“Part
of the Plan?”
Matthew
21:1-11; Matthew 26:31-35, 69-75
First
Presbyterian
The
Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
April
17, 2011
Palm/Passion
Sunday
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Those who subscribe to our midweek
email know I have been reading lately an outstanding book by a seventy-year-old
Franciscan priest named Richard Rohr who lives in
If I was to summarize Rohr’s book in
a sentence, I would say it like this: The
way up is down. Or I guess you
could say it the other way around: The way down is the way up. No
matter how you say it, Rohr asserts that one of life’s great mysteries is how
our failings can be the foundation for our spiritual growth.
It is often as we fail, fall, falter, or founder – “go down” –
that we can go “up” in a meaningful and transforming way.
Here is the shocking truth: we
can grow spiritually more by doing “it” wrong than by doing “it” right.
Look at Peter in the midst of our
Passion Week saga. At table with his
disciples, Jesus told them they all would desert him as the coming days became
more tense and dangerous. But Peter
objected, insisting to Jesus that though everyone else might betray him, he
never would. To which Jesus replied,
“Peter, before this night is over, before the cock crows to greet the
dawn, you will deny me three times.” Again,
Peter vociferously voiced to Jesus his lockdown assurance that even if his
association with Jesus leads to his own death that he, Peter, will not forsake
him.
We know, though, that he did.
Sitting in a courtyard later that evening after Jesus had been arrested,
a servant-girl came up to Peter and said that she knew he was with Jesus.
Frightened for his life, Peter demurred, saying, “I
do not know what you are talking about.” Later,
while sitting on an out-of-the-way porch, another servant-girl spotted him and
said to people near her, “This man was with Jesus of
Peter, he of the grand pronouncements,
good intentions, and voracious desire always to appear up – the model disciple, the intimate friend, the one who
“gets” Jesus – was down.
But, in the divine economy, the way
up is down. In the face of his
betrayals of Jesus, Peter not only experienced remorse but, more importantly,
came to greater self-understanding. The
exchange between Peter and Jesus on the other side of the resurrection in which
three times, as if mercifully to blot out the three betrayals, Jesus asked Peter
if he loved him and with each affirmative answer gave him work and ministry to
do, is one of the more moving episodes in the gospels.
Eventually, Jesus even told Peter that he was the rock on whom he, Jesus,
was going to build his church.
We can learn from Peter’s failures,
from his journey down.
How often the church disfigures this essential message.
We often act as if the way to a deeper spirituality, to a closer
relationship with God, to suitability for leadership is the up
highway – impeccable moral rectitude, a seemingly put-together life, serial
success. But, if that is so, why
does scripture intimate something different?
Jesus said that the last will be first.
The down will be up.
Those who seek to save
their lives with their own posturing and piety will lose them and those who fall
can rise. Witness a few of the
stories Jesus told:
To those on the outside, the father’s
two sons had a lucky life – a father who cared for them, a thriving business
of which they were a part, a sure inheritance.
But the prodigal did not come to
himself or truly know his father’s love until he failed spectacularly in
the far country of dubious decisions and murky morals.
The elder brother, meanwhile, as far as we know, stayed stuck in the
self-righteousness of his good life and remained at arm’s length from his
father’s love.
In another story, while a Pharisee was
trumpeting at center stage his good and commendable deeds to God and giving
thanks that his life was not muck and mire, riff and raff, like so many others,
the publican was off in the background confessing his sorry lot, praying, “God,
have mercy on me, a sinner.” And
it turned out that the latter one, the down
one, the one of no artifice, was the one approved by God.
In his second letter to the Corinthian
congregation, Paul told the members of that church that he appealed to God three
times for relief from whatever it was that he termed “a thorn in the flesh”
– was it depression or loneliness or some physical malady – but he heard God
say, “My grace is sufficient for you,
for power is made perfect in weakness.” The
way up is down.
I have marveled many times these last
years as I have sat at the Aging & Saging tables on Thursdays and heard a
number of persons I respect tell of times when their lives blew apart.
