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Twinbrook Baptist Church Rockville, MD Ordinary Time September 17, 2006 Pastor: Kip Ingram |
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Have you heard of the Darwin Awards? They are named after Charles Darwin, the scientist who taught that all species evolve and progress through history by their ability to adapt and survive. Those who don´t adapt don´t survive. The Darwin Awards, which has a huge web site and a successful book, recognize human beings who display a remarkable ability not to survive and adapt to their circumstances. In other words, they do really stupid things and end up hurt or removed from the human herd altogether. One recent submission for the Darwin was on behalf of a man from Bloomington, Ind., who was with others at a drinking party outside early one Saturday morning. He got the brilliant idea that he would shoot off a mortar-style firework. So he taped it to an old football helmet with duct tape. And then he had the brilliant idea of putting the helmet on his head to fire it. His girlfriend told police that when he ignited the firework, she saw a large flash, then saw her boyfriend on the ground, the helmet destroyed from the blast. He was taken to the hospital and treated for burns, lacerations and a concussion. There is a wonderful quote at the bottom of the Darwin web site: ”Human beings, almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experiences of others, are remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.” Shakespeare wrote: ”What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form, in moving, how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!” And yet, we´ve all seen America´s Funniest Home Videos, where someone tries a silly stunt and you can almost see what´s coming as that person crashes or falls or doubles over in pain and regret. We human beings are ”a piece of work,” aren´t we? We can be one thing at one moment and something seemingly opposite the next. We are a study in contrasts, it seems. And this is true of us not just in silly or trivial moments. It colors everything we do, including our relationships, our moral aspirations and our faith. Take a look at Peter in our gospel story today. Jesus is walking along with his disciples, and he asks them an interesting question: ”who do people say that I am?” And the disciples responded: ”Some say John the Baptist or Elijah returned, while others say Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” But then Jesus asks them: ”Who do you say that I am?” And Peter answered: ”You are the Messiah, the son of the living God.” Well, when Jesus heard this, he turned to Peter and singled him out with a blessing. Jesus tells him that he is right on the mark and that only God could have revealed this to him. You talk about being recognized and appreciated for an insight! Peter achieved the dream of every aspiring business person seated at a boardroom table, hoping to say something that will impress the boss. He gets a spiritual slap on the back while the others can only look on. He´s on his way up, spiritually speaking, headed for great things. You can almost hear him thinking about his advancement: would this insight establish him as assistant Messiah or only assistant to the Messiah? Regardless of what Peter is thinking, Jesus does single him out as offering some profound insight into what Jesus was about with God´s purposes. It is a high and holy moment. And yet, not long afterward, Jesus is sharing with the disciples his plans about going to Jerusalem to suffer and die at the hands of the leaders there. Suddenly, Peter pulls him aside and begins to rebuke him: ”This must never happen to you! I forbid it and so does God!” He doesn´t want Jesus as God´s special person to be exposed to suffering and death like any other human being. It seems Peter, after the earlier episode, feels like he has an inside track on God´s purposes. But Jesus rebukes Peter, not indirectly, not lightly, but in the strongest terms. ”Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me, and you are not mindful of God´s purposes.” When Jesus says this, we learn in Mark=s gospel that he turns toward the disciples while turning his back on Peter. Peter got behind him alright, because Jesus turned his back to him, and in doing so, put Peter in the spiritual doghouse. So here we have two close episodes in the life of Peter, follower of Jesus. Which one is really Peter? Is he the insightful spokesman for God or the unwitting spokesman for Satan? Is he the faithful follower of Jesus or the guy who just doesn´t quite get it? Is he the kind of person who will make for a future leader of the church or the kind of person who will deny knowing Jesus? Which one is really Peter? Well, in all honesty, they both are. Like all of us, Peter is neither an angel nor a devil. Like all of us, Peter is a human being, living with his aspirations and struggles, his faith and his faults, his wise foresight and his awkward foolishness. Do you know the word ”ambiguity”? It means literally to amble or walk around something, to see it from more than one perspective. If something is ambiguous it has more than one side to it, whether we are talking about an event, a story or a person. Ambiguity is part of the human condition. We all of us have more than one side to us. And like Peter, sometimes we can feel the painful distance between one side and another in our living. Sometimes the contrast is between our ideals and our failures, sometimes it is between our moments of faith and of sin, sometimes it is merely between clarity and making mistakes. But we all feel our ambiguous self, acutely at times. Maybe it is the ambiguity of wanting to be our most faithful, positive self at work and then getting really upset or frustrated about something which results in a blowup. Maybe it is the feeling of being untrue to our deepest convictions in a moment of pressure. Maybe it is saying something we later find we regret. Like Peter, we all have two sides or more to deal with. There is an interesting Peanuts cartoon strip which starts in the first frame with Charlie Brown standing on the pitcher´s mound with his hat and baseball glove on. He says in the caption: ”Boy, I must be stupid to stand out here and take a beating like this!” In the next frame, his friend Linus has walked up to him, so Charlie Brown says to