“If You Love Me…”
A sermon by Lanny Peters, pastor
Oakhurst Baptist Church, Decatur, Georgia
May 1, 2005 (Sixth Sunday of Easter)
John 21: 15-19
Garrison Keiler has a story about one of the residents in his town of Lake Wobegon named Larry who was saved twelve times. This was a record in his church. What made it even more remarkable was that Larry belonged to the Lutheran Church, which, unlike several other churches in town, did not even give altar calls. There wasn’t even an organ playing “Just as I Am without One Plea” in the background. Regardless of that, between 1953 and 1961, Larry Sorenson came forward twelve times, weeping buckets and crumpled up at the communion rail. Each time this shocked his minister. The last time it happened was when the pastor had just delivered a dry sermon on something like stewardship. The minister needed to put his arm around Larry, pray with him and be certain he had a way to get home. “Even we fundamentalists got tired of him,” Keilor concludes.
A lot of us here, probably a large majority even, grew up feeling a lot of guilt. Guilt is not all bad; it keeps us from all sorts of antisocial behavior. But it is probably not the motivator that many parents and many preachers seem to think it is. In fact, guilt may even serve to keep us from true repentance and lasting change. In Barbara Brown Taylor’s book, Speaking of Sin, she writes, “…most of us prefer remorse to repentance. We would rather say, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I feel really, really awful about what I have done’ than actually start doing things differently. …the guilt itself is so exhausting that it drives us right back into the arms of our sins, which may provide us with our only reliable comfort.” Speaking of Sin, the Lost Language of Salvation (Boston: Cowley Publications, 2001), 66.
The idea of repentance was central to Jesus’ teaching. In the gospel of Mark, Jesus’ first words are, “The time is fulfilled, and the realm of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news.” (1:14b) Notice that he did not begin with the bad news about our sin and guilt, but the good news that was worth turning toward. We see that at the beginning of Mark, the oldest gospel written, and again here at the conclusion of John, the last gospel written.
When I last preached two weeks ago, the scene ended with Jesus and the disciples enjoying a breakfast that the risen Christ had cooked up for them on the beach. When they finished breakfast, Jesus turns to Peter and says, “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?” It must have been a poignant moment. After all, it was Peter who had denied him three times the night of his crucifixion. It is not clear what “these” refers to, his friends maybe, food perhaps, the security of home, possibly. It’s hard to say, really, just as it would be hard to say for ourselves if Jesus asked us, “Do you love me more than these?” It would be a difficult question for me to look Jesus in the face and answer. I would have to look around my life at all the things that give me security, and it would give me pause. But not Peter. Without hesitation, he says, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” And in a sense Peter speaks for all of us who want so badly to follow Christ, but also know how often we do so inconsistently and halfheartedly. Peter knows that he is totally dependent on Jesus’ forgiveness. You know Lord that I wanted to be there when you were murdered, but I was too scared.
So Jesus asks him again, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” And Peter answers once again and probably more emphatically, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” Jesus says, “Tend my sheep.”
Then Jesus asks him yet a third time, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?”
Jesus asks Peter three times to give him an opportunity to reverse his three denials, which is a gracious thing for Jesus to do. I think Jesus is also trying to get Peter to go a little deeper each time. Let me give you an example. The next time you are with a good friend ask, “How are you?” They’ll probably say something like, “Oh fine, thanks.” But then look them in the eye and ask again as if you mean it, “How are you, really?” and they’ll begin to tell you the truth. And if you hear some pain or even some joy being described, tell them you would like to hear all about it and sit down with them as if you have nowhere else to be except with them and ask again, “Now, how are you?” and enjoy an afternoon of intimacy.
Peter says “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” Jesus said, “Feed my sheep.” Jesus said it three times so Peter and the church he would help found would get it. But it’s amazing how often we don’t. When I was growing up, over and over I was told that the major goal for us was to love Jesus. We sang lots of songs like, “Oh, How I Love Jesus.” It’s easy to love Jesus; it’s loving each other, especially our enemies, that is difficult.
God did not send Jesus son into the world only to get our love. God is not that insecure and needy. Jesus was a gift because God so loved the world and through Christ God wanted us to love the world and each other. Jesus summarized this when he said, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you shall love one another. By this everyone shall know that you are my disciples, that you love one another.” (John 13:34)
“Do you love me,” Jesus asks. We answer, “Yes Lord, you know we do.” He smiles and says, “Feed my lambs.” That is, take care of my children. “Do you love me?” Jesus asks. “Yes Lord, you know we do.” Then tend my sheep. That is, love one another here in this place as I have loved you. “Do you love me”, Jesus asks, a third time. “Yes, Lord, you know everything, you know we do.” Then feed my sheep. That is, look for me in the face of a stranger, a hungry child, a person who is homeless. Look for me on the streets and in the workplace and at your school, and reach out in love, as I have loved you. Jesus offered Peter what he offers us over and over, even when we fail to love, that is, forgiveness, another chance, a fresh start.
