Sermons

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Following From A Distance
March 6, 2005
Sermon Series on the Gospel of Luke
Fourth Sunday of Lent
Rev. Dan Baumgartner
Luke 22:54-62

It’s nice to be back with you after being gone a couple of Sundays. I’ve figured out that I know I’m on vacation when three things happen: I read a lot, we get lots and lots of exercise…and I never wear a pair of long pants! All three happened last week, so it qualified as vacation!

I do read a lot on vacation. Books, magazines, the newspaper everyday. It’s been hard not to notice all of the trials that are going on. The Michael Jackson trial. The Kobe Bryant trials. The Rick Neuheisel trial. In America, we seem to have this certain fascination with the courtroom drama.

Trials are sort of interesting. Somehow, even in the celebrity trials…at least some of the time…the truth eventually comes to light. And there’s something fascinating about seeing the real character of the person on trial come through.

In our reading of the latter parts of the gospel of Luke, there are a lot of trials going on. The most obvious is the trial of Jesus. He has just been arrested, and will soon be on trial before the Religious Leaders and before the Romans.

First though, there is another trial. It is Jesus’ closest apostle, Peter, who is in the spotlight. And remember, it was just 20 verses ago, Peter assured Jesus he was ready to go to prison, even to death with him.

Once each year for the last eight years, I get together with three of my classmates from seminary. Most of those years, in various locations from Tennessee to Whidbey Island, we have ended up having one of our more serious talk times around a fire, at night.

There’s something about gathering around a fire at night. If you step just a little ways away, the darkness first shadows you, and then swallows you up. The people you are talking to hear your voice, perhaps, but they don’t see your face. But if you come back anywhere near the fire, the people around you can see you clearly.

Peter watched them arrest Jesus, and take him to the house of the high priest.

Peter followed Jesus…at a distance. A safe distance. And while Jesus was taken inside to await his trial…Peter was put on trial outside in the courtyard.

A simple servant-girl, seeing Peter’s face as he sits down by the fire, stares at him and says

“This man also was with him.”

Peter says simply,

“Woman, I do not know him.”

What had Peter thought, when he said just 20 verses ago, “Lord, I am ready to go with you to prison and to death!”?

What did he think that might look like? Perhaps he imagined himself in a heroic pose, standing up in the midst of hundreds of people, standing before Caesar himself and boldly proclaiming, knowing the repercussions and disregarding them, “He is my Lord!”

Maybe Peter had thought it would be under bright lights, on center stage, the cameras rolling, a heroic martyr bears testimony. Maybe he imagined Jesus looking on, beaming and nodding his approval. Maybe that's what he thought.

But here he is, late at night, just a handful of rough people, Jesus apparently not in sight at the moment, and a lowly servant cross-examining him.

Maybe he said to himself, “What good will it do to get myself arrested?” Maybe the setting felt small and trivial, just sort of “every day.” I don’t know. All we have is what he said in this situation:

“I don’t know him.”

When I read this, I was struck by this thought: Who we are in the everyday, in the trivial, every day situations…shapes who we will be in the poignant times.

Peter was following Jesus from a distance. He played it safe. There’s a million ways we play it safe…at work, in the neighborhood.

• We have nice, safe conversations with people. We talk about religion…in general.
• We talk about morals…in general.
• We talk about ethics…in general.
• We talk about Christianity…in general.

Nothing that is going to get us in hot water anywhere. If it gets too warm, we back away from the fire into the shadows where its harder to see our faces.

Years ago, I would go into work at our business at 6 a.m. and help my boss boot the computer up. He knew I was a Christian, and he wanted to talk about Christianity, about his interpretations of the Bible, about other religions. We’d have interesting conversations.

But I know of a fifty times I would back away from telling him who Jesus was in my life, that he was my Lord, that I knew him, that I was trying to trust my life to Him.

There’s a million ways we play it safe. We don’t ask for things in prayer, because we don’t want to be disappointed.