him: ”My team hates me. I´m a lousy pitcher, my stomach hurts . . . I don´t know why I play this game. I must really be stupid!” In the next frame Linus says to him in response: ”Charlie Brown, You can´t go on like this. You´ve got to change your atttitude! The years are going by and you´re not enjoying life at all!” In the next frame Linus continues: ”Just remember Charlie Brown . . . The moments you spend out here on this pitcher´s mound are moments to be treasured!” And in the next frame Linus concludes as he walks away: ”We´re not going to be kids forever, Charlie Brown, so treasure these moments . . .” In the next frame we see Charlie Brown leaning forward with renewed determination on his face. In the next frame, he lifts his leg and brings back his pitching arm to throw the ball. In the next frame, he has thrown the ball, with his arm following through. In the next frame: ”Pow” . . . Charlie Brown has been knocked upside down in the midair by a ball that has been so hard that it knocks off his glove, his hat, his socks, his shoes and his shirt. Finally, in the last frame, Charlie Brown is lying in his shorts on his back looking up, and he says: ”This is a difficult moment to treasure.” Charlie Brown, it seems, struggles with his ambiguous life. He struggles between despair over ever being a good pitcher and high hopes for being the kind of person that people will admire and that he himself can feel good about. Whenever he tries, though, he seems inevitably to get knocked off his feet. We all have those difficult moments that knock us off our feetBsometimes they are profound and tragic, sometimes they are part of our own unique responses to our lives. I remember a conversation I once had with my father. He came to a vital Christian faith in his later years, seeking to live out his faith toward the best he knew. I remember him lamenting to me one time about how he could be in a really wonderful frame of mind. ”Feeling close to God” was how he put it. And then after watching a football game on TV, particularly if his team lost, he would lose his perspective and be in a lousy attitude for a time afterward. It felt to him like God went out the window. He honestly struggled about those two sides of his ambiguous life. The novelist and humorist, Frederich Buechner, captures the sense of his ambiguous life using a little hyperbole and honest confession: ”I am a part-time novelist who happens also to be a part-time Christian because part of the time seems to be the most I can manage to live out my faith: Christian part of the time when certain things seem real and important to me and the rest of the time not Christian in any sense that I can believe matters much to Christ or anybody else. Any Christian who is not a hero, Leon Bloy, wrote, is a pig, which is a harder way of saying the same thing. From time to time I find a kind of heroism momentarily possible-a seeing, doing, telling of Christly truth-but most of the time I am indistinguishable from the rest of the herd that jostles and snuffles at the great trough of life. Part-time novelist, Christian, pig. That is who I am” Well, as people of faith, what do we do in the face of our ambiguous lives? The Christian ethicist, Reinhold Niebuhr, said that it is hard to acknowledge the reality of our ambiguity. Either we let ourselves see only the good side and live with naive illusion, refusing to see the full picture, or we look at the struggles and conflicts and give in to despair that things will ever get any better. What we need is something that transcends our ambiguous existence, something we can count on when the days of our experience are either good or bad or some mixture. What we need is someone who loves us, just as we are, someone who is there for us, morning by morning with great faithfulness. Someone we can rejoice with when things are going well; someone we can turn to in the struggles. We can acknowledge and tell the truth about our ambiguous lives because there is a God who loves and accepts us. But as important and meaningful as acceptance is, it is not the whole story for us. God loves us, to be sure, but God also has hopes for us, for what we can be--not perfect, but participants in the work of God in the world. This is what Jesus tells Peter when he says, ”I will give you the keys of the kingdom, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven.” In other words, what you do will have a sacred power and purpose to it. Our lives may be ambiguous and they will never be perfect in our living, but there is hope for each one of us to be participants in the work of God, to do wonderful things as we follow the way of Christ. We are sometimes tempted to think that God can only use us if we are somehow saintly and perfect, if we never make mistakes or destructive choices of sin, but the Bible is full of very imperfect people, like Peter, who find love and hope with God, even in their ambiguous lives It is also good to be patient with others and with ourselves, knowing that the people around us are not all-good or all-bad. Our children are not perfect, but neither are they the worst kids in the world. The same goes for our parents, our spouses, our other family members. We could add to this list our teachers, our co-workers, our doctor, our friend, the minister. There is a kind of Godly wisdom in being able to see someone truly as she or he is, warts and all, and still finding and encouraging the good in that person. And there is a kind of Godly grace in being able to see and accept ourselves truly, warts and all, and still working toward the good to which God calls us. Many centuries ago, the writer of the 8th Psalm said to God: ”when I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them . . . yet you have made them a little lower than angels and crowned them with glory and honor.” That´s us. Not divine, not perfect, but honored by a loving God and created in hope for good things. So we live with ambiguity and with hope, trusting the One who made us to walk with us each step of our journey. i. Found in Robert Short, The Parables of Peanuts (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 233-34. ii. Frederick Buechner, The Alphabet of Grace (New York: Seabury Press, 1970), v. iii. Langdon Gilkey, On Niebuhr: A Theological Study (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2001), 16-18. |
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