Confession

 

John 18:12-27

John 21:15-19

Peter loved Jesus.  He loved Jesus deeply and in both of these passages he is making promises to Jesus.  In the second passage from John he is promising that he loves Jesus and Jesus is telling him to therefore show it by going out into the world and caring for Jesus’ sheep – or God’s people.  In the first passages, Peter is promising that he will never forsake or betray Jesus.  But then we see that he does.  This isn’t his intention.  He is not planning to betray Jesus.  He loves Jesus.  But he got caught up in the moment and before he knew what he was doing, he had done the very thing he hated – he had betrayed this person whom he loved.  He had betrayed his Lord.  He had betrayed God.

We, too, make mistakes, devastating mistakes sometimes, against the people we love and in doing so, against God God-self, who loves us all and wants right relationships for us all.  Sometimes these mistakes are complicated by our failure to realize that we have a choice about them.  Many times, maybe even most times, we don’t realize we are being “tempted” into hurting others and therefore hurting God until the moment has passed. 

We see example after example of this in our movies.  So many of our stories involve a betrayal, often unintended, of one person by someone they love. We’ve talked before about the movie “The Devil Wears Prada”.  The movie’s main character, Andi, starts as a person with goals and integrity.  She wants to be a journalist, and she has written about injustices such as poor work conditions.  She is in a committed relationship and values her time with her friends.  She enjoys her life, and has a cause or meaning, a purpose in her future.  Her values do not include shallow things like appearance, being thin, high fashion, owning expensive purses, clothing, things.  She puts work in its proper place as one aspect of who she is.  She is down-to-earth, centered, and knows where she is heading and what she wants.  When she first applies for the job as Assistant to the Director of Runway Magazine, she is appalled by the value system that surrounds her – the emphasis on accessories that make no real difference to one’s well-being, the insistence on being thin, on looking “right,” on dressing “right.”  She is also kind, committed to her friendships and cares about her relationships with those friends, and with her boyfriend, above all others.  But when she takes the job, she finds her values and her identity being slowly challenged, slowly and subtly being undermined and eroded.  She finds herself giving up more and more of her time with her friends and significant other in order to work.  She finds herself being pulled into the drama and the appeal of a fast-paced career with models and glamour and eventually into valuing the entire system of clothing and accessories and being thin and owning purses that cost thousands of dollars – all things she didn’t used to care about.  The choices she is faced with – to choose depth, meaning and relationships, or to choose appearance, glamour, fame and achievement are subtle choices, but she finds herself choosing for the latter again and again, and she finds herself saying to those who would challenge those choices, “well, I didn’t have a choice!” She chooses to do what her boss asks her to do, and in the end that means that she ends up deeply hurting a colleague who was becoming a friend.  She took from her an activity, by agreeing to do it herself, that she knew was the thing most valued by her friend.  She betrayed that relationship, all the time repeating that phrase, “I didn’t have a choice.”  Similarly, she begins a flirtation with another man, “cheating” in an emotional way, on her boyfriend.  Again, it is subtle, and it feels to Andi like she is just responding in the best, most appropriate way to the actions of others coming at her.  But she betrays that relationship as well, deeply hurting the man she loves. 

“I didn’t have a choice.” But that lie that she told herself, that she didn’t have a choice meant that she lost her friends, she lost her significant other, she lost her sense of self and her values.  As she and her boyfriend are having the conversation where they are actually splitting up, she receives a phone call from her boss, and she says, “I’m sorry.  I have to answer this,” STILL not realizing she is making a choice.  As her boyfriend walks away he says to her, “You know, in case you were wondering?  The person whose calls you always take – that’s the relationship you’re in.”  Even after all of those losses she still didn’t realize the choices that she was making or that she had a choice to make, until her boss, Miranda, in the film pointed it out to her by comparing Andi’s choices with her own.  Andi could see that Miranda’s choices were hurtful, were harmful, were devastating.  But until Miranda pointed out that Andi had made the same choices, Andi couldn’t see. She could not see the choice she was making, or even THAT she was making a choice. It was just like with Peter, who did not realize he was doing what Jesus told him he would, that he was denying the person he loved, until the rooster crowed, reminding him of Jesus’ words that said he would do exactly that.

Similarly with Saruman in Lord of the Rings who thought he could look into the Palantir thinking he could learn from it and instead was seduced by it.

            Also in a Joan of Arcadia episode where Joan has been asked to do something by God that Joan does not understand and that she feels would hurt her friend.  She chooses to say “no” to God instead, believing that she has a good reason, but that choice, that choice to “protect” her friend against that request of God lead to the friend being much more harmed, much more damaged than if she had acted differently. 

