One of the things I admire about Jesus is that he never left too much unfinished business on his emotional plate.  Maybe I should say I envy him.  We people pleaser types tend to let our emotional garbage disposals get backed up with frustration or anger or sadness or whatever until something unpleasant happens.  Jesus just wasn’t that way.  You can draw a straight line of connection from whatever Jesus was saying or doing in any given moment back to what was at the center of his soul.  You can see it in his prayer life, in his very obvious need for solitude, in his sensitivity to the down and out and his confrontation of hyper-spiritual religious types and even in the times he was found weeping at the death of a friend or over a city full of lost souls.  You never have to doubt what was on Jesus’ heart; you could see it or hear it plainly.  Especially in the way he called things as he saw them and moved freely, back and forth, between blessing and blessing out as the situation called for it.  Just ask Peter.

Peter had just confessed Jesus as the Christ and heard Jesus’ blessing, “‘on this rock I will build my church (Matthew 16:18).’”  But, having heard that blessing, it didn’t take Peter long to demonstrate a weakness that plagues all of us, our incredible capacity for being both deeply spiritual and incredibly superficial at the very same time.  When Jesus saw that his disciples were beginning to realize that he truly was the Christ, the Messiah, the savior, he began to define for them what being the Christ was going to mean.  It was going to cost him great suffering and eventually his life.  “From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering . . . and be killed . . ..”

When Peter heard that he rebuked Jesus with a “Not on my watch!” attitude only to end up proving that we are never more vulnerable to miserable failure than just after we’ve achieved monumental success.  That’s surely one reason Peter so easily leap-frogged from being so spiritually aware to superficially self-centered in one breath, shot his mouth off and drew a good blessing out from Jesus, who just moments before had so profoundly blessed him.  With the very same language Jesus had used to confront Satan when he was tempted in the wilderness just after his baptism, Jesus said to Peter, “‘Get behind me, Satan!  You are a stumbling block to me . . ..’” 

Here’s Peter, moving from being the rock, the foundation on which Jesus would build his church, to the personification of evil in less time than it takes to draw his next breath!  What a trip!  It’s an easy one to take, isn’t it?  And, never more quickly than when we dictate to God, from our perspective, how life should be.  That’s all Peter had done.  But, to Jesus, it wasn’t just a mere slip of cerebral.  It was conscious choice; Peter was trying to box God in.  He was “‘setting (his) mind not on divine things but on human things.’”  To Jesus, to organize even your most private thoughts without God at the gravitational center is the very nature of evil itself. 

In 1894 President Grover Cleveland signed the bill that set aside the holiday we celebrate tomorrow, Labor Day.  It’s a day meant to honor working people.  All you have to do is have a job and you’re the guest of honor, it doesn’t matter what you do.  Or, is that true?  Don’t we all make distinctions between different kinds of work as being more or less significant or valuable based on rather superficial judgments?  Like the way we use the terms sacred and secular.  If you work in a church, your work is sacred but if you do anything else, it’s secular, or worldly or temporal and, therefore, less significant.  It’s one of the things I like least about church work, this superficial way in which we determine the value of what people do when only God really knows.  Another reason I don’t like it is because of the way it subdivides and separates us preachers from “real” people.  It’s like there are three sexes, male, female and preacher. 

In truth, to be secular or worldly or temporal means to simply organize your life without God.  A school teacher who commits herself to serving Christ is doing sacred work because of who she is

serving.  And, even the most eloquent of preachers, if he organizes his life without God, is doing secular, not spiritual, work.  Even in Jesus’ personal presence, what got Peter in trouble was his instance that his Lord would not do this or that because that’s the way Peter thought it should be.