This reminds me of another breakfast not long ago. I am thinking of the breakfast that Ashley Smith fixed for Brian Nichols after her nightlong ordeal. Of all that was written about that, one of the most profound reflections came from Andrew Sullivan in Time magazine. He writes,
We latch onto this story not just because it's a riveting end to a high-stakes manhunt. We find ourselves transfixed and uplifted by the sordid ordinariness of it all. He was an alleged rapist and murderer. She was tied up in a bathtub, clinging to the wreckage of a life that was barely afloat. One was a monster, the other a woman unable to care for her 5-year-old, looking for cigarettes in the dark. And out of that came something, well, beautiful. He saw his purpose: to serve God in prison, to turn his life around, even as it may have been saturated in the blood and pain of others. She saw hers: to make that happen. These people weren't saints. Grace arrives, unannounced, in lives that least expect or deserve it.
I say that as a believer. The crimes Nichols is suspected of are inexcusable. The serenity of Smith is close to inexplicable. But the message of the Gospels is that God works with the crooked timber of human failure.
That was an exceptional moment of redemption. But every day we have smaller, calmer chances to turn another's life around, to serve, to listen. How often do we simply not see what is in front of us?
How often do we believe that the world's evils--from terrorism to crime to emotional cruelty--are beyond our capacity to change? Or that there is no one in front of us whom we can serve? Smith and Nichols' story is a chastening reminder that we may be wrong.
There's a line in a Leonard Cohen song that has always stayed with me. It kept me going in a bleak moment in my life, when I thought, as we all sometimes do, that I couldn't see how good could come out of the dreck I had turned my life into. "Forget your perfect offering," Cohen advises. "There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.
Peter had shown himself to be a person with lots of cracks, impulsive, egotistical, uncourageous. Jesus saw all that from the moment he called him. But Jesus did not focus on that, for he also saw in Peter warm-heartedness, enthusiasm, and most of all, a person capable of modeling the love of Christ for others.
In fact, Jesus makes an amazing prediction. He says to Peter, when you were young you fastened your own belt and went wherever you wished. But someday, someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not want to go. The story ends with Jesus saying to Peter, “Follow me.” And that is exactly what Peter would do. Tradition says that Peter would later be cruelly crucified just as Jesus was. Just as the Good Shepherd laid down his life, so would the one who tended his sheep. It is a dangerous mission to follow Jesus. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Archbishop Oscar Romero are some of the most well known examples of those who gave up their life to follow the way of love. Recently it was a little known woman named Marla Ruzicka. Young, blonde, relentlessly buoyant and sometimes giggly, the battle-weary journalists in Iraq nicknamed her "Bubbles" in the early days, uncertain what to make of this gregarious life force that had dropped in their midst. Time correspondent Simon Robinson wrote of her,
In Kabul and Baghdad during the past few years, Marla was the life of the party. She would rent a house for a day, arrange food and drink and then fire off e-mails to friends and colleagues inviting us to a celebration that sometimes ended with a display of her enviable salsa-dancing skills.
But behind her party girl attitude and surfer-girl looks was a fearsome determination and astonishing compassion, qualities that were instrumental in her securing millions of dollars in aid money from the U.S. government last year to help the victims of American bombing in Afghanistan and Iraq…. Fiercely anti-war, she was savvy enough to understand that she probably couldn't stop conflicts but that she could help their victims.”
She pushed for an accurate count of civilian casualties. At a time when the International Committee of the Red Cross and United Nations were leaving Iraq, Marla started the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict.
Marla and her longtime Iraqi aide and driver Faiz Ali Salim, 43, were killed on April 16 when their car was tragically caught between a suicide car bomber and a US military convoy. Christian Science correspondent Jill Carroll said, “When she died Marla was traveling to visit some of the many Iraqi families she was working to help. Lately, she had been attempting to aid the relatives of a toddler whose parents were killed after the mini-bus they were traveling in was hit by what was believed to be an American rocket. The baby was thrown out of a window to save her life.
The only thing we can say now is at least she died doing what she wanted, doing what she really, really believed in. If she were still here, she'd be most worried now about her driver's family and who will take care of all the other Iraqi families she was working with. She would point out, this happens to Iraqis every day and no one notices or even cares. There are no newspaper articles or investigations into what happens to them. For most of them, there was only Marla.
While not many of us may believe that we are capable of this deep a commitment to feeding Christ’s lambs, we should never fail to see that it is the kind of love that Jesus embodied. Who could have imagined that Peter, of all people, would become one of the great leaders of the church? Jesus did. So when you begin to think that you are not capable of offering great love, and you feel that old guilt creeping in, remember that Jesus is not interested in past failures but future possibilities. "Forget your perfect offering. "There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."