Sermon

August 28, 2005

A Sermon Preached at St. Stephen’s on Aug. 28, 2005, by the Rev. Cork Tarplee

A man arrives at the pearly gates, and St. Peter looks up his record and says, "Well, you didn't do anything particularly good, but neither did you do anything particularly bad. I'll tell you what: If you can tell me of one really good deed you've done, I'll let you stay." So the man says, "Well, once I saw some bikers menacing a young woman. I stopped my car. I took out my tire iron. I walked up to their leader, a huge, hairy, ugly man. He had a nose ring. I ripped it right out of his nose, and I said, 'You leave this girl alone, you hear?' I stared at all of them, and I said, 'Now get out of here, or you'll have to answer to me.'" St. Peter was impressed. "When did this happen?" he asked the man. "About two minutes ago."

The truth is that actually following Jesus is likely to wind us up in some pretty uncomfortable situations. Those who follow these things tell me that the gangsta-rapper who now calls himself “Ja Rule” and now sings about love has an CD out called, “Pain is Love.” He explains, “Love is about sacrifice. You have to sacrifice for those who come next, and when you sacrifice for others, they get a little more love than you had. We ought to look at and follow the examples of people like Martin Luther King and Jesus Christ. These people knew something about sacrifice.”

That message is an echo of this morning’s Gospel. Our story this morning is a continuation of last week’s reading in which Peter says that Jesus is the ultimate role model, the Child of God, and Jesus rewards his insight by calling Peter the “rock” on which Christ will build the Church. Now Peter offers another outburst: as Jesus talks about making the ultimate sacrifice, Peter blurts out, “God forbid it! This must never happen to you!” This time Jesus rebukes Peter, again with a play on Peter’s name: “Get behind me Satan! You are a stumbling block to me!” Peter, you see, is the ‘rock’ when he sees Jesus’ sacrificial love as godlike; but when he doesn’t get it, he’s the ‘block’ in the way. Jesus then sits the disciples down to explain that the essence of following him has to do with giving up security and the easy life and being willing to lose your life.

I am reminded of playwright Dennis Potter saying that religion is “the wound not the bandage.” Potter who wrote ground-breaking off-beat movies and television shows, suffered all his life from a painful, disfiguring skin disease. As he was dying of cancer, he granted one last interview to the BBC. The interviewer, trying to make sense of Potter’s suffering and his religious faith asked if here at the end Potter found religion a source of comfort. Potter dismissed the question as irrelevant to faith: “I have always found religion to be the wound, not the bandage.” In other words, you know that you have been touched by God, not so much in those moments in which you find inner peace, but in those moments which wound you, break you down and break you open to new life.

What Potter didn’t say and what is attested to by the remarkable works that came out of his pain is that being wounded by faith is also the way to life’s deepest satisfactions. I think that’s what Jesus had in mind when he said, “Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” In other words, making the sacrifices that love requires is the way to the fullest and richest life human beings ever know.

For those of us who follow the comics in the daily paper, there has been a running illustration of this principle for the last month or two in the strip, “Funky Winkerbean.” There isn’t a single reference to religion in the strip and I have no idea if the author professes any faith, but he has caught the essence of what Jesus said in this morning’s Gospel. The sequence begins with Funky having nightmares and flashbacks of being in the war in Afghanistan . He is wounded and tormented by these visions, tries to escape them, and finally listens to what they are trying to say to him. He interprets them as a call to return to Afghanistan to do humanitarian work locating and dismantling landmines. The work is dangerous—he is almost killed by an unexploded mine, and his wife who will not be left at home and so goes with him narrowly misses death by a car bomb. In yesterday’s strip, Funky and Becky are comforting a little girl newly orphaned by the car bomb while their Afghani friend says that the hardest thing about these conflicts that they leave children like this little one with no one to care for them. Following the call of THAT wound, the American pair insist that child is not left without anyone to care for her…because she has them.

Now making allowances for the soap-opera qualities of the comics, I think you can see what I am getting at. The deepest and most sacred impulses of life may not be those that soothe us, but those that torment us and impel us to love. Loving acts may not be safe or effort-free, but they always bring us to the fullest and richest way of being alive. It is the Jesus way. “Those who lose their life for my sake will find it,” he said. Lord, give us the strength and courage to love. AMEN