• So we pray prayers that sound pretty good but don’t go anywhere.
• We go to church, but we don’t risk ourselves with other people.
• We don’t tell them where we’re scared, or insecure or dying inside.

So we look like it’s all together but it’s not. We take total control of our own lives, make our own weekly, monthly, one-year, five-year, ten-year plans, make our own decisions and ask God to rubberstamp it and have this vague uneasy feeling that something’s wrong.

The first year I was at Bethany I went down to Costa Rica with the high school trip. We worked together building an addition to a school, and then two days we went and held sort of impromptu Vacation Bible School in some pretty tough areas.

The second of those days, we showed up at the designated area…and there wasn’t one kid around. Not one! After 10 minutes or so, the word trickled in that this was a Catholic neighborhood, and word had went out that we were a Protestant group. Because Catholics and Protestants don’t get along so well there, all the parents had told their folks not to go!

So there we were. What were we supposed to do? Being the bold follower of Christ that I am, I immediately thought:

“Well, I guess that’s it! We go back. We tried, it didn’t work.”

I literally was ready to get back in the van.

Luckily, one of the other leaders did something different. She prayed right there, out loud,

“Jesus, what should we do? We’re here, we want to love kids in your name and there are none here. Help us. What do we do?”

And a few minutes later, she divided us up to walk through the neighborhood and invite kids.

How? Strum a guitar, sing, kick a soccer ball, tell jokes, try to speak Spanish…do whatever came to you. Sure enough, an hour later there were 200 kids there! There’s a million ways to play it safe.

“I don’t know him,” Peter said.

We can play it safe, we can follow Jesus from a distance…or we can go close and see what happens. If we do…life will be harder, messier, scarier…and much, much richer.

“You are one of them!”

The next voice whispers across the fire to Peter.

Oh, no! Not one of them! Now Peter is being lumped together as one of the followers. Part of the church that Jesus is calling together.

“I am not!”

Peter has spent the last three years of his life traveling with this little band. He quit a job, left his hometown, threw his lot in with this little community that believed that in Jesus, God was doing something totally new. Three years!

“You are one of them.”

“I am not!”

I bet you have felt like this before. If you stand up to claim you are a Christian, you get thrown together with every bad example, every unloving fanatic, every conservative Republican, or every liberal Christian Democrat (in this congregation you need to list both of those!), every biker with “Jesus Saves” tattoed on his bicep, every television evangelist.

“You are one of them!”

I am not.

I have bad news.

You are!

When you say “yes” to Jesus Christ, you get a whole new family. The church. The body of Christ. You don’t get to pick your family, do you?

Every family has its awkward characters. Every family has an Uncle Roy, who shouts, smokes, drinks and sabotages family get-togethers. Every family has a Grandma Fran who bosses everybody around, and gossips about whoever stayed home from the reunion.

You don’t have to agree with them. They might be hard to love. But they’re still family, no matter how hard you might want to say “I don’t belong with them!”

I have people talk to me all the time about not wanting to be lumped with “those” kinds of Christians. I feel it myself. It’s partly why people in America love to do so much church shopping. They keep going to different places, hoping they can find a church that doesn’t have “those” people.

It’s dangerous business. Eventually you find yourself with a group of people who look just like you. And what we need are all those people who know Jesus…who are very different from us.

When I was on vacation, I read…for the second time…and you need to know there are very few books I would read twice…a novel called The Brothers K, by David James Duncan. It has everything anyone needs: excitement, theology, baseball.

It’s actually something of a parody on Dostoyevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov,” and it’s about a 1960’s family with five brothers, including Irwin who is the “spiritual one” of the boys. One of the interesting parts is how the book portrays the church, the community of faith.

On the one hand, it has the worst picture one might imagine of The Church. Irwin’s home church is a place where people are encouraged not to think, and where the answer to every single question is “Jesus.”