Our own Jerry Poteet was a front line Army chaplain in Vietnam during some of the worst of the war during the 1968 Tet offensive.  His job involved moving from post to post ministering to the troops including serving the Lord’s Supper sometimes as they came in and out of battle.  They didn’t care that he was Baptist and he certainly didn’t care what they were or weren’t.  If you wanted Communion, all you had to do was show up.  That worked well until Jerry began to discover that, in the jungle heat and humidity, his grape juice kept rotting.  So, he sent off to headquarters for help.  As it so happened, the chaplain in charge was Catholic and, in response to Jerry’s request, sent real Communion wine.  All was well until Jerry served it to a Baptist boy one day.  The young soldier was highly offended that this Baptist chaplain had served real wine.  Jerry tried to explain that, if he wanted Communion, he’d have to take the way it was served.  It wasn’t his to dictate.  We’re like that.  Like Peter, we often dictate to God how grace should come.  We keep God boxed into our little ways of thinking and come dangerously close to serving the very cause of evil ourselves and missing the grace that could be ours.

Jesus was basically saying to Peter that it wasn’t his to dictate how grace should come, what form it should take or what it would cost.  In fact, he went further.  Not only was bringing grace to this world going to cost Jesus it was also going to cost anyone who chose to follow him as well.  “‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.  For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it,’” Jesus said.  This is what Jesus meant.  If keeping your life in a neat little box you can handle and making certain that the journey is as painless as possible, you won’t enjoy hanging with Jesus (pointing to Communion table).  It’s only in letting go that we live.  It’s just that letting go feels like dying, even though it means living. 

A few months ago, a woman who is member of another church I once pastored lost her husband after some forty years of marriage.  She has had such a difficult time accepting his death that I began to fear for her.  She would call late at night weeping uncontrollably and I just felt all but helpless trying to console her long distance.  I called her this last week and I could tell when she answered the phone that something had changed.  When I asked what that might be she told me that she had gotten to the place where she wanted to die so badly that she actually prayed that God would take her.  But, he didn’t.  He kept giving her another day.  Kind of like the movie, Groundhog Day, she kept waking up every morning only to live the very same nightmare through one more time.  Finally, she said, “I just decided that if I couldn’t die I might as well live.”  It was like she was saying that when she stopped demanding that life come to her on the terms she could command and control, when she set her mind on living and not dying, everything changed overnight.  She said, “I sold my husband’s tractors, bought myself a new car and I’m on the way to Colorado.”  Now that she’s let go, the life that she was about to miss by wishing herself to death is finally becoming hers.

We think it’s holding on that keeps us in control and safe.  More than we want to admit, we tend to believe that he who dies with the most toys wins.  In truth, like a good friend once said, he who has the most toys, dies.  Jesus was telling Peter, and us, that we are not in control.  Our only real option is to surrender ourselves to his life or to die trying to do something else.  That’s it.  In fact, it’s not a question of whether or not we’re going to die, only a question of what kind of meaning that death will have and whether or not there will be eternal life on the other side of it. 

Nancy and I went to see her father last night in the nursing home.  I was taken aback at how quickly he is slipping away from us.  Even in two weeks the slippage has been remarkably fast.  I sat there and watched Nancy feed her dad supper and tenderly nurse him, granting him the most profound dignity even in the way she wiped his mouth and spoke gently to him.  When we left, I remarked to Nancy how powerful a lesson that is.  We work hard all of our lives.  But, it’s when it’s all said and done, if we’re lucky, all we’ll have is a simple bed, a blanket, a drawer or two of socks and shirts and a couple of pictures to remind us of what used to be.  He who has the most toys . . .?!

But, when I thought about it, Elmo has more than that.  Not only does he have someone to nurse him as he leaves, he still has his faith.  Somewhere, deep down inside, he and God still commune.  We’ve seen it.  We’ve heard it.  For quite some time, he has been slipping in and out of awareness of who we are.  But, even in the very recent past, when he couldn’t remember anything else, we could still get him to sing.  He loves the old hymns.  Especially the one that goes like this. “Let us labor for the Master from the dawn till setting sun, let us talk of all his wondrous love and care; Then when all of life is over, and our work on earth is done, and the roll is called up yonder, I’ll be there (James M. Black, When the Roll is Called Up Yonder).”

Some may think that’s an over-sentimentalized way of seeing what’s really happening.  I don’t think so.  It’s like the closer Elmo gets to dying, the closer he get to living.  There’s a straight line of connection between what we’re hearing, and seeing, and what’s going on in his soul.  That because, all of his life, he’s been following Jesus.  When he dies, he’ll live again.

How about you?