            In most of these situations: Andi in Devil Wears Prada, Joan in Joan of Arcadia, and Peter in this story with Jesus, we find the same ending.  In the “Devil Wears Prada” Andi eventually chooses to walk away from the evil that she is becoming.  In the Joan clip, she is given another chance, repeatedly, and she chooses to listen and follow God.  Saruman never changes: he becomes too entrapt in his love for evil.  But with Peter, too, we know the end of this story.  The end is that Peter does follow Jesus after Jesus’ death and resurrection.  Peter becomes a martyr for the faith – dying because of his proclamation of Jesus as Lord.  He does stand up for God, by God, by Jesus.  He had a slip, but that wasn’t the end of the story. 

We, too, make mistakes and hurt people we care about.  But God offers us forgiveness, God offers us new chances every day.  More, God forgives us and starts us over again and again and again.  I wish I could say that people were as forgiving.  But they aren’t always.  Some betrayals can’t be gotten over.  Some mistakes can’t be righted by apologies or attempts at reconciliation. 

            I’m reminded of a MASH episode which I shared about recently in a blog post but wanted to share it here as well: In Episode “Dear Sis”: Father Mulcahy punched a guy who had hit him first and was being difficult.  He felt bad about it and tried to apologize, but the man was still being an absolute jerk who was completely incapable of seeing how he contributed to the problem.  Father felt bad and was outside and said to Hawkeye:

F: You know, I used to coach boxing at the CYO. I told my boys it built character.

H: Father, why don’t you stop punching yourself on the chin.  Pick on someone your own size

F: I’m Christ’s representative. “Suffer the little children to come unto me.  Do unto others… I’m not just supposed to say that stuff.  I’m supposed to do it.

H:All you’re supposed to do is the best you can.

F: Some best.

H: Best is best!  Look.  Suppose you were sitting here right now with somebody who had done his best and was feeling lousy about it.  You’d let ‘em off the hook wouldn’t you?

F:  Sure I would.  And if the hook didn’t work, I’d probably try an uppercut.

H: Father, get off your back.

F: It isn’t just that.  I don’t seem to make a difference here.  I hang around on the edge of effectiveness.  And when I do step in, I really step in.

H: Look.  This place has made us all nuts.  Whey should you be any different?   WE don’t sleep we don’t eat and every day a truck dumps a load of bloody bodies on the ground.  Okay so you hit someone.  We have to stand here and watch so much misery we’re lucky we don’t all join hands and walk into a chopper blade.

            The reality is that none of us are perfect.  Not one.  And that means that all of us will err at one point or another.  We all will.  No matter how “good” we are, and no matter how hard we try, we will hurt people.  We will hurt people we don’t care about, and we will hurt people we love.  We will, like Peter, deny someone we love when we feel threatened, refusing to stand up and say “I know that person and I love that person” to someone who is condemning them.  We will, like Andi in “Devil wears Prada” choose to do what gets us ahead, even if it means someone else losing out on an opportunity.  We will, like Joan in Joan of Arcadia, choose to follow our own path, thinking we know best, even when we’ve been told otherwise.  We will err. 

            But the Good News of this story and every Bible story is one of God’s amazing and great, unfathomable forgiveness, offered to us again and again and again.  It is the Good News of second, third, 100^th choices to do right again next time.  It is one of Grace.

            Our call when others seek forgiveness and reconciliation is to follow God, to follow Jesus and extend grace just as they did, not just for the other, but for our own healing as well.  But we cannot control the choices of others and sometimes we will not be offered that same grace. 

            Still, you can count on God’s grace.  Jesus shows it to Peter, and God shows it to us.  God hopes that we will not make those decisions that harm relationships, but God knows we will err, we will make mistakes.  And when we do, God is there to offer us new starts, new chances, new opportunities. 

            There is something else I want to say here.  We are in the season of lent, and lent as you know, is a time that we are usually called to self-reflect and to “repent”.  But that word, “repent” carries with it so many associations that are incorrect.  “Repenting” is not about beating yourself up with shame and guilt and pain.  It’s not about punishing yourself and then striving to do better.  “Repenting” means turning around, going a different direction.  Marcus Borg defines “repentance” as “returning from exile.”  I want you to think about that for a moment.  Because doesn’t that feel very different that what we’ve always heard it to mean up until now?  Returning from exile is about coming home: coming HOME.  You come home to yourself, you come home to who you really are, you come home to who you want to be.  And we don’t tend to get there by beating ourselves up.  Yes, self-reflection is necessary to know what is keeping us in exile, and what is keeping us apart from what we love and what we want to be.  For Peter, his denial of Jesus was keeping him from Jesus.  So we change.  But we don’t change out of shame and guilt.  We change as a way to return home to the people we are called to be. 

            I think about Frodo in Lord of the Rings when he thought that Sam was out to take the ring from him.  Frodo “repented” or came home from exile when he saw Sam again for who he really was: the helper who, in the end, saved Frodo’s life.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.