It’s led by a mean-spirited, ego-driven pompous pastor (there’s always one of these!) named “Brother Babcock.” Out of sheer vindictiveness, Brother Babcock and a few others) are instrumental in making sure that Irwin ends up in the army and being shipped to Vietnam. You read about these vindictive people, the meanness and narrow-mindedness and you say, “If that’s the church…I don’t belong.”

But on the other hand, The Brothers K has one of the best pictures you can imagine of the church. Thanks to Brother Babcock Irwin, who went to Vietnam, where he suffered a breakdown from the things he witnessed.

He was shipped back to California to an Army mental hospital, and put on a regimen of electric shock therapy. His family and people in his church find out he has been misdiagnosed and is slowly being killed, but they have no way to get him out.

Finally, knowing something needs to be done, they just drive from Oregon down to California. They are the motliest crew you’ve ever imagined: 2 of Irwin’s brothers, his mom, an 80 year old woman from the church, a Korean elder, an associate pastor and his pregnant wife and a couple others, traveling in a 32-foot Nomad RV with Uncle Truman, who drinks too much beer.

They don’t have much of a plan, and absolutely no power. Half of them barely believe in God, and the other half don’t really like each other. But someone they love is in trouble and so they drop everything to go. And as Elder Joon says,

“Maybe once we are there…the Lord will show us the best way to help!”

And when you read this, it makes you say

“Yes! That’s the church! I belong there! I could drive that RV!”

The people who follow Christ come in all shapes and sizes. All branches of theology, all colors, all opinions, all sorts of sin. It’s hard work. It’s messy. Sometimes the church embarrasses us. But if we are going to follow Christ, we’ll do it together.

The ancient church father Cyprian once said “no one can have God for his Father who does not also have the church for his mother.” Saying “I’m not one of them!” is just another way of playing it safe, just another way of following Jesus at a distance.

There’s one more voice across the fire:

“Surely this man also was with him; for he is a Galilean.”

“I don’t even know what you are talking about.”

By this point, Peter is a long way away. He’s not really even denying Jesus. He’s just skirting the subject altogether. “I don’t even know what you are talking about.”

My second year of college, I was in eastern Washington. Anne and I had dated in high school, and we were still dating. But she was back in Seattle, growing like crazy in her love for Jesus.

And I was across the state, forgetting who I was. Drinking quite a bit of beer, avoiding church quite a bit, avoiding Christians quite a bit, avoiding Jesus quite a bit. And we’d talk on the phone, and Anne would want to talk about Christ and her faith.

And I just wasn’t engaging. I wasn’t argumentative or anything. I didn’t deny my faith. Just didn’t track. “I don’t even know what you are talking about.”

And even across the telephone lines (pre-cell phone days), Anne could tell. She could hear it in my voice. I was a long way off. And one day on the phone she finally said,

“Dan, what are you doing?!”

I was busy following Jesus…from a distance.

When Peter takes his eyes off of Jesus, he goes astray. Every time. When he’s on top of a mountain, when he’s walking on water, when he’s sitting in the courtyard, every time Peter takes his eyes off of Jesus…he messes up. And instead of walking beside him ends up following from a safe distance.

Peter said to the man

“I don’t even know what you are talking about.”

At that moment the rooster crowed.

And the Lord turned and looked at Peter.

That’s all it says. It’s so powerful.

“And the Lord turned and looked at Peter.”

What was in that look? Anger? Disappointment? Love? Mercy? Grace?

Three times Peter messed up. Three times Peter said a loud “No” to Jesus.

• I don’t know him.
• I’m not one of them.
• I don’t even know what you are talking about.
  
  “And the Lord turned and looked at Peter.”

It’s good for us to know this morning…that when Peter took his eyes off Jesus,

Jesus never took his eyes off of Peter.

It’s good for us to know this morning…that all of Peter’s “No’s” to Jesus counted less than Jesus’ “yes” to Peter.

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