting, though, he and I closed the door and we began to say things to one another we should have said months or years before. It wasn t easy for us to say or hear. But that open conflict led to healing and grace. That honest conflict, well handled, worked through, led to a great chapter in our lives. Not only does pretending, hiding, get in the way of genuine peace but it gets in the way of genuine relationships. My friend the therapist says conflict is a step towards genuine intimacy. We can t have a genuine relationship without having times of conflict. And pretending, swallowing what we think rather than speaking it, hiding our wounds and our dreams, keeps us from experiencing grace and forgiveness. If we are always working to only show our idealized self to the world and others, then forgiveness is like a package that never reaches our true address. How can we experience grace if we are never real? People may forgive us and we may forgive others, but if we are hiding our true self then who is being forgiven? Perhaps the reason we ended up in Matthew 16, watching Simon Peter and Jesus rebuking one another out there on the road, is because I see something healthy in that kind of honesty, that kind of conflict, that kind of willingness to be real with one another. And I wonder if we love one another with the kind of love that is robust enough, persistent enough, to work through the hard stuff and let the people around us be honest about who they really are and what they really think and what they really fear and what they really hope for. Maybe the reason we ended up out on the road with Jesus and Simon Peter, growling and muttering at one another, is because most of us ache for the kind of love that will set us free to be real. Instead of that heated argument at Caesarea Philippi ending the relationship between Simon Peter and Jesus, the relationship endures. It grows. Simon Peter argues with Jesus about heading to Jerusalem and enduring the cross, but the relationship endures. 5
Simon Peter, asked by Jesus to accompany him into the garden of Gethsemane and pray, falls asleep. The relationship endures. Simon Peter, even though he is warned by Jesus that he is going to deny knowing Jesus three times, does just that as he warms himself by a charcoal fire outside the high priest s house while Jesus is on trial. Three times he is asked if he is with Jesus, three times he denies even knowing Jesus, and then the rooster crows. Simon Peter, when Jesus is marched out of the city, carrying a cross beam across his bloodied shoulders, is nowhere to be seen. John tells us there are three or four women near the cross, and there is one unnamed male disciple. He is referred to as the disciple Jesus loved. Scholars believe the unnamed disciple near the cross was John. Simon Peter is nowhere to be found. They re friends. They re brothers. Simon Peter is the one who stepped out of the boat and tried to walk to Jesus on the water, and Jesus caught him when his friend began to slip beneath the water. Simon Peter was one of the three disciples Jesus took with him when Jesus went mountain climbing. They re friends. They re brothers. But when Jesus looks up, through eyes dulled by unspeakable pain, he studies the crowd, looking for the face of his friend, and his friend is missing. The face of his friend, those eyes, will help him get through this awful day, but Simon Peter is nowhere to be found. The Rock is missing. The relationship endures. Jesus doesn t give up on Simon Peter. In fact, if you look at the 21 st chapter of John, this is one of the last stories we have about Jesus and Simon Peter. This story tells you something about forgiveness love grace. Let s look back at the 21 st chapter of The Gospel of John. In the scene, here at the end of the Gospel, we see the disciples of Jesus. Not all of them but seven of the followers of Jesus have gone from Jerusalem up north to Galilee. Back to the lake they know so well. Of the seven -they are Simon Peter, Thomas the Twin, Nathanael of Cana, the sons of Zebedee (that would be James and John), and two unnamed others- we know four of them were professional fishermen before Jesus invited them into a life of catching people with God s truth and grace. So the seven of them head north to the places they know so well. Which is what we do when the world doesn t make much sense, and everything seems upside-down. The seven -four of whom at least were once professional fishermen- head up to Galilee. Simon Peter tells the other six, I m going fishing. They decide that is a good idea and they head out with him. The group fishes all night and they catch nothing. Which is the sort of the way it has been for them, lately. Nothing seems to be working for them. 6
