Easter Sunday 2002 | John 19:40-20:17

*Preached at Grace North Church March 31st, 2002.*

One of my favorite people in the New Testament is Peter. This is because in the first four books he appears in, Peter comes off as a real dork. Being possessed of a certain dorkliness myself, I relate to Peter. He's loud, brash, often clueless, but so well-meaning that it's hard to fault him. Not that that ever stops Jesus. But of course Jesus would not have chosen him if he didn't immediately see through his shortcomings. Jesus knew something of the potential in Peter. Reading the Gospels, it seems like Jesus just didn't really know how to get at that potential, and it often frustrated him.

That potential eventually does break out, but it doesn't happen in the Gospels. It is in the book of Acts that Peter really begins to shine. This diamond in the rough does eventually get polished, but what is it that does the polishing? How does this good-hearted dunderhead transform into the fearless leader, the skilled orator we encounter in Luke's account of the early church?

Peter in the Gospels and Peter in the Acts of the Apostles form a kind of diptych, a literary "before and after" photo. But what is the hinge? What is the watershed event that transforms him?

Three guesses, and I'll give you a hint.it IS Easter. Very good! The crucifixion and the resurrection-another diptych-is the catalyst that turns our hero Peter from a bumbling fisherman into the leader of the fledgling Christian church.

Let's look at the "before" photo of Peter in the Gospels. Jesus is forever lecturing him, getting ticked off at him, and sometimes even publicly humiliating him. Why? Because Jesus is frustrated. He teaches and teaches, performs miracle after miracle, and Peter just doesn't GET IT. He doesn't understand why Jesus breaks the rules of Jewish law, seemingly at his own whim, he doesn't understand why Jesus doesn't run the other way from trouble, and he certainly doesn't understand Jesus' teachings of peace and non-violence towards his enemies. Peter doesn't understand how the Messiah could be weak, he doesn't get that to truly live you have to die, and he is flumoxxed by Jesus' embracing of untouchables.

Peter doesn't GET Jesus, but it's not for lack of trying. After all, he was a successful business man, who dropped everything, left his wife and family, and started following a penniless itenerate preacher around the country. That's dedication, but it's not what you'd call practical, or anything even resembling a good idea. But that's Peter for you. He tries hard and plays well with others, but he never seems to come home with the gold star on his forehead.

It must have been very hard for Peter when Jesus was killed. All his preconceptions, all his carefully formed ideas about who Jesus was and the point of his ministry came crashing down around his ears. It wasn't just Jesus who died, every notion of who Jesus was and what he was about died with him. Affection might have kept John at the foot of the cross, but Peter's whole world came crashing down that bad Friday, and he can be excused for slinking off and hiding under a rock in my book.

Jesus was dead. And not only that, all of Peter's ideas about Jesus were dead. Peter must have felt like a supreme failure. He had left his family and spent three precious years traipsing around the hills following a fraud. Everything he had believed in during those three years, every hope he had, every ounce of faith he had mustered got nailed to that cross and finished.

Which turns out to be a good thing. It's a good thing because all of Peter's ideas about who Jesus was, and what the messiah was supposed to accomplish were WRONG. Jesus' frustrations were warranted; Peter DIDN'T get it, and the erroneous ideas he held needed to die.

Peter stayed under his rock for three days. Then the impossible happened. Mary is suddenly at his door, she's hysterical, talking nonesense. She says that someone has stolen Jesus' body. This is an unheard of breach of Jewish Law. Peter is outraged, and for a short time he forgets that he is wallowing in self pity and he races John to the tomb.

Soon Jesus appears to Mary, alive, but different. Then he appears to Peter and the rest of the disciples. He is ghostlike, walking through walls, yet he is solid; breathless they feel with their own hands the wounds that finished him. And gradually it dawns on himwho Jesus is. It isn't until Jesus meets with the disciples in the upper room after his resurrection that one of them confesses, "My lord and my God!"

Suddenly all the frustrating things Jesus did and said snapped into place. Suddenly things made much more sense than they did before. You cannot kill God. God is not threatened by the puny armies of men, not even Rome. God does not fear death. God understands the law better than the priests do. Suddenly Jesus is not enigmatic, or crazy, or foolhardy. Suddenly, Peter GETS IT.

A few days later Jesus meets with him again, and charges Peter to feed his sheep. Yes, Peter can do that. Peter understands. Peter is not afraid. Peter is changed.

For it was not just Jesus the man that died on that cross and rose again. Peter's ideas about God, about himself, about his purpose in life died, too, on that day. And only after that death did Peter begin to truly understand God, did he truly GET Jesus, did he truly come into his own.