They now are some of our wisest, most compassionate, faithful members.
There is a tangible authenticity to their lives that is like throwing
open the windows on the first day of spring.
There were events or humiliations in their lives that they could not
cover up or cover over and they met God and a deeper version of themselves in
the midst of them. For them the way
up was down.
If we do not trust God’s grace, we
shall live in fear of the down way, of
falling or failing, and so will continue to rely on our own machinations,
manipulations, and maneuverings to make our way through life.
But Peter wasn’t half the disciple before his falling that he was
afterward. And our friends at the
Saging table who experienced a great falling have been transfigured.
Why? Because their falls
opened up space within them wherein they could come face to face with the truth
of themselves, where they could come to realize the real presence of God with
them, in them, even in their least glorious moments, and where humility could do
its work.
We do not have to go looking for ways
to fall. Sometimes they are done to
us and sometimes we bring them on ourselves.
But if we accept them; that is, if we do not deny them or run for cover
or try to control the situations and the outcomes but dare to feel the full
brunt of them, we shall come to experience both the truth of ourselves and the
presence of God in deeper and more revelatory ways than we have heretofore.
John Calvin reminds us that the two – knowledge of God and of ourselves
– go together. So much of our
spiritual growth and maturity is a matter of seeing
from faith’s perspective – gaining a new consciousness – and the way down
offers a different “look” than the constant parrying we do to keep our lives
“camera ready” and in equilibrium.
The four biblical gospels are faith
documents written from the vantage point of post-resurrection.
That permits the gospel writers to comprehend things that could not have
been fully understood as they were happening.
That truth holds as well for us: our lives are best discerned in
retrospect. Many have made the
observation that insight often comes through hindsight.
And the insight we glean from Peter’s fall and rising and our own
concerns the providential guidance of our God the Spirit.
How many times across the years I have
been with people in the last weeks of their lives and, as they look back over
their years, they express in a variety of ways the sense that their life
“could not have been otherwise.”
Of course, they could have made
different decisions along the way. But,
despite our thrall with freedom, we may not be as in control of our lives as we
think. We choose among possibilities
that are presented to us more than we create the possibilities.
My experience, both personally and with others, is that more than human
freedom and decision-making is at work in our lives, much more.
“It couldn’t have been otherwise” is a common if inexplicable sense
of things as we view our lives in retrospect.
That sense, of course, doesn’t apply
to everything about our lives or everything that happens to us.
We are not proverbial puppets on a string.
But I think it absolutely pertains to our experiences of failing and
falling. Peter was captive to a
false understanding of himself that was a ticking time bomb that was going, soon
or late, somehow or another, to explode. We
know the story of how, despite his protestations to the contrary, at crunch time
he betrayed Jesus three times. Who
Peter thought he was and what he could do was not who he really was or what he
in fact was able to do.
The falling was very painful to Peter.
But it opened the door to a more truthful self-assessment and the
possibility of a more authentic life. As
Peter followed the divine light that filtered in through the rubble, a newer and
truer Peter emerges who eventually out of his weakness grew strong.
Like with Peter, it is from the
place of our resurrected self – up – and
the recognition that this self is healthier and better able to contribute
positively to life that our fallings and failings can be seen as “it
couldn’t have been otherwise” or “it had to be that way.”
The way up is down.
Anyone facing his or her failings and fallings with honesty and mercy
finds the way to greater wisdom, maturity, compassion, and God.
Such among us ought not be to be ostracized but welcomed by any community
that claims to live in the name of Christ.
Sometimes, in retrospect, we see how
our failings and fallings brought about growth and development in us that could
not have happened any other way. We
had to go through what we did in order to arrive at where we are now spiritually
which is better than where we were. If
we did not know better, we might even think that our fallings were God-ordained,
part of a providential plan for our good.
But then the thought is quickly
dismissed, or is it?
Amen.
Copyright
© 2011 by First Presbyterian Church