Everything is upside-down. It feels to them like the cosmos, life, has become a puzzle no one can figure out! Jesus enters the city and the crowds cheer him like a conquering king. A few days later one of his best friends betrays him. Their friend is nailed to a cross. His body is placed in a tomb donated by a quiet admirer. Three days later the women discover the tomb is empty. Mary tells people about the gardener, near the tomb, who turned out to be Jesus. There is the night they were in the room in Jerusalem, with the doors locked against a visit from the Temple police, and Jesus showed up. Showed them the nail prints in his hands and the wound in his side left by the sword. He gave them a blessing, prayed God s peace into their troubled lives, and then he was gone. gone. He s alive. He s dead. He s in the tomb he s not. He s in the room with them. He s suddenly So they have fished all night and they have nothing. None of it makes sense. What s going on? What is God up to? What do they do next? So they go fishing, all night long, and catch nothing. At dawn the next morning they look across the water to see a stranger standing on the beach. The stranger shouts out, Children, you have no fish, have you? The stranger tells the seven fishermen to throw their net to the right side of the boat. They figure, Why not? Nothing we ve tried all night has worked. We ve got nothing to lose. So they toss the net over the right side of the boat and suddenly the net is full of fish. Simon Peter figures it out, first. Simon Peter realizes that the stranger standing on the beach is Jesus. It s the Lord! he shouts to the others. Simon Peter has taken his clothes off to fish, and now he gets dressed in a hurry. Then, fully clothed, he dives into the water and swims the hundred yards to shore. He can t wait to get face-to-face with Jesus. Jesus has a charcoal fire going. He is cooking fish and bread for his friends breakfast. The Nazarene tells his friends, the disciples, to bring some of the fish they have caught and add it to the breakfast. Then, Jesus says, Come and have breakfast. 7
They have breakfast and then Jesus pulls Simon Peter off to the side. The two of them just the two of them take a walk. Jesus asks Simon, three times, if Simon Peter loves Jesus. Each time Simon says, Yes, Lord, you know that I love you. Jesus responds by saying, Feed my sheep tend my sheep. Jesus is giving Simon Peter the opportunity, three times, to express his love for his friend and teacher and Lord as a way of moving beyond that night just a few days before when Simon denied - three times- even knowing Jesus. It s a put-right moment. The whole scene is amazing. Jesus never mentions the night Simon Peter, in Jerusalem, while Jesus was on trial, denied knowing him. Jesus never mentions the night that Peter was intimidated by a servant girl s question. Jesus never says, I thought you were a Rock, a Cephas, and then under pressure you fell apart you turned into sand. Jesus never says that. He simply shows up. Jesus shows up early in the morning. And it s as if Simon Peter s moment of failure in the courtyard in Jerusalem doesn t matter anymore. Forgiveness turns Peter away from the failure and towards God s next, good thing. And maybe there are two last reasons we ended up where we ended up today. Maybe God wanted us to look at some of the scenes in the relationship Jesus and Simon Peter had with one another because when the subject of forgiveness comes up, we spend a significant amount of energy trying to decide if others deserve our forgiveness. Have they suffered long enough? Have they expressed the appropriate kind of remorse? Have they proven that they are beyond failing us in the way they have failed us in the past? Have they made things right and cleaned every part of the mess their sinfulness or rebellion or unkindness caused? Maybe the story of Simon Peter can free us from the work of trying to decide if someone else deserves our forgiveness? Walking through the story of that fisherman s life, this week, was a reminder that Simon Peter never seemed to get it all together. And he kept messing up. Which doesn t excuse a lifetime of intentional, deliberate sin or unkindness on his part or our part, but I was struck by what a mess he was. Jesus shows up at the Sea of Galilee, tells Simon Peter where to find fish, prepares breakfast for him, and then never mentions the failure in the courtyard of the priest s house. It s not about working hard to decide whether others deserve our forgiveness. Because Simon Peter doesn t deserve the forgiveness of Jesus, and neither do we. And still it comes as a gift. And maybe the Spirit of God led us to the story of Simon Peter and Jesus to invite you to accept this gift of love of forgiveness from God. Forgiveness is a tough thing to accept. Grace can be a hard thing to hold. 8
Forgiveness can be a difficult thing to receive to let in deep. If God knew the mess inside, and the messes I have created along the way, we tell ourselves, God would never love me forgive me claim me. God would leave me out there on the road near Caesarea Philippi. But Jesus knew the mess that was Simon Peter. And Jesus still shows up at the Sea of Galilee early in the morning. So perhaps we revisited the story of Simon Peter and Jesus because God wanted you to see that Simon is forgiven. And you might know that you, too, can be forgiven. Maybe the reason we ended up out on the road with Jesus and Simon Peter, growling and muttering at one another, is because most of us ache for the kind of love that will set us free to be real forgiveness that meets us as we are. That is how Jesus loves and forgives Peter and how Jesus loves and forgives us. So risk real. (What would that look like in your life?) Grace is real. God s love is big enough to set us free to risk real. 9