I remember when I was in third grade, I was terrorized by the idea of hell. I found I couldn't sleep. I was TERRIFIED of God. My mother brought me to see our pastor, who pointed out several scriptures that were supposed to comfort me, to show me that I could never slip out of God's hand, that God's love for me was eternal. But every summer the traveling evangelists would come around, and the hellfire preaching would begin again. And so would my mounting anxiety.

By the time I was a teenager, I was a nervous wreck. I became a religious fanatic to try to stay on the right side of this monstrous, capricious, dangerous deity to which I was bound. But there is no pleasing a despot, and trying drove me to the brink of suicide, and further, into certifiable mental illness. And just when I thought it could get no worse, my religious community turned on me. The radio show on which I preached was deemed "evil" for playing religious pop music, and the youth group to which I belonged was ordered to shun me by my youth pastor. My only friends in the world turned their backs on me that day, and my little world fell apart.

The next few years brought little comfort. I played the church game, but in a very real way, God, for me, had died. I turned to drugs, sex, and rock-n-roll, adopted the agnosticism of my new friends, and despaired. Finally, in the middle of a parking lot at four in the morning, I cried out to whatever power might be. "I cannot accept the God of my parents," I raged at the sky like King Lear, "but if there is someone else there, help me."

Within 24 hours I was presented with a new model of God. I asked my best friend BJ who God was, and he spun a vision of the universe as a vast cosmic dance, in which all the stars, all the planets, the angels and demons, the plants and animals, all knew their steps and danced with wild and glorious abandon. Only humans had forgotten how to dance. Our religious traditions were our feeble attempts to join back in. This God was a process, not a person. This God did not hold judgement over my head, but only whispered one profound, encouraging word: "Dance." Dance, boy! Dance!

I cannot describe how profoundly moved I was by this description. I cried for three days. And my understanding of God changed forever. God was born again in that moment. And so was I. In my own experience, God had been crucified; and then resurrected as a very different being.

St. Paul says, "When I was a child, I thought as a childbut when I became a man, I put away childish things." When I was a child, my God was a projection of my parents. They were Mommy and Daddy writ large. Always hovering, waiting for me to screw up, always poised, ready to punish me.

But God is not my parents. God is not your parents. The ideas we were given about God as children rarely serve us well as adults. And if we attempt to cling to them, it forces on us a dysfunctional neotony. When we grow up, we are no longer children, and even if we do recite the "Our Father," God is not the big Daddy in the sky.

It may be that you have many notions about God that no longer serve you. You may be clinging to ideas about who God is, and what Christianity is about that made sense in sixth grade, but no longer have much relavance at sixty. I want to let you in on a little secret: it is okay to let that God die.

Peter had to do it; he had to let go of Jesus and let him be killed, otherwise the resurrected Christ could never have appeared to him. I had to do it, too. The God of my childhood simply had to go, so that a mature faith could be born from the ashes.

About five hundred years ago, Meister Eckhart said, "I pray that God would rid me of God for the sake of God." What he desired is that God would remove from him every erroneous notion, every preconception, every idea he held about God. Because only then could he begin to understand what the real God is like.

To the children here this morning I want to say that as you grow and change, your understanding of who God is and what God is like will also grow and change. It might be kind of scary sometimes when one of your ideas about God changes, but it is completely normal, and it will be okay so long as you are aware that God is changing, and can LET him change and grow.

To the adults in the congregation, I want to ask you a question: Has your God died yet? Are you holding on to ideas, fantasies, and fears about God that are rooted more in your childhood than in your adult life? If so, I invite you to nail that God to the cross with that guy Peter THOUGHT was Jesus. Let him die, and say "good riddance."

For if you can do that, a wonderful surprise awaits you. If you can do that, the real God will be liberated, and will liberate you. For it is not just we who need to be born again. God, too, needs to be saved. God, too, needs to be ressurected. But first, you have to be willing to let him die. Let us pray
God of the despairing, and God of dancers
We do you no favors when we cling to those images that keep you distant, that keep us perpetual children, that keep us separated from you by dogma or guilt or shame. Help us to pray, with Meister Eckhart, to be rid of those images which distort your loving presence to us, so that we can make room in our hearts for the real you. For what good does it do us if Christ was crucified and resurrected two thousand years ago, if he is not likewise crucified and resurrected in us? Die, God, so that you can live. And so that we can live, and do so with abundance. For we ask this in the name of the one who showed us that everyone, even you, must lose their life to find it, even Jesus Christ